Women in Dark Times (35 page)

Bartana is therefore another woman artist who scavenges in the night-time debris of the Second World War, another woman who is telling us that the reckoning is not done. Returning to this moment, she is trying to revive a way of subsisting in the world beyond the boundaries of nationhood which the horrors of that war and its aftermath have made it almost impossible for us to envisage (Europe will be stunned). ‘Rethinking nationality absolutely’, she states, ‘has been my topic for the past decade.’
35
The ambiguity is telling – rethinking absolutely or rethinking nationalism in its absolutist form, although either formula of course works. In this, Bartana rejoins the spirit not just of Arendt, but also of Rosa Luxemburg and Virginia Woolf, for both of whom nationality was a scourge. Post-war Europe was, as we have already discussed, eerily harmonised, relying for its new economic dispensation – the next ‘miraculous’ stage of its history – at least partly on the deathly work of fascism. As already evoked in relation to Shalev-Gerz, this was the chilling argument of Tony Judt, for whom today’s drifting migrants are the ghosts of Europe’s lost peoples, hated because they remind Europe of its past, the spoilers of its new, ethnically and nationally perfect, picture. For all her bravura and panache, both deliberate – Bartana is a consummate performance artist – it is not, therefore, metaphorically that she is bringing Europe’s past to life. Rather she is turning this moment of history inside out, or – like Shalev-Gerz’s endlessly flickering coin in her artwork
Perpetuum Mobile
– spinning it on its head. Echoing Judt’s argument, she is also historically precise. Sierakowski wrote his own speech, she comments in one interview, ‘from the heart because after the war Poland became such a homogeneous society’.
36
By the end of the war, with the loss of the Jews, the Russians and the Germans, Poland was 98 per cent Polish, which it had never been before.

If 
. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned
makes its appeal to the Jews, it is therefore as part of our human condition, which means it must also, by definition, be addressing that appeal to everyone. The JRMiP manifesto puts these lines in italics:

We direct our appeal not only to Jews. We accept into our ranks all those for whom there is no place in their homelands – the expelled and the persecuted. There will be no discrimination in our movement. We shall not ask about your life stories, check your residence cards or question your refugee status. We will be strong in our weakness
.
37

. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned
is, as Bartana puts it, a ‘very specific case study’, but, she immediately qualifies, ‘it touches on more universal issues that reflect on social changes and migration in Europe and the Middle East, and the possibilities, or impossibilities of living with others, and the extreme nationalism and racism that is everywhere and currently increasing.’
38
Bartana’s target is the nationalism and racism which are today on the rise again. ‘When such a question is raised regarding the Jews of Poland,’ writes Azoulay in another essay on Bartana’s work, ‘it is deflected in the “hall of mirrors” of being a refugee in the twentieth century – Armenian, Albanian, Bosnian, Rwandan, Turk, Iranian, Palestinian.’
39
If in 1943 the Jew was the model for a world in flight, today Arendt’s stateless are everywhere. Bartana is always specific, but it would make nonsense of her project to make any exclusive claim. However painful – she is fully cognisant of the resistance she will provoke – hers is a universal invitation.

*

Ariella Azoulay’s naming of the Palestinians at the end of her list of today’s refugees is there to remind us that a new stateless population were created on the back of the Second World War when the Jews took on the trappings of nationhood, putting to an end once and for all their status as a minority people. Throughout the three films of 
. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned
, the story of Palestinian expulsion and dispossession hovers unspoken. Like Rola Younes, the young Lebanese woman in Shalev-Gerz’s exhibition
D’eux
or
Of/About Two
, Yael Bartana is heiress to this moment (as indeed is Shalev-Gerz). Although she left Israel in 1996, she lived there again briefly in 2006, and since 2000, Israel has appeared as the repeated focus of her work. And yet, in every artistic gesture she has made since what might seem like a partial homecoming – she describes herself as an ‘ongoing returnee’
40
– she has mounted the fiercest challenge and rebellion to the concept of return as final, redemptive destination, which is its overwhelming meaning in the language of Israeli nationhood. Bartana is an undutiful daughter. In her case we cannot talk about ascent –
aliyah
– the word indicating the elevated status accorded the Jew who ‘returns’ to the land of her ancestors; but nor precisely descent –
yerida
– the word used to describe those who fall, decline, betray the nation by choosing to live elsewhere (although some would doubtless choose to describe her in these terms). Instead, against the reductive alternatives on offer, Bartana, like so many of the women in this book, occupies a place in between, of belonging and not belonging, which is at once a place of suffering – ‘I suffer because I am trapped in between’
41
– and of emancipatory freedom (the interstices being the only space where all my three modern women artists seem able to subsist).

. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned
is therefore a work – Bartana is an artist – with more than one story to tell, more than one history she is bringing to the surface, melding them into what for many would be a shocking, unwelcome combination (another bid for intimacy). Just when you think you might have ‘got it’, that you might be beginning to know where you are, however strange, she takes you somewhere else, sometimes in the same gesture, the same filmic image or sequence into which she condenses worlds upon worlds. In the second film of the trilogy,
Mur I wie
ż
a
(
Wall and Tower
), a group of young men and women, full of the energy of the Zionist pioneers, recreates an Israeli kibbutz next to the site of the Warsaw Ghetto, where we see Israelis learning the Polish words for land, freedom and peace. And yet it becomes impossible – as we witness the barbed wire and the building of the watchtower – for memory not to splinter among its myriad associations: from ghetto, to concentration camp, to kibbutz, and from there to the checkpoints and the wall in Israel today that scars the landscape in the name of security, seizing the land and cutting off Palestinian villagers from their schools, fields and homes. The film is, in her words, about ‘creating historical measures by way of repetition’, as a way of enabling ‘an alternative way of thinking’.
42
To many, for whom no such link is permissible between the persecution of the Jews in Europe and Israeli government policy today, such a mental trail would be pure scandal. And yet Bartana does not completely relinquish the earliest Zionist vision. ‘In favour of liberation’, she states, Zionism was ‘an experiment for which I still have a huge amount of respect’.
43
Even if it always contained its dark side: ‘a dream-nightmare that became just a nightmare’.
44
And then, making her own words that were originally Hannah Arendt’s on the earliest Zionist pioneers: ‘We the Jews, victims of hostility and hatred, escaped to Palestine like a people trying to escape to the moon.’
45
She is sourcing the unconscious dimension of history – the only difference from the other women in this book being perhaps just how explicit, wilful almost, she is about the whole thing.

On the soundtrack of this second film, the Israeli national anthem is played backwards. This is not the first time Bartana has played on such inversions, violating the sanctity of the nation. One of her most powerful films,
A Declaration
, of 2005, shows a young man rowing across the bay to Andromeda Rock off the shore of Jaffa, where he substitutes an olive tree for the Israeli flag. At one level this staged confrontation could not be more simple: the olive tree, which has been at the centre of Israeli appropriation of Palestinian land and a symbol of Palestinian resistance, replaces the most powerful, immediately recognisable insignia of state. But Bartana does more. Through the way she films, she is making a more complex claim. The slowness, the weight of the gestures, the repeated close-up focus on the breaking waves and foam, make this film – as much as a defiant act of substitution (what on earth is an Israeli flag doing flying on such a tiny piece of rock?) – a tribute to the two things which brute nationalism has no time for and has to subdue: the pace of nature and critical, resistant thought. We are being ushered into creative, contemplative time, against which the skyline of Tel Aviv that we see on the far side of the bay feels impotent.

Bartana is charting the death of an ideal. But she also manages to inscribe that ideal into her art. The four-channel video
Low Relief II
of 2004 depicts protestors struggling with the army or police, the image modified to give the impression of an ancient sculpted bas-relief (political resistance as iconic, history passing into antiquity before our eyes).
A Summer Camp
of 2007 ostensibly narrates the reconstruction of a demolished Palestinian home undertaken by local villagers together with the support of Israeli and European volunteers. On the back of the double-sided screen a run of black and white images depict what appear to be Europeans riding camels through the desert taken from the 1935 Zionist film
Avodah.
46
Bartana has found an aesthetic form capable of registering just how easy it is for utopia to disinherit itself.

Bartana has no interest, therefore, in making her work innocent of what she feels most urgently in need of critique. As I have argued throughout this book, the feminist call for freedom, the fight for justice, does not require the banner of innocence on its flag. She knows that creating a movement – including feminism, I would say – always risks re-joining the trappings of power and authority it most fervently wants to reject. That is why monumentality is so central to her trilogy, why ceremony, pageantry, the insignia of statehood haunt and repeat across the work, why indeed – starting with Sierakowski’s exhortation – the trilogy often has something of a masculinist air (albeit inflated to its own bursting point).
Nightmares
takes place in a now abandoned stadium, which was constructed out of the rubble left by the destruction of the 1944 Warsaw uprising, subsequently used as the setting for the majority of state and party ceremonies under Communist Poland. Standing in his derelict arena, Sierakowski, lord of all he surveys (which, bar a few earnest spectators, is mostly nothing), cannot help but evoke this history, together with the aesthetic traditions – Leni Riefenstahl’s
Triumph of the Will
, early Soviet cinema – which accompanied it. ‘I never gave up on Riefenstahl,’ Bartana replies to Galit Eilat when she suggests that she has (or perhaps should have).
47
The final film,
Assassination
, concludes with the raising of a monumental statue of Sierakowski to mark his transition from hero to martyr (it is already huge, but shooting it from below massively, almost ludicrously, inflates its size). She is evoking that history, not, she insists, repeating it.
48
But you have to get up close. This is for her an ethical issue, a matter of human responsibility: ‘You don’t take responsibility for something you don’t identify with.’
49

What, then, is the role of the woman in the dreams and nightmares of her nation? What, more simply, does the modern nation state require its female subjects to be? Today, in many countries of the world, women are full citizens in a way Luxemburg could scarcely have imagined – although, as we saw, she gave increasing support on this issue to her close friend and comrade Clara Zetkin, who was at the forefront of that struggle. What has been the price? This, I would suggest, is the question that has been somewhere propelling this decade of Bartana’s work, in its ‘absolute’ – her word – devotion to the critique of nationalism in its most militant guise.
50
In Israel, unless she refuses, every woman is a soldier – emancipation as the freedom to carry a gun. The irony would not have been lost on Luxemburg. How, then, can you pluck the woman, or any one of these women, from the ranks? The Andromeda Rock of
A Declaration
of course already contains its reference to a woman chained to a rock (an image still aesthetically venerated today – Louis Smith’s for me ghastly painting
Holly
of a model chained to a rock was shortlisted for the 2011 BP Portrait award, and adulated by some critics).
51

Bartana’s first film,
Profile
of 2000, records a range practice of female army recruits, rifles cocked and pressed against their faces, shooting at a male dummy target in response to the voice-off command of a woman sergeant whom we never see. The women are lined up (as you would expect). But the camera is held on the face of just one of them in the forefront of the image, behind which you see the array of bodies – female although you only really see their legs and boots – stretching out behind her in a single line. Slowly, through the tiniest almost invisible gestures and expressions, you start to realise that this one recruit is losing her way. She drops her gaze, leans almost too closely on her rifle as if it is holding her up rather than the other way round. She does not belong. She clearly does not want to fulfil the task that Israel as a nation sets its citizens before any other (compulsory military service as the initiation rite of the state). From the same filmic angle, Bartana succeeds in capturing the serried ranks of statehood – what it means for an Israeli woman to enter the polity – and in giving permission to one of its subjects to fail. Quietly the close-up does its work (as it does in Shalev-Gerz’s
First Generation
, with its almost unbearable focus on the faces of its subjects), taking the myth of self-mastery, individual and collective, apart at the seams.