washing and lubrication service 2015
In the midst of the Israeli diamond-exchange district, in between fancy skyscrapers, stands a one-storey construction – an abandoned space that once functioned as a garage. In summer 2015 two young Israeli artists, Limor Tamir & Yaniv Amar, invaded the place, turning its internal space into a fantasy-like installation, titled "Lubrication and Car-Wash Services". Viewers who could find the place, in between the tall buildings and the gas station surrounding it, entered a space where beauty and ugliness were juxtaposed, and a sense of liveliness and movement was challenged by dozens of small and medium-sized jars of formalin, that contained preserved dead animals.
The proposed paper will analyze this installation through the issue of the “subject”, arguing that in this installation the subject becomes a reflexive and dynamic epistemic and political form. Through contemporary theories on post-Zionism I will show that "Lubrication and Car-Wash Services" embodied dialectical issues that are at the heart of contemporary Israeli identity in a state of occupation.
These dialectical issues, in their historical and cultural context and in their aesthetic forms, will enable me to define this installation as a dynamic platform for the engendering of subjects. The reflexive epistemic system of subjectivization, which is generated in this installation, constructs the idea of occupation as a thematic subject that vacillates between the artistic object and the Israeli state, while the occupying subject (as a political form) is performed synchronically by the artists and by the visitors. Through this case and the epistemic model it offers, this paper will define the contemporary subject as a contingent idea that assumes a dynamic essence.
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The Case of the Occupying Subject in Israeli Contemporary Art
Ronit Milano
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Ronit Milano is a senior lecturer at the Department of the Arts in Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Her book, The Portrait Bust and French Cultural Politics in the Eighteenth Century was published in 2015. Her recent articles focus on curatorial and economic aspects of contemporary art and on the revival of historicism in contemporary art.
