katalog-overlapping voices - Ritesinstitute

they are also problematic for Palestinian and israeli
political activism. they reduce israeli and palestinian
voices to proxies for guilt discourses instead
of engaging with the arguments they are
making.
at the same time, i would suggest a less anxietyridden
approach to the fact that the israeli-arab
conflict and the occupation becomes a space for
projection. Representations of violence and collective
ethical transgression (even if they are only
hinted at in an artwork) always lend themselves to
multiple reinterpretations and demand to be appropriated
by the viewer. it is futile and unproductive
to try to instruct viewers beforehand about the
proper forms of viewing art through an official
statement. if educators with school classes were
to try to forestall any comparisons between german
wehrmacht and israeli soldiers by declaring
such statements taboo, they would merely deaden
any productive debate. the emancipatory potential
of such an exhibition is not served by forcing
on the viewer ethically charged rules on the proper
reception of the works.
in austria, the interest in Palestinian and israeli
politics is always mediated through the austrian
past and the european past more generally. the
most productive way to deal with this tendency is
to take risks and see provocative, inappropriate,
and embarrassing statements as an opportunity to
offer new approaches to seeing israelis and Palestinians.
it is the work of curators to allow such debates
and the work of museum educators to encourage
them and make them productive – in
dialogue with actual visitors, rather than imagined
and stereotyped austrians, the existence of whose
prejudices we simply presume.
one way that museum educators can foster fruitful
debates is to point out other models of recep-
tion; describing, for example, what type of reception
a piece had or might have had or has already
had in israeli and/or Palestinian contexts. it is crucial
to work with the fact that the pieces exhibited
aim to challenge simplistic assumptions about
identity, voice, or representation. this does not
mean that there is not an ethics of reception.
guides should, for example, show their disapproval
of inappropriate remarks. nonetheless, the
main aim should not be to reduce embarrassment
but rather to use it.
alexander ari Joskowicz is assistant Professor in the Department of
history at the University of mississippi. he is currently working on
the anticlericalism of german and french Jews in the context of the
“culture wars” between liberals and catholic church since the
enlightenment.
1 on museum pedagogy in this regard, see: Richard sandell,
“museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference”, Routledge:
london, 2007.
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