The original Hebrew version of this article is was published in Maarav. The Eigenheim Journal of Culture (Issue 1 Volume 0), is publishing the article in Hebrew in their new multi-language magazine.
Medinat Weimar is proud to present the translated English version.
The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons - by J. M. W. Turner 1835
You can do or say almost anything, but who’s listening?
By: Yael Berda and Ronen Eidelman
The truth is that you can do a lot through art, you can say lot. Almost anything. Both in Israel and in the post 9-11/Bin Laden you can still say almost anything. Art is the most radical of spaces, a place where the rule of law is suspended. Where you’re forgiven for pushing the envelope and encouraged to break the rules. Often, this space is free of discrimination on the basis of color, religion, nationality and sex. Discrimination does exist: against the uneducated and conformists. Even when other rights are suspended, the right to artistic expression prevails.
Thus art holds an unusual place in the lawful rule of liberal democracy. In some European constitutions the freedom of expression even overrides the law. They have clauses stipulating that should a law be broken for the sake of artistic expression (not every law, naturally), then the artist is exempt from prosecution for the purpose of maintaining the right of freedom of expression: This is the right to be in a “state of exception” , in a space without rules, on an island outside the law. And the freedom to take others there with you.
This state of exception is a space in which we can suspend the very laws that establish us as people. It’s difficult to explain where this space exists, but we’ve all been there at some time or other. Some of us live there. Anyone who’s been in the army, in jail, in the Occupied Territories, who’s gone through evaluation exams for a hi-tech company, who has passed through Jerusalem’s central bus station, been in the airport after your flight has been cancelled or in the unemployment office, even anyone who’s driven on a new road, before the National Road Company has had a chance to paint in the white lines and sign-posts- anyone who’s been anywhere recognizes the atmosphere of an exceptional situation.
In the state of exception, rules do not apply. Consequently, it’s like a state of emergency. But even an exceptional situation will eventually become the normal and the routine if it persists- and after all, in Israel we exist in a perpetual state of emergency. We’ve been in a state of emergency since the founding of this country: Our emergency birth was broadcast live and we have lived within this ‘legal’ crisis ever since.
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And if this state of emergency is permanent, the government also defines situations of emergency within it. Sub-situations: A state of emergency within the emergency, an especially critical state of crisis, a state of war and a state of calamity.
Within a state of emergency many defensive measures may be implemented and forced on the citizens of the country; in our case, these measures are strange, colonial regulations, they have British accents and a great sense of humor. For example, the Copyright Laws in Israel that were passed in 1919, the censorship of cinema, which is based on the Mandate Law for the screening of silent films dating from 1927 and lastly, the “emergency Leviathan” of the budget arrangement (Hok Hahesderim) , that swallows up every social law passed in Israel for reasons of economic emergency.
Bottom line, the main objective in declaring a state of emergency is giving the government- meaning the executive branch and the army- the right to make decisions that otherwise would have been made by the legislative branch, the people’s representative. Therefore, a state of emergency is a mechanism that overrules the separation of powers. It is a mechanism that allows those holding power to decide what is law. This harkens to the days when a king’s word was law.
Giorgio Agamben wrote that the state of exception, the place where democracy is suspended, has become the fundamental basis for modern rule since 9-11/Bin Laden. The frequent declaration of a state of emergency creates a trickle-down effect in which democracy slowly ebbs away-at first in a small patter and finally in a huge torrential tidal wave of sovereign authority. An enormous power, quite like the Hobsian Leviathan, a thing Walter Benjamin termed “pure violence”, that which is outside the law, which makes the exceptional acceptable.
Agamben defined the space where the state of exception becomes the rule as a “camp” (like a refugee camp or a concentration camp). This is the place where madness reigns, where something that had been completely unacceptable a mere ten minutes prior is now normal.
(NATO) Northen Arts Tatical Offensive
So we’ve said that through art you can do a lot, say a lot. Almost anything. This is the most radical of spaces, where the rules are suspended, where perhaps even the state of emergency cannot exist (or would not wish to exist there, to be more accurate). But we can’t discuss freedom of expression without asking one question: Who is listening?
And the state of emergency in art is that most of Israeli art today isn’t interested in who’s listening, but rather in self-advancement. Even when it does have something to say it’s a proclamation of criticism or protest- and this is not the worst case scenario, where art is just a tool in the hands of marketing and advertising.
Don’t jump out of your skins. The last paragraph is probably a broad generalization, but then, the reality here is a generalization since any remark you make about it becomes obsolete before you’ve made it, it becomes history or interpretation, and any attempt at consistency fails because of the exceptional nature of the Israel/Palestine reality. This is another of arts problems here: Reality is far more original and interesting that art itself, it is far more surprising and radical.
Writing about the state of emergency in art is an attempt to describe the void. Many have done this better than us; Georges Perec did so in ‘Species of Spaces and Other Pieces’, Peter Brook did so in ‘The Empty Space’ and there are a diverse group of Buddhist teachers and theorists who have written about emptiness. They all agree that the very last thing an empty space contains is emptiness. The empty space contains life, motion and change. The empty space is the airport and the subway; it is the corridors of transition between one dimension to the next, from the private to the public, from the internal to the external, the administrative to the political.
One-dimensional Art
You can be critical in art. It’s even welcomed, as long as you don’t go against art’s Holy Places (galleries, museums, curators), as long as you’re careful not to bite the hand that feeds you (sponsors, funds, philanthropists). There was a time when even this was chic (Hacke); there was even guerilla art that protested and criticized artistic institutions. But today, artistic criticism has been appropriated by the establishment and lossing its critical bite and its ability to bring together, to create solidarity. The artist is encouraged to be critical and independent of thought, but nothing is said of political activity, of partnership, of change and struggle.
You can choose to be critical, to be a protest artist, but stay an individual and don’t even contemplate working outside the field of art (solidarity and building community is out of the question). You are, after all, artists- and not, God forbid, something as low as social activists or (God forbid!) politicians! (Herbert Marcuse already stated this in his book ‘The One-Dimensional Man’: he recognized the system that integrates and co-opts language and revolutionary ideas and makes them redundant, and the ineffectiveness of protest).
Israeli art, quite like the Israeli industry of peace, has made protesting into a profession. The critical artist opposes the Occupation and exploitation, goes to the Biennales, exhibits his/her work, travels the world and gains recognition and prestige for merely recognizing the situation (and if so inclined, may have even documented those that struggle to change the situation).
Since most of our jet-setting artists come from the privileged classes, they must forcibly be awakened to the recognition of repression. Then they are applauded for their sensitivity and compassion, they are praised for having the sense to realize the severity of the situation and to document it. On the other hand, those few others who really suffer the repression simply have to do their jobs (and without criticism, please). A Palestinian artist once told us- “No matter what we exhibit, the most important thing is that we’re Israeli/Palestinian artists”. Content loses its value; now the imperative is identity, the artists resume. The exhibitions manifesto is far more significant that the exhibition itself.
Ronald Haeberle and the Art Workers Coalition 1970
The “travel agency” of protest artists is a small clique of curators and funds, all experts on the art of conflict and the architecture of poverty. Sometimes they conduct discussions on multi-culturalism, sometimes they discuss borders , every once in a while they debate the various forms of documenting a massacre. They meet in exhibitions and functions around the world, in the exceptional spaces of art, where anything can be said, but no one is listening. These are arts “projects”. In some cases, the artists even deign to spend some time with their “objects”. In this clique anything can be said as long as it’s against the establishment, without undermining its legitimate authority. It’s forbidden to mention that all of the clique’s members are of the elite class (or well on their way to being such), it’s forbidden to mention who hasn’t been invited and it’s forbidden to speak outside the well-established limits of the radical consensus. Any cultural ignorance is banned completely- and most importantly, you must never pollute the deliberations with the demand for political action outside the world of art (with one exception to the rule: you are allowed to sign petitions).
Even when young artists attempt to crack open this consensus dead-lock it’s usually through a protest against the very establishments that rejected them; establishments they would have been thrilled to be accepted to. They don’t want an alternative world. They just want to get by and manage what’s already there.
Fearing Enlisted Art, Reviling the Revolution
On June, 1957, long before he could have imagined that the Situationist Revolution would be over and done with, without having achieved even one of its goals, Guy Debord wrote (and it’s astonishing to realize how many artists complete their academic studies without even knowing who this man is): “We must support…the necessity of considering a consistent ideological action for fighting, on the level of the passions, the influence of the propaganda methods of late capitalist; to concretely contrast , at every opportunity , other desirable ways of life with the reflections of the capitalist ways of life; to destroy, by all hyperpolitical means the bourgeois idea of happiness…..we must introduce everywhere a revolutionary alternative to the ruling culture….. ”.
True, it is irritating to speak of the revolution. It’s especially irritating when talk of the revolution is bantered about on huge advertisements declaring some new supermarket sale. It’s difficult to discuss the revolution when most of those who deal with culture don’t really know what they want, don’t really know what they’re fighting for or who they’re fighting against.
True, current neo-liberal ethics also maintain the importance of developing creative, critical and cultured employees engendered with “dynamic revolutionary thinking” . No question, it’s hard to talk about positive radicalism when the economic system is a system of radical capitalism and power is no longer in the hands of the government, but is controlled by corporations and other bodies accelerating in a space of a new, unknown sovereignty. It’s difficult when the radical left and the radical right agree on so many points when describing the situation.
True, the situation is disorienting and debilitating, and Israeli art finds itself in a tailspin of political confusion. The only mantra accepted by all is that none of them wish to create (political) recruited art.
There are those that say that alternative art means building frameworks and systems of action. They believe that communities should be established inside the capitalistic arena and used within the technological spaces while avoiding the struggle against them. They believe this because they recognize the one-dimensional aspect of protest, because they realize that protest itself may be integrated into a system and co-opted for its own growth.
They ask artists to fight within their own field of expertise and for their own needs: Fight against the policy of art funds and fight for adequate pay for artists. They claim that we can let go of the romantic image of the dissident artist in an age where the industry of culture is one of the most profitable industries that exists. To us this sounds as if people who never really needed to struggle for their survival are now asking us to give it up: This is a convenient solution, perhaps even a lucrative one, but certainly not the answer to our artistic state of emergency.
The Political Economy of Art
The issue of philanthropy in art is not a new one: Feudal art or Church art, Sami Ofer or the Israel Museum’s CEO Club- even the Situationalists wanted to raise funds from those wealthy elite who were sick of the bourgeoisie life. In a world of privatized government and charity, we don’t want to pass purist judgment on fund activities. But we should criticize art that doesn’t utilize its exceptional position to talk about it. We should criticize art that doesn’t talk about the cultural, political and economic climate within which a situation like this can exist or talk about how political this fund money really is.
Art must recognize that these funds shape our freedom of expression. They make artists regiment themselves; they make them self -censure the content and shape of the art they create. Art can debate the significance of privatizing government and life and entrusting them to philanthropists. Perhaps the time has come to talk about it right here.
John Heartfield, The Hand has Five Fingers, 1928
Arts Political Alternative
We want recruited art. Art recruited to life that communicates with the surrounding. Art which is the surrounding. Art, whose materials are the street, the city, the disaster, the everyday and the huge boredom of the war today, the war of i.d.’s, papers, E-Mails, and borders which conceal the atrocities from our eyes. Art that is subversive in its mere presence, in its accessibility, in the fact that it touches life, lives in the political, which is the cobweb of the language its eyelashes, the fingers of the protocol stenographer in court, the bulldozer driver, the encrypted code writer, the world’s smuggler and the mind’s pirate. Like the law, language can function only from the moment it realizes it is language. From the moment art defines some parts of life as art it makes them invulnerable to any dictatorship but its own. Like the law, art is total, it is everywhere (that is, if we aren’t afraid to allow it this space, to allow art to live at it’s fullest).
We want art that doesn’t always know what it’s saying. Confused art, art that doesn’t have all the answers, but can still distinguish between good and bad. Art that isn’t afraid of struggle, even when it knows that it will lose most of the time.
Because of its exceptional nature, art can create a state of sovereignty for itself within life. It can determine the nature of the debate, it can weave reality. Not recruited art like that of Amos Oz, Michael Moore or the posters of Mayday, and not art that uses environment friendly materials, but rather art that grabs hold of the limits of our collective consciousness and then begins to run with it, runs far into the distance in order to broaden them. Art that has stopped deluding itself and holding itself away from life, art that takes its place fully, politically. That allows itself to flood space, whether empty or full. That fills the law, fills the body, the city and the government with what it is and what it can be.
A friend of ours said recently that she creates in order to be “present in the world”. We want not only to be present in the world but to allow the world to be present in us, in all that we create. We don’t want just presence, but a partnership in the world- a partnership of expression, power, and decision-making. Not to talk about human rights, but to live them.
We want to unravel the boundaries of the exceptional space we have been given and to let art seep back into life.
