The Artist’s Population
Jonathan Hirschfeld, 2011
We may almost compare the artist’s population to the Jewish population, the Jewish people. It seems that despite its current status as a persecuted minority (and at the same time being of a superior class), involved in deep conflict and divided into tribes that hate each other, it still relies on a sense of deep-rooted - perhaps illusory- ancestry, that connects them to a moment of uniquely human grandeur, to a moment of revelation.
It is easy to find the “Orthodox” in it, frozen in conservation, preserving the shell of similarity of former glory, and then -incited with jealousy- disapprove of the world. It is easy to find in it the same "self-loathing Jews", who collaborate within, bearing tidings of “the decease of painting/art”.
There are many and varied enemies of painting/art, ranging from traditional Marxist students, who see the painting as merchandise, tools of segregation status, pretending as if photography, video, performance, movement, nature, action, and others - have not already become elaborate commodities, having found their way into the homes of the very wealthy, in order to bestow on them the assets of segregation, the well known ability to possess the avant-garde that differentiates the upper class from the lower classes.
In my opinion, real artists are those who believe in the existence of the spirit. Similar to the real Jew, who believes that his ancestry, may it be real or not, based on a moment of revelation, real or not, includes people who created aesthetic expressions, the real painting will be the one, that forces the viewers to experience themselves as spiritual entities.
Therefore, many contemporary painters will have in common the dialectic ability, to be both. Also the ironic, post-modern seculars who understand art as a talking ground where they unwittingly serve as agents of the ruling ideology and cultural dominance, and at the same time- without there being a contradiction- as magicians who are able to give soul to matter, and change the beauty of their creation into a moral imperative which necessarily arises out of a responsibility of the one who has a soul towards his environment.
The painting, like certain movements within Judaism, such as Hasidism, who tried over the years to return to and restore their ecstatic foundation (foundation of private revelation) and the non-institutionalized back to the religious experience, of which, Lacan says, "Religion has done to God what marriage does to love" - that is - emptying the real impossible apparent into an actual routine practice, while using signs - the painting, then, strives towards it.
In this sense there is no big difference between the huge crucifixion of Zorbran, and the abstract of Pollock or Roth’ko, since they all believe in the spirit of man, and the feasibility of a private moment of revelation, hero worship of one man. But those fortunate are lucky compared to the fate of the post-modern artist who without the veil of ironic armor will always be exposed to the mocking of the pathetic.
Fredric Jameson suggests in "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" a certain dialectical approach, that sees the late capitalism also as the best and the worst disaster of Western culture.
This is the approach I am proposing here. There is no novelty in it; it is the attitude of the Hero in the Greek tragedy, who knew that his fate was decreed in advance, with nothing else to do but to fight, as if he doesn’t know it. This is heroism.
Participants: Erez Aharon, Vered Aharonovitch, Galia Uri, Ariel Asau, Naamah Berkovitz, tsuki Garbian, Jonathan Hirschfeld, Michael Igodin, Dvir Cohen-Keidar, Gidi Smilansky.