Field Research
The grant
The Field Research grant is awarded by invitation only. The grant supports one year of research, with an option for extending the term, in coordination with the Foundation. The awardee will engage in field activities, research and writing.
The grant aims to promote work done in the social and ideological periphery of Israel’s art field and to become acquainted with the Plastic Arts creative work thriving far from its center. Furthermore, the scholarly discourse will help to critically hone the criteria that guide the evaluation process in the main track of the Foundation’s artist grants.
The researcher`s work will center on artists of his/her choice, per the research topic. As part of the grant, a dedicated sum will be set aside for activities such as supporting artists, curatorial projects, professional assistance and more, per the researcher`s discretion and in coordination with the Foundation.
The budget may assist artists in their work directly or indirectly, in coordination with the researcher and the concurrence of the artist. It will not be possible to apply for a Foundation Artist grant before completing participation in the research.
The researcher is free to choose the research point of view and maintains the copyright for it. Upon completion of the research, the names of the participating artists and the researcher’s paper will be published at the Foundation’s website.
The 2022-2023 researcher:
Albert Suissa
Author, curator, and essayist writing on criticism of art and the art field.
Research Topic: Creating, Beyond Objects
In late 2022, we postulated our first hypotheses for the field study, “Creating, Beyond Objects” under the overarching theme of “Art Peripheries.” Since then, intricate and multifaceted aspects of our subject of research have accumulated into towering piles on our desk. Thought and research on the subject of “art and/in the periphery,” as it turns out, are experiencing unprecedented surge all over the world. Far from the traditional geographic paradigm of “center and periphery” with all that it entails, today’s study of art and periphery often engages in stripping the center of its symbolic assets, an in-depth examination of the historical models formulated by different art centers around the world, critiquing the methodologies of the different historiographies and the politics of history of art writing, the formation of a canon and relationship to tradition, postcolonialism and postmodernism, author and source, the core and periphery of the psyche (psychoanalysis) and more. In this discourse, “periphery” is no longer a passive and secondary term that orbits or is subjected to a center, but a multitude and metamorphic notion whose changing, not necessarily converging synonyms are “the other”, “alternative”, “hermaphroditic”, “polyphonic”, “self-sufficient” and so forth. No more periphery in the generic singular, which the center replicates and homogenizes all over the world, but peripheries, plural, multifaceted and independent of the center and even of one another.
Due to the multiplicity of manifestations and different modus operandi of the various peripheries, the research itself will avoid in as much as possible a methodological movement from its center – that is, the theses and conceptualizations that have already accumulated in the research of “art and peripheries,” towards its object – i.e., the various peripheries of the Israeli art world. Rather, from this point on, the movement will be reverse: From the artists selected for the research to the definition of their independent spaces vis-à-vis the centers and peripheries as they perceive themselves, and from there, to the private conclusions and the landscapes of the creative realms that they will develop themselves. The selected artists are the ones who will present the main arguments, and the decisive authority in the research will be them, their art, and their own reasoning.
With this in mind, the peripheries that have emerged thus far in our research are: death, femininity, design, impishness, infantilism (not to be confused with childishness or childlike), escape, faith, and more.
