Ebook: Civic Aesthetics: Militarism, Israeli Art and Visual Culture

This book explores the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture. It unpacks the way in which art and visual culture contend, not with the military itself, but with its foundational impact on Israeli identity, culture, and society: its influence on bodily images and national affiliations; its impression on landscape; its authority as a coercive glue that encompasses collective memories; and, most importantly, the acceptance of those numerous militarized aspects as unproblematic parts of civilian life. Analyzing a range of artworks and art-related objects with the help of cutting-edge theory, it touches on various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, political geography and landscape theory, in search of a civic aesthetics that is able to submit a taken-for-granted military excess to the renewed scrutiny of its viewers.
What the images do and how they work is of interest in this book, not what they show: this study discusses the complexities of visuality, arguing for art’s capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct its own visibility. Images and artworks are often read either out of context, on purely aesthetic or art-historical ground, or as cultural artefacts whose aesthetics play a minor role in their significance. This book breaks with both traditions as it approaches all art as an active participant in the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This innovative approach builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to allow a new theory of the image to come forth, where the relation between the political and the aesthetic is one of exchange, rather than exclusion.