With the election Wednesday of hardliner Ariel Sharon as prime minister, Israel is once again in the news. This can only help focus interest on the excellent exhibition featuring contemporary Israeli art at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, and the complementary exhibition featuring older Israeli modern art at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura.
To the rest of the world, Israel seems very much a country with a chip on its shoulder. With its history as a state founded in the face of intense opposition by refugees from Hitler's death camps on what were formerly Arab lands, this pugnacious pose may perhaps be inevitable. But what relevance can the art of this embattled and some would say artificial state have for the rest of us? Is there not bound to be something of a siege mentality in art produced under such conditions?
The work of Penny Yassour (b. 1950) and Sigalit Landau (b. 1969) would definitely suggest so. In "Screens: Railway Map Germany 1938" (1996), Yassour tries to explore the irrationality of rationality itself. Depicting Germany's prewar train lines in giant rubber screens, her intended message is that this apparently ordered and convenient system of transport facilitated one of the most barbaric acts of genocide in history.