Stamped Landscape and Stained Landscape

 

The notion of “landscape-place” has recently become prevalent in the field of art as well as in tangential disciplines. The expression “landscape-place” is intended to indicate that its subject or object is not a mere landscape, a landscape in the literal sense of the word, but rather embeds additional dimensions and layers that are concealed therein. These strata “charge” it with a long trail of meanings, beyond the visible and the immediate sensory experience. In this essay I would like to propose another term, which I find more pointed: “marked landscape.”

 

From the very outset of Israeli art, the Israeli landscape has been context-dependent. To wit: its depictions by artists have represented diverse ideological interpretations of concepts such as ‘homeland,’ ‘land,’ ‘place,’ ‘the history of a place,’ ‘the status of a place,’ ‘the visibility or invisibility of the landscape.’ In other words, the depictions are not those of a simply beautiful or engaging landscape, or of a ‘landscape per se.’ The choice of landscapes is neither accidental nor ‘naive’; it is influenced by historical, political, social, military, religious, ecological, and narrative-personal contexts.¹

 

In the past decade this phenomenon has had a present and consequential manifestation, mainly in paintings, photographs and installations by members of the middle and younger generations in Israel. These artists opt for ‘contaminated landscapes,’ controversial landscapes or ones somehow ‘stigmatized’ by someone. For example: landscapes in the outskirts of cities; ecologically polluted landscapes; landscapes associated with religious and mystical rituals; landscapes in the Occupied Territories and the landscapes of the other (settlements, refugee camps); landscapes to which the IDF prevents entry or even visual documentation thereof (firing zones, the nuclear reactor, military bases, and deserted detention camps, landscape sections that are erased from aerial photographs); landscapes that expose the land-cover and converse with the nature of the surface (of the painting or photograph); landscapes that expose the Israeli’s inclination to repudiate the local conditions and construct houses and neighborhoods “like those abroad” (‘build-your-own-home’ projects); virginal landscapes and penetrated ones; landscapes extracted from virtual fantasies; landscapes in states of collapse and desolation, and landscapes of real or metaphoric ruins; landscapes associated with the artist’s personal-familial story or involving a dialogue with art history. All these landscapes present a different Israel (perhaps “more real”) that the one featured in the pink wrapping of ideal or kitsch landscapes in tourist-oriented postcards.

 

Landscape, environment, nature, area, territory, place,² settlement, homeland, country, state, home – these are words that now have no single, straightforward, naive definition. For reasons to be elaborated later, they are perceived as code words that conceal – each of them separately and all together – rich semantic fields of expansive meanings and interpretations. Constantly stratified, these meanings and interpretations ceaselessly expand, since they contain and are contained, appropriating or adopting therein a long, lengthening trail of feelings and insights (emotions, urges, memories, dreams, fears, traumas, passions, beliefs, hopes, yearnings, criticism, censorship, repression, denial, concealment, sublimation, and consecration). These words are an artistic source of inspiration, a target for reporting, arguing, or flaying.

 

Israeli art (like Israeli society) can no longer boast aesthetic statements that reduce it to the boundaries of mere beauty. There is no “beautiful landscape” – there is “marked landscape,” a landscape which the artist chose to define, to converse with, to unearth that which had been concealed beneath the colorful surface. Any critical analysis of the modes of viewing and any artistic articulation of these marked themes must note that as the landscapes become an artistic source of inspiration, they also function as a point of departure for a critical discussion. In Israel 2003, landscape or words, and the visual images that signify or define them, have become a “ticking bomb,” a fire burst, a forbidden zone that cannot be touched without acknowledging that a “sterile zone” no longer exists.

 

Nowadays, “to know a landscape” means to know that it is multi-layered and contains revered values and revised values; befitting places or places where both observing and staying are prohibited; dangerous / secret / occupied / seized / liberated places (delete the superfluous / fill in the blanks). “To know a landscape” means to acknowledge the fact that in these turbulent times, sacred landscapes have blended with profane ones; those of the present have merged with those of the past; religious landscapes with secular ones, military landscapes with civilian ones, landscapes of entertainment and pastime with the landscapes of suffering and death – and no one can pinpoint the dwelling place of the landscapes of tranquility, peace and quiet. In a crazed era of war and terror, both local and international, of ecological wear and tear, the entire world – with its landscapes and places – has, in fact, become a “marked landscape,” one that prompts artists to create images of “before” and “after,” and images of ruins.

 

Thus it is not surprising that in recent years – more than ever – Israeli art has perceived the landscape as a sign of identity. Artists look into themselves in order to find their native habitat, and observe the landscape to find or identify themselves in it. They do not always identify with what is revealed to them, depending on whether they are prepared to remove their various blindfolds. Art’s basic patterns (“I vis-à-vis the landscape” and “the landscape and I”) are now filled with current materials different from those that characterized Israeli painting or photography in the past. The new representations of the Israeli landscape differ from the utopian-Zionist landscape portrayed by Boris Schatz’s Bezalel artists. They differ from the wilderness and early settlement landscapes in 1920s and 1930s art or from the kibbutz landscapes of the 1940s. They differ from the lyrical-abstract landscapes depicted by the New Horizons group and from the seismographic mental landscapes of Anna Ticho, Leopold Krakauer and Aviva Uri. They differ from the Tel Aviv billboard landscapes and from the collages incorporating, confronting or juxtaposing the sacred landscape from here (the Western Wall) with the secular landscape from there (a village in Europe) in Raffi Lavie’s works,³ and from Arieh Aroch‘s memory-stratified Jerusalem street-sign landscapes (Agrippas Street, 1964). They differ from Michael Druks’s Druksland maps (1975), and from the maps of the Dead Sea (1976) that have become amorphous, monstrous Rorschach blots, and from the country’s maps marked with geometrical shapes that replace the contour of the Green Line* in Dganit Berest’s works in the 1970s.⁴

 

It seems that contemporary artists who mark a landscape-place in their work operate with a greater sense of urgency and are more anxious and despairing in their assertions. They cast a more disillusioned and piercing gaze than in the past, which is not committed to any governmental, economic or other agent. The black stain, the shadow of the map of Israel (including the territories of the Palestinian Authority) imprinted/painted on Meir Gal’s armpit in his work Untitled (2002), presented in the current show, is not a friendly landscape-place convenient to live in. It is “a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof”; a marked landscape, a sign, a stamp, a barcode, an identifying mark, a stigma, an irremovable stain, it defines and links the artist/model to his native habitat, in the same way that a number or dye are used to brand cows or sheep, defining its identity and affiliating it to a herd and an owner.

 

The expression “marked landscape” is broad enough to include the semantic fields of both “stamped” and “stained” landscapes. The stamped landscape is inscribed with the Zionist seal of approval (“local landscape,” “Israeli landscape,” “our landscape,” “homeland landscapes,” “the Zionist home,” or “my home”). The stained landscape is branded with a negative stain, a mark of Cain, a scar, the traces of injuries inflicted by wars and hostilities, appropriation, occupation and penetration, religious, military or civil activities, or ecological pollution. The signs in the landscape are remainders and evidence of the acts performed in it, signs waiting to be spotted and decoded, like the signs in a crime scene waiting the inquisitive and interpretive eyes of the investigator. The artists (and the viewers after them) espy and uncover these signs concealed or revealed in the landscape. They point at them, illuminating or obscuring the landscape with the new – critical or factual – meanings.

 

The show Marked Landscapes introduces several approaches exhibited by contemporary Israeli artists who observe the Israeli landscape and reflect it by taking action from within and against society’s scopic regime, blind spots and blindness as manifested in its relation to the landscape and its components.⁵ The scopic regime is dictated and channeled by ideological (political, military, religious, social, ethnic, tribal and gendered) and aesthetic modes of seeing, both of which are necessarily subjective and manipulative.

 

Marked Landscapes focuses only on the unique point of view of the Zionist-Israeli-Jewish scopic regime, yet it is well aware that there are other perspectives too (such as those of the Arab-Israeli, Christian and Muslim, Bedouin, Druze and Palestinian male and female artists). These perspectives are not included in this show, and still remain to be explored in other frames that suggest another reading and perspective. The twenty artists participating in the exhibition were selected from among dozens of Israeli artists currently working in Israel and abroad who delve into the “landscape-place” in Israel.⁶

 

The silhouette of the map of Israel and the “Territories” on Meir Gal’s armpit is only one example of the link between the country’s territories and the artist’s bodily territories or private-domestic environment. In the work Green Line (1986) featured in the show, David Reeb marked the Green Line as the outline of a country whose body has changed and whose old contour hovers above an abstracted texture of fields or streets. In other works in that series, the Green Line is imprinted on the interior of the artist’s studio. Other signs are imprinted on “sacred landscapes” (The Western Wall or Temple Mount). At times, these signs are reminiscent of barcodes, alluding to the transformation of the specific site into a consumer commodity.⁷ At other times the signs appear like barbed-wire fences or as bars – signs that present a political situation.

 

Hilla Lulu Lin’s triptych Cold Blood (A Poem in Three Parts), 1996, makes a similarly horrifying association between the landscapes and the artist’s eyes, which have become chunks of meat, like the meaty skies above Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Another sign, that of urine and odor, is perpetuated in Joshua Neustein’s conceptual work Territorial Imperative (1976-77). Neustein, one of the first artists to explore “marked landscapes,” documented an activity held on the Golan Heights (and in other places in the world) via photography and various documents. He sent a male dog to urinate in the landscape, thereby marking and demarcating the territory imperative to him. In the years in which this work was executed (as today), this act had a metaphoric-political meaning. It was an accurate visual formulation of the gap between the boundaries of a natural territory – the essential living space of an animal – and a national territory whose boundaries are those of hubris, Man’s desire for conquest and mastery. In another piece, Nature Morte (1983), Neustein marked the scorched silhouette of a Phantom jet in the Galilean landscape, a quintessential emblem of a deadly weapon of war, a modern pictogram of the angel of death.

 

Signs and textures of maps, aerial photographs, military and authoritarian signs, and erasures made by the military censor form the basis and source of inspiration in works by Michael Kovner, Nurit Gur-Lavie (Karni), Guy Raz, Gilad Ophir, and Mirjam Bruck-Cohen. As early as 1974 Michael Kovner created paintings based on aerial photographs and photographs of the houses of Palestinians in Gaza, El Arish and Hebron. It is a gaze at the landscape of the other, from a helicopter or through field-glasses, from the Jewish side of the “Seam Line.”**

 

The series Aerial Photographs – Gaza (2002) by Nurit Gur-Lavie (Karni) too, offers an overview of the landscape of the other – the Jebalia refugee camp. The artist’s father maintained work and commerce relations with the Palestinians, and his packing-house ultimately became a concept most identified with the division between the two sides (the Karni Crossing). After her father’s passing, Gur-Lavie started looking “beyond the border,” toward the other. In her paintings one may discern the intersecting streets and central junction of the refugee camp, creating an accentuated sign with multiple meanings greater than its functional shape on the camp’s map. This sign is at once a cross, a bull’s eye in the sights of the helicopter zeroing in on the target, and a cancellation sign similar to an X in popular visual culture. Perhaps most of all, however, this sign implicitly corresponds with the X sign in Aviva Uri’s 1970s series of drawings (and in her studies Crossfire, Intersected Sheaves of Light, and Roadblock on the Path of Pain from 1973). In Uri’s case, the X marked signs of cancellation, crosses and graves, birds and airplanes – all of them signs of death.

 

In Guy Raz’s and Gilad Ophir’s photographs,⁸ the military and/or governmental presence leaves its impression on the Israeli landscape in the form of painted road-blocks, pierced targets, tunnels and radar devices. In these photographs the viewer’s gaze is blocked vis-à-vis geometrical shapes (squares, rectangles, semi-circles) that take up a considerable part of the photograph “erasing” the landscape expanses behind them. The act of erasure embeds a dimension of censorship, prohibition and guidance – determining what you will see and what you will not see in the landscape.⁹

 

This aspect, in a different context, is presented in Meir Gal’s photographs, Untitled (Erasing the Museum), 1996, and is implied in Eldar Farber’s painting Drive-In (1998-2001). Kasimir Malevich’s paintings, Black Square (1915) and White Square (1918) echo in the background, a reminder of 20^th century Modernism. The landscape in Drive-In is urban, marked at its center by a white rectangle – the large-scale cinematic screen. That screen, on which tales are projected, blocks the landscape behind it by its very presence.

 

Another screen, wallpaper with a giant photograph of a forest view and snowy mountains is affixed to one of the living room walls in the home of a family of immigrants from the Former Soviet Union residing in Afula and fantasizing about Mother Russia. That photograph by Shai Aloni directs us to yet another facet of the show: landscapes of memory and association.

 

The paintings of Rena R. Bekin, Keren Anavi, and Shlomi Hagai, and Leah Marmorstein-Yarchi’s photographs operate within the confusing dual field of what we see in the works and what we think or imagine in them. In the overt dimension, Rena R. Bekin’s paintings abstract the Israeli landscapes, transforming them into geometrical shapes whose style calls Joseph Zaritsky’s series of paintings Yehiam and Na’an (1947-1952) to mind. On the more covert level, concealed within the painterly grid, are the unified structures of the Birkenau death camp and the railway tracks leading thereto.¹⁰

 

Leah Marmorstein-Yarchi’s seemingly banal landscape photographs likewise elicit Holocaust-related associations in the viewer’s mind. The family playing amidst the shacks in the reconstructed site in Atlit, the girls standing amidst the trees in a JNF forest, or the baby hoisted up in the air by his grandfather next to the Tel Hai courtyard. These and other images trigger an associative mechanism, a nearly conditioned reflex, that shifts thought from here to there. A similar feeling is evoked upon viewing Shlomi Hagai’s paintings: the empty factories call the death camps to mind in their shape and the terrifying atmosphere they convey.

 

Memorials burst forth from Keren Anavi’s forest paintings. She marks the Israeli landscape as a landscape of wars and gravestones. The recreation sites and holiday resorts conceal bitter memories of past battles. Nuphar Kedar employs the vestiges of past cultures as a key image in the generation of local identity and belonging. She plants footprints and remnants of things past in the Israeli landscape. The vestiges of a Crusader fortress; capitals and tympana of ancient synagogues; the tombs of the Just and other Cabalists – these and others stand in a present-day landscape and their consumed vestiges form evidence of the past and a focal point of pilgrimage. The archaeological vestiges that mark the landscape with undeciphered traces from the past are at the core of Gilad Efrat’s paintings. The past is the present and the present is the past.

 

Like a detective arriving at the scene of crime, gathering findings that will lead him to solve a crime, Larry Abramson arrived in Tsooba to see the ruins that Zaritsky did not see when he painted the place from his studio on Kibbutz Palmach-Zova. tsooba is the phonetic transcription of the name designating the ruins of the Arab village that stood on the kibbutz’s whereabouts and it is written in Latin letters in all of Abramson’s works on this theme (1993-94). Zaritsky’s blindness is an allegory to the scopic regime, that sophisticated apparatus of consciousness and ideology that structures modes of seeing and determines what we will see in the landscape/reality and what will blind us.

 

Adi Kaplan & Shahar Carmel also challenge the scopic regime, observing the country’s landscapes and unearthing within them covert messages hidden behind the walls of the sacred graves, fire and smoke. Mirjam Bruck-Cohen and Gal Weinstein expose that which had been covered behind the patched textures, reminiscent of camouflage nets, of the topographical maps of Shefar’am or the Jezreel Valley.

 

In another work by Mirjam Bruck-Cohen, The Architect’s Vision – The Client’s Whim (1996), within her knitted map, like an icon, she situates the hands and face of an urban planner whose vision was never realized and his plans never implemented, but rather served the artist as a point of departure for her own pieces. Six months after her work was exhibited, the architect was killed in a terrorist attack in Haifa. The work acquired an added, terrible meaning. The imprinted face of the architect was transformed into the sign of a disconcerting presence, like the face of Christ whose features remain impressed on Santa Veronica’s veil, a memory sign that remained after the victim’s crucifixion and death.

 

This review of some of the works featured in the current show commenced with the marking of a map on a human body and concludes with the marking of a human portrait within a map. Ultimately, man is a reflection of his native landscape, and vice versa: the “marked landscapes” are the reflections of “marked” human beings who live and die here, in this land, for the sake of it or because of it.

 

Notes

1. Thanks to Tali Tamir for her lecture on this theme to the participants of the Curatorship Course. Her presentation and interpretation of this subject matter have sharpened the way in which we explored the show’s concern.

 

2. In Hebrew there are seven different definitions to the word makom (place): the area taken up by a given body; a rural or urban settlement for human residence; a replacement orsubstitute; a seat for a single person, a space or gap in which to stand or be, a situation or standing, and one of the names of God,the Omnipresent. These seven interpretations range from the most concrete, earthly and material (an area and a piece of land) to the most abstract, heavenly and spiritual (God).

 

3. Raffi Lavie, Untitled, 1971, collage and oil pastels, 40x29 cm.

 

4. Dganit Berest, Map of Israel with a Lozenge Border, 1976, spray paint on school map, 110x160 cm., collection of the artist.

 

5. A “blind spot” is the area of the retina from which the optic nerve emerges, traveling from the eye to the brain. It is insensitive to light, and therefore unable to perceive stimuli that are translated into vision. Figuratively, it denotes a space within the normal scope of a transmitter where reception is low.

 

6. The exhibitions curated by Dr. Gideon Ofrat at Zman Le’Omanut, Time for Art, Center for Israeli Art, Tel Aviv – The Return to Zion: Beyond the Place (Makom) Principle and “I Shall Rebuild You Ruins”: The Image of the Ruin in Israel 1803-2003, supplement the current show, creating a “virtual exhibition” of sorts that may sum up the preoccupation of Israeli artists with marked landscapes.

 

7. David Reeb, Jerusalem of Gold, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 140x100 cm.; David Reeb, Holy Places #1, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 93x70 cm.; David Reeb, Holy Places #2, 1995, acrylic on canvas, 93x70 cm.

 

8. During 1996-2000 Gilad Ophir embarked on joint photographic excursions with Roi Kuper as part of the project Necropolis. Works from the project were featured in joint exhibitions of the two artists and in solo exhibitions staged by each of them in Israel and throughout the world.

 

9. The practice of landscape erasure, in painting or photography, is also discernible in the work of other Israeli artists. Raffi Lavie, for example, employed a type of “whitewashing” and “cover-up” in white (or other color) in order to erase and conceal the landscape poster or the postcard underneath; Ariane Littman-Cohen erased/cut out “censored” landscape sections from aerial photographs in her exhibition White Land (February 2001, The Artists’ House, Jerusalem).

 

10. Two photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, taken by Allied planes on February 4, 1944, were the source of inspiration for Rena R. Bekin’s paintings.

 

 

* Israel’s border as drawn up at the end of the War of Independence, during the 1949 armistice agreements, before the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967.

 

** A new term for the Green Line, separating Israeli and Palestinian territory.