Land Art (Israel)

001

It’s not land art, but it looks like land art –the arc of the jetty at the Haifa port and the circles and lines of fields and roads in the Jezreel Valley in the center-north of the country, just a short drive away. The human hand stratifies the space which it puts to human  purpose, economic and ideological. I think it makes the space more “dynamic,” more volatile. Urban and rural, I love the open sense of scale on a hot day under a strong sun, the blue and red, and the green and brown, and the intensity provided by a cheap zoom lens. They have their independent life. I like these spaces and the image one can make or lift out of them perhaps more than the hoary narratives that undergird their organization. What’s left after the old narrative dries out are intense visual impressions, and the possibility of new political configurations apart of and apart of the old ones. Reading Deleuze reading Foucault, I realize that this latter possibility represents a throw of the dice.

About zjb

Zachary Braiterman is Professor of Religion in the Department of Religion at Syracuse University. His specialization is modern Jewish thought and philosophical aesthetics. http://religion.syr.edu
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3 Responses to Land Art (Israel)

  1. Gail says:

    That top picture looks so much like one of the opening shots of the Sembene film I’m writing about–and using D’s words on Foucault to talk about the latter’s cinematic sensibilities in insisting on the disjunction of light and language, the visible and the sayable. The disjunction is undergirded and sustained by the Outside, which for Deleuze, are “les rapports du pouvoir.” He calls Foucault the most cinematic thinker (paraphrase)!

  2. Gail says:

    Yea, the quote is “Foucault est singulièrement proche du cinema contemporain” (72, french; page 55, english)

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