page_title: Visual arts in Israel
section_title: Post-conceptual art in the 1970s
hierarchical_section_title: Visual arts in Israel / Local Art Between Wars, 1967–1982 / Post-conceptual art in the 1970s
caption_attribution_description: Sculpture 中文: 雕塑 עברית: פסל
context_page_description: Visual arts in Israel refers to plastic art created in the Land of Israel/Palestine region, from the later part of the 19th century until today, or art created by Israeli artists. Visual art in Israel encompasses a wide spectrum of techniques, styles and themes reflecting a dialogue with Jewish art throughout the ages and attempts to formulate a national identity.
context_section_description: Conceptual Post-Minimalist Installation artists Avital Geva, Joshua Neustein, Micha Ullman, Buky Schwartz, Benni Efrat, Zvi Goldstein, Yocheved Weinfeld, Adina Bar-On, Nahum Tevet, Or Ner, Michael Gitlin, Pinchas Cohen Gan discarded the conventions of taste, the heroics of authenticity, and provincial narrative. By sheer force and power of evading ‘taste’ while yet remaining in the context of art, art could be redefined, its field expanded and the artist liberated to achieve unique existence and value. (see Clement Greenberg)
  The axioms of that 1970s group were indifference to Zionist aesthetics; a general distaste for regionalism, national myths, and individual heroics. Avital Geva's Exchange of Cultures brought Arab Villagers and Kibbutzniks to exchange books with one another. To define a purpose for art, he moved his activity into the Greenhouse to grow vegetables and fish ponds with resistant students, to make art an educational tool.
  Ullman's Berlin Library created a standard for memorial sculpture. His negative space sculptures were often made by digging under ground. Buky Schwartz made perspective correction and earliest video art in the country. Neustein (in collaboration with Marx and Batlle) made the first environmental work. The Jerusalem River Project 1971 was a sound river at the edge of the Judean desert. Boots at Bet Omanim Jerusalem was an agglomeration –five truck loads- of army boots left by various armies in the region, piled into random heaps.
  Joshua Neustein's five Ash Cities were geographic ambivalences realized in five museums in the US, Germany, Poland and Israel. The Ash cities were on-the-floor relief maps made with tons of ashes and a chandelier.
  Efrat's Ararat Express 1986 is a procession of horses passed through the streets. Each horse carried a television set on its saddle. A documentary film projected on the television screens showed throngs of people displaced by disaster, famine or war, wandering.
  Efrat, Neustein and Gitlin also produced methodical, basic, severe graphics that re-defined the materials, tools and viewer's roles. Efrat's double silks and shadow pieces dealt with the concrete aspect of pictorial surfaces. Neustein's torn paper works, Erased Drawings, Magnetic Fields, Steel Wool, Carbon Copy Drawings adhered to unity and even uniformity of making objects or images. He transformed drawing into a three-dimensional practice Yigal Zalmona, Josef Maschek, Robert Pincus Witten and other international critics called that type of art "epistemic abstraction". Gitlin hacked plywood boards with the strategy devised by Neustein of removal and replacement. Gitlin's sculptures, however, were more architecturally oriented. Nahum Tevet's work summarized by James Trainor: The basic building blocks that comprise Tevet's formal vocabulary of sculptural units, for both his small wall works and the large, sprawling, encyclopedically heroic sculptural installations, are simple, verging on the Platonically archetypal—the table, the chair, the box, the boat hull, the rectilinear plane, the book-like block, the framework armature, etc. As Sarit Shapira wrote: In any possible context, they identify as mutants of a territory, or as agents of de-territorialization. The quasi-modeled arrangement of these works presents what is not a model of a given production mechanism of objects, or what will always distinguish itself from such a model; at most, this is a model-proposal for a mechanism of objects that does not yet exist. For this purpose, Tevet replicates his items in limited series (the number of items replicated in each work is also limited, as is the number of times that Tevet replicates entire works or major parts of them), thus distancing them from any automatic and motoric—that is, obedient and “blind”—reproductive mechanism.
  These dozen artists were not an organized movement, there was no manifesto but rather there were strong opinions and an ideology, a timely kinship that found a common desire for a collective agenda. Sometimes they were referred to as Post Minimal, or Conceptual, to elaborate
caption: Benni Efrat
  Energy, 1969
  Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv-Yaffo
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