This essay reflects on works chosen from the Sonnenfeld Collection at the Katzen Gallery at American University in Washington, DC—it originally accompanied an exhibition at that gallery in early 2021—to comment on the observations of several generations of Israeli artists on the land and its meaning for the culture and politics of Israel’s coming into existence and evolution during the first 70 years of its existence. Beginning with a pair of photographs of pioneers in the land in the fifteen years before statehood—and conceptually re-purposed by a contemporary Israeli artist in 2008—and moving through decade after decade of engagement with the landscape of Israel in both figurative and abstract modes, with and without humans present within these contexts, veering from brightly colored to virtually colorless images, including paintings and photographs, the essay traces a distance between earlier assertions of presence and the gradual emergence of questions regarding presence, absence, and identity. Israel, in its internal development, is both visually and thus verbally interwoven with the issue of its external relationship with its immediate neighbors and to the shifts between what comprises “internal” and “external”—”this” and “other”—as the context has metamorphosized from the 1930s to the 1950s to 1967 to 1993 to 2000 and to the present.

中文翻译：

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代替缺失的地方


本文反思了从华盛顿特区美利坚大学卡岑画廊 (Katzen Gallery) 的 Sonnenfeld 收藏中挑选的作品（它最初伴随着 2021 年初在该画廊举办的展览），以评论几代以色列艺术家对这片土地及其土地的观察。对于以色列的文化和政治的形成以及其存在的头 70 年的演变具有重要意义。从建国前 15 年这片土地上的拓荒者的两张照片开始，并于 2008 年由一位当代以色列艺术家在概念上重新设计，并经历了数十年以具象和抽象模式与以色列风景的接触在这些背景下，有或没有人类存在，从色彩鲜艳的图像转向几乎无色的图像，包括绘画和照片，本文追溯了早期对存在的断言与逐渐出现的有关存在、缺席和身份的问题之间的距离。以色列在其内部发展中，无论在视觉上还是在言语上都与它与其近邻的外部关系问题以及“内部”和“外部”（“这个”和“其他”）之间的转变交织在一起。从20世纪30年代到1950年代，到1967年，到1993年，到2000年，再到现在，背景已经发生了变化。