TYO staff and volunteers take advantage of any chance they get to enjoy the Palestinian countryside. But we live here, so it’s a bit easier… For those of you who don’t live here, or are looking for a different way to see the country, we wanted to share two exciting opportunities coming up for you to enjoy the hills, valleys, olive groves and wheat fields of the West Bank.

Abraham Path “Palestine Youth Summer Walk,” July 23 – 30
The Abraham Path Initiative is organizing the second annual youth walk through the West Bank. Young people from around the world will walk 70 kilometers from Nablus to Hebron, staying with families, getting to know each other, and enjoying the natural and cultural beauty of Palestine.

“Peace Cycle,” October 9 – 23
A British non-profit organization coordinates this bike ride from Amman to Jerusalem. Participants will have the chance to stay with local families and enjoy the countryside and cities along the way. Furthermore, the trip will raise money for Oyooni Eye Clinic, an initiative that aims to deliver specialized eye care to diabetes and glaucoma patients in the West Bank and Gaza. Read more at http://www.thepeacecycle.com/

If you’re coming to Palestine with one of these exciting initiatives or on your own, check out www.visitPalestine.ps for tips. And let us know if you come see the beautiful valley of Nablus and sample delicious knafeh!

Many of my ideas about art, like most belief systems, come from my father, who, trafficking me down the stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway that lies between his house and my mother’s house once quoted Luciano Fabro to me, “Most artists are born warriors and die merchants”.  This phrase, at the tender age of 12 or 13 (an odd tendency of my father is not to vary his discourse according to the age of his listener) had a big effect on me. Under the common misguided impression of 13-year-olds that those who have just been born are good and those who are about to die bad, I vowed to always remain a warrior and never, against all odds, allow myself to be led down the evil path towards commerce and merchandising. 

…

11:05am.  April 25, 2008.  Chicago, Illinois, Merchandise Mart.  I am  bounding and dodging my way through NEXT and Artopolis spectators who seem hell bent on moving as slowly and as aimlessly as possible.  I’m late.  I flit about at the end of a long line emanating from the elevators, digging through a decomposing black backpack for my participants’ badge.  Finally, I find it amidst a wad of unidentifiable objects and pull it out just as the authoritative eye of the guard finds me.  On sight of my badge, she quickly waves me through.  The faces of those patiently bearing the line slide into a blur past me as I bypass them towards the elevator. 

…

Late afternoon.  April 16, 2008.  Check point.  Bethlehem.  Surrounding the West Bank is a wall made of wide, imposing concrete slabs.  At the base of the wall are piles of garbage and tangled, overgrown weeds.  All across the wall are spatterings of graffiti, “My sister did not through stones”, “Ctrl. Alt. Delete”, “I am not a terrorist”.  Anyone trying to get into or out of the West Bank is required to pass through a security check point in order to get from one side of the wall to another.  I hold my American passport in my sweaty hand. On sight of the dark blue vinyl covering, the little gold pressed lettering, the authoritative eye of the guard nods me through.  I exit through the iron turn grate, and stride out towards Israel, past a long line of some 50 Palestinians who must endure rigorous, never-ending interrogations, the degrading taunts of Israeli soldiers, and what they perceive to be an ongoing alienation from dominion over their own well-being.

…

What do these two experiences have to do with each other?  Well, besides some surface characteristics: the waiting, the long line, my possession in both cases of the sought-after passe-partout, the blur of faces as I speed by them, the delineation of privilege based on affiliation—not much, really.  One cannot really compare the experience of the Palestinians to the experience of art-fair goers.  Likewise, it would be a stretch to try to compare the battle between Palestinians and Israelis to the battle between artists and art buyers.  It would be insulting even to try.   

…

My father is a communist.  No, he’s a republican.  No, a communist.  No a republican.  (Did you know many Palestinians are communists?  I didn’t.)  He owns an El Camino, and keeps a picture of Mao on the dash-board.  He says, “I’m a member of the republican party because, what kind of left doesn’t believe in guns?”  He told me when I was a little girl, “It’s not the artists who decide what art is, it’s the art critics and the art buyers.”  They make the distinction between good and bad art and important and unimportant art by deciding how much it costs and by writing about it in well read magazines and art history text books. 

…

In the taxi on the way home from the airport after my flight from Israel and Palestine, my taxi driver asked me if I thought the Palestinians and the Israelis would stop fighting.  I told him I didn’t think that they would any time soon because they need each other.  They depend on each other to hate the other one.   The existence of Israel depends upon the exclusion of the Palestinians: if the Israelis let the Palestinians into Israel and it continued to remain a democracy, at the next election, Israel would become Palestine for the simple reason that there are more Palestinians than there are Jews.  For that reason, it is necessary for the Israelis that the Palestinians continue to bomb them so that they will have a reason to continue the segregation of the Palestinians.  And for the Palestinians, they depend on the Israelis for the impossible dream of Palestine—to be able to fight for something that is worth living for.  The Palestinians were offered a Palestine and they turned it down.  Because it is the dream they want and not the sad compromise of reality, and defeat. 

…

At NEXT.  I took off on my break from supervising The Green Lantern booth to have an experience of art.  After a few moments bumbling my way down carpeted aisle-ways and cubicled gallery samples, I came across “About a World” a video piece by Corinna Schnitt (Galerie Haus Schneider Uschi Kolb.  Karlslruhe).  In the piece, a dozen naked women lay scattered across a field, and a man in a suit approaches each of them respectively and attempts to enact an experience of intimacy.  With the first one he slowly lowers himself on top of her.  The second, he tries to spoon her.  It touches me.  This poor, lonely man in a suit, surrounded by sexy, naked women, none of whom will respond to his advances since they are all dead.  I couldn’t help but empathize with him, not only as a 21^st Century, alienated, emotionally damaged human being, but also as a viewer of NEXT, trying systematically to get into bed with art that has been so packaged and so disseminated, like carcasses hanging in a meat market, that all my attempts at intimacy were proving futile.  You try fucking a dead girl in a field surrounded by 11 other dead girls.  I think something of the suit-man became infused into me in that dark room because I stumbled out of the space, blinking, dazed, feeling like I had lost some essential part of my subjectivity.  I have a vague recollection of floating several inches above the ground through Roots & Culture’s space.  Looking at Carmen Price’s pieces and then the giant yarn sculptures on the ground I became convinced that I had in fact started hallucinating, and that my soul was in fact becoming detached from my body.  I was wondering if someone had spiked the Grolsch. .  I remember saying to someone, “I can’t imagine a venue that is less conducive to having an experience of art”.  I passed by “Invisible Cargo” (Andrea Chung) and the smell of the spices began to infect me like a religious incantation.  I remembered the smell of those spices from somewhere… from somewhere…  but where?  Where was I?  Where am I?  My nose carried me, I passed through a room, my body almost perpendicular to the floor, my eyes transcending the barrier of material, my body invisible.  I was at the “Mexican Border” (Richard Mosse), unable suddenly to delineate between the inside and outside of the photo.  Do photos have an inside and an outside?  Do I?  Is metaphysical duality fungible?  Are national borders traspassable? Inside one of the photos, I found myself crouching on a patch of dried leaves, sundry items waffling sneakers I was not wearing, reading a passage out of The Wizard of Oz, “They continued down the Yellow Brick Road that led them to the edge of the River.  The Woodman said, ‘I will cut down some trees and make a raft.’ The scarecrow volunteered to push the raft across the river with the pole”.  It was then it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the divisions between time and space are conventional.  One hour is not contiguous with the next, space is imaginary, and the value of art is symbolic.  The art that was around me was reified, commodified, codified in system of exchange markets.  And how can art that pretends to interrogate the structures of systems of representation ever ignore its own translation into a monetary value, into a price?  What is the difference between the logic of how we conceive the value of art and the logic of how we conceive market value?  I did not see art hanging around me.  I saw goods.  Without warning or explanation, I found myself on the other side of the Merchandise Mart reading these words somewhere below the words, “The WEST FAMILY loans money”:  “The artists are working to re-represent reality, either through the building of a constructed reality, representations of reality in odd materials, scale-shifting, or the incorporation of one “reality” into another reality… the end image includes elements of the “real world””.   And with that, suddenly, I was in Jerusalem, in an image of the real world, lost in a haze of the Arab market.  Giant slabs of beef hung from the ceiling.  Long compartmentalized boxes filled with different colored spices, textiles, candies, baked goods, coffee, falafel…  I was looking for a poster I had seen the day before.  A retro style poster with an orange tint and a horizon-style drawing of mosques and other buildings with the slogon VISIT PALESTINE.  I couldn’t find it anywhere, I kept turning down odd alleys, the same cheesy bejeweled bracelets and ornately decorated backgammon boards around every corner. “Are you shopping?”  A man holding a small glass of mint tea called out to me.  “Hello my friend, come into my shop” another man, leaning upright next to a wall filled with dazzling, hanging earrings.  “Do you have a boyfriend?”  “Help me spell the word, sesame,” another man with a pencil and small pad of paper called out to me… “Special student discount” “Let me talk to you… just for a moment… just for a moment…”  I passed by a row of hanging paintings of assholes…  is my body for sale?  I idly wondered.  Who is art for?  What is art for?  Where is Palestine?  What is Palestine for?  Who is Palestine for?   The market spun around me in an unidentifiable rash of twirling, blurred colors.   I felt myself falling.  I don’t know what happened after that. 

…

When I came to, it was dark where I was.  I was alone.  There was sound but none of it distinct.  I felt a wall against my back.  My eyes fluttered open.  I was inside an installation booth, a video projected against the wall.  I must have passed out, I thought to myself.  The letters of four words were rearranging themselves supernaturally on the far wall—according to some system whose rules I did not understand.  I rubbed my eyes, and wrenched myself (not without difficulty) to my feet.  I squinted at the modulating letters, hopping and trading spaces in front of me.  It was a live action word scramble.  It took me a few moments before I realized the words were a piece by Lior Bar that was continuously spelling and unspelling the words, “Israeli Jewish White Male”.  

…

Eventually I succeeded in navigating myself back to The Green Lantern’s booth.  I honed in on it thanks to Featherproof Press’s poster-excerpt series of Zach Plague’s book, spelling the word BORING over and over again in giant letters.  Thank God for boring I thought to myself.  I stood there blinking as Caroline Picard, director of the The Green Lantern Gallery and Press tried to coax me back to reality.  “The question is,” I said, “Is art antithetical to shopping?”  “No,”  said Caroline. “That’s how you know it’s art,” said Zach.  “When it costs a lot.”  “Or,” said Mark Byrne (also from Featherproof) “When it’s free, but you can’t have it.”  

…

I remember my taxi driver, the same one who took me back from the airport from Israel asking me, “Do you believe they will ever find peace, the Israelis and the Palestinians”?  And I answered him, “Yes, of course I do.  I have to.”  

Lily

von Dominique Omakowski

Kibbutz Givat Brenner

Tel Aviv

Yaffo

See Genezareth

Jerusalem

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