The engagement with the image of the map in 1970s art introduced postmodernism to Israeli art, since the most quintessential sign of postmodern art is the transition from a representation of the world (the visible world in the classical case, and the inner world of the human psyche or the medium in the modern case) to a representation of representations.
Take pears, for example. Chardin's classic painting is a representation of visible pears. In the case of the modern Cézanne, pears are a comment on the medium: a brushstroke, the flatness of the canvas. But the postmodern artist, if he paints pears, they will be taken from an advertisement for pears, from a pear-shaped porcelain saltshaker, etc.; it will be a representation of a representation. One could even go so far as to claim that the pears we buy at the supermarket, engineered to have a longer shelf life and look large, fresh and shiny, are a representation, a copy without an original, a simulacra of the pears we remember from our childhood, whose taste was lost for good. Depicting them today would also be a representation of a representation. Therefore, the image of the map replaced landscape painting. What was the classical function of landscape painting? Well, the answer is complicated: it was political, because the land always belongs to someone. It was about the relationship between man and nature, whether it is nature as an object of practical reason, or the sublime where nature stands for the divine, the dreadful, the hidden, and the unconquerable. The gaze at nature, its framing, its taming into an image, and its arrangement in a composition were often a sign of possession, its ownership and subordination to ideology. The landscape is a ground for ideology to such an extent that one may distinguish between a Catholic landscape, such as the graceful world in Claude Lorrain's works, and a Protestant landscape, as in Jacob van Ruisdael's Wheat Fields which praise diligence and human endeavors.
In the local field, one may say that the classical painters depicted the landscape as a representation of the visible (Anna Ticho, Shmuel Charuvi), the modern ones used landscape as a springboard to the Lyrical Abstract (Yossef Zaritsky, Yehezkel Streichman), whereas the postmodern turned to map images to discuss political and ideological issues.
One of the most striking examples of this process is Deganit Berest's work, in which she puts a blue rhombus as a geometric border on top of the country. In my interpretation, the rhombus implies rational thought, perhaps in continuation of a tradition that pits nature against reason, perhaps as an antithesis to the political reality. But I would not suggest to the viewer to pin high hopes on reason which, at second glance, turns out to be just as arbitrary and ridiculous as our real borders.
This is given a distinctive visual expression in Larry Abramson's work, in which the Jordan is seen with its head in the Sea of Galilee as if it were a microscopic sperm on its way to the egg. It is a simple and witty work that spans the entire political discourse about conquest and occupation, gender, masculinity, the land as a bride, as a virgin to be inseminated, etc., in one refined visual expression.
David Reeb touches upon the exposed nerve of the affinity between the map and the landscape when he places the map—an empty contour, a frame without a picture—as if it had fallen from the balcony, diagonally on a bed of a reddish-yellow-green abstract. This reddish-yellowish-greenish abstract is bright and fidgety enough to hint at pop art influences, while calling to mind the modernist Eretz Israeli abstract, which originated in the landscape. Squares upon squares, like agricultural fields seen from a bird's-eye view. This painting may be an aesthetic expression of the tragedy inherent in the concept of border, in its indifference to the scenic routes and human lifestyles, but to me there is also something heartrending about it. This border without a country to delineate is a solitary brushstroke, assimilated in the background, struggling to float as a meaningful signifier in a chaotic field.
It is hard not to see the resemblance, both visual and conceptual, between this work and Gal Weinstein's carpet work. Weinstein, too, uses modernist abstraction and the color gamut of Israeli modernism, which seems to have been upgraded and adapted to the contemporary eye. Weinstein, too, identifies the ways in which disciplining, studying, and documenting the landscape are a part of its appropriation and transformation from nature into territory. His work reaffirms an acute gaze at the political aspects of the act of representation itself.
The best-known and most paradigmatic case in which the landscape is replaced with the map as a ground for discussing political and ideological content is, doubtlessly, Michael Druks's Druksland, where he uses the logic of the map to produce a self-portrait. It is a portrait that comprises an act of self-positioning, so to speak—taking one's place in the art world, with various figures in the field appearing as landscape features; social, intellectual, autobiographical, and political positioning. It is the self as a territory with mountains and ravines, lakes and borders.
Considering the connection between the Jewish body, the subject, and the landscape in Israeli art, we can think of the way Reuven Rubin portrays the figure of the pioneer (First Fruit) who was shaped, tanned, and healed from the Diaspora disease by the Eretz Israeli landscape. For Zaritsky as well as Ori Reisman, the landscape was a ground for expressing inner life and honing the language of painting. It sometimes seems that the body disappeared from Israeli painting with the establishment of the state, which made it redundant: the Jew was united with his land. It reemerged around the Six-Day War. I would place Druksland on this axis. The subject and the landscape. Body, culture, and nature. The country's map and the mental map of emotional and psychological landscapes unite. This is a key work in Israeli art because only through it can the axis of landscape painters and the Lyrical Abstract artists be deciphered a-posteriori as the self's relation to the landscape.
Replacement of the landscape with a map in 1970s Israeli art reveals itself to be a critical act that allows the continuation of the historical-artistic discourse regarding man and nature, the Jew and the Land of Israel. This time, however, there is no longer a visible world, and the discussion is carried out against a system of representation: the map.
