Framing art as action: rethinking refusal in contemporary Israeli art.

In January 2004 five Israeli men were tried for disobeying a military order. Noam Bahat, Matan Kaminer, Adam Ma'or, Hagai Matar, and Shimri Tzameret had refused to enlist in the Israeli army, a mandatory act for every non-Arab citizen in the state of Israel. Their trial, dubbed "the trial of the five" by the media, lasted almost a year and debated complex moral and legal issues related to military refusal. At the end of the trial, the jury acknowledged the five men's passion for the state of Israel and their devotion to Israeli society, but declared that the men, in their refusal, severely undermined the rule of law Following the judgment, the court condemned the five and sentenced them to one year in prison. (1)

In February 2004 nearly 120 artworks entered Prison 6, a military jail in Athlit, in northern Israel. The exhibition, "One Pink Rose: Organic Art in a Digital Era," was extremely diverse. The one thread connecting all the work was the notion of imprisoning art together in the company of refusers. The curators of "One Pink Rose," artists Rafram Chaddad and Lance Hunter, did not restrict the participating artists in any way but one: the artworks' dimensions were limited to those of a standard-size paper so that they would be able to enter the prison without any difficulty.

The exhibition was initiated a few weeks earlier when Chaddad was facing prison for refusing to serve in the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) reserves. The artworks were collected in order to curate a private exhibition in Chaddad's prison cell, as a means of turning his detention into an act of resistance, but these plans had to change when Chaddad's sentence was dismissed a few hours before his imprisonment. In order to make use of the numerous artworks collected, Chaddad and Hunter brought the art to two of the refusers, Bahat and Tzameret, who welcomed the works into their cells. On February 18, 2004, once the artworks were within prison walls, the exhibition opening began on a hill overlooking the prison, with food, drinks, and music, but obviously, without the actual art.

The public trial and the sentence of the five refusers set in motion a surprising number of artistic reactions. (1) "One Pink Rose" belongs, in part, to this reactive group as a clear homage to the refusers and their cause. But the exhibition's originality lies in its attempt to make a broader statement about the public's limited range of accepted identities, standpoints, and norms. In this article, I will draw on the trial, the refusers, and the "One Pink Rose" exhibition to outline how this particular art project engaged in the political, and how the refusal to display it affected the significance and success of the exhibition. I will take this opportunity to expose "One Pink Rose" to a broader audience, for it has remained practically unknown and escaped the media's attention despite it being a major political, social, and artistic statement involving numerous artists. The strong critical potential of "One Pink Rose" lies in the exhibition's versatile nature, its unstable interrelations, and its multiple targets of critique, which offer an alternative configuration of the social norms that shape identity politics in Israel today.

ATTEMPTS AT ESCAPE: ALTERING PRISON SPACE

The main function of the prison apparatus, according to Michel Foucault, is not the detention, but the classification of individuals. (2) In modern disciplinary societies, power involves separating, operating, and categorizing subjects. The prison apparatus is set at the heart of the social order to contain, and define, those in need of civilization. Those categorized as a menace to society are physically separated from it; those who are imprisoned are labeled as social outcasts in turn. Foucault writes on this taxonomic function of imprisonment:

[...] one would be forced to suppose that the prison, and no doubt

punishment in general, is not intended to eliminate offences, but

rather to distinguish them, to distribute them, to use them; that it

is not so much that they render docile those who are liable to

transgress the law, but that they tend to assimilate the transgression

of the laws in a general tactics of subjection. (3)

Bahat and Tzameret were convicted, along with the others, and marked as political criminals. To use Foucault's vision of the purpose of imprisonment, they were put in prison in order to be publicly recognized as delinquents, essentially as a means of disciplining society at large. Assigning the five refusers to prison service was designed primarily to disconnect them from the public as a "general tactic of subjection," while punishment for the concrete offense was only a secondary objective. The jury acknowledged this distinction by justifying the sentence on the grounds of intimidation of the public, agreeing that "in such a case, when the offence aims to carry away the public into a mass delinquency, this is a legitimate element in the sentence." (4) The act of refusal was a minor component in the felony; the way in which the refusers publicly framed their actions prior to and during their trial, linking civil, public, as well as political struggle with military disobedience, were taken as illegitimate acts in need of harsh suppression. Their decision to publicly claim their right of refusal was inspired by a large group of refusing veterans who served time in jail, five different support groups, and a small but existing acceptance in the media. (5) The court made use of the "trial of the five" to respond to this tendency to refuse service, and affirmed:

Since the defenders' main goal in their refusal is not to save their

souls but to tamper with government policy in illegitimate and

forbidden ways, they are a danger to our democratic existence; that is

why the court must make a clear border between a legitimate political

expression and a refusal of a legal command that has a hazardous

potential of hurting the interests of life saving, equality and the

survival of the army and the people. (6) (italics mine)

TRANSGRESSIVE DISCIPLINE

The "One Pink Rose" exhibition directed its subsequent critique to the public as well. The backside of the invitation to the exhibition opening translates as follows: "You are cordially invited to the exhibition opening and a cocktail party ... Prison 6, Beit-Oren Junction, Road 4 (near Athlit).

This text rejects the idea of prison as a house of criminals and social outcasts. In its verdict, the military court divorced the conscientious objectors from the rest of society. The exhibition, in turn, reunites them by inviting the public to join the objectors in jail. This invitation transforms delinquency into a cultural event; it also transforms prison from a place of confinement to a potential place for cultural pilgrimage. As a result of this transformation, being unable to enter jail becomes a disadvantage for those in search of culture.

The details of securing transportation into the jail were supposedly found on the Web site prison.2ya.com. This URL, however, led to the Web site of Artistes sans frontieres, linked to the "One Pink Rose" virtual gallery. (7) True to its title, this page brought prison to you, rather than explaining how to get into prison. A vertical grid filled most of the main gallery page, which was divided into small squared compartments. Each compartment hosted a name of one artist participating in the exhibition. Clicking on the artist's name opened a new page and displayed a reproduction of that artist's work. Framing the top and left sides of the square compartments, and each reproduction, was the exhibition's logo, a fragmented black rose silhouette.

The grid format of the virtual gallery confined all artists to square compartments, imprisoning them together with their works and with the conscientious refusers, while creating new rules for visiting hours--unlike its material correspondent, the virtual prison is always open to the public. Clicking on an artist's name directed one to his or her artwork, and one could move between the cells or go back to the main prison grid. Here "One Pink Rose" reunited those in and out of prison by virtually releasing the images from their confinement and making them available to the public. This is the counterpart to the provocative invitation to go to prison. On the one hand, the public is impossibly invited to enter prison, and on the other, the imprisoned works are virtually released. This double move blurs the court's clear border between legitimate and illegitimate action. Passing through prison walls and confusing the distinction between the inside and the outside of the prison, the disparate exhibition elements spelled out the irrationality of imprisoning culture.