by Jon Lackman | 29 September 2006 | Contemporary, Journals
The May-July 2006 Third Text is themed “The Conflict and Contemporary Visual Culture in Palestine and Israel.” Its introduction reads:
“The issue of visual arts and their role in both the Palestinian and Israeli projects of identity creation has not been treated before in a substantial and comprehensive manner … Over forty Palestinian and Israeli writers, scholars and artists were approached to suggest pieces for this special issue; the guidelines were deliberately vague and liberal … In the end, we included twenty pieces, almost evenly divided between Israeli and Palestinian contributors … This Third Text issue is being published at an especially painful moment for Palestine. The sixth decade since the Nakba or great catastrophe of 1948 is completing its cycle … While the Holocaust has been remembered, memorialised and analysed for decades, ever since 1945, the Nakba has only recently been recognised and with important work on it finally emerging. This special issue of Third Text is part of this late recognition and one that may help bring about a historic coexistence of both nations in the small country that Palestine is … Most Israeli scholars whose work we included have not written about Israeli art and culture but have chosen instead to deal with Palestinian art and culture. This was not a result of any guideline or wish on behalf of the editors, but of their own volition … That most Israelis writing here have chosen to take such a stand may be one positive sign in a political landscape laden with despair … The first section is a general map of the conceptual landscape … The second section [presents] the visual and fine arts … The third section centres on cinematic representations of the conflict and its memories.”
One essay, by Meir Wigoder, “is a complex meditation on a painting depicting a scene of a suicide bomb attack and enters into the ‘Medusa’ world of the suicide bombers’ photos and videotape memorialisation”: “I want to examine a series of photographs in which heads play an important role in signifying not only the concept of political horror but also the production of such images. I am concerned with making a distinction between the act of terror (which relies on the actual act of destruction) and the gesture of terror, which exists prior to or after the blast, on the level of representation. I shall start by stepping back from the actual event and examine the ritual in which Islamist suicide-bombers stage their last portrait and engage in a symbolic performance of their actions.”
