- Author
- Title
- Shifting sights: civilian militarism in Israeli art and visual culture
- Supervisors
- Co-supervisors
- Award date
- 14 June 2012
- Number of pages
- 226
- Document type
- PhD thesis
- Faculty
- Faculty of Humanities (FGw)
- Institute
- Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA)
- Abstract
-
This study attends to the relation between images and frames of vision in the contexts of militarized Israeli national identity and Israeli contemporary art. It unpacks the way in which art and visual culture contend, not with the military itself, but with its foundational impact on Israeli identity, culture, and society: its influence on bodily images and national affiliations; its impression on landscape; its authority as an coercive glue that encompasses collective memories; and, most importantly, the acceptance of those numerous militarized aspects and elements as unproblematic parts of civilian life. The attention to a variety of artworks and art-related objects and events is meant to answer two separate sets of questions. One set belongs to the politics of visual culture, and questions the militarized aspect of its Israeli incarnation. The other belongs to the politics of visual art more generally, and examines its potential to expose and comment on its own construction. Both sets of questions start off from locating the power of images in the awakening of a contradictory desire to see what they actually cannot show (Mitchell, Pictures). This tendency of visual art to reflect on its own premises, limitations, and power structures, it is argued, may lead viewers to reappraise their modes of perception more generally. The critical image as it is outlined in this study, then, does not attempt to clarify confusions or to solve misunderstandings, but to complicate matters on aesthetic, social, cultural, and political levels alike.
- Note
- Research conducted at: Universiteit van Amsterdam
- Persistent Identifier
- https://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.371735
- Downloads
-
Thesis
Title pages
Contents
List of figures
Introduction
Chapter I: Canons of Israeli society
Chapter II: Bodies of the nation: eroticized soldiers
Chapter III: Looking through landscape
Chapter IV: Kebab in theory: mapping vision
Chapter V: Greetings to the soldier-citizen: consuming nostalgia
Chapter VI: Fence art: re/framing politics
Afterword
Works cited
Summary
Samenvatting
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