The title of this exhibition is borrowed from a painting by Tamar Getter, from her Recruits Series (1989-1991). The series is based on photographs of new army recruits, whose portraits are integrated into the paintings. In these works, Getter links the portrait – an ancient subject in the history of the visual image – to socially relevant issues. Her focus is on the problematic nature of the myth of the soldier in Israeli culture, through the prism of the tension inherent in portraiture: between its power to represent the human, the universal or the singular, and the fact that it is always confined to an ideological framework that is dependent on point-of-view and rife with cultural and political contexts. The Recruits Series is the point of departure for this exhibition – it seeks to continue Getter’s exploration by looking at a selection of works from Israeli art whose common ground is the use of the portrait as a critical agency.
The portrait has always been a central theme in art, but it is also present and plays a role in everyday social reality. In this sense, it functions as a connecting link between worlds and realms that are perceived as separate: ritualistic or commonplace; perpetuation or standardization; glorification or bureaucratization; documentary or staged; means of identification or seduction; humanistic or oppressive. The convention of the portrait, even when it is different and changes according to context, place and time, serves as a means for constructing, blurring and erasing – in some cases in order to create an identity, in others as a way to differentiate – and, as such, it is an object for investigation.
A political reading of portraits demonstrates what is always surprising to rediscover: that beneath the apparently natural, necessary and self-evident, contradictory, colliding forces are at work that are responsible for this appearance, and that art has the capability to show this. At its best, the art of the portrait reveals the face to be an arena of battle, and the portrait a mode of struggle in conflicted social-cultural fields.
At its best, the portrait is not only a particular, distinctive representation of a specific individual in the world, nor a generic mirror of a panoply of categorizations and approaches – in some cases mutually contradictory – that exist in uneasy cohabitation: dictator or subject; oppressor or oppressed; distinguished or despised; innocent or suspect; hero or victim. At its best, the portrait converts before our eyes the “either-or” paradigm into that of the “both-and,” and even more: that of “both and not-both.” In other words, it subverts its representative function to the point where all categorizing and positioning elude our grasp and we are forced to rethink what we ostensibly already knew.