Project description
A history of Israel's modern textile production as a form of nation-building
An ongoing tension between local versus global/universal influences can be discerned in the historiography of Israeli visual culture. It remains under debate which sources have shaped Israeli modernism and what political implications followed the incorporation of Middle Eastern traditions, European Jewish heritage or international avant-garde movements into Israel's national style. The EU-funded TMIM project will enter the debate by investigating textiles produced in Israel during the period 1940–1970. This study will examine different sites of textile production including the Bezalel Academy for Art and Craft, the government-owned fashion brand ‘Maskit’ and the fine art establishment. TMIM aims to establish the significance of a group of highly prolific female artists and designers, whose work has been entirely overlooked due to the lower status of craft-based practices within the art historical canon. Using an interdisciplinary approach that integrates art historical and anthropological methods, this study examines textile production in Israel as a hotbed for a range of issues at the interstices of aesthetics, national identity, and gender.
Objective
"The development of Israeli visual culture in the twentieth century was underscored by artists’ search for local roots, counterbalanced with their desire to dialogue with an international artistic arena. As in other settler societies such as the United States and Australia, the attempt to produce a distinguished idiom of Israeli modernism oscillated between ""nativism"" and ""universalism""––two seemingly opposed tendencies that were actually interrelated. Indeed, the historiography of Israeli visual culture has emphasized the ongoing tension between local versus global/universal influences. Nevertheless, scholars continue to debate which sources shaped Israeli modernism, and what political implications followed the incorporation of Middle Eastern traditions, European Jewish heritage, or international avant-garde movements into an Israeli national style. The proposed study would contribute to such debates by investigating a medium that has received little scholarly attention––textiles. Textiles and the Making of Israeli Modernism: From the Zionist Bauhaus to Feminist Art (TMIM) will focus on textiles produced in Israel during the 1940s–1970s within three separate yet overlapping fields of practice: an art and craft academy, a government-owned fashion brand, and the fine art establishment. TMIM will draw and expand on recent scholarship that addressed the marginalization of textiles within art history due to its association with ""low,"" commercial, or ""feminine"" work, as well as the innovative field of object-oriented anthropology that considers ""things"" as agents of cultural and social meaning. TMIM aims to establish the significance of a group of highly prolific artists-designers, all female, whose work has been entirely overlooked. It is precisely its position at the crossroads of art, craft, and commerce that makes the field of textiles fertile ground for examining the construction of modernist perceptions during this formative period of Israeli nation-building."
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
91904 Jerusalem
Israel