Culture, Theory & Critique, 2009, 50(23), 275288

What Does Landscape Want? A

Walk in W. J. T. Mitchells Holy
Landscape
Larry Abramson
LarryAbramson
Culture,
10.1080/14735780903240315
1473-5784
Original
Taylor
2009
000000July-November
2-3
50
larry@012.net.il
&
Theory
Article
Francis
(print)/1473-5776
& Critique
2009 (online)
RCTC_A_424205.sgm
and
Francis

Antony Gormley, STEREO II, 2008, the artist.

Abstract This essay is a conversational dialogue with W. J. T. Mitchells

groundbreaking ideas on landscape, conducted as a quest not only for
common ground between artist and theorist, but also between Palestinians
and Israelis. Applying Mitchells speculative notion of What Do Pictures
Want? to landscape, it investigates the possibility that beyond its desire to
be loved blindly, landscape also needs to be filled by the dreams and memories of its beholders, to be an inclusive space of totemic multiplicity in
which fundamentalist idolatry and dogmatic iconoclasm are replaced by a
shared discourse of critical idolatry.

In his preface to the second edition of Landscape and Power, published in 2002,
eight years after the first editions appearance, W. J. T. Mitchell takes issue
with the title he originally gave this groundbreaking anthology of writings
on landscape as cultural practice. In place of the original titles dyadic
coupling of Landscape and Power, he proposes an alternative conceptual
triad of Space, Place, and Landscape, arguing that: Landscape is a relatively weak power compared to that of armies, police forces, governments,
and corporations. Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a
broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify. This
indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature of whatever
force landscape can have (Mitchell 2002: vii).
This is a surprising comment coming from someone who had visited
Israel and Palestine intermittently but steadily since 1970, and who has
discussed the region extensively in his critical writing about landscape for
over twenty years a region he prefers to name Israel-Palestine, a pair of
monstrous Siamese twins, joined at all the vital organs, and yet separated by
the teeth and claws with which each twin tries to tear its uncanny double to
pieces (Mitchell 2007). Obviously, the status of landscape as a significant
Culture, Theory & Critique
ISSN 1473-5784 Print/ISSN 1473-5776 online 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/14735780903240315

276 Larry Abramson

instrument of power symbolical and physical in the one hundred year
struggle between Jews and Palestinians, has not escaped Mitchells attention.
In Imperial Landscape, his foundational essay written in 1987 and published
in 1994 as the first chapter of Landscape and Power, he observes that the marks
of imperial conquest in Israel/Palestine would seem to be absolutely
unavoidable. The face of the Holy Landscape is so scarred by war, excavation,
and displacement that no illusion of innocent, original nature can be
sustained for a moment (Mitchell 1994: 27). In fact, when he suggests, that
landscape doesnt merely signify or symbolise power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power (Mitchell 1994: 12), he could well be referring to
what Israeli architecture theorist Eyal Weizman has recently called Israels
politics of verticality: The appropriation and carving up of the landscape of
the occupied territories not only on the ground, with ever changing security
zones, separation barriers, segregated highways and endless roadblocks, but
also below the ground and in the air above, with tunnels, underpasses and
overpasses that intertwine to create a unique type of political space that
desperately attempts to multiply a single territorial reality and create two
insular national geographies that occupy the same space (Weizman 2007: 15).
How then to interpret Mitchells change of heart, from the polemic neoMarxist Landscape = Power of the first edition of Landscape and Power to the
more soft and inclusive landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting
a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify of
the second? The key to this transition may well lie in his book What Do
Pictures Want?, published in 2005 but researched and written between 1994
and 2002, and thus a record of the development of his image theory in the
years following the publication of the first edition of Landscape and Power.
What Do Pictures Want? is an investigation of the widely shared notion that
visual images have replaced words as the dominant mode of expression in our
time (the pictorial turn, as Mitchell himself defined it), an investigation based
on the theoretically unorthodox assumption that images are living things, and
as such have minds and desires of their own, and hence also the power to
seduce and influence human beings. Mitchell takes the human tendency to
animate images and think of them as having a life of their own, and turns it
on its head, reversing the traditional relationship between picture and beholder
into one in which the desire of the image takes central stage. The spectator
thus ceases to be sovereign over the visual order, and is turned into the imagined object of an autonomous, and demanding, pictorial gaze. While Mitchell
himself is the first to identify the shortcomings of this vitalist theory, he insists
upon its potential as a speculative poetic tool that can liberate visual studies
from the closed circuit of hermeneutic and semiotic conventions, and provide
a new (one is tempted to say vital) way of understanding the role of images
in contemporary culture. The question to ask of images, he challenges, is not
just what they mean or do, but what they want.
Artists, of course, have always asked themselves precisely that. While
traditional art historians were trying to decipher artists innermost intentions,
and new art historians the machinations of the social context in which art
acquires its symbolic value, the artists themselves knew that the only thing
they could do, and in fact should do, was to be attentive to the needs of their
paintings, or sculptures, or whatever mode of image-making they were

A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchells Holy Landscape 277

engaged in. By positioning the question what do pictures want? as a tool of
theoretical investigation, Mitchell has constructed an intuitive bridge between
the studio and the study, introducing the shared space of the image not only
as the long missing link between artists and interpreters, but as the space of
social discourse par excellence. In this context the image becomes space, not
because it depicts an illusion or impression of space, but because it is in a state
of constant fluctuation, resisting meaning and producing in its viewers a
paradoxical double consciousness vacillating between magical beliefs and
sceptical doubts, nave animism and hard-headed materialism, mystical and
critical attitudes (Mitchell 2005: 7).
Landscape, of course, is no different to all other modes of image-making,
and its beholders are subject to the same vacillating double consciousness that
images always produce. In the first edition of Landscape and Power, Mitchell
proposes to ask not just what landscape is or means but what it does
(Mitchell 1994: 1). Now, armed with the insight gained in What Do Pictures
Want?, it is time to return to landscape with a new, inevitable question: What
does landscape want?
To try and address this challenge, I want to take a cue from Mitchell
himself, who in Holy Landscape: Israel, Palestine and the American Wilderness (2002) chose to return to the landscape of his childhood in the Nevada
desert (a real place in my own memory, as he defines it) in order to discuss
the persistent cultural concept of a primeval, unspoiled paradisiacal place.
The real place in my memory, my zero degree of landscape, is the landscape
of Israel, or more specifically the hills of Jerusalem, and even more specifically
the rocky fields and valleys on the outskirts of West Jerusalem, where I
grew up and have spent most of my life.
My parents moved to Israel in 1961, turning their backs on South
Africas regime of apartheid and hoping to take part in the building of what
they perceived as a just and egalitarian socialist society. I had barely turned
seven, and my first task at school was to learn the language, of which I knew
nothing. My teacher was a hefty no-nonsense woman whose mission in life,
so it seemed, was to get me to adopt a new, Hebrew name, and my headmaster was the spitting image of David Ben-Gurion. He was a short middleaged gentleman, with flames of white hair shooting out in all directions
from the sides of his bald head, and every time he addressed the student
body in the sun-baked yard, it felt as though prime-minister Ben-Gurion was
standing up there on the podium, waving his arms and orating in a shrill,
undecipherable voice. He was in fact a geographer by the name of David
Benvenisti (the similarity of the two Davids names may also have contributed to their merging, in my impressionable new immigrants mind, into the
one and same figure), and we studied Israeli geography called Yediat
Haaretz, Knowledge of the Land in a book written by him, aptly titled
Moledet, Homeland. Our main pastime as kids was to take walks in the
many open areas in and about the neighborhood we lived in, from which we
would return with great big bunches of wildflowers. When the Authority for
Nature Preservation initiated a national campaign to protect the wildflowers
from extinction, we continued our frequent forays into nature, only now to
identify the protected species and reprimand anyone who even considered
picking them. We went and came at will, and except for the occasional

278 Larry Abramson

warning by an adult not to touch rusty old tins that could contain explosives
from the War of Independence, and the troubling presence of a family of
new immigrants from Kurdistan who lived in a cave in one of the valleys,
our Garden of Eden was undisturbed.
At least twice a year we went on tiyulim, school trips to different parts of
the country, driving out in tarpaulin covered trucks, hiking by day and sitting
around bonfires at night, singing in hoarse voices and eating scorched potatoes.
On our hikes we would stop occasionally at vantage points to hear from our
teachers and guides about the geology and history of the area. Everywhere we
went carried moving memories of pioneering halutzim, heroic Palmach battles
and glorious Jewish kingdoms of ancient times. The Zionist narrative and the
stories of the Bible were intertwined and inscribed right there in the landscape,
as real to us as the rocks and mountains we climbed.
In fourth grade my friends and I joined the Scouts, a politically unaffiliated youth movement that drew its principles equally from Baden Powell and
Binyamin Zeev Herzl.1 We wore sloppy khaki uniforms with neckerchiefs
colored to designate our (low) rank in the organisations hierarchy, and spent
two afternoons a week learning to tie knots and light fires with a single
match, collecting contributions for the needy, and mainly having fun
outdoors. Once, as dusk settled on Hovevei Zion2 valley, just on the outskirts of
our neighborhood, we played a game called Ayala, Gazelle: our scout leader
(a kid just a few years older than us) played the gazelle, standing upright on a
high rock and scanning the terrain around him, while we, the hunters, were
to sneak up and get as close as possible to him without being detected. I
remember lying motionless in the undergrowth between a cluster of grey
rocks for what felt like eternity, hardly daring to move or to breath, thorns of
Sira kotsanit pricking my side, the sharp smell of wild oregano tantalising my
nostrils and unidentified insects flickering across my forehead and crawling
up and down my perspiration-soaked body. In the fading light I watched the
stars light up one after the other in the enormous evening sky that enveloped
the vague silhouette of the gazelle until it was so dark I could no longer see
what was happening up on the slope. Eventually I gathered enough courage
to crawl out of hiding and carefully edge my way uphill on my elbows, only
to discover that the game was long over and that everyone had packed up
and gone home. Oddly, though I was all alone in the dark valley, I made my
way back towards the distant lights where I knew my dinner was waiting
with a sense of calm satisfaction in my heart. I had survived the wild; I had
been initiated into the landscape; and I had forged my link with a long chain
of pioneers who had like me sacrificed their comfort to become one with

Binyamin Zeev Herzl (18601904, originally Theodor Herzl, born in Pest,

Hungary and active as a journalist in Vienna) was the founder of modern political
Zionism.
2
Named for Hovevei Zion (literally: Those who are fond of Zion), was the protoZionist eastern European Jewish organisation considered forerunner of the modern
Zionist movement.

A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchells Holy Landscape 279

the Land, from biblical Abraham all the way up to the brave fighters of Ariel
Sharons Unit 101.3 I belonged.
For an immigrant child with an urgent need to bond, landscape indeed
became a significant medium of belonging. Of all the diverse and grand
landscapes the country had to offer, I felt most connected to the moderate
hills and valleys surrounding Jerusalem, with their stepped slopes, striated by
countless man-made stone terraces built and maintained over the centuries to
keep the fertile top soil from washing away. I was moved by the way these
signs of human cultivation were integral to the natural landscape, the way
this sense of continuous community was manifest in the geography itself. On
tiyulim and picnics, it was always exciting to come across one of the old ruins
that were scattered here and there across the landscape, deserted stone
houses with wild vegetation growing out of their crumbling roofs and walls.
We called them hirbeh ruin in Arabic but despite their culturally-specific
name, for us they were beyond history, reminders of a time immemorial
when men were part of the harmonious cycle of nature. The hirbeh gave landscape its antiquity, collapsing human historical time and natural geological
time into a combined mythological presence to be had, in both the erotic
(biblical), and the intellectual senses inherent in the ideologically loaded
concept of Geography as Yediat Haaretz, Knowledge of the Land.
What then does landscape want? My first, tentative answer would be: to
be loved. Landscape wants to seduce us, to embrace us, to draw us in to its
bosom of unreserved belonging. Landscape wants to be loved in totality: it
wants to be had passionately, like a lover, and emotionally, like a consoling
and accepting parent. It promises exquisite release and comforting intimacy,
and in return asks only that all critical thought be banished from the minds of
its lovers. John Muir, founder of Yosemite Park who went to much pains to
keep the Ahwahneechee Indians out of his artificial landscape-garden,
described the mountains that rose above the park as having feet set in pinegroves and gay emerald meadows as if into these mountain mansions
Nature had taken pains to gather her choicest treasures to draw her lovers
into close and confiding communion with her (in Schama 1996: 89). This
close and confiding communion with nature, via the construction of an imagined homeland landscape, has been at the heart of all national identities, as
has been landscapes particular agency to naturalise and render transparent
the very ideological motivations that are at its source.4 Landscape, therefore,
does not simply want to be loved; it wants to be loved blindly.
Awakening from the spell of blind love can be very painful. For me it
happened some thirty years after my original childhood bonding with landscape, and in the very same hills around Jerusalem. In 1993, as the Oslo
3
The short-lived Special Commando Unit 101, established in 1953 under the
command of Ariel Sharon for the purpose of retaliatory across-the-border raids
against Arab military and civilian targets, assumed mythological status in the imagination of Israeli youth of the time.
4
The foundational role of landscape in the construction and naturalisation of
national mythologies has been discussed extensively in recent years. See in particular
Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (1988), Alan R. H. Barker and Gideon Biger
(1992), and W. J. T. Mitchell (1994).

280 Larry Abramson

peace process was promising mutual recognition and a political reconciliation between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, I
felt a call to look afresh at the familiar landscape of my childhood. As
though ideological cataracts had been removed from my eyes, I was set to
see all that blind love had kept from me: The terraced hills were still beautiful, but now they were less the ancient landscapes of my imagined biblical
ancestors and more the deserted agricultural groves of Palestinian villagers
who, since 1948, were condemned to uprooted lives in distant refugee
camps; and the crumbling stone hirbeh interspersed between the fruit trees
were now less the romantic memento mori ruins so integral to the
European culture of landscape, and more the chilling empty hulls of depopulated5 Palestinian homes. The concept of scopic regimes,6 which came up
so often in the intellectual discourse about the gaze in the 1980s, was
abruptly yanked out of the innocuous realm of theory to become a concrete
political reality on the ground. Wherever I looked, I could no longer see
innocent landscapes, only scopic regimes designed to construct the gaze
and control the consciousness. The pine forests, so enthusiastically donated
by generations of Jewish children in the diaspora among them historian
Simon Schama, as he testifies in the introduction to his monumental
Landscape and Memory (1996: 5) and planted by the Jewish National Fund
to make the wilderness bloom now looked more like a Euro-centric desire
to visually colonise the Levant, to conceal sites of depopulation,7 and to
prevent Palestinian use of land.8 The passion for archeology, a national
mania in the early years of the State when Israelis were searching for any
relic that could establish their historical rights to the land, now seemed to
carry a covert agenda of obliteration, by which the surface traces of a
Palestinian physical culture are destroyed in the process of digging deep for
the ancient Jewish layer; and the practice of Hebrew cartography and
nomenclature, part of the revolutionary Zionist reconstruction of a native
Jewish identity and the revival of the Hebrew language, now fell suspect as
a dubious act of symbolic ethnic cleansing.9
As an artist, my most eye-opening realisation was that art, and abstract
painting in particular, was itself a scopic regime, and possibly the most
effective of them all. The dominant art movement to emerge together with the
state of Israel was New Horizons (both established in 1948), a mixed group
5

Depopulation is the term used by Palestinian researcher Walid Khalidi to

describe the combination of forced expulsion, flight of terror and strategic withdrawal
that resulted in the assessed number of 750,000 Palestinian refugees outside the 1949
cease fire lines between Israel and its Arab neighbors. See Walid Khalidi (ed) 1992.
6
See Martin Jay (1988).
7
In A. B. Yehoshuas short story Facing the Forests (1962) a mute Arab burns
down a JNF forest to reveal the remains of a depopulated Palestinian village. See
Yehoshua (1968).
8
See description of Pine deserts in Weizman (2007: 120).
9
Historian Meron Benvenisti, son of first generation Israeli geographer David
Benvenisti (my childhood headmaster, as told above) was the first to describe the
concerted effort of Israeli cartographers, archeologists, geographers and historians to
establish a Hebrew map. See Benvenisti (1997 and 2000).

A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchells Holy Landscape 281

of artists united in their desire to become part of what they perceived as the
most progressive artistic form of the time: abstraction.10 Under the charismatic leadership of Yosef Zaritsky, a painter who was trained in Kiev and
came to Palestine in 1923, they developed a soft style of abstraction inspired
by Cezanne and influenced by French Informel painting. This Lyrical
Abstraction, as it was called, soon became the widely accepted canon of
Israeli art, the symbol of Israels new modernity.
The group was based in Tel Aviv, but in the 1970s the aging Zaritsky,
seeking refuge from the stifling coastal plain heat, started spending his
summers in the cooler climate of Tsuba, a kibbutz in the Jerusalem Hills.
Straw hat on head and paint box under arm, Zaritsky would go out daily to
make watercolor studies of the landscape around Tsuba, semi-abstract
compositions that soon assumed mythological status as father-figure
Zaritskys crowning contribution to Israeli modernism.
As it happened, in 1993 Tsuba was one of the landscape sites I was looking at with new critical eyes, since the kibbutz was built on the grounds of a
Palestinian village deserted in 1948, from which it also took its name. The
villages ruined houses and terraced groves form an outstanding landscape
object that prominently commands the view to and from the kibbutz. Remembering Zaritskys Tsuba watercolors, I went back to look at them and was
amazed to discover that for all his plein air pathos, he had not seen the
deserted Palestinian village; it had disappeared from sight in his delicate
harmonies of abstracted form and painterly valeur. I had stumbled across the
missing art historical link, the long overdue explanation for the almost universal acceptance of Lyrical Abstraction as the quintessential Israeli visual style.
Abstraction even more than forestation, archeology, cartography and
nomenclature was the ultimate Israeli scopic regime, an Art of Camouflage11 that permitted Israelis to be at once Zionist and modern, to be blind to
the morally challenging reality of Palestinian expulsion (alongside equally
unsettling social issues central to the 1950s, such as the mass influx of
Holocaust survivors and Jewish refugees from Arab countries) while remaining progressive members of the universal community of modernism. The
virginal white pages of Zaritskys beautiful modernist watercolors echoed the
Zionist dream of an empty land, a clean slate upon which to start history
afresh.
In the studio I embarked on an expanded cycle of sight-specific paintings that made the cultural gaze their subject and critically echoed Zaritskys
idealising mode of abstraction (see Figures 13). Choosing a photograph I had
taken through a telescopic lens of the site of deserted Palestinian Tsuba, I
proceeded to paint daily oil-on-canvas paintings of it; each time the photorealistic landscape painting was complete, I blotted its wet surface with a page
of newspaper and peeled it off, abstracting the picture below. I repeated this
over and over again, and when I eventually stopped I had scores of ruined
landscape paintings and the equal number of their traces imprinted on the
mundane pages of a daily newspaper. I felt that this cycle of lost landscape
Figure 321

10
11

See Ballas (1980), and Ofrat (1998).

See Abramson (1998).

282 Larry Abramson

Figure 1 Larry Abramson, from tsoob, 199394, oil on canvas, 25 25 cm. Private collection, Tel Aviv.
Photo: Oded Antman.

Figure 2 Larry Abramson, from tsoob, 199394, oil impression on newspaper, 40 28 cm. Private collection,
Tel Aviv. Photo: Oded Antman.

A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchells Holy Landscape 283

Figure 3 Larry Abramson, from tsoob, 199394, oil on canvas, 35 50 cm. Private collection, Tel Aviv.
Photo: Oded Antman.

pictures somehow managed to address the complex issues of hegemony and

possession inherent in the landscape gaze, and that perhaps my destructive
process of mechanical abstraction had managed to place a question mark
over the modernist urge to retreat from reality through the aesthetics of
abstraction. But I still felt that the site was asking for more. In the studio I had
a collection of branches and roots I had taken from the site, and the next thing
I did was to paint trompe loeil paintings of them, interrogating them under
the harsh clinical gaze of my studio lights. Now the work was complete in the
incomplete sense it seemed to need, going the full cycle and back again from
the inaccessibility of the distant gaze to the prick in the eye of the metonymic
fragment.
To highlight the conflicting historical, cultural and political semantics
contained in this one landscape site, I chose for the works title the neutral
phonetic spelling of the sites name: tsoob . The entire work, including 38
landscape paintings, 38 impressions on newspaper and 13 paintings of flora
from the site, was exhibited in 1995 at the Kibbutz Art Gallery in Tel Aviv.12 A
year later, in 1996, I was asked to lecture about it at art schools and universities in and around Boston. One of the professors to whose students I spoke
was art historian Caroline Jones, and unbeknown to me, she later told W. J. T.
Mitchell about my work, suspecting it would interest him. Indeed it did; he
wrote to me to ask for more information, and so started a dialogue that has
continued ever since. His Landscape and Power, and especially Imperial
Landscape that opened it, provided me with the theoretical support I so
desperately lacked just a few years earlier, when I was groping my way
around looking for a way out of the blind spot of landscape. Landscape and
its critique became our common ground.

12

Curated by Tali Tamir. See Tamir (1995).

284 Larry Abramson

But can landscape provide a common ground not only for a conversation
between artist and theorist, but for the more loaded and potentially explosive
dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis? On the face of it, the answer would
be a resounding no. Landscapes desire to be loved blindly produces among its
lovers a blind faith that is the bedrock of all nationalistic and religious fanatical
constructions. The same hilltop in Jerusalem that represents for one the site of
the holy Jewish temple, bears for the other the sacred footprint of Mohammed
on his divine ascent to heaven.
In Holy Landscape, written for a conference held in 1998 at Bir Zeit
University, Mitchell introduces the concept of idolatry as a frame of reference
for understanding the status of landscape in Israel-Palestine, focusing his
attention, and criticism on the apocalyptic reading of landscape practised by
fundamentalist Jewish settlers in the occupied territories. The landscape
becomes a magical object, he writes, an idol that demands human sacrifices,
a place where symbolic, imaginary, and real violence implode on an actual
social space (Mitchell 2002: 270). As an Israeli, I found nothing new about this
notion; I remember participating in anti-occupation and anti-settlement
demonstrations as far back as the early 1970s, in which our slogans equated
the concept of sacred land with idolatry, a political theology we condemned as
diametrically opposed to true Jewish and even Zionist values. The issue, it
would seem, is less whether landscape is an idol, and more how, in Mitchells
words, to sound out this idolatry, to unbind its fascination.
In What Do Pictures Want?, Mitchell puts aside the somewhat pontifical
tone of Holy Landscape and takes a long critical look at three traditional attitudes toward images idolatry, fetishism and totemism. Taking his inspiration from Nietzsches Twilight of the Idols, he interprets the idea of sounding
out the idols not as a dream of breaking the idol but of breaking its silence,
making it speak and resonate, and transforming its hollowness into an echo
chamber for human thought (2005: 2627). This critical idolatry, as he calls it,
leads him to reassess the neglected concept of the totem, and the notion that it
can provide a more relevant critical framework for our double consciousness
toward images than conventional critical iconoclasm. The term totemism, he
quotes from Levi-Strauss, covers relations, posed ideologically, between two
series, one natural, the other cultural. Is this not also a definition of landscape?
The totem, like landscape, is an ideological instrument by which cultures naturalise themselves and ground themselves in the land; but it is also a grass-root
communal medium, a symbolic space for kinfolk to interact and bond in
common destiny. Totemism as a critical framework, Mitchell concludes,
addresses the value of images as a game between friends and relatives, not
as a hierarchy in which the image must be adored or reviled, worshipped or
smashed. Totemism allows the image to assume a social, conversational, and
dialectical relationship with the beholder (2005: 106).
Sadly, the outstanding landscape totem in Israel-Palestine today is the
eight meter high concrete wall constructed by Israel as a security barrier
against Palestinian terror attacks.13 What critical idolatry can be practised
13

For a history of the West Bank Wall and a discussion of it as an instrument of

occupation and repression, see Weizman (2007: 16182).

A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchells Holy Landscape 285

in relation to this brutal violation of the landscape, this horrific billion
dollar idol of blind, single-minded security? Surprisingly, in the few years
it has been in place, the Wall has assumed an auratic presence of the kind
associated with holy places, becoming a site of pilgrimage for an endless
flow of tourists and sightseers. British visual culture researcher Simon
Faulkner has recently recounted how, on his inevitable visit to the Wall
with camera in hand, he realised how the Walls photogenic presence,
together with its media-determined iconic status, combined to make it
photographically irresistible.14 In fact, the ritual of visiting and photographing the Wall is a constant reinforcement of its aura, and an uncanny mirroring of the age-old Jewish tradition of visiting the Western Wall in
Jerusalem, to lament the destruction of the temple and appeal to God for a
better future. Paradoxically, the section of the Wall that blindly cuts through
the heart of Palestinian Abu Dis has become a kind of hallowed ground, a
dreaming site for those who wish to imagine a different political and
geographical reality in Israel-Palestine. Artists without Walls, a joint group
of Israeli and Palestinian artists that got together in 2004 to protest the Wall
and its policy of separation and exclusion, and many other artists from
around the world, have worked to turn the Wall into a shared totem of
despair and hope (see Figure 4).
The finest example of how landscape can be such a shared space for
despair and hope comes from Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian lawyer and writer,
whose recent book Palestinian Walks maps his passion for the landscape of
Palestine, a landscape he describes as rapidly vanishing under the Israeli settlement machine and unchecked Palestinian development. The book is a series of
walks sarhat in Arabic, the mirror image of my childhood tiyulim that take
place on various Palestinian hills, sometimes alone, sometimes in the welcome
company of friends and memories, and sometimes in unpleasant conflict with
Israeli occupation authorities. On the last walk in the book, after taking a
roundabout route to avoid Israeli settlements and army posts, Shehadeh finds
himself in a steep, green valley with a brook running through it. As he reaches
the water he freezes, sensing an alien presence in his valley; an Israeli settler
is there, his gun propped to his side, preparing a nergila with which to smoke
some hashish. They exchange tense words that carry the entire tragedy of
Israeli and Palestinian mutual miscomprehension, and as Shehadeh turns to
leave, the settler invites him to stay and smoke with him. He accepts:
Figure 4

All the tension of the times, the worry about going through area
C,15 the likely prospect of encountering soldiers or settlers, or
getting shot at or lost, was evaporating. With every new draw of
the nergila, I was slipping back into myself, into a vision of the
land before it became so tortured and distorted, every hill, watercourse and rock, and we the inhabitants along with it I was fully
aware of the looming tragedy and war that lay ahead for both of
us, Palestinian Arab and Israeli Jew. But for now, he and I could sit
14

See Simon Faulkner (2008).

The Oslo accords, signed in 1993, divided the West Bank and Gaza into three
zones. Area C is under full Israeli control.
15

286 Larry Abramson

Figure 4 Artists without Walls, Wall of Tears event at the separation barrier, Abu Dis, 2005. Photo: Larry Abramson.

together for a respite, for a smoke, joined temporarily by our

mutual love of the land. Shots could be heard in the distance,
which made us both shiver. Yours or ours? I asked. But how
could we tell? We agreed to disregard them for now and for a
while the only sound that we could hear was the comforting gurgle
of the nergila and the soft murmur of the precious water trickling
between the rocks. (Shehadeh 2008)16
16
Reading Shehadehs book, I remembered a similar respite in 1997, when Israeli
and Palestinian artists came together to set up a people-to-people encounter group,
called The Mobile Seminar. The group was lead by Palestinians Sliman Mansour and
Jack Persekian and Israelis Gannit Ankori and Larry Abramson, and, among its many
activities, it took joint trips through the Israeli-Palestinian landscape, crossing political
lines of division and sharing the thoughts and memories evoked by the geographical
and cultural sites visited along the way. The group was dissolved in 2000, along with
the peace process to which it so hoped to contribute.

A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchells Holy Landscape 287

When Mitchell writes, in his preface to the second edition of Landscape
and Power, that landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad
range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify, and that
this indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature of whatever
force landscape can have, he is expressing the hope that what landscape
wants is more than the uncompromising power to demand human sacrifices
of its beholders. He is expressing the hope that landscape wants not only in
the sense of demands but also in the sense of lacks, that it indeed needs to be
filled by the dreams and memories of its beholders, to be an inclusive space of
totemic multiplicity, a shared space in which brothers, sisters, cousins,
neighbors and even critical tourists can walk together side by side, and talk
about the landscape.17 I need to share that hope with him.

References
Abramson, L. 1998. Art of Camouflage (Hebrew). Studio 94, 1617.
Ballas, G. 1980. Ofakim Hadashim (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Papyrus, Reshafim.
Barker, A. R. H. and Biger, G. (eds). 1992. Ideology and Landscape in Historical Perspective:
Essays on the Meanings of Some Places in the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Benvenisti, M. 1997. The Hebrew Map (Hebrew). In Theoria VeBikoret 11, 729.
Benvenisti, M. 2000. Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Cosgrove, D. and Daniels, S. (eds). 1988. The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on The
Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Faulkner, S. 2008. Picturing the West Bank Wall. Unpublished paper. Presented at
the International Conference on Art, Visual Culture, and the Israeli Occupation.
Manchester Metropolitan University.
Gurevitch, Z. 2007a. The Poetics of Besideness. In Amitai Mendelsohn (ed), Landscape of Longing: Avrahams Ofeks Early and Late Works. Jerusalem: The Israel
Museum, 8690.
Gurevitch, Z. 2007b. Al HaMakom (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers.
Jay, M. 1988. Scopic Regimes of Modernity. In Hal Foster (ed), Vision and Visuality.
Seattle: DIA Art Foundation, Bay Press, 323.
Khalidi, W. (ed). 1992. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and
Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestinian Studies.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed). 1994. Landscape and Power. First edition. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (ed). 2002. Landscape and Power. Second edition. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 2007. An American Drifter in Israel-Palestine: Reflections on a
Contested Landscape. Unpublished keynote address. Fifth International Shenkar

17
Coining the term Besideness (Leyadiyut in Hebrew), Israeli anthropologist and
poet Zali Gurevitch has elaborated on this particular form of side-by-side discourse,
by which walking and talking collude to create the thin borderline of conversation.
See Gurevitch (2007a and 2007b).

288 Larry Abramson

Conference on Contested Landscape. Shenkar Forum for Culture and Society, Shenkar
College, Ramat Gan.
Ofrat, G. 1998. One Hundred Years of Art in Israel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Schama, S. 1996. Landscape and Memory. New York: Vintage Books.
Shehadeh, R. 2008. Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape. New York:
Scribner.
Tamir, T. 1995. Tsuba: Abstraction and Blindness. In Larry Abramson: Tsoob (exhibition catalogue). Tel Aviv: Kibbutz Art Gallery.
Weizman, E. 2007. Hollow Land. London and New York: Verso.
Yehoshua, A. B. 1968. Facing the Forests (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz
Hameuchad.

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