katalog-overlapping voices - Ritesinstitute

The Project of Art and Life as a Protest Project
In recent years, in several contexts, I proposed working with the inter-generational
paradigm as a precise analytical tool in the spatial and vertical cross-section
within the culture of immigration. In the vertical axis, one must examine
the generation gap by means of an interval of twenty years. In global contexts,
indeed, the same heartbeat of twenty years that exists on the vertical axis in
the inter-generational paradigm within Israel exists also in the spatial axis in
the relations between Israel and the United States. Despite the speed of information
and communication in the age of globalization, the 20th century gap is
still the gap of update time of periphery to center (I am working on the concept
of the periphery in a relative and dynamic model and in this specific context,
Israel is the periphery of the United States) and thus – the chronicle of the 90s
in Israel supports clear parallels of the phenomena that greatly characterized
feminism in the United States of the 70s. There is basis for comparison between
stage three in the inter-generational paradigm in the scene of the orient in Israel
and feminism of the 70s in the United States. In both cases, art and protest
are two branches breaking out of one trunk or two beats of one heart, which
together build life.
Men and Women – East and West
The significance of the link between feminism and orientalism is the granting
of expression to the power of problematicality of who is a minority within
a minority. It is possible to repeat here the almost trivial truth, according to
which many achievements of material culture of human civilization are achievements
of women: embroidery, sewing, gold crafting, pottery, knitting, cooking,
and baking. While Western modernism has reached the stage of raising human
creatures ‘illiterate in manual labour’, indeed, at the same time, the greatest
of its artists and designers, designers of fashion and culture, take inspiration
and even actually use manual labour of women, which is supposed to
be dear in the era of the machine, and it regardless still weighs in as cheap
as it is accessible due to discrimination on the basis of status. These uses of
culture, as is known to all, were and are a fundamental characteristic in colonialism,
but they recur in miniature fashion in parallel dynamics. There are
feminist artists that went yet further and in this light placed modernism as
opposed to barbarism. 11
Such manner of use as this was made by male artists of women and by Western
artists of orientals at the founding of the State, both in music and in fashion,
while less in high art. The Israeli product of the melting pot was characterized
by an occidental designer that makes use of oriental motifs from an orientalist
viewpoint: the fashion of ‘maskit’, gold crafting, and Bezalel. In the framework of
this use, the substances of the sub-culture or the ethnic culture range from enchantment
to revulsion, between orientalism to defining kitsch.
The significance of feminist struggle in Israel cannot be divorced from the
fact that most working women are at a low status; from the level of labourer
and below they are women of oriental extraction. This fundamental characteristic
probably led to the birth of the ‘Achoti’ (‘my Sister’) movement as oriental
feminism that is separate unto itself, dealing with the issue of a minority
within a minority. Beyond this, it is quite frequent in the history of the
oppressed to encounter their disparaging symbolization as a woman. orientalist
perception sees all things oriental as a feminine temptation, and there
are existing anti-Semitic texts that portray the jew as a woman. 12
‘Bet Achoti’ (My Sister’s House) as a Type of Communitas
About two-and-a-half years ago, when Shula Keshet was appointed head of
the ‘Achoti’ movement, she founded the house named ‘Achoti’ that is located
in southern Tel Aviv. By this act, she essentially transformed the office
center of the movement from a functional office center into a feminist culture
and community center, which is to say that she turned it from an institution
into a community.
Victor Turner spoke of the state of the communitas as the state in which society
possesses responsible bodies that feature a unifying quality, which are
132 OVERLAPPING VOICES
based on food or drink. Usually, these were simple products, such as wine
and bread. Undoubtedly, honey is a central one among them; honey also connects
in many dimensions to femininity, among other things, being a product
of a maternalistic society. Femininity is always and ever a sub-structure within
the dominated structure, and as it encounters the conditions to solidify as a
communitas, indeed it renews its original meaning as an order of love, i.e.,
the bond of fraternity as it protects each other.
The Unification between the Archive Effect and the Beehive Effect, which Shula
Keshet displays in her current creation signifies unification between the culture
of writing and material culture. The beehive is also a library with cells
that express the cells of knowledge and production. It contains within it those
conditions required for establishing identity anew. When a commune of lower
class breaks free from dependency on the upper class, its selfhood is the
chief product that it must produce first and foremost. It is incumbent upon
it to reproduce its identity. Liberation from the reflective glance of the hegemony
as a power that creates its world means breaking free from existence as
an object and acquiring the status of a subject again.
The unification between the archive effect and the beehive effect is also the
unification between the crown of masculine culture that possesses a long literal
tradition, a culture of the book and writing, and feminine culture, the
achievements of which as a material culture are engulfed and denied frequently.
In its implementing within the Israeli expanse, the project of integrating
the beehive with the archive, it is also a synthesis between orient and
occident, between hegemony and sub-hegemony, among the working class
and the royal class, and a statement that there is a queen mother for culture
alongside the king father. Use of a beehive is also defiance toward the indolent
class of modern royalty – the economic and social hegemony. Challenging
the do-nothing hegemony is achieved by the female laborers connecting
to produce the aristocratic nectar-honey.
Summary: Art as a Project of Changing the Archive
Art as a project of changing the archive is one of the outstanding missions of
art and creative critique, while the hegemonial archive continues to rewrite
and represent reality. The beehive, which is both the working archive and the
home, possesses a register that is industriousness, production, and sharing.
The library is the archive of dead writing, and its register is liable to be laziness,
exploitation, and erasing.
The Israeli expanse that is an excluding, blocking, and labeling expanse copies
to the ground what transpires on the page. The immediate geographic
reflection of the historic and vice versa is extreme. monuments of perpetuation
are erected and cover up for the project of forgetting. Art as a document
of conscious and committed identity within this expanse is required for a project
of which the striving can be used to the fullest as aiming for a voice of
identity and territory. Translating the lone female voice, which is not expressed
in writing, repositioning identity anew, dismantling and construction, and cultivating
territory on several levels: the margins of the city, the periphery and
the urban, and the written book.
I write these words as one who for some years has set myself a goal of opening
the dead archive and installing another loudspeaker for the broken partial
existence of graduates of communities of immigration within the State –
whether in music, in literature, or in identity. I write them out of hope that art
that struggles will break through the barriers.
Haviva Pedaya
Haviva Pedaya is a poet, a culture critic and a scholar in jewish studies in the Ben Gurion University of
the Negev as well as senior fellow in the Van Leer Institute in jerusalem.