Domesticated Wilderness: On the Poetics of Impact in Avner Pinchover’s Works

Abstract

The Israeli artist Avner Pinchover is assembling a corpus of works that is part of the Israeli culture of violence, exposing the ways the art field, and Israeli society, recognize violence as a legitimate component of culture, of the aesthetic cannon. Pinchover's performativity of violence might well be read not only in the art context but also in the context of the charged Israeli-Palestinian reality in which separation walls and ethnic and religious boundaries are dominant symbols, physical aggression, and its visualization.

Pinchover develops a "poetics of impact" in his works, which allows him to create a particular and universal language of violence. In the corpus of works discussed herein, it is a literal attack on the "dry and fake walls" of the safe and even sacred art territory, which might be read as symbolic or metaphorical.  His radical language of staged and scripted violence is interpreted herein as an aesthetic act, as part of a cultural performance, and as a way of intervening in the local art scene, symbolically confronting its architecture of power, as well as a possible metaphor to deal with or reflect upon the violent reality in Israel/Palestine.