Etamar Beglikter

Beglikter's works are based on photographs from his own family album that document his father's time in the army as soldier in the Yom Kippur War. The family trauma fuels Beglikter's choice of imagery and yet Beglikter consciously takes two steps away from it, as his works focus on the 'in-between' moments of battle – moments characterized by a sense of idleness and lack of ceremony – and manipulate the structural array of the image. By so-doing, Beglikter joins a line of artists that deal with the stereotypical effect achieved by the silhouette technique: from Gur-Arie's portrayals of Zionist pioneers, to Kara Walker's contemporary silhouettes that deal with the role of women in African-American history.

 

Drawing on his interest in formal patterns from the collective memory of Israeli society, Beglikter translates familiar (or even over-familiar) faces into unexpected materiality that is rooted in American pop-art tradition. Golda Meir's portrait is engraved on a plastic bucket, and Herzl adorns two identical prints, both techniques reminiscent of pop-art's usage of reproduced prints and ready-made objects. In a move of surprising irony, Beglikter replaces Andy Warhol's pop-art icons, among whom are Marilyn Monroe and Jacklyn Onasis, with icons from an opposite frame of reference – close, serious and fundamentally "un-sexy" – of Zionism's visionary on the one hand, and Israel's fierce leadership on the other. Herzl's prints are titled Without a Beard, and in this context Herzl's famous beard is paralleled with Marilyn Monroe's famous hairdo – both of which serve as visual features that are enough to identify the depicted person.

 

Baruch Blich writes about the alternative modes of commemoration that Beglikter formulates in these works: "Beglikter translates the high to the low, the divine to the popular, not so as to glorify the characters depicted, and certainly not in order to glorify the Zionist past of these immortals. Rather, he aims at lowering these national leaders into the aesthetic grounds of daily life, plain and unbiased… choosing, for instance, to use plastic buckets as material – the same buckets as those used during construction to mix cement in – on the one hand serves to tie the depicted leaders with familiar work standards, while at the same time subversively criticizing those that spoke greatly of the ethics of labor yet were hardly acquainted with it themselves."

 

Beglikter deals with the mythical status of military imagery at large – not only those of combat soldiers, but also the symbols and attributes that belong to these battlefield legends. The third print in the exhibition depicts two combat planes dropping bombs with the open sky in the background. Other military images serve as concrete materials in the sculpted object that completes the body of works in the exhibtion – a petit and shiny dreidel. The dreidel, which is traditionally made of cast lead, is transformed in this work, as its four sides are made up of military metal discs, hanging on the wall from the silver chain of the disc; the handle and tip of the dreidel consist of a golden bullet casing. The personal identifying details that are engraved on a military disc are here replaced by the traditional Hebrew words 'Nes Gadol Haya Po', thus replacing the individual identity of the soldier with a general, national identity.

 

The shape of the disc remains true to a military disc, divided to two sections, so that the soldier then breaks the disc in half and puts each part in one of his shoes. This simple act that is required from every soldier hints at the ambivalent fate that the soldier's military service entails. The traditional dreidel game involves gambling, as children guess which of the four letters the dreidel will eventually indicate. The aspect of gambling in this seemingly innocent child-play echoes the unknown fate towards which the soldiers are heading. The golden bullet pierces through the dreidel, threatening to disrupt its stability. The circular tip of the bullet is a-proportionally enlarged, thus instilling the object with a sense of imminent danger. At the same time, the golden dome of the bullet resembles the architecture of a Muslim mosque – an architecture that in itself is distinctly rooted in Israeli reality, and in the sense of "here". 

Tamar Margalit  

 

Beglikter ©