by Greg Afinogenov on February 1, 2010
The paintings revisit, again and again, the familiar touchstones of Israeli conservatism: religion, motherhood, military prowess, the return of the diaspora, the struggle for national survival. From their thematic arrangement a kind of total worldview emerges—self-sufficient and, no doubt, inspirational, but also ossified and incapable of change. None of the paintings even seem to acknowledge that Israel is a country undergoing rapid and unsettling transformations (which are symbolized, not least, by Azrieli’s own skyscrapers). Their most common visual idiom is a vaguely Chagallian, vaguely sentimental image of shtetl life, which serves only to illustrate the process by which an artistic style developed by the marginalized and downtrodden has become the dead matter of institutional art.
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by Greg Afinogenov on December 15, 2009
To a great extent, the world of these photographs, like the photographs themselves, is a creation (in that outsider-art kind of sense) of the aparát. Not the buildings, for they are, by and large, much older; and not the people, for they, like early Christians, are in the world without being of it; but the whole impersonal network of social relationships that sustains the Party and, by extension, the State; carving out the tracks along which the passersby are always so determinedly marching. There is, in other words, an inherent ambiguity here, which places this particular tentacle of the aparát in the peculiar position of being simultaneously artist and spectator.
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