Entendiendo el arbitraje desde el desarrollo

As mentioned at the beginning of this section, Rancière’s theory on aesthetics provides a framework to understand aesthetics both as a general field of visibility connected to political issues of distributing the sensible, as well as a field of criticism and interpretation of art (Rancière, 2009: 11). Aesthetics in that sense, becomes a regime – a set of perceptions and laws that determines “the ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and way of conceptualising both the former and the latter” (Rancière, 2006: 91). The aesthetic regime is not the only regime in which art is framed, as Rancière (Rancière, 2002: 135 fn1; 2006: 86-91) recognises two other regimes – the ethical regime, and the representational regime of art. The ethical regime designates to art an educational role guiding us towards knowing the truth, and what is good (ibid). The representational regime of art, on the other hand, disconnects art from any moral, religious or social criteria. Instead it locates art within a separate system which determines hierarchy of genres, styles, and judgment. Rancière (Ibid) criticises both the ethical and the representational regimes, arguing that they do not provide a full account of art. They either eliminate aesthetic judgment in favour of moral judgement (the ethical regime) or separate art from other sensory experiences (the representational regime). The aesthetic regime, therefore, suggests a third way in which to combine both logics.27

27 _{The notion of ‘third way’ or ‘third space’ is an important notion within humanities and}

Similarly to the aesthetics of politics, aesthetic art influences the sensible through its potential to organise the order of things (Thomas, 2015). Moreover, the process of influencing the sensible within art occurs by using dissensus. It interferes with the modes of representation and challenges existing dichotomous definitions of visibility/invisibility, perceptible/imperceptible and activity/passivity from two positions. The first is within the aesthetic regime of art through questioning hierarchies within the arts, subjects matters, styles and genres. The second is through a constant negotiation and exchange between the aesthetic regime of art and non- artistic regimes, such as the political. By arguing that, Rancière (2006: 81-82, 2009: 13, 46-47, 51) maintains the distinction between art and life, as the politics of aesthetics occurs in the third space between them. This third or dissensual space is understood as a temporary removal from the police order into an alternative sensible reality. It is a contradictory space which is based on the experience of being apart and together, of art being an art and “something else than art” (Rancière, 2002: 137). That which makes art a privileged political practice within the aesthetic regime can be used to explore and challenge society and culture’s axioms. It suspends traditional relationships and characteristics of everyday life “allowing for different meanings, subjectivities, and directions to take root” (Tanke, 2011: 78). To demonstrate the meaning of dissensus within an artistic context, Rancière (2011: 74) refers to critical art works such as, Martha Rosler’s photographic collages between 1967-1972 that combines images from the Vietnam war

however, it can be defined as a physical or conceptual space which opposes binaric thinking and political oppositions, and engages with politics outside of its power centres and established structures and organisations.

and images of domestic and middle class American life. Rancière (ibid) refers to this type of stylistic juxtaposition as an aesthetic break which brings two different sensory realities: one embodies the everyday manifestations of America lifestyle and happiness and one of imperial America which is either hidden or justified as a defensive war ostensibly intended to protect democracy and the ‘free world’. In Rosler’s case the break or dissensus within the distribution of the sensible does not lie in the political content of her work, but rather in the production “of a sensory form of strangeness, a clash of heterogeneous elements provoking a rupture in ways of seen and, therewith, an examination of the causes of the oddity” (Ibid).28

Although Rancière presents the aesthetic regime of art as a paradigm which can be applied to any form of art in any given context, he identifies its moment of emergence (aka ‘the aesthetic revolution‘: Rancière, 2002) as the end of the 18th _{century. Within art history, this moment is perceived by}

Rancière as a turning point regarding the ways artists and thinkers rethought the unique qualities of art and its relationship with life, developing new artistic styles and movements such as Realism, Romanticism, and collage (Tanke, 2011). It is marked as a ‘revolution’ as it signifies the liberation of art from the representational regime that was in itself another revolutionary liberation from the ethical regime of art (Rancière 2002: 135 fn1; 2006: 91; 2009: 6-

28 _{In another place, Rancière (2010: 149-150) brings other examples of critical art where he}

analyses them in a similar matter to that of Rosler. For example, Chantel Akerman’s film,

From the Other Side (De l’autre côté 2002), which examines the US-Mexico fence along

the border; Anri Sala’s video art, Give the Colours (2003), presenting the project of Tirana’s mayor where all the house facades in his town were painted in bright colours; and Pedro Costa’s film In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda 2000), telling the story of a young group living in a poor suburb in Lisbon.

7).29 _{Within a more current context, Rancière (2010: 11, 212) develops his}

argument on dissensus in response to the rise of the neo-liberal order and the dominance of political consensus. This is an aspect I will further elaborate on in the next chapter when I refer to Mouffe’s model of radical and plural democracy which understands dissensus rather than consensus as the main base of democratic relations.

Rancière’s approach towards art is used for the purpose of re-evaluating Israeli art discourse. But first, it is important to ask what are the sets of values, references and perceptions upon which Israeli art is built? According to the art historian Gideon Ofrat (2014: online), there have been at least 14 attempts at a historiography of Israeli art since 1939. Despite the multiplicity of voices, and the authors’ personal taste and bias that resulted in a tendency to emphasise certain artists and trends while ignoring others, there is a consensus regarding the overall divisions and pattern in Israeli art (Ibid). The most evident consensus is the division of Israeli art into decades, each focused around main figures (individual artists or dominant artist groups), and dominant styles and mediums. Apart from the establishment of the Bezalel School of Art (1906), the years prior to the establishment of Israel were characterised by European influences on Israeli paintings, especially French post-impressionism (1920-1930, associated with the city of Tel Aviv) and German expressionism (1930, associated with the city of Jerusalem) (Tammuz, 1980). Since the 1940s there are new attempts to produce more

29 _{Similarly to the aesthetic regime, Rancière (2006) understands the ethical and}

representational regimes of both historical periods as a general art paradigm. He associates the ethical regime of art with Plato, the representational regime of art with Aristotle.

localised Israeli or Hebrew styles, such as the Canaanites (1940s) who were inspired by the Mesopotamian civilization, and New Horizons (1940s-1960s) who created abstract paintings inspired by the qualities of local bright light and topography (Zalmona, 2013). The decades following by the 1970s are characterised by growing cosmopolitan tendencies, with the adoption of conceptual, neo-expressionist and later, New Media art, with more Israeli artists working outside, or not solely inside, Israel (Omer, 1998; Rabina, 2008; Mendelsohn, 2008).

Apart from a chronological consensus, there are also repetitive themes that can be found throughout the development of Israeli art such as the search for home or a localised identity (Frame Story: 100 Years of Israeli art, 2008). These were framed within a dialectic model which largely refers to the tension between ‘here’ and ‘there’, or the ‘local’ and ‘universal’. The most significant validation for this model comes from 1986 retrospective exhibition

The Want of the Matter: A Quality in Israeli Art which is further discussed in

the third chapter. Sarah Breitberg-Semel (1986), the curator of this exhibition, suggested an overall thesis from which to evaluate Israeli art. The chosen artworks, with emphasis on paintings by Tel Aviv based artists, have all demonstrated a unique interpretation – or ‘domestication’ or ‘localisation’, in the curator’s words (1986: online) - of Western artistic trends which are based on the specific cultural and geographic location from which Israeli artists made their works. Local Israeli art could then be understood as art that is drawn to the East – the primitive, the raw, the rooted – but it is mediated through the civilised filters of Western art, be it academic painting,

abstract or conceptual art. The Want of the Matter has since gained canonical status within an Israeli art discourse that encapsulates the hierarchical system of locations, institutions, genres and mediums that constitute what can be understood as the representational regime of Israeli art (Roei, 2016). According to Manor (2005[b]), the dominance of this system is mostly evident when looking at critical and curatorial interventions within the historiography of Israeli art, which accepts the dialectic model and only offers a critical gaze or an alternative history that complements it.

In this thesis I focus on the political or critical content that arises from the art collectives’ works. I use Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art to emphasise the ways in which art collectives suggest new time-space configurations and new modes of seeing and being. As such, this thesis is not a chronological analysis of Israeli art, where the emergence of contemporary collaborative and socially engaged art practice is merely the latest development within an already fixed narrative; nor does it offer an account of alternative sites of art production that complement this narrative. It focuses on what I understand as the expansion of artistic margins via the proliferation of non-profit, autonomous, radical and/or activist spaces which have become significant sites for art production and circulation for artists and activists in Israel. This is where I argue Rancière’s aesthetic theory is limited. First most of Ranciére’s interpretative work focuses on artworks that take place in the established and institutionalised domain of art which include major museums, galleries and biennales. I argue that the way Ranciére understands aesthetic dissensus is insufficient when one examines critical and political works of art that occur

outside of these major art spaces. More substantially, Ranciére’s (2010: 140) emphasises the differences between political dissensus (a “political process of subjectiviation”) and aesthetic dissensus (“modes of visibility that re- configure the fabric of sensory experience”). Returning back to his analysis of Rosler’s photographic collages, Ranciére (2011: 75) argues that “there is no reason why the sensory oddity produced by the clash of heterogeneous elements should bring about an understanding of the state of the world; and no reason either why understanding the state of the world should prompt a decision to change it”. In this thesis I examine art collectives, such as Empty House and Onya, whose formation was largely interconnected to the J14 movement, and others, such as Muslala and Arteam that aspire to push for a consciousness and political change through artistic practices. As such I would expand on Rancière by offering a more dynamic interpretation on the movement between aesthetic and political dissensions, as well as of art’s negotiation with non-artistic domains. For this purpose, I will introduce Guattari’s aesthetic paradigm with its key notion of transversality which I use as the main research model for understanding the intersection of aesthetics and politics.