The Power of Place and the Representation of Landscape in the work of Palestinian artists
The Power of Place and the Representation of Landscape in the work of Palestinian artists.
This paper intends to examine a selection art works by several
Palestinian artists that deal with the question of landscape and place.
Although it might appear at first that the question of landscape and of
place in particular is distant from the theme of Art and War.
However I would argue its relevance stems from the fact that the
Palestinian/Israeli conflict is one that centers around a struggle over
the legitimacy of claims to the same terrain. Precisely because
Palestine is a country without defined borders and because one of the
central aspects of the national struggle is the struggle
for freedom and sovernity for people in the occupied territories
the representation of the land is pivotal for a fragmented and
dispersed population. How the land and places are represented in visual
art articulates a peoples' relationship to the homeland. The type of
images that have been created of Palestine, by Palestinians over the
last decades, decades in which the physical landscape of Palestine has
undergone considerable change, do much to reveal the image and quality
homeland in the national imagination and how Palestine has been
represented in an ongoing conflict. The 'war' between Israel and the
Palestinians over the claims to the land has in many ways also been
fought out through images, via different mechanisms. Israel has used a
wide variety of mediums from archaeology, to tourism and film as Ted
Swedenberg observes, "Zionists launched a massive project aimed at
revealing an originary historical inscription in the landscape…the
Zionist project of uncovering and displaying exclusive Jewish roots had
the effect of denying any authentic Arab historicity in
Palestine". While Zionist discourse emphaised a religious claim to the
land, Palestinians through their iconography stressed both a natural
and organic relationship to the land, epitomized in pastoral imagery.
In his introduction to Fields of Vision Stephen Daniels makes a very
salient observation on the relationship between the landscape and the
presentation of the nation,"Landscapes whether focusing on a single
monument of framing stretches of scenery provide visual shape: they
picture the nation. As exemplars of the moral order and aesthetic
harmony particular landscapes achieve the status of national icons".
Daniel's proposition is that out of the diverse landscapes that
constitute the geographical terrain of a nation particular
landscapes are selected to act as representative of the homeland. One
of the qualities of landscape of course, is that one cannot represent
all aspects of a landscape, a representation is always by its very
nature selective, in fact land defies representation in many ways as we
cannot reveal all the histories, experiences and qualities of a place
and terrain.
Boris Groys suggests in his piece on iconoclasm that avant garde
artists have employed methods of war, being the vanguard of change in
revolutions of art. In relation to his observations in the Palestinian
context, I would argue from artists' testimonies that we have that they
saw themselves as revolutionaries in their role of raising cultural
awareness, preserving Palestinian heritage and articulating national
identity in their work, which in turn became part of the visual
vernacular. These articulations took place during a period in
which there was a suppression and denial of Palestinian identity and a
continual negation of Palestinian experiences, histories and cultural
identity. Thus, in many ways their revolution was not in confrontation
with their own society but with the denial of Palestinian identity by
others.
When examining the cultural production of a community it is important
to consider both popular and avant garde art in order to understand the
consumption of visual media in a society. Images of rural scenes and
Palestinian village was one of the dominant themes of
popular paintings produced in the early 1980's. In the majority
of paintings a specific place was not imaged but rather a generalized
view of the rural landscape. The utopias, which in fact means no-place,
depicted a golden era of Palestine in which the future Palestine was
cast in an image of the past which in turn served to elide the present.
The artists during this period did not chose to represent the
consequences of modernization and occupation brought about by Israel
and the accompanying sense of alienation, rather they took comfort in a
nostalgic image of the past. It could be argued that these were all
discursive responses to war a retreat to the comfort of past, with
emphaisis on the social unit of the family and the nation as a family.
These generalised romantic images enabled the national community to
identify with the land for it enabled everyone it could be argued to
complete the narratives of these images with their own personal
memories.
The pre-occupation with representing the rural landscape shifted in the
1990's to focus on the representation of the tactility of place,
artists used natural materials and objects from their surroundings as
index's of place and their deep attachment to it. The mud works of
Sliman Mansour’s which had begun as experimentations, moved into what
he defined as a whole language of expression as he perfected his
techniques in the late 1990’s. He created monumental works using
traditional construction techniques that celebrated local building
crafts and appeared as architectural relics from a lost village.
Through their tactileness and rich encrusted surfaces they spoke of a
nostalgia for a comforting place of the past seemingly making reference
to the memory of a lost homeland. Such readings are imparted to the
viewer not through former symbolic national symbolism but via the
ambiance of the colours and textures.
One of his paintings Olive Pickers done on the eve of the millennium
dealt with dream of utopia in a different way. The colurless figures
float on a grey background engaged in the act of olive picking.
Ironically there is no landscape just the ritual and gestures of
collecting the harvest. The haunting image could not stand in sharper
contrast to the wholesome idealic imagery of the Palestinian
countryside that Mansour had created in past. In this work he was not
only deconstructing and critiquing the former iconography of
nationalist paintings he was also conveying a whole mood of the period.
W.J. T. Mitchell in his essay Imperial Landscape suggests landscape
takes on the quality of fetish commodity, as fetish it is designated
with qualities not inherent to it, yet values are represented as
emanating from land rather than being the creation of society which
transforms land into landscape. This idea is also represented in
another work by Mansour entitled "A Piece of Holy Land". The work
comprises of a gilt frame in which ordinary earth is framed. In fact it
could be earth from anywhere, however what makes it so poignant is the
fact that it is earth from Palestine from the beloved homeland. As the
late Edward Said has observed, if one covers Palestine with all the
historical inscriptions, experiences and claims to it, there would be
on room left for the terrain. The tactility and textures of place was
to win the recently deceased Hassan Hourani second prize in the
Qattan’s Young Artist’s award in the year 2000. Hourani’s
piece “One of Us” consisted of cubes of herbs
and soil placed both in and outside the gallery space, in geometric
patterns. The work made reference to history of abstraction in
Arabic art with its sources in the natural world. At the same time,
however, the piece also spoke of the deep fetishism of place, in which
textures and smells become deeply poignant and symbolic for
Palestinians which is evident in the artist’s statement, “The Place
takes us away only to bring us back. The place says a great deal in its
silence, adding to its magic day after day".
In considering the power of place and memory and in particular
how elements of the landscape become feteshised and symbolic it must be
remembered that loss and displacement is not only experienced by
Palestinians in the diaspora but by those who live in the occupied
territories and Israel. Even though Palestinians reside on the land
that is their homeland, many are refugees displaced from their original
villages and cities, while in turn occupation and Israeli polices means
that people live in a state of alienation with little power over many
aspects of their lives. The fetishism of place and the memories and
significance everyday objects carry has also been explored by Emily
Jaccir in here work "Where we come From". Using her ability to travel
within Palestine and Israel she undertook the requests of numerous
Palestinians of their longings from their homeland. Some people
asked her to go to particular places, to eat certain
foods and visit relatives. Each journey was documented with a
photograph and a description of the request. Her work operates on many
levels and shows that fetishism of natural and everyday elements and
their symbolism in Palestinian culture is not only confined to an
artistic discourse but rather artists tap into a culture of people
and their social memories and in particular the way they preserve
and maintain their identity. Infact the work also reveals much about
her own identity and her freedom of movement. At the same time the
symbolic importance of these places are not lost for the people who
requested the journeys as they did not undertake the journey
themselves, one could argue that infact they become even more poignant.
In the contemporary work of Palestinian artists the bond of place is
expressed through a deep fetishism of both natural and “found”
materials. It is by taking these everyday elements and creating from
them art that the artists suggest how a discourse of place and
belonging is fostered and sustained in circumstances of displacement.
The olive tree, for example, has continued to be an important symbol
used by Palestinian artists. Vera Tamari for example creating dozens of
miniature clay olive trees where the leaves and branches of tree appear
to created via the delicate impression of a human fingerprint. While
Khalil Rabah, has used the tree in many different forms in his
installation works: transplanting it, photographing it, and using its
oil and leaves all as a symbol of the homeland. Everyday
seemingly banal objects are also elevated to symbolic status and become
fetishised icons of place and memories. Naser Soumi based in Paris
uses, fragments of Jaffa oranges, the indigo colour and old photographs
in his assemblages, which become homages to the lost coast of
Palestine. Ahlam Shibli captures the beauty of the textures of
places through the lens of her camera, creating an intimate album of
the unique qualities of everyday Palestinian spaces, contemporary
landscapes and homes. Accumulating numerous photos her series functions
as a resistance to the workings of time.
Questions of place inevitably are tied into relationship with time. In
many of the art works mentioned the art works suggest a timeless
quality in relation to place, whether it is images of a utopian past,
or the importance given to natural and found materials and objects. In
a sense many of them refer to a paradox of the fragility and
temporality of natural materials and forms yet at the same time they
serve as a symbol of timelessness. Other works example suggest an
exploration of the passage of time, Emily Jaccir's piece mentioned
early shows how relation to place is distilled into specific elements
with the passing of time, which are held in reverence in the mind of
one who cannot reach that place, regardless of how much that place
might have changed.
A recent work by Jawad al Malhi entitled "The Bicycle" deals
specifically with the passage of time and transformation that has come
with it. Re-creating on a grand scale a painting represented a group of
children playing on a bicycle in a camp. The original painting which
has been lost embodies time and place. The intention of the original
painting was to document the community of the camp, during a stage in
their history for the belief was that camps were only temporary places.
Seventeen years later, the camps still exist but the communities have
changed, the children have grown up, while their circumstances are not
those of theirs or their parents dreams. In many ways Al Malhi distills
the meaning of the passage of time with the large scale paintings and
their fragments and with the motionless oversized bicycle on which no
one can play and which stands in a silent gallery space symbolic of the
paradoxes of this moment in history.
In many ways the fetishisation of place is heightened by its loss and
at the same time, although Palestinians reside in Palestine, a sense of
loss and disillusionment prevails, for this is not the Palestine of
people's dreams, which reveals a lot about their interaction with
physical space. There is a complex relation to place in which
experience, social memory and aspirations are all entertwined.
Currently their has been considerable focus on borders The Wall and
checkpoints, with artists documenting The Wall, filming the wall and so
forth, more so than in other periods in the history of Palestinian art
have artists focused on the details of the 'war' and aggression against
them. At the same time however it is not just the landscape which is
changing but communities within the these enclaves are also
transforming with the experiences of loss.
Ted Swedenberg, 1990. "The Palestinian Peasant as National
Signifier" in Anthropological Quarterly, Vol 63: No.1 p.19.
Stephen Daniels, 1993. Fields of Vision: Landscape Imagery
and National Identity in England and The United States. p.5.
ًًW.T.J Mitchell, 1994. "Imperial Landscape" in Landscape and Power Ed. W. Mitchel.l
Qattan Foundation, Young Artist Award, 2000.