Bi-National Allegory: Israel–Palestine and the Art of Larry Abramson
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W. J. T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, and editor in chief of Critical Inquiry. His recent books include Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to the Present, Critical Terms for Media Studies (with Mark Hansen), and What Do Pictures Want?, which won the Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association in 2007. He is finishing a new book Teachable Moments in Race and Media, under contract to Harvard UP.
Footnotes
1. I have learned, however, that this blemish is a Duchampian accident, perhaps a flaw in the photographic reproduction in the catalogue in which I re-viewed this painting. However, Abramson tells me chat Malevich’s original is now developing cracks, just like the old masters, and that his current returns to the black square are consequently exploring the issue of cracks and flaws. Sometimes chance leads the way to design.
2. The artist, as quoted in Daniella Talmor, “Eventus Nocturnus,” Larry Abramson: Eventus Nocturnus, trans. Hanita Rosenbluth (Haifa Museum of Art, 2001) 100. See also Gannit Ankori, “Bodies of Knowledge: The Art of Larry Abramson,” Larry Abramson: Eventus Nocturnus (Haifa Museum of Art, 2001).
3. Elyakim Chalakim is a name invented by the Israeli licensees of The Garbage Pail Kids, an American series of trading cards released in 1985 by the Topps Company, depicting grossly deformed kids and designed to parody the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls. In the English original the character dubbed Elyakim Chalakim was called Second Hand Rose, or Trashed Tracy. As chance had it, the name Elyakim (literally, in Hebrew, meaning “God will raise up, resurrect”) Chalakim (in Hebrew “parts, pieces”) could be read: God will resurrect the pieces. Even though the Israeli translator was probably only looking for a first name to rhyme with Chalakim, the resultant Elyakim Chalakim brings to mind the Kabbalist notion of “tikkun,” the mending of the shattered vessels that contained the divine light. In 1990 Abramson allegorically proclaimed Elyakim Chalakim “the great artist of the future,” by virtue of his will to “raise himself out of the surrounding wilderness of refuse and rehabilitate himself as a new axis of vertical meaning,” as quoted in Gideon Ofrat, “The Death of Elyakim,” Larry Abramson: Eventus Nocturnus, trans. Peretz Hidron (Haifa Museum of Art, 2001) 102.
4. From e-mail correspondence with the artist, February 22, 2010.
5. I have many reasons for using the phrase “Israel-Palestine” (or “Palestine-Israel”) to designate a hyphenated country that, from one point of view, only exists in the utopian image of a bi-national state, but from another point of view actually exists, and has existed for over half a century as a single administrative, governmental entity in which a population resides in a condition of radical inequality. But this would require an essay in itself.
6. See Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad: or The New Pilgrim’s Progress, 1869.
7. Despite the large body of commentary on Abramson’s work by Israeli critics and art historians, there has been little attention to the centrality of the political in his “abstract” and symbolic works. The political meaning of the crescent, which has been part of his work for the last twenty five years, has “never been seriously regarded,” according to the artist. E-mail correspondence, February 6, 2010.
8. Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Autumn 1986); 65–88.
9. Abramson’s work tsooba, made in 1993–1994 and exhibited in 1995 at the Kibbutz Art Gallery in Tel Aviv, was a groundbreaking critical dialogue with the role of abstract painting in the erasure of Palestinian memory from the landscape and its representations, tsooba included 38 25 × 25 cm oil on canvas landscape paintings after a photograph of the site of a deserted Palestinian village, 38 impressions of the wet landscape paintings on newspaper, and 13 still life paintings after samples of flora taken from the site.
10. When Golda Meir notoriously claimed that “there is no such thing...
