The Nation’s Groves is the name of a Dor Guez project exhibited during 2011 at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. Like his other projects, this body of work dealt with the implications of the Israeli occupation on the development of both Israeli and Palestinian identity and ethos. The Nation’s Groves presented these topics by examining the social and cultural consequences of the Zionist forestation enterprise on the local landscape and inhabitants. This was the first time the Tel Aviv Museum presented the Palestinian Nakba—both as a term and as an expression of the Palestinian perspective on the 1948 war—as a basis for a solo exhibition. The audience was asked to respond to the exhibition using a standard format of notes bearing the title Response—from which derives the title of the current project. Visitors wrote hundreds of notes in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, occasionally decorated with Stars of David and Palestinian flags. The artist picked one hundred of these, scanned them, translated them, and turned them into a single block. Their content varies between supportive slogans— “an honest and necessary political soul-searching,” “moving and thought-provoking”—to violent outcries—“Anti-Zionist propaganda courtesy of the Islamic Movement,” “Who needs enemies when there are Israelis like you??” (to which another visitor responded: “ Who needs idiots when there is an Israeli like the one who wrote this?/”). Together, these reactions paint a tapestry of a stratified social array, which is more indicative of the blindness of the Israeli political discourse than of the “artistic” aspects of the original exhibition. In fact, one requires no former acquaintance with Guez’s projects in order to approach the workResponse, since most of the responses did not go beyond the terminological filter “Nakba,” stopping short of the proposal put forward by the artist to address the essence of that term. A meta-response of the artist to the audience addressing him, Response challenges the relations of power between the couple addressor-addressee, and the triangle audience-artist-institute.[1]
[1] Apropos Lacan’s statement that a letter always arrives at its destination, we should note that the addressor and the addressee here are one and the same. The responses carry a potential idea that is bound to explode and be activated. The symbolic order (Lacan’s “Big Other”) receives the letter the moment it is delivered. The symbolic order is the very language and law, changing from one person to another. This order, which is outside ourselves, provides our unconscious desire, which will never reach its satisfaction, even if it will endlessly search for the recognition of another person. The response notes are addressed neither to Dor Guez nor to the Tel Aviv Museum, but to the addressor himself. For more on why a letter always reaches its destination see Slavoj Žižek’s re-reading of Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter” in his Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge 1992), pp. 1–30.
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