Uncharted territories

ONLY ONE PAINTER covered in depth by art historian Gannit Ankori in her new book about Palestinian art could be described as creating work meant to serve a didactic, even propagandistic, agenda. And as someone who experienced firsthand the Nakba, the Palestinian ''catastrophe" of 1948, Ismail Shammout, with his canvases of broken people against barren landscapes, is only describing what he himself went through when, at age 18, he set off as a refugee on foot from his native city of Lod.

When I told Ankori, whose study, ''Palestinian Art" (Reaktion), is the first scholarly work on the subject, that I thought some of Shammout's paintings had a kitschy feel to them-for example, ''Whereto" (1953), his well-known painting in which a forlorn-looking Jesus-like character wanders hopelessly with his three waifish children, their native town receding in the background-she disagreed strongly. Shammout's works, she explained, are ''important for every person to see if they want to understand the Palestinian experience of the 20th century. I look at his paintings and they break my heart." Shammout's works, she reminds me, ''have been able to affect people for half a century.. . .It may not be a popular definition of what good, stylish art is, but I don't buy into the Western concept of 'good art."'

Shammout is not by any means typical of the 25 artists chosen by Ankori. In fact, none is ''typical," as she has deliberately selected art of varied media and genres by artists from a wide range of backgrounds, in an attempt to put paid to any stereotypes and preconceptions her readers may have. In that sense, that the author of this pioneering academic study of the subject is an Israeli Jewish woman only adds a touch of fitting irony.

In an unusually personal preface, Ankori, an associate professor of art history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and visiting associate professor in the Women's Studies in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School, explains what she says drew her to the field. With a father who was a professional academic, she spent much of her childhood in largely unwelcoming communities in the US. Summers were passed back home in Israel, and ''there, too, I was an outsider." Art became her refuge, and an identification with the ''other" a way of thinking for her.

Later, in the 1980s, as an undergraduate at the Hebrew University, Ankori had a part-time job assisting one of the many foreign journalists stationed in Jerusalem. One day, the two of them, together with a Palestinian associate, Daoud Kuttab, today a prominent Palestinian journalist, traveled north to an assignment in the Galilee. The American reporter asked ''simple, touristic questions about the sights and sites of the 'oriental' Holy Land," she writes, and she and Kuttab ''offered their respective responses."

For Ankori, the experience was formative. After the trio passed Canada Park, northwest of Jerusalem, which the Israeli identified as a newly forested park created by the Jewish National Fund, she was startled when her Arab cotraveler explained that ''the trees were planted as part of the Zionist effort to cover up three Arab villages that were destroyed and depopulated after the war of 1967."

Both she and Kuttab were correct, but Ankori suggests that this was her introduction to the Palestinian ''narrative," and as Kuttab continued to provide a running commentary all the way to the Galilee, ''the once familiar homeland" was transformed into a place ''of interlaced tragedies." She says that she kept her mouth closed the rest of the trip.

. . .

What's wonderful about ''Palestinian Art" is that it brings to our attention so many very good artists, and that, through both the color plates and Ankori's incisive commentary and analysis, we learn that they have so much more on their minds than ''the conflict." This doesn't mean that the Nakba-that watershed moment when Israel became a state, was attacked by its Arab neighbors, and some 700,000 indigenous Palestinians became refugees (another 160,000 remained in Israel and became citizens, who today are still struggling for equality in the Jewish state)-isn't integral to their consciousness and their identities, just that they also are preoccupied by questions of religion and family and gender and self-realization. Creating works of art isn't for them just another way of fighting a war.

What the artists studied by Ankori do share is that many of them, she says, in a nod to the work of the late Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, tend toward ''Dis-Orientalism." By this she means not only that so many Palestinians have been displaced from their national home in the Orient and lead peripatetic lives-she surveys artists living not only within Israel and Gaza and the West Bank, but also in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, as well as Europe and the United States-but also that the study of Palestinian art necessarily requires putting aside many of the Western assumptions about the Orient. Like members of other migrant groups, many Palestinian artists possess hybrid identities (with a relatively high percentage of Christians among them, and a large number of women, many also have marginal positions in their own society) and occupy a ''fluid" space between the Oriental world and the dominant culture of the West.

Take two installation pieces that use the keffiyeh, the archetypical Arab male head-covering, to critique the male-dominated hierarchy of traditional Arab societies. In Mona Hatoum's ''Keffieh," which the Lebanon-born artist began in 1993 and only finished six years later, the black threads that give the headdress its chain-link pattern have been replaced by human hairs that peek in alluring strands from the edges of the sheet. On the other hand, in ''Tattoo" (1997), an installation by Ramallah resident Khalil Rabah, the artist has deconstructed the keffiyeh, removing the black threads and piling them up in the central square of the white grid, so that they resemble a little heap of hair on a barbershop floor. Ankori believes that Rabah was unaware of Hatoum's piece when he created ''Tattoo," but both artists, she writes, pitted the ''rigid" and orderly male grid against an ''organic and more chaotic" female form.

''Palestinian Art" is not a comprehensive catalog of the field, but it does manage to pack in analyses, some longer, some brief mentions, of a diverse group of artists. They include avant-gardists like Hatoum, who from her base in London creates installations and performance works that expose her most intimate memories and fears, and Raeda Saadeh, a Jerusalem resident whose installations challenge her traditional Muslim upbringing. One chapter is devoted to painter Kamal Boullata, whose career has ranged from dark, Courbet-like self-portraits to cleanly graceful geometric silk screens incorporating lines from the Koran and New Testament in Arabic, and another to the no-less variegated career of Sliman Mansour, whose works appear in multiple media and numerous styles: a still life of a peasant's simple breakfast; mud reliefs of the face of the Biblical Hagar, mother of the Arab nation; geometric patchwork paintings abstractly depicting symbols of Jerusalem; evocative figurative canvases of the olive harvest that are reminiscent of Diego Rivera, to name a few.

None of the artists Ankori approached during the 20-year period she researched the book (in the interim she also published two books about the Mexican feminist artist Frida Kahlo), refused to cooperate with her, despite her being Israeli, and she says she developed relationships with them all, including Shammout, even though they have not been able to meet. Ankori notes that Israeli and Palestinian artists have been working together on shows and other projects for decades, in recognition that their shared interest can serve as a ''common denominator to enable us to make the little strip of land between the Jordan River and the sea to be a place where we can live together."

The art of Palestinians, Ankori tells me, has a lot in common with art made by members of other migrant populations, who are creating some of the most interesting work in Europe today. ''Migration, dislocation, and post-colonial angst," she notes, make for good stimuli for art. Her belief-and the sadness that seems to infuse her voice as we speak makes it clear that she herself is unsure if this is only wishful thinking-is that ''art and culture can offer an alternative to the political realities" constructed by world leaders, ''which bring a clash rather than a bridge between civilizations."

Gannit Ankori will be speaking on "Dis-Orientalism: Palestinian Artists between East and West" Monday at 5:30 p.m. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Room 3-133. Call 617-253-1400.

David B. Green is deputy editor of The Jerusalem Report.