Israeli Art and Reality

If there is an aspect that defines much of Israeli art in the last three decades, it is its close relation to reality. Without entering philosophical meanderings about what is reality? (Heidegger, Hegel) we can assume that reality in art is the simple act of leaving the studio and looking out to the world to record the sensual and intellectual input it offers. In saying that the artist “leaves the studio” and “records” – we might address 19th century painting practices, but in contemporary art, we are rather alluding to the media of film, video and photography, and in a country where political and social reality is so overwhelming, it is not surprising that these media took the center stage and are identified as quintessentially Israeli.

“Reality” has been a central theme in Israeli Art since the 70’s – in the performative work that Michal Neeman, Joshua Neusten, Pinchas Cohen Gan and others did following the Six Day’s War (1967) -  but it first came to define photography in the years of the First Intifada (1987-1993) with the images photojournalist were shooting in order to document events for the printed press. 

For the 1st Photography Biennial in Ein Harod in 1988, the late Adam Baruch coined the term Art-chronicle. He wrote then:

“Art-chronicle” is my own term, and though it may be somewhat intuitive for immediate acceptance as an “ism”, I want to pass it on to the public. It comprises as blend of art and of chronicling: art as art in every way, and chronicling in the sense of immediate documentation ongoing journalistic photography, and the relation between them. It is a relationship sustained only by photographer-artists who are alert to the circumstances of journalistic commissioning and capable of deriving advantage of this “handicap.” The handicap is constant and varied: pressure, the rapidity of response, taking into account the quality of news print, the intelligence of editors, the need to serve a product that must sell, the need for high and immediate comprehensibility, and the conscious erasure of certain nuances. The discipline required is that of the conscious photographer-artist.[…]

Art-chronicle is the best option of the Israeli photographer who lives in a basically non-supportive cultural environment.

Indeed, photojournalism was the platform where outstanding photography was done and slowly accepted as part of the artistic mainstream. It was formative for Miki Kratsman who worked for the newspaper Haaretz between 1985 and 2012 and Pavel Wolberg, who worked as a photojournalist for Haaretz and other outlets between 1997 and 2018. The immediacy of the events represented are the epitome of Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment”, and this principle shaped the work of these artists in the coming decades with photographers, like Ron Amir and Assaf Shoshan, who keep this approach of photography as a tool for documenting a human and complex political realty.

So “reality” – more specifically, political reality was already an established subject matter in Israeli art, when it took center-stage with the new media of video art. The appearance of video art, though, took place almost a decade after Adam Baruch wrote those lines, and it must be seen as part of the paradigmatic shift in Israeli art and culture that took place during the mid-1990s. This shift was triggered by political upheavals in the Middle East, whose resonance within Israeli culture and art was paralleled and influenced by developments in the televised media.

The events in question, from the Oslo Accords to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1996, created a new visual language that rose directly  - not out of concrete events, but rather out of the representation of these events in the televised media. With the appearance of cable television, which the majority of Israeli homes acquired in the late 1980s, foreign news channels – including form Arab countries,  were able to broadcast in Israel during the first Gulf War in 1991 competing with the state television channel, which had enjoyed a monopoly in Israel since 1968. This was further enhanced by the inauguration of the first commercial Israeli television channel in 1993, which was the first to broadcast commercial advertisements. This created a new “reality”-  comprised of news, marketing and above all, emotional manipulation, laid itself bare to deconstruction, pushing young artists to take a stand.

This connection between media and video art was essential for much of the early development of video art in Israel.  In this early stages, it was Doron Solomons who was the most influential on the artists who reacted directly to the political reality in Israel. He led the way for other young artists to focus their work on the new televised reality. For these artists, the emerging visual idiom encompassed an almost intuitive treatment of television language and its formats – as befits a generation that grew up in front of the screen. 

Although quite typical of the first generation of video artists, the “mediatic” context in Israeli video works - whether as subject matter or as background framework can be found until this day, for instance, in the works of Omer Fast and Roee Rosen. 

But “reality” soon opened to the wider, personal, and historical focus of the artists and the challenging cultural environment that is Israel and its history.  Nir Evron, for instance, in his choice of locations to shoot his eerie videos, demands a knowledge of the history that is imbued in each location – whether the Island where Alfred Deryfus was locked or the ruins of the palace that the King of Jordan was building for himself and remained unfinished due to the occupation of the West Bank in 1967

Also Ilit Azoulay, in her deconstruction and re-construction of seemingly common objects inevitably addresses the wider cultural and historical context where these object were found.

Direct referent to the political and religious Middle Eastern conflict can be found in Nira Pereg’s works documenting and commenting on different “consecrated” spaces. 

Also Yael Bartana creates fictional histories that seemingly solve the conflicts that are entangling Israeli society. She does so by going back to the mediatic and appropriating  visual marketing tricks to endow her works with seductiveness and dreamlike artificiality. Bartana’s works echo a mediated reality, but she mostly creates her own “fictional” narratives by directing and creating deliberate situations. 

Very fast, video artists learned the potential to speak about reality rather in terms of it’s negation or re-creation and not its reflection. Gilad Ratman, for instance, creates fantastic environments in his works. His narratives are obscure and surreal, achieved by fragmenting and juxtaposing several stories that develop in parallel; unconnected and drawn from different realms creating dislocated narratives. In this way, the viewer tends to create parallels and metaphorical meanings out of the unconnected sequences. 

Another aspect of Israeli art that is central to video and photography is the performative quality - where often the artist him or herself take a position of acting out a role, or simply performing his or herself, giving another layer of “reality” to the work. This was especially common in the earliest works, as the artists lacked economic means to hire actors and participants – as in Doron Solomons and specially Guy Ben Ner. Such is the case in some of Michal Helfman’s videos, and Chen Cohen’s photographic projects.

More recently, younger artists use computer generated imaging (CGI) to create their own reality, as is the case with Ruth Patir

Even Yael Efrati’s sculptures stem for her “reality” and photography that is being de-constructed and re-constructed, generally with “low”, non-artistic materials. Her subject-matter too relates to her personal memories and the familial home. 

More than being merely representational, video art and photography dealing with “reality” in Israel is used by artists to elaborate on their own situation, identity, political location, and personal and collective history and trauma.