In the chronology of Israeli art, the 1970s are considered a constitutive stage in the rise of performative artworks which resonated with significant changes that had occurred in the American and European art world during the second half of the 20th century. As Dror Harari explains, a defining feature of this period was “the transition from the static object to the making-process and an emphasis on the creative, generative action […] that occurs in time and place”.¹ In Israel, preliminary examples of this emancipation of the artistic object from traditional aesthetic criteria began to appear in the mid-1960s, and were manifested in a conceptual and/or multidisciplinary approach characterised by a particular stylistic signature that referred to Israeli locality.

By the beginning of the 1970s, Harari adds, the artistic discourse in Israel implemented terms such as “live art”, “happening”, “total experience” or “event”, deriving from theories concerning the “new theatre” that had evolved in the work of ground-breaking international artists such as Allan Kaprow, Gutai Group and Joseph Beuys. Moreover, as Israeli conceptual and performance art established itself, one of its distinct features became the inseparable connection between creating subject, artistic process and work, placing the artist’s body and self as its origin, means and purpose.²

Three significant Israeli artists exemplify this tendency: Yocheved Weinfeld (b. 1947) and Efrat Natan (b. 1947) – broadly considered pioneers of conceptual and body art – and Adina Bar-On (b. 1951), perceived by art historians as the “mother” of Israeli performance art. Weinfeld began creating in the late 1960s, while Natan and Bar-On presented their works towards the mid-1970s. During their years as uprising artists, the paths of the three coincided occasionally: Weinfeld and Natan were personal students of Raffi Lavie – a leading representative of the discourse emphasising the material concreteness of the creation process – and presented their early works in various exhibitions he curated for the group 10+.³ Weinfeld and Bar-On participated in the Meitzag 76 event, curated by art historian and Israeli philosopher Gideon Ofrat, who coined the Hebrew term “meitzag” as the equivalent of performance art.⁴ Weinfeld and Natan were highly prolific throughout the 1970s and up to the early 1980s, but later withdrew from the art world for several years into motherhood, whereas Bar-On created continuously and even included her husband and children in some of her works.

Although each artist’s language was distinct and transformed in accordance with their evolving creative phases, all three displayed a persistent move across mediums and an awareness of materiality as the generator of formal/textural sensations, originating from the body and objects in the case of Weinfeld and Natan, or in movement, voice and facial expressions, in the case of Bar-On. Consequently, their works corresponded with the defining tendencies of 1970s body art and performance art, while displaying interrelated themes, such as the various dimensions of feminine corporeality and issues of history and memory, or responded to the Israeli locality and political situation.

Efrat Natan, Head Sculpture, 1973, photographed performance © Courtesy Efrat Natan

Efrat Natan, Flag, 1974, photographed action, gelatin silver print, 13 x 18 cm, photo: Tamar Getter © Courtesy Efrat Natan

From their early works, the three artists deliberately challenged conventional genre classifications, mostly from formal concerns and experimental motivations, but not completely detached from the social climate of the time, especially the disillusionment of Israeli society from formative myths that praised the nation’s military strength and glorified the sense of collectiveness, which occurred after the traumatic Yom Kippur War of 1973.⁵ In Head Sculpture (1973), Efrat Natan wondered along Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv wearing a T-shaped piece of painted plywood on her head on the morning after the military parade in Jerusalem that took place as part of the Israeli Independence Day celebrations. Like other works she created at the time (for example, Building High, 1973 or Flag, 1974), she referred to it as an “action sculpture”,⁶ conceptually locating it between the material and the performed. In a later exhibition, she displayed the sculpture alongside a collage of six photographs that documented the event, creating a liminal space – this time, between object and representation, tangible and remembered. The significance of the live installation as a response to the political climate crystallised, as Noam Gal argues, from the photo placing the headless Natan near an announcement of Israel’s Memorial Day for the Fallen ceremonies, metaphorically transforming her into a walking dead.⁷

Yocheved Weinfeld, Untitled, 1976, stitched photographs, documentation of a performance during a one-person show at Debel Gallery Jerusalem © Yocheved Weinfeld

Yocheved Weinfeld, Stitched Hands, 1974, stitched and rephotographed photographs, collection Tel Aviv Museum of Art © Yocheved Weinfeld

Yocheved Weinfeld, Untitled (Menstruation), 1976, documentary photographs of performance, 11.8 x 8.2 cm each, photos by David Darom, Debel Gallery Archives at the Information Center for Israeli Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem © Yocheved Weinfeld

Weinfeld’s exhibition in 1974 included a photographic series that displayed her distorted face, resulting from a process of sewing the paper in the areas of her mouth. The two-dimensional photo thus evolved into a three dimensional object, simultaneously functioning as a visual manifestation of a physical action (that Weinfeld later developed into an exploration of the materiality of sensations in her exhibition Pains, 1975), and a symbolic image linking the personal to the political through the corporeal, as she explained: “The subject is scars, because the war was a type of scar […] and besides that, my mother had undergone surgery […] Art in Israel did not deal with the body […] and I wanted flesh”.⁸ In Untitled (Menstruation) (1976), Weinfeld graphically presented the traditional Jewish ritual of post-menstrual purification as a body-performance aimed at visually displaying what she experienced as the “arousing language” of the Book Code of Jewish Law (Shulchan Aruch).⁹

In the written outline of Bar-On’s first performance in 1973, conceived and executed while she was still a student in the Bezalel Academy, and at a point in time that connected the familial (the death of her brother) with the social (the Yom Kippur War), she is described as behaving “like a static picture which changes with subtle nuances”¹⁰. Similarly, the works she created afterwards consisted of movement sequences realised through her body and facial expressions, and described as “situation/image theatre (visual theatre)”, “encounter – and image” (1974), “theatrical syntax for an emotion” (1978) and more, emphasising her insistence on a happening between image and action, materiality and performativity.¹¹ Curator Yona Fischer, a significant figure in promoting the new artistic discourse in Israel at the time, explained that Bar-On’s art “escapes any definition, because it is a language, a means of transmitting information”.¹²

Adina Bar-On, 1st  Performance at Bezalel Academy of Arts, Summer 1973 © Courtesy Adina Bar-On

Efrat Natan, Roof Work (Golgotha), 1979, photographed installation © Courtesy Efrat Natan

All three artists accentuated the material body by directly exploring presence and absence. Natan’s Roof Work (1979), an installation on the roof of a Tel Aviv condominium where the artist lived at the time, consisted of several undershirts placed in different positions and on various surfaces, while she herself hid in her apartment. The undershirt became a recurring image in Natan’s works, referring to her childhood in the kibbutz: “always white, worn at the end of the work day, after bathing, transmitting cleanness and simplicity […] an installation of undershirts is almost a performance”.¹³ The garment therefore functioned as a visual metonym for Natan, embodying her past corporeal experiences, and in many ways performing a theatrical “speech act” declaring her present while absent.

In Weinfeld’s work, visual presence was challenged through acts of performative disappearance. For example, Sheet (1976) is composed of seven black and white photographs displaying a female body, assumed to be the artist’s, completely covered in a white sheet, and in Serial Photograph (1976), six black and white snapshots of the artist’s face are gradually erased with white gouache. Weinfeld’s choice to present the processual transformation in the photo-object focuses the attention on the continuous movement occurring within the displayed body – its changing silhouette in Sheet and shifting facial landscape in Serial Photograph. Consequently, the act of painting on the photo, like being present in it, turns the series of successive frames into a form of live performance the artist is executing, even if not physically.

Adina Bar-On, Woman of the Pots, 1990, a series of performances, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem © Courtesy Adina Bar-On

Adina Bar-On, Sacrifice, 2002, performance at Interaction Festival, Piotrkow Trybunalski, Poland, May 2002 © Courtesy Adina Bar-On

In Adina Bar-On’s case, bodily presence was – and still is – the starting point of the performance, perceived as an act of reciprocity aimed at triggering a physical reaction in the spectator – be it excitement or reluctance. Her use of the body’s substances – expressions and breathing, voice and text, movements and postures – consistently emphasises its concreteness, while enhancing the live quality of the performance as a material of its own: space, time, energy, rhythm. In this way, Bar-On continued transforming the materials of her works and re-locating them: for example, the crying scene from Woman of the Pots (1990) became a short vocal performance entitled Sacrifice (1990 and onwards) that she performed independently at various events, some of which were socially-politically protestive in nature. As such, she utilised the formal as an embodied experience of unmediated communication.

In their insistence on presence, the three artists enabled their bodies to simultaneously be form and content, object and image, but above all an encounter: Yocheved Weinfeld’s way “to create something that bothers, that is not afraid of itself” in puritanical Israel of the 1970s where many things were swept under the carpet;¹⁴ “a delivery of a theatrical situation that happened to the spectator” in Efrat Natan’s words;¹⁵ and for Adina Bar-On, an image that exists “only in the sense that you remember that there was an Adina there, who did these things, and yourself in connection with her”.¹⁶