Bad Girls – The Israeli Version 

Contemporary Women Artists in Israel

Published in Jewish Feminism in Israel: Some Contemporary Perspectives (edited by Kaplana Misra and Malanie Rich), University Press of New Engalnd, 2003

Preface: To be (political) or not to be?
Since this essay is being written during the Festival ofSukkoth (Tabernacles), against the backdrop of the recent political turmoil in our battle-fatigued region (this time, the El Aksa Intifada), the following question cannot be avoided: What is the significance and impact of artistic practice in a permanently volatile country? During times of peace, visual art is last on the list of Israel’s cultural agenda. Resources, budgets, institutional and market infrastructure are not self-evident in a place where the political conflict overshadows any attempt to operate according to codes of ‘normality’. In times of conflict, these circumstances are radicalized ad absurdum, for there is nothing farther or more detached from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than the preoccupation with sexual identity and the body. Within this context, writing about artistic practice is likewise perceived as petty. Notwithstanding, perhaps the very engagement with the ‘normal’ is, in itself, a political statement highlighted by the cry “live and let live”.

Those who are not familiar with the visual art scene in Israel naturally have all sorts of presumptions and expectations. What kind of culture does Israel produce? What are the themes Israeli artists are expected to confront? Many foreign curators and professionals from the art field who I met in Israel preferred and appreciated, to a greater extent, artists whose work was explicitly political, while disdainfully dismissing anything that was not explicitly political. This implies that in a country where the legendary political ‘pot’ is always boiling, and at times even overflowing, there is no justification for the individual’s preoccupation with ‘normal’ individualistic trivialities, such as sexual identity, gender, sexuality, or the body. I hope that the following text will not only illustrate the options of representation of women by women in Israel, but also link the works to the socio-political reality in which they were created.

As I will attempt to illustrate, the binary opposition implied by the above, concerning a pair of dichotomous options, namely ‘political’ and ‘a-political’, is not entirely accurate. The choice made by women artists currently operating in Israel, to focus on voicing either a quintessentially political voice, one which is often perceived as superficial and propagandist, or a personal, individual, ostensibly apolitical tone, which in any event declares itself as political, is a dynamic, flexible circumstance-related and multi-faceted choice.

The filter through which I will discuss these issues is that of an exhibition I co-curated in 1994 (together with anthropologist and sociologist Dr. Tamar El Or) for the Ein Harod Museum of Art in Israel. Entitled Meta-Sex 94: Identity, Body and Sexuality, the exhibition presented fifteen artists – thirteen women and two men — who featured paintings, photographs, videos, installations and objects. It reflected a local as well as international tendency that culminated in the 1990s: a preoccupation with issues of sexuality and identity that challenged conventional definitions and political expectations.

The following paragraphs will combine a discussion of works from the show as well as later works exhibited in other frameworks. It will set out to anchor artistic practice in Israel on the borderline between the personal and the political.

Background and facts – here and there:
The following episode was the introduction to my essay for the Meta-Sex catalogue: “The car began to cough and choke, it bounced and stopped. We came out, four women — three of the artists participating in the exhibition and myself, the curator. We were on our way back from the Ein Harod Museum of Art, midway, just past Wadi Ara. Darkness was growing. We lifted the engine cover and once again were compelled to admit that the ‘constructivist relief’ uncovered in front of our eyes was like a riddle to us. Were it not for the men, who stopped their car and within seconds located the source of the problem, we could not have gone on. We could not ignore the grotesque coincidence that put the feminist theory and all those academic texts we read to the test of reality. We thought of history, that kept us away from the car engine, of the progress we made towards it, despite everything, and of the long way still ahead of us. Can this story serve to uphold an anti-feminist argument? Is this an essential scene or is it merely a coincidental episode?”

Some of the crucial burning issues related to cultural gaps and tensions, on both the local and the universal levels, emerged already in that depiction. Naturally,Meta-Sex was feminist in its orientation. Against the backdrop of the political situation and the flourishing myths of masculinity, heroism and machoistic patriotism, exhibitions of this kind are still rare in Israel. Even though the present essay does not purport to review the history of the feminist voice in Israeli art, one ought to mention one precursor of Meta-Sex, an exhibition considered a trailblazer in art research and curatorship.

In the summer of 1990, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art held the first feminist exhibition, Feminine Presence(curator: Ellen Ginton), which set out to explore the beginnings of the ‘feminist era’ in Israeli art. In retrospect, it seems that the exhibition paradoxically pointed out the problematic issues inherent in the feminine voice within the local artistic context. What the curator exhibited was, in fact, a chronology of denial, often accompanied by an apologetic tone, both on her part and on the part of the women-artists. Curator Ellen Ginton skillfully analyzed the history of the denial discourse and showed how it corresponded to the earliest phase of Feminism – the phase of imitating men and talking in male-minded terms. Dganit Berest, a prominent Israeli artist, wrote in the exhibition catalogue: “First, I knew that feminine identity or sexual identity had not occupied me at all in my works […] an interpretation which would try to distill a common component, a ‘feminine’ one, from the works of the various artists represented in this exhibition would seem to me forced, even offensive.” Tamar Getter, another leading Israeli artist, articulated the axiom: “Just as there is no male and female mathematics, so there is no masculine and feminine art.” It seems to me that both would have agreed with Virginia Woolf, who wrote in 1929, “It is fatal for a woman to lay [in her work] the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman.” The curator’s conclusion was that there is no point in looking for formal, behavioral or mental common denominator in women’s art, since “these artists have nothing in common, apart from the fact that they are women, and Israeli women artists.”

This assertion implies that art is a universal-autonomous field, operating beyond sexuality and it is unrelated to gender. Nevertheless, Feminine Presence marked a turning point. It was a significant exhibition, if only for exposing the extensive power held by women in Israeli art from the seventies to the present day. One may argue that Feminine Presence made Meta-Sex possible, by introducing a legitimate channel of discussion, placing these concerns on the agenda and inspiring a discussion.

The four years that passed between Feminine Presence and Meta-Sex reflect a deep generation gap, which attest to a real change in perception and expression of sexuality and gender within the artistic context. Unlike Feminine Presence, Meta-Sex did attempt to point out a common denominator, perhaps not a formal one, but certainly a mental one, which reflects the transformations in current feminist thought. A certain ‘normality’ could be detected, a maturation. Israeli art, which previously refrained from exhibiting its sexual facets, began to rid itself of the embarrassment. The art of the seventies in Israel, was characterized by repression and denial of sexuality (being conceptual, intellectual art). The eighties stressed sexuality. This is one of the reasons that the gap between the participants in Meta-Sex and the women-artists of Feminine Presence is much greater than the four years separating them, since it conceals at least twenty years. Most of the women artists that exhibited in 1990 (with the exception of the younger ones) were a product of the seventies, years in which they grew and matured as artists. In their art, and moreover, in their statements as expressed in the catalogue (except the artist Michal Ne’eman who explicitly stressed gender/semiotic issues) they internalized the denial of the significance of gender to the work of art. The young artists of Meta-Sex, in contrast, internalized the flourishing of sexuality characterizing the late eighties. For them, feminism ceased to be an object for battle. It was now possible to talk about art in feminine or masculine terms, just as it was possible to deal openly with the sexual aspects present in the work.

Beyond the generation gap and the differences in attitude, there was a fundamental difference in the artistic language. Of the seventeen women artists who participated in Feminine Presence, only three exhibited sculpture and painting was clearly the dominant medium. In Meta-Sex, most artists applied technologies related to mass media: photography, video, installation and object. Only a few exhibited paintings, and even then, they evaded the traditional definition, being a part of an installation, or disguised as photography. This tendency can be explained in terms of trend or zeitgeist. But it may also reflect the exhaustion of painting as a leading privileged masculine discipline. For the craft of picture making, a translation of the world into its material being, was throughout art history, the heritage of men; these pictures functioned as “portholes to the safe”, where “the visually desired” was deposited. Among the various treasures lying in this safe were representations of women.

Consequently, from the beginning of the seventies (both in Europe and the U.S.), women artists focused on alternative modes of expression which could replace painting, such as photography, installation, earth works and performances. These strategies aimed at undermining the representational systems, at reducing the translation gap and bringing forth “the real thing”. The feminist discourse offered Art History a reflection and interpretation from the perspective of the margins (the ‘others’). It sought to divert the mainstream toward new directions, to offer yet another analytic tool for looking at the world. The rational-hierarchic-linear thinking, which characterized the modern era, collapsed along with the absolute utopian and ideological belief systems. The feminine voice offered a different rationale, containing a variety of multi-faceted, experiential alternatives. Feminist reading has integrated successfully into the general discourse of post-modernism. Its contribution to the discussion of contemporary art is immeasurable.

The Meta-Sex (dirty) body
Naturally, the preoccupation with identity issues introduced the body as a central object in Meta-Sex, both as a biological organism disintegrating into parts, and as a demanding, physical matter, that can be experimented upon and transformed — the last front of ideological battles, in the sense of how to employ and how to represent it in a way that would make a difference.

Meta-Sex revolved around several thematic axes: The body, the abject, the domestic function, and the autobiographical-personal link. The inventory of images consisted of body parts, sexual implements, personal articles, domestic objects, hygiene-related items, purification, eating and secretion, kitchenware, motherhood, women-soldiers, brides, feeding instruments, biological mutations and consumption products. The works in Meta-Sex challenged the accepted relationships of woman-mother, woman-nature, woman-home, woman-dirt and woman-man, concurrently undermining feminine conventions.

Miriam Cabessa: subverting Nature/Culture dichotomy Miriam Cabessa chose to exhibit in Meta-Sex one of the most moving attractions borrowed from the neighboring museum of natural history — a showcase displaying errors of nature: a two-headed calf, a lamb with six legs, an egg within an egg, chicks with three and four legs, and other mutations — products of nature’s cruelest imagination. The clinical scientific language of the original labels was used as part of the work. By dislocating and transferring an item from a Nature museum to an Art museum the artist rendered a cynical, amusing and cruel shift, that undermined the validity of taxonomic categories as well as all other socially constructed categories. The representation of nature’s failure could be interpreted as corresponding to the conservative concept of the woman as the ‘other’, as inferior, lustful, and non-spiritual.

Simone de Beauvoir, a representative of the early phase of feminist discourse, described women as “prisoners of their womb”. She argued that in order to obtain liberty and equality women must first liberate themselves of bodily processes, especially those connected with childbirth, which she perceived as the root of their subjection to biology, of being a passive instrument of life. “Trapped by nature, the pregnant woman is plant and animal… a collection of sticky materials, an incubator, an egg…”. The miserable creatures in the glass cabinet of Miriam Cabessa’s work seemed like this “collection of sticky materials”. They, too, render embarrassment because of their anomaly.

One of the basic assumptions posed by the feminist discourse is that woman’s social presence is different from that of man. The traditional research of art history is paved with texts that stripped the body of its sexuality and removed its social and psychological context. In this process, the nakedness of the body, the erotic charge carried in its nudity, its sexual identity and its modes of presentation within a context of social discourse, were submerged and erased.

Anat Zahor: the abject Mother Nature
The most subversive representation of the female body in Meta-Sex was Anat Zahor’s Urination video. It was set in a very dark room, close to the museum’s Judaica collection; the floor was covered with red soil and in the center there was a monitor displaying a video film that documented a woman urinating. The soundtrack was a combination of gushing water and the sound of nuns singing. The woman, shown in the natural and comfortable position of kneeling in nature, is seen from behind, so that only the lower part of her body and the shower of urine being absorbed in the earth are exposed. An innocent young girl crouching down to obey nature’s call. The screening of the video in a loop engendered a sense of endless urination — an act of voiding, a sense of release. In exposing the intimate act, in peeping into the most discrete, taboo parts of the female representation, the artist undermined centuries of canonical ‘proper’ female representation.

Urination and other works in Meta-Sex related to a key term in feminist theory — the abject — coined by scholar and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva. Abject is “that which disturbs identity, system and order. That which does not respect borders, positions, and rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite”. Underlying this notion is the body as a symbolic system of interior and exterior, administered through a regime of prohibitions which constitute the symbolic order: what is clean and what is dirty, what is proper and what is despicable; what is approved and what is rejected, what remains within the system and what is discharged and cast out. In this context, dirt is perceived as a violation of the body’s integrity, threatening to dissolve the soothing division between the body’s interior and the external casing of the skin.

According to Kristeva, this process of rejection, exclusion, elimination, or removal of waste occurs, first and foremost, on the basic level of body tissues: blood, urine, saliva, vomit, breast milk, trimmed hair, perspiration and semen — all these are organic materials excreted from the body. However, from the private level of bodily tissues, Kristeva expanded the principle of abjection, applying it to more generic levels of social order: the dirty, the defective, the abnormal have always represented the borderline, the peripheral, the bestial, that which occupies the margins of the dominant culture and in any case belongs to the female domain. The efforts invested in preserving the categories as well as those invested in exclusion — are called Culture. The term Abject Art, derived from this context, refers to art which deals with a body that has ceased to be an object of passion and has become abject — a despised object, that is exposed in its basest, most contemptible aspects. Urination in the western world is a matter of secrecy, an act locked behind restroom doors. Anat Zahor brought urination out into the open. This may be her version of the representation of Mother Nature.

Ariane Littman-Cohen: from biography to politics
Another work that dealt with the notion of the abjectand the concepts of dirt and contamination, although from a different point of view, was Ariane Littman-Cohen’s Sterilizer (Interior, 1994). A sterilizer is usually designed for cleansing and sterilizing, neutralizing the virus that threatens to contaminate the body. An assortment of personal items was inserted into the sterilizer: a photograph of the artist as an infant, curled in her mother’s arms; cosmetic products for preventing premature wrinkles; a reproduction of Manet; a photograph of a street in Prague; some sweets, condoms and dried flowers. These articles resembled laboratory samples from outer space, exposed to ultraviolet lighting, to a sterilizing and purifying mechanism, that neutralized them of the ‘real’, of childhood memories and remnants of life which clung to them.

Interior reminded me of the bubble metaphor formulated by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard when he compared our lives to the life of that sick boy, who grew up in a sterile, medical environment, a vacuum barring any possibility of germ penetration that protected his vulnerable body. His mother caressed him with rubber-gloved hands through a sterile sleeve built into a glass tent. He grew up in an ex-territorial atmosphere, under the constant supervision of science, threatened by his mother’s kiss. According to Baudrillard, we are all bubble children; we are all afraid of touch. Our brains and bodies have already become analogous to this sanitized sphere, a transparent envelope within which we seek refuge in vain. “The extermination of mankind begins,” he said, “with the extermination of germs.” For “man, with his humors, his passions, his laugh, and his genitalia, is nothing more than a filthy little germ disturbing the universe of transparency.”

The biographical (local) element in Interior was even more powerful in another work by Littman-Cohen, a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle modeled after an old photograph of herself as a baby embraced in her mother’s arms. The romantic-ideal scene of mother-daughter relationships against the backdrop of the snowy Alps stood in contrast to the deconstructive potential of the picture into a thousand pieces. Littman-Cohen was born in Switzerland and immigrated to Israel on her own, after her brother committed suicide when she was 18. The deconstruction and reconstruction of the familial harmony were congruent with her personal story. Analyzing this process of deconstruction, the artist wrote, “The smile of my mother especially was striking to me, it embodied a spontaneous and free happiness, something that belongs only to youth and great expectations. […The puzzle] represented my revolt against the inexorability of time and against life that had not, as it slipped past, materialized the expectations embodied in my mother’s smile. […] When the [puzzle] machine instantly closed, exercising a pressure of a few hundred tons upon the image, fragmenting the image into one thousand pieces, I felt the physical crushing of time. The fetishization of time and memory was blown up into one thousand pieces and I felt a sudden terror inside”.

A more direct feminist tone was embedded in another work by Littman-Cohen in which she dealt bluntly with sexist representations of the female body as object used for sales promotion in advertising. A pair of straddled legs belonging to a display window mannequin emerged from the wall and in-between the legs, at eye level, a peephole inviting the viewer to peep in. Looking in, one could see an inscription embroidered on a floral lacework, a famous quote from Alexander Pope: “Women have no character at all.”

Concurrent with Littman-Cohen’s scrutiny into her own biography, she conceived a body of work referring more specifically to her Israeli identity. In Holy Land for Sale(executed for the exhibition Desert Clich’e: Israel Now – Local Images) she exported 150 bags of sacred soil to America, marketing holy earth in easy-to-carry, handy-sized packages. The work was executed in collaboration with the Israeli company Arim (which in Hebrew means cities or towns), a government-owned national development corporation whose logo was printed on each bag. Arim represented Israel’s technological development in recent years. The “blooming of the desert” is no longer a metaphor for planting forests, but rather an expression of advanced technological urbanization. Packaged like holy water or religious souvenirs, Holy Land For Sale referred to Israel’s growth and to the Holy Land as a potential real estate venture. Holy Land for Sale can also be viewed as a metaphor for transferring areas of land from hand to hand.

In Virgin of Israel & Her Daughters, Littman-Cohen reacted to the Israeli masculine myth of heroism. A dozen beehives, lit in red from within, were scattered around with their top panels wide open. This installation was originally created for Tel Hai ’94, an exhibition taking place once every few years in Tel Hai, the fortress of the Israeli myth of heroism, in the Upper Galilee. In 1994, the curator (Gideon Ofrat) chose to exhibit the works in military tents. As a female monarchy headed by a “queen-mother”, the beehive embodies an advanced level of cooperation and nurturing, where the male members play a secondary role. In Virgin of Israel & Her Daughters, Littman-Cohen chose the beehive as a metaphor, shedding new light on women’s place within the Israeli legend of heroism. At the same time she drew attention to the private mother who sends her sons to war, and the public mother (motherland) who claims her victims. The empty, functionless beehives, reminiscent of sarcophagi, evoked a memorial site. A close observation of the open beehives revealed mysterious signs carved on each of the inner walls: scratches and engravings in the wood. These were the tracks of the wax moth, a beehive parasite which leaves its gnawing marks on the honeycombs, evidence of the slow process of death in the beehive. Paradoxically this piece tied together two biblical myths, the myth of plenty, “The Land of Milk and Honey,” and the biblical extinction myth of “a land that devours its inhabitants”.

Hilla Lulu Lin
Between body politics and Middle Eastern politics
Another artist whose works incorporate both the personal and the political is Hilla Lulu Lin. In Meta-Sexshe presented a video installation entitled No More Tears in a room with yellow walls and a ceiling fan. A wrapped, coated heavy stone was suspended from a hook in the most irritating location in the room, threatening the viewer. The video documented an endless journey of a yolk, that crawled slowly up the artist’s arms, climbed to her shoulder, entered her mouth, emitted fully, reverted to rolling on the palm of her hand, and so on and so forth. It was a never-ending loop of an auto-erotic act, “anorectic acrobatics” – reception and emission, between pleasure and strangulation which demanded a kind of acrobatic skill so the yolk would not burst in her mouth.

Through the act of nearly swallowing the yolk, Lin tried to unravel the common affinities between woman-food-body, and to take control over anything likely to penetrate. The choice of a yolk/egg , an archetypal feminine-organic element, brings to mind erotic cinematic scenes, exhibiting a similar use of organic materials. The linkage between body and food also corresponds with Janine Antoni’s chocolate and soap castings and Jana Sterbak’s meat-dress works.

A different kind of association between food and existence was manifest in Cold Blood (A Poem in Three Parts), a chilling work produced by Lin in 1996, in the wake of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and prior to the ascent of the right-wing Likud party. It consisted of three parts: The Tel Aviv Seashore, based on a postcard image of Tel Aviv; a manipulated image of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem; and the artist’s eyes. The hedonistic character of Tel Aviv’s seashore was juxtaposed with the sacredness of the Dome of the Rock, the most sacred Muslim site in Jerusalem. Both iconic landscapes were depicted under raw, bloody skies. In-between these two scary images the artist planted a postcard-size photograph: her own two eyes, blinding in their emptiness.

Anat Betzer-Shapira: back to normality – stereotypes of domestic territories
In the Sisters series Anat Betzer-Shapira used stereotypes of children’s paintings, as they appear in psychology books – pictures that depict the family institution, the motherly and fatherly functions from a child’s point of view. She processed these childish representational stereotypes of “mommy in the kitchen,” enlarging them to form ‘bad’ and ‘dirty’ child-like paintings, and added inscriptions: ‘sister washing dishes,’ ‘sister digging in the dirt,’ ‘sister cooking’ or ‘sister is doing it for herself.’ One got the impression of solidarity with these feminine functions, as if the artist sought to sanctify the despised works of all the anonymous ‘sisters’ sharing the same fate, wherever they may be.

Betzer-Shapira’s second piece was a room installation in which she covered the museum floor with doormats and hung tapestries on the walls. The latter, produced in a weaving factory, meticulously reconstructed original paintings executed by the artist depicting fresh pure brides. The bulky, rough doormats holding the dirt and mud at the threshold belong at the domestic territory, albeit from the other side of the door. The symbolic meaning is clear: The romantic aura of the bride, the object of universal yearning — the wedding night ideal — became a farce. “Beyond the doormats is where dream and movie brides were always carried. Inside the house they often found filth and dirt, which they turned, into a flourishing garden. In this garden the beautiful brides faded, assumed the face and flavor of their cleaning detergents.”

Ganit Mayslits-Kassif: the feminine voice of architecture
Another expression of ‘staining’ and negotiating with ‘dirt’ was offered by architect Ganit Mayslits-Kassif, whose work expressed her ‘feminine voice’ through architecture. In Building Components she utilized the museum’s standard building components in a manner which subverted its architectural hygiene. The walls, ceiling and columns were manipulated by use of inferior-‘feminine’ materials, such as milk, rice, candies, feathers, latex, nipples, and rubber. These unorthodox materials stained the whiteness of the walls, introducing an unconventional texture, rendering the rough lines of the ‘white cube’ flexible. The window ‘blocked’ the view with candies, the glass ceiling was covered with feathers, and one of the walls acquired phallus-like extensions covered with synthetic fur on either side.

Mayslits-Kassif perceives her architectural and academic work as a laboratory, where she explores the interrelations between architecture and the body, order and randomality, cleanness and dirt. Architecture is considered the queen of all disciplines, associated mainly with the masculine tradition. The encounter between gender and architecture allowed her to apply critical thinking. Architectural values such as rationality, order, efficiency, linearity, functionality and clarity are all considered part of a male-modernist architecture. Ganit Mayslits-Kassif tried to violate the tranquillity of the ordered, clean architectural space. She wanted to reconsider the materiality of our everyday, constructed environment through sensual motivation. She chose to re-build the functional clean space, and transform it into an erotic, unmediated, inviting and seductive environment.

Galit Eilat and Max Friedmann sharing a fantastic bedroom
Intervention in the details of the architectural envelope was extended to the architectural territory in Galit Eilat and Max Friedmann’s joint work. The two situated their work (Those in the Yard) in a storage-shed inside the forest behind the museum. Eilat and Friedmann transformed the old wooden shack into a bedroom: two single beds, a table, shelves, an armchair, and an open closet. They decorated the mahogany wooden beams of the walls with a wallpaper-like pattern and covered the floor with a wall-to-wall synthetic tiger-patterned fur carpet. Inside the room they planted some subversive elements such as a reproduction of a medieval painting of tortured women, or the open closet with garments printed with bodily impressions – a man’s underwear with an upper body image of a woman, or a full slip printed with an image of a masculine body.

By situating the bedroom, an explicitly domestic territory, outside the museum (the museum itself is located within the socialist territory of a kibbutz), the artists created a feeling of a fictional lodge, like periodical rooms in history museums that preserve the collective memory of the past through the individual’s daily life (the king’s bedroom, the servants room, etc.). In this case they wanted to create allusion to an atmosphere of a certain rococo-style-middle-class taste, referring to the most decadent European culture. Rococo-style art objects were intended to entertain the rich, bored, tired and passive society, which turns to art for pleasure and leisure. The rococo represents the final phase in a culture of taste in which ‘beautiful’ and ‘artistic’ were still synonymous. Transforming the kibbutz shack into a rococo-style bedroom was an ironic social comment on socialist values in contemporary consumerist culture.

Meira Shemesh: the false splendor of the trivial
The same kind of fake splendor, albeit more personal, was evoked by Meira Shemesh’ restored childhood living room, which consisted of three components: The Hanger (1994) – a richly decorated chandelier in which she replaced the light bulbs with colorful stuffed balloons; My Mother’s Dress (1994) – a silvery evening dress belonging to her mother, and Thingies – banal objects placed on a shelf. All three elements belonged to the ‘female realm’.

The empty garment conceals the body’s memory, with its smell, its touch and its secret passions, like an absent-present. The elegant fifties dress as well as the chandelier could be read as nostalgic items. However, it seems that Shemesh was rather interested in sabotaging the memory, she deepened the already-deep deécollté, added the necklace, stuffed the breasts with balls, and thus violated the authenticity of the nostalgic personal remnant, rendering it grotesque.

Such shifts were also typical of the series Thingies, which crowded the two wooden shelves set on the third wall. The remains of the formica sideboard previously occupying her parents’ living-room, the realm of kitsch, were populated by a rare collection of utterly useless objects: souvenirs, cheap ornaments, parts of toys; all re-treated and re-processed, through an obsessive handicraft of occupational therapy, a careful and pedantic work, as though attempting to preserve the nostalgic qualities, to heal and stitch together the memory fragments. These unimportant objects that radiated a cheap and scorned beauty sought to undermine the concept of ‘home’ as the ideal construction of a good woman, and to challenge definitions of good taste.

Shemesh offered here a new concept for Still Life – the genre of the minor themes. Unlike the genres of the major themes, that is placed in the public sphere of history, the sphere where subjects constitute themselves by action, the genre of the minor themes is pushed to the margins, to the domestic sphere of kitchen. Norman Bryson, who studied the genre of Still Life, argued that it is the silent, hidden side, the voiceless side of material life. According to Bryson, domestic artifacts convey a sense of familiarity, as they situate the spectator in a close and identified space; therefore, in their presentation lies a dimension of comfort. Bryson also pointed out that still life paintings correspond to the sensations of the hand rather than the eye. In this context, it may be argued that Meira Shemesh’ manipulated mundane artifacts deny the dominating power of the (masculine) gaze, and are far more receptive to touch than to the gaze.

Tamara Masel’s choice of silence
Tamara Masel’s photographs too, denied the dominating power of the masculine gaze. She portrayed anonymous portraits, photographed from behind, from an angle that revealed the neck and hair and concealed the face. One could not tell whether it was an older woman or a young girl. Both turned their backs on the viewer, avoiding exposure, refusing to return a gaze. Sexuality was restrained, embarrassing. The braiding implied something innocent, taking one back to adolescence; yet, it was, in fact, another kind of bodily-regime, a routine act performed by mothers on their daughters in order to render a clean, disciplined appearance. Turning the back also implies not being associated with anything considered ‘feminine’, with materiality, beauty, or any other sign of temptation.

Michal Shamir and the erotic (conceptual) dialogue with the viewer
Temptation and dialogue were the core of Michal Shamir’s conceptual work. Shamir inserted ‘sign-posts’ into visible locations such as the restroom and the building’s entrance, and assimilated them so that they were integrated ‘naturally’ into the architectural components: tin sign-posts were attached to the entrance walls and to the building’s central columns, while other sign-posts were planted in hidden niches in the museum. The camouflaging simulative strategy – assimilating the ‘artistic’ signpost among ‘regular’ signposts – operated in contradiction to the very visible, functional essence of signposts. The inscriptions on the signposts were mainly instructions for bodily activity (“open your mouth”; “close your eyes”; “lean forward”) or intimate-erotic commands (“lick your knees”; “touch yourself”; “press your thighs”; “inhale”; “exhale”; “open your mouth”; “suck your toes”; “smell your sweat”). Under the cover of the intimate tone these imperative sentences tell us what to do. They convey authority, power and discipline and their syntax corresponds to the familiar structure of: “Insert a disk to drive A, and press enter” or “apply shampoo to your hair and massage gently”. The power of the instructions was derived mainly from the surprising intimate content and, of course, from our inability to respond.

Merilou Levin promising not to fake orgasms
The idea of linking bodily discipline to recipes for freedom and happiness was also manifest in Merilou Levin’s works – a realist painting of a bra hook on a chopping board and a small blackboard. On the blackboard (the realm of expression for millions of teachers) the artist wrote [in Hebrew], repeatedly, as if she were a punished pupil in docile handwriting the promise: “I will not fake orgasms.”

This subversive text alluded to all those ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ sexual modes of behavior according to Dr. Ruth. No longer a woman as a supplier of sexual services, no longer satisfying by pretending to be satisfied, no more denial of your own authentic self as a woman. The obsessive repetition strives to restore a childhood-memory of an ‘educational’ punishment, assignment that involved self-taming, obedience, submission and repetition. The same ambiguity reflected in the painting of the bra hook on chopping board, a painting that can be read as metaphor for what is left of the struggle for women liberation. Foucault talked about good handwriting as one of the common technologies within the mechanism of subject production; “a specific practice and training, that focus on the hand in order to teach it to produce punctual movements, thus discipline the entire body to create a new, better and more docile self.” Likewise, it can be claimed that, through good handwriting or the pedantic, delighting realist painting, the artist seems to train herself to ‘submit’ to her liberated self, declaring its explicit unwillingness to fake orgasms.

Nir Hod: undermining the myth of heroism
Discipline and falseness were also manifest in the seriesWoman-Soldiers by Nir Hod, the only male-artist inMeta-Sex. In a glittering golden-framed triptych Hod depicted three women soldiers, each directing her gaze toward eternity, conveying pride, glamour and patriotism – a visual convention in official photographs of male and female soldiers in Israeli historical propaganda. The woman soldier at the center of the triptych was the artist himself, employing his own body dressed in drag to characterize the stereotype of the woman soldier, rendering her both kitschy and exotic.

For Hod, the woman soldier is an archetype of femininity, a symbol of the total woman. By using his own image, holding a cellular phone, and wearing a seductive unbuttoned uniform shirt, Hod wanted us to re-examine this ultimate Israeli clich?: A woman soldier in obligatory military service, an essential Israeli invention, a unique matchless model of equality between the sexes, a model which has been officially marketed to the world as a pure Israeli brand. Hod questions the myth of women’s equality, particularly in light of the traditional role division so common in a society that lives from war to war. This ironic description of the women soldiers shed a new light on the constant criticism in Israeli society regarding discrimination of women in the army, where they serve a shorter period of time and their promotion in many of the branches is blocked due to their sex.

In Soldier and Woman Soldier (1996) the soldier is enacted by popular Israeli rock singer Aviv Geffen, who was quite a controversial figure in the 90s, an object of adoration to a great many Israeli youths. His androgynous appearance and the fact that he did not serve in the army, along with his pacifist songs, marked him as a symbol of a ‘lost’ generation.

These investigations in gender politics represent the social, sexual and cultural transformations currently taking place in Israel. They reflect a basic discomfort with the state of women in Israeli society, where equality between the sexes has always been a myth. Women’s discrimination is manifest in nearly all aspects of the country’s social life. The attitude toward the integration of women into society has always been ambivalent in Israel, and the root of this ambivalence lies in the role of the Orthodox parties and the Jewish religion in the political life in Israel.

Tiranit Barzilay: from post-modernism to post-Zionism
I started this essay by analyzing works that address universal gender issues, and I would like to conclude with Tiranit Barzilay, a photographer whose works are saturated with sociological and political local contents. In Barzilay’s Bomb Shelters series (Untitled, 1993), consisting of staged youth, in ceremonial blue and white clothing, engaged in repetitive Sisyphean functionless actions, one can identify western post-modern issues transformed into local concerns. The official western voice talks about the disintegration of meaning and self, while the ‘local’ voice talks about post-Zionism and the disintegration of national identity. The ritualistic activities carried out in bomb shelters echo the official national memorial ceremonies: Holocaust Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day.

Tiranit Barzilay’s photographs echo the shattering of the two heroic Israeli myths: the myth of solidarity and the myth of the “safe shelter for the Jewish people.” The latter was the core of Zionist ideology, but this safe haven was questioned with every new war. It was seriously challenged during the Gulf War when missiles landed on Tel Aviv. In another series of photographs (Image #3, 1996 and Image #6, 1996) Barzilay depicted young people in underwear preoccupied in mundane group rituals of sorts, taking place in empty rooms in Tel Aviv. These photographs reflect ‘generational’ conditions of anxiety, loss of identity, solitude, passivity, impotence, weakness and detachment. The hugs seem more like mechanical gestures, devoid of feeling. The passivity, the acts’ lack of apparent function, the body’s intimate exposure, created an apocalyptic atmosphere. Within the Israeli context, these photographs may bring to mind associations of the Holocaust – people squeezed in corridors or lined up for the shower.

In the photograph of the Dance scene (Image #6), one may observe the radical change Israeli society had undergone from the years of heroic Zionism to contemporary Post-Zionism. The circle dance recalls the hora – the celebrative Israeli circle folk dance, choreographed during the early optimistic phase of Zionism, a popular dance at Jewish weddings until this very day. For Barzilay, a young secular leftist Israeli, these figures are frozen in time. The solidarity is established through being in the same boat, as it were. There is no eye contact among the girls and the women who dance, even though they hold hands. The famous Israeli ‘togetherness’ and solidarity collapsed, deconstructed into an empty pattern of a staged ritual.

In conclusion, one may learn a great deal about gender interrelations, social issues, and politics via art. This holds true universally, and particularly in Israel, where one may draw parallels between the private body of the individual and the public body of Zionism. The ‘right’ body, according to Zionist ideology, was a working body, a fighting body, a healthy one, a ‘macho’, the so-called ‘New Jew’ – the Israeli. In this sense, the young generation of women artists whose work reflects the feminist discourse of the body’s deconstruction offers a different post-Zionist voice within the discourse of deconstructing the mythical heroic ‘public body’.

Translation: Daria Kassovsky