page_title: Israeli sculpture
section_title: Representative sculpture of the 1970s
hierarchical_section_title: Israeli sculpture / History / Representative sculpture of the 1970s
caption_attribution_description: installation 中文: 裝置עברית: מיצב
context_page_description: Israeli sculpture designates sculpture produced in the Land of Israel from 1906, the year the "Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts" was established. The process of crystallization of Israeli sculpture was influenced at every stage by international sculpture. In the early period of Israeli sculpture, most of its important sculptors were immigrants to the Land of Israel, and their art was a synthesis of the influence of European sculpture with the way in which the national artistic identity developed in the Land of Israel and later in the State of Israel.
  Efforts toward the development of a local style of sculpture began in the late 1930s, with the creation of "Caananite" sculpture, which combined influences from European sculpture with motifs taken from the East, and particularly from Mesopotamia. These motifs were formulated in national terms and strived to present the relationship between Zionism and the soil of the homeland.
context_section_description: Performance art began to develop in the United States in the 1960s, trickling into Israeli art towards the end of that decade under the auspices of the "Ten Plus" group, led by Raffi Lavie and the "Third Eye" group, under the leadership of Jacques Cathmore.  A large number of sculptors took advantage of the possibilities that the techniques of Performance Art opened for them with regard to a critical examination of the space around them.  In spite of the fact that many works renounced the need for genuine physical expression, nevertheless the examination they carry out shows the clear way in which the artists related to physical space from the point of view of social, political, and gender issues.
  Pinchas Cohen Gan during those years created a number of displays of a political nature.  In his work "Touching the Border" (January 7, 1974) iron missiles, with Israeli demographic information written on them, were sent to Israel's border. The missiles were buried at the spot where the Israelis carrying them were arrested. In "Performance in a Refugees Camp in Jericho", which took place on February 10, 1974 in the northeast section of the city of Jericho near Khirbat al-Mafjar (Hisham's Palace), Cohen created a link between his personal experience as an immigrant and the experience of the Palestinian immigrant, by building a tent and a structure that looked like the sail of a boat, which was also made of fabric. At the same time, Cohen Gan set up a conversation about "Israel 25 Years Hence", in the year 2000, between two refugees, and accompanied by the declaration, "A refugee is a person who cannot return to his homeland."
  Another artist, Efrat Natan, created a number of performances dealing with the dissolution of the connection between the viewer and the work of art, at the same time criticizing Israeli militarism after the Six Day War. Among her important works was "Head Sculpture," in which Natan consulted a sort of wooden sculpture which she wore as a kind of mask on her head. Natan wore the sculpture the day after the army's annual military parade in 1973, and walked with it to various central places in Tel Aviv. The form of the mask, in the shape of the letter "T," bore a resemblance to a cross or an airplane and restricted her field of vision."
  A blend of political and artistic criticism with poetics can be seen in a number of paintings and installations that Moshe Gershuni created in the 1970s. For Gershuni, who began to be famous during these years as a conceptual sculptor, art and the definition of esthetics was perceived as parallel and inseparable from politics in Israel. Thus, in his work "A Gentle Hand" (1975–1978), Gershuni juxtaposed a newspaper article describing abuse of a Palestinian with a famous love song by Zalman Shneur (called: "All Her Heart She Gave Him" and the first words of which are "A gentle hand", sung to an Arab melody from the days of the Second Aliyah (1904–1914). Gershuni sang like a muezzin into a loudspeaker placed on the roof of the Tel Aviv Museum. In works like these the minimalist and conceptualist ethics served as a tool for criticizing Zionism and Israeli society.
  The works of Gideon Gechtman during this period dealt with the complex relationship between art and the life of the artist, and with the dialectic between artistic representation and real life. In the exhibition "Exposure" (1975), Gechtman described the ritual of shaving his body hair in preparation for heart surgery he had undergone, and used photographed documentation like doctors' letters and x-rays which showed the artificial heart valve implanted in his body. In other works, such as "Brushes" (1974–1975), he uses hair from his head and the heads of family members and attaches it to different kinds of brushes, which he exhibits in wooden boxes, as a kind of box of ruins (a reliquary). These boxes were created according to strict minimalistic esthetic standards.
  Another major work of Gechtman's during this period was exhibited in the exhibition entitled "Open Workshop" (1975) at the Israel Museum. The exhibition summar
caption: Exposure (Installation view), 1975 by Gideon Gechtman
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2011:11:09 21:58:42", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4430", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "646", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "500"}