Civic aesthetics : militarism, Israeli art, and visual culture / Noa Roei.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Roei, Noa, author.

Series:

Radical aesthetics, radical art

Radical aesthetics - radical art

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Aesthetics--Social aspects--Israel.

Aesthetics.

Aesthetics--Social aspects.

Israel.

Physical Description:

xiv, 225 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm.

Place of Publication:

London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

Summary:

Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of "civilian militarism", Roei employs the theory of various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, landscape theory, and aesthetics, to explore the potential of visual art to communicate military excesses to its viewers. This study builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to discuss the complexities of visuality, the visible and non-visible, arguing for art's capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct their visibility. Images and artworks are often read either out of context, on purely aesthetic or art-historical ground, or as cultural artefacts whose aesthetics play a minor role in their significance. This book breaks with both traditions as it approaches all art, both high and popular art, as part of the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This approach allows a new theory of the image to come forth, where the relation between the political and the aesthetic is one of exchange, rather than exclusion.

Contents:

In search of a civic aesthetics 1

Between critique and complicity 5

Showing seeing: the critical image 9

1 Can(n)ons of Israeli society 13

Frames and set-ups 13

Soldier figures, civilian militarism and Israeli art 17

Taking sides: exhibitions as framing agents 21

Visual performatives 25

Critical frictions 28

2 Bodies of the nation: eroticized soldiers 35

Serial quotations 37

National bodies 45

Rewriting the Jewish body, again 49

Women soldiers 52

Queer dreams of the nation 57

3 Looking through landscape 65

The landscape way of seeing 67

Tracing erasure: tso'ob'ä and Zionist scopic regimes 71

The 'stifling of the gaze' 76

Israeli mindscapes 82

4 Kebab in theory: mapping vision 91

Zooming in on the thinking image 91

Contesting mis/interpretations 94

The archaeology of the still life: bringing back the anti-image 97

Distortion and desire: the mapping impulse 100

Seeing green: shaping emplacement 104

5 Greetings to the soldier-citizen: consuming nostalgia 109

Peace, security and sparkles 112

From guns to cream cheese 118

The politics of nostalgia 120

Preposterous postcards 122

The limits of critical discourse 127

6 Fence art: re/framing politics 135

Bil'in and beyond: aesthetics of disagreement 135

Redistributing visibility 139

Changing contexts, shifting frames 148.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781474253161

1474253164

9781474253154

1474253156

OCLC:

957546453