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PDF FormatA more elegant harnessing of the same contempt for Zionism appears in the works of Yosl Bergner, which systematically strip the first Jewish settlers on the land of their heroism. In drawings such as Ship of Fools (1963), showing Jews immigrating to Palestine, and The Funeral (1977), which depicts the result of their efforts, he portrays the pioneers as a rabble of false idealists who descended on the land only to corrupt it with their presence. In The Idealists (1978), he presents a huddled group of faceless, awkward figures gathered around a leader who represents the artist’s deceased uncle, who was an early settler; his garb suggests a traditional prayer shawl. In these works and others like them, the Zionist pioneers are not depicted as monstrosities, but rather as pale, wide-eyed herd animals, pathetic in their weakness and folly. Bergner compares them to flowers, “night flowers which live for a day, water-lilies, swamp flowers, flowers with no name.... And perhaps all the stories too about the generation of founders are merely the fruit of our imagination and our longing for romance, poetry, mystery?”23 And indeed, the effect of his works is to demonstrate that these fruits of the national imagination are nothing more than that—the false adulation of men and women who were not heroes, but only weak people lost in the delusion of sacrificing themselves in order to build a Jewish state. Bergner’s bottom-line message is perhaps best epitomized in After the Show (1972), a sketch of a herd of empty chairs ringed around a tall post with a rag nailed towards the top. The chairs, which feature prominently throughout Bergner’s work as hollow stand-ins for their human occupants, are gathered around a meaningless rag on a stick—the national flag, itself also hollowed out of any meaning worth noticing. The purpose of After the Show is brutally clear: The show of Zionism has ended, the actors have left the scene and all that is left is the props—even if these are human props totally unaware that the show has ended (Fig. 7).24
Fig. 7. Yosl Bergner, After the Show, 1972
Courtesy: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
The empty chair, representing fallen, empty people (and frequently, because of its associations with the empty Davidic throne, a fallen and empty kingdom), is a favorite symbol of Israeli artists in their rejection of the Jewish past. Another artist employing it systematically is Micha Ullman, who often situates the chair buried underground or lying on its back in a subterranean crypt. For Ullman, the false national rebirth represented in the empty chair is a sham, “essentially Jewish, a longing for what can never come true, like the coming of the Messiah.”25 Indeed, so successful has this symbol been as a stark critique of the aspirations of traditional Zionism and Judaism that by 1991 an entire exhibition could be held at the art museum of Tel Aviv University devoted to the empty chair in Israeli art.26 The depiction and celebration of a Jewish past rendered as utterly meaningless had become a fixture of the nation’s artistic culture.
In the same year that Tel Aviv University ran its exhibition dedicated to the empty chair, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem mounted a massive retrospective of Israeli art entitled “Routes of Wandering”—whose message was not the irrelevance of the past, as much as the resultant condition of rootlessness that the destruction of the Zionist myth implied for the future. The idea of the exhibition, according to its curator, originated with the recognition that “the awakening from the Zionist dream has left deep traces upon Israeli art.” The exhibition was intended to choose works signifying
rootlessness and wanderings away from fixation in any defined territory or form: Works that formulate the myth of the exodus from Egypt not as a beginning of the voyage to the Promised Land, but as a text of the desert generation.... The language and syntax of these works emphasize the aspect of expulsion implicit in the inscription “Get you gone” [Genesis 12:1], rather than the promise “For unto your seed I will give the land” [Genesis 12:7].27
The attitudes which precipitated this exhibition at Israel’s largest and wealthiest public museum had become so fully articulated in the 1970s and 1980s that by 1991 they no longer surprised anyone: Having jettisoned the Zionist attachment to the land, the Israeli art community constructed a new myth, one which glorified wandering and devalued place as a matter of principle. In this, the final stage in the dezionization of Israeli art, they were abetted by such characters as the French-Jewish existentialist thinker Edmond Jabיs, to whom Tel Aviv’s artists made frequent pilgrimage during their sojourns in Paris, and who explicitly advocated the view of the Jew as essentially a nomad: “[W]e don’t progress.... The place is always a place in which you are there, but without being, and from there you have to go on to somewhere else.”28 Tumarkin, too, contributed much to the articulation of rootlessness as a chronic condition, describing himself as “a citizen of this country but loathing most of its inhabitants and yet feeling so utterly attached to every chord of its light and scenery. I do not feel a Jew, and yet I am from here. Not from there. I feel no bond with Germany—the country, the landscape, the people. Yet my culture is mostly from there, not from here. Where have I come from? My Jewish mother? And where shall I go in exile? To my German father?”29 Exile from the land, which Zionism had depicted as a terrible aberration from the normal life of a people, began to assume the dimensions of an unalterable fate, and perhaps even an ideal.
Among the many Israeli artists who have in recent years embraced nomadism as a Jewish principle is Michael Sgan-Cohen, who has produced an entire series of autobiographical drawings exploring his crisis of identity. In one, Wandering Jew (1983), a bird-like anthropomorphoid stands with a hand pointing to the back of its head, as if it were holding a gun. Another hand extends from heaven, suggesting the divine origin of the curse. The message differs little from early Zionist depictions of the tragedy of exile, but with one salient difference: The condition of exilic wandering is unmitigated by having settled in Israel. A related image of unending Jewish nomadism is found in Michael Druks’ folio collection Flexible Geography: My Private Atlas. Among these works is Uganda-Brazil (1979), which consists of two maps chosen at random from around the globe. With black ink Druks blots out all of the land surface except for a coastal strip shaped exactly like the modern state of Israel. The work reminds the viewer of the time, a century earlier, when the Zionists were desperately searching for a location for a Jewish place of refuge, and were willing to consider a whole host of strange locales, most infamously Uganda; in the final analysis, it suggests, the present-day location of the Israeli is in any case arbitrary, exchangeable for any other. Similarly, the works of Jennifer Bar-Lev make frequent use of English words and phrases to imply that the Jew is only at home when he is on the road. In Wandering (1989), the title stands alone on a brightly painted board. In The Gypsy Carnival (1990; Fig. 8), strings of paste-up letters give voice to Bar-Lev’s fantasy of being carried off by the paradigmatic nomadic people: “The Gypsies have painted their eyes black,” reads one sequence. “They offer to paint mine too.”
Fig. 8. Jennifer Bar-Lev, The Gypsy Carnival, 1990.
Courtesy: The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Like their Jewish nationalist predecessors, contemporary artists in Israel do not hesitate to invoke biblical motifs to get their message across; yet now the message is that there is no promised land, only dispersion and wandering in the desert. Among the many examples are the works of Bracha Ettinger-Lichtenberg. In her Eye of the Compass: Lapsus (1990), she presents numerous photocopied and inscribed sheets of paper installed in a formation which constantly draws the attention of the observer away from its center, out to the periphery and beyond. In the middle appears God’s command to Abraham: Lech l’cha—“Get you gone.” A more sophisticated exploration of the same theme is Igael Tumarkin’s Land Without Water (1984), a crude arrangement of iron bars and cloth suggesting a primitive shelter or an altar, on which is emblazoned the slogan (in Latin characters) Lekh lekha lamidbar (“Get you gone to the wilderness”). While the inscription refers to Abraham, the title is an allusion to the biblical passage in which the Israelites, wandering in the desert, have lost their only source of water. Faithless and embittered, they turn against Moses for having led them into the wilderness—but in the context of Tumarkin’s work, it is the state of Israel itself which is now understood to be a parched desert, in which the people cry: “Why did you bring the people of God to this wilderness, that we and our cattle should die here? And why did you take us out of Egypt to this miserable place, not a fertile land of figs, grapes and pomegranates, and there is no water to drink?”30
