Civic Aesthetics Militarism, Israeli Art and Visual Culture

Exploring the politics of the image in the context of Israeli militarized visual culture, Civic Aesthetics examines both the omnipresence of militarism in Israeli culture and society and the way in which this omnipresence is articulated, enhanced, and contested within local contemporary visual art. Looking at a range of contemporary artworks through the lens of “civilian militarism”, Roei employs the theory of various fields, including memory studies, gender studies, landscape theory, and aesthetics, to explore the potential of visual art to communicate military excesses to its viewers.

This study builds on the specific sociological concerns of the chosen cases to discuss the complexities of visuality, the visible and non-visible, arguing for art's capacity to expose the scopic regimes that construct their 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, both high and popular art, as part of the surrounding visual culture in which it is created and presented. This approach allows 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.

INTRODUCTION
Two Images
Between Critique and Complicity: Civilian Militarism and Israeli Art
What this Book Does, and What it Doesn't

CANONS OF ISRAELI SOCIETY
The Fortunes of the Soldier-Figure in Israeli Art
Taking Sides
Framing Representation
Critical Frictions

BODIES OF THE NATION: EROTICIZED SOLDIERS
The Politics of Quoting
National Bodies
Rewriting the Jewish Body, Again
Women Soldiers
Queer Dreams of the Nation

LOOKING THROUGH LANDSCAPE
The Landscape Way of Seeing
Tracing Erasure: tso?ob´ä and Zionist Scopic Regimes
The “Stifling of the Gaze”
Israeli Mindscapes
KEBAB IN THEORY: MAPPING VISION
Contesting Mis/interpretations
The Still Life as Intertext
The Map as Still Life
Seeing Green: Shaping Emplacement

GREETINGS TO THE SOLDIER-CITIZEN: CONSUMING NOSTALGIA
Peace, Security, and Sparkles
From Guns to Cream Cheese
The Politics of Nostalgia
Preposterous Postcards
The Limits of Critical Discourse

FENCE ART: RE/FRAMING POLITICS
Redistributing Visibility
Changing Contexts, Shifting Frames

Afterword
Bibliography
Index

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