katalog-overlapping voices - Ritesinstitute

or orientalism as a type of oppressive, insulting, and humiliating label. From
the open space of the East to a niche of orientalism. The carving up and extraction
of the oriental from its place from within Islamic jewry signified the
positioning of orientalism as a loose tile devoid of orientation (lacking selfhood,
missing a point of focus, without a mizrah) of the present, a square possessing
a here and now that builds itself solely in current contexts in the presence of a
culture that controls the legitimate codes. (It is worthy of note that, in contrast
to orientalism, this culture reserved for itself a channel to access its past,
whether from a stance of negating, accepting, destroying, transforming, or secularizing
it.) The final significance of this situation is that Israeli orientalism
is a product that was produced by a super-group in a culture for the sake of a
secondary group within it much more than an independent product. In other
words, it is a fruit of the structuring of occidental jewry.
The Delicate Stage of Transition and the Peril of Cementing
Uniformity in the Name of Multiculturalism
This stage of Israeli culture is a dangerous and fragile one. on the one hand,
the historical moment of expropriation from history appears to have passed,
expropriation that spanned a period similar to that of the intergenerational
schema – sixty years. Callous and direct structures of discrimination or exclusion
are no longer acceptable in Israel’s reality. on the other hand, absence
yet commands Israel’s ‘obvious’ reality; in one sense that is upon the
surface, it has become converted into a discourse concerning the multitude
of voices, and in another sense, it yet throbs on from the depth of its establishment
and structuring within Israel: the absence is still represented in the
history books, as in the educational system, the situation on the periphery,
the spatial and compartmentalizing architecture 5 and the culture’s legitimate
codes.
This study is essential for the purpose of understanding and reorganizing the
chronicles of oriental art in the country. Art that originates from within an oppressed
group suffers doubly, as artistic critique, which is supposed to conceptualize
and act as a mediator of art for the broader public has its own eyes
shut and its attention is weak vis-à-vis this art’s message and its ciphers; because
of its essential differentness from society’s legitimate codes, this art’s
differentness is liable to be perceived as an expression of cultural inferiority.
For this reason, the new art project that is concomitantly a project of self-reestablishment,
a protest project and a field project, which requires critique
that conceptualizes its achievement of liberation from its being affixed in the
niche of oriental art. Indeed, art labeled as ‘oriental’ possesses subversive,
destabilizing strength, and exists on the fringes; however, its debate duplicates
the problematicality of the mindset of the ‘reinforcement unit’. And were
the debate to be played out from a panoramic viewpoint, it would be possible
to discern the most significant avant-garde in these forces – not the hegemonial
center, but rather, the center of living and important achievement – that
that decides what will be tomorrow. The goal of the artist is to locate the dead,
lacerated, and dispersed parts, and to transfer them back through a unifying
filter, to break free from the dissecting and dichotomous gaze of the ‘center’
as opposed to the periphery.
The critical artistic and intellectual activity in Israel must comprehend that it is
coping with a space of which most of its symbolic design originates in the Jewish-Christian
expanse, while it continues to command a small and real territory
in which there is a centrality of two identical problems that have been denied:
the Jewish Muslim expanse and the Palestinian Arab expanse. In the past,
I attempted to develop the principal paradigm of exclusion from the book and
the routing to the periphery. This is a fundamental structure that is tested in its
implementation in the Israeli expanse by the hegemonial attempt to create maximal
possible congruence between the design of the substantive expanse and
the design of the space of remembrance as it is documented in the history book
project.
Geography and history are therefore two complementary disciplines that – hand
in hand with hegemony – are likely and liable to join archivization of the ex-
130 OVERLAPPING VOICES
panse as living or moribund. Erasing and writing, building and destroying, settling
and routing immigration are all complementary practices, practices that
express the symbolic, both in the sense of social order and the sense and context
in which the religious is translated into an institutionalized creed. 6
The Scene of the East in Visual Art
In this framework, I shall propose a summarized sketch for creating a basic
chronicle of the oriental backdrop in visual art. In light of descriptions above,
it is possible to understand that issues occupying oriental art express a certain
type of essential problems, such as the question of the refrain, the question
of the past that was truncated in a traumatic manner, occupation with a
cataloging, labeling gaze, analyzing the gaze and undoing those forms in
which the oriental became a stereotype. It can be estimated that parallel to
this, a movement will be reflected along the intergenerational axis that expresses
the gradual conscious development of the artistic act. Describing the
annals of tension in oriental art [as in other types of the orient or orientalism
in the country] requires asserting a new language for the following issues: A.
chronicles. B. conceptualization. C. problematics. D. context. E. forms and
contents. F. the question of refrain. G. relations of art and critique.
As a fundamental illustration of the liberty and fullness of the orient in its approach
to its past (although amid a covert dialogue with the hegemonies), I
shall present the artist Avshalom okashi. I do this amid in-depth dialogue
with the research of mordechai omer regarding this artist, albeit in a manner
divergent from that in which he elected. okashi will become an indicator
of the producing craftsman of oriental origin that arrived in the country before
the melting pot, and became acclimatized and educated in the shadow
of the best of traditional schooling for European painting, which was represented
in the country by European jewish painters. It expresses and merges
in abstract art the symbols of the sublime that are engrained in it by virtue of
the individual collective remembrance of its group, and advances progressively
with the revolution of the immigration in the 50s to the figurative, from
which it returns and proceeds toward the sublime. okashi constitutes a countermotion,
a hero of another sort, being an anti-hero, if the oriental as a blank
sacrifice is a hero.
The shock of the 50s on a visual level is mostly and entirely a complete silence;
a stage of traumatic speechlessness, which is integrated and permeates gradually
to violence. Almost twenty years of silence vis-à-vis visual art. okashi,
who is in any case an artist with a structured career, can express observation
from the side about the immigrants, being an individual who is ensconced
locally and in the momentum of creation.
Between the 60s and the 70s, almost no gap exists between visual art and
the cry of the street. Power and beauty lurk in the simplest expression of placards
and signs of demonstrations, which are characterized by simplicity and
bitterness in the shout of black and white. The immigrants – who escape and
attempt to extricate themselves from their placard existence – produce placards
in which there is no distance between art and popular protest. In the
70s, the cry of the oppressed was forcibly expressed at its zenith in the work
of Afiya Zakharia (she is also of Yemenite extraction) who is driven in an obsessive
fashion to paint all the walls of her house in bold colours 7 and to extricate
it from the walls of her small Amidar (government housing) home to
reprocess it, to import an expanse, even if as an apocalyptic scream.
Pinhas Cohen Gan (born in meknes, 1942) immigrated to Israel at the age of
six. In his work, it is possible to see the continuation and development of the
phenomenon of very distanced description of the East-West problem. I have
attempted to portray him in the shadow of okashi (there are additional lines
of similarity among both artists.) Indeed, his first works regarding East-West
conflict express conscious struggle with rupture, incision, and chasm; nevertheless,
he works from a stance of distance from the direct, while processing
it into a principally structured problem. The fundamental structural expression
is expressed as early as his decision to exhibit in a cowshed at the outset
of his career.