“What art wants? – Everything; What art can? – Nothing; What art does? – Something”
J.L. Godard
Art Focus Jerusalem 2008

The Jerusalem Foundation proposes the 5th edition of Art Focus, within the Talpiot Beit Benit Congress Centre still under construction, west of Jerusalem, in the ‘Pavilion’, from September 23rd to October 25th, 2008. Designed as a series of events and shows organised around contemporary creation, Can art do more? intends to bring together practices from multiple and diverse aesthetic and geographical horizons. Built as an open and multifaceted event, it aims to demonstrate the liveliness and diversity of contemporary art, at the time of globalisation, and to foreground the profusion of ideas and the many proposals it gives rise to. At a time when contemporary art biennales and artistic events of all kinds can be found to be more and more numerous across the world, Art Focus 2008 reasserts its longstanding tradition and wants one more time to take the context and the political and cultural situation into account. That is the reason why the programme of this edition intends to give an overview of the multiple aesthetic and critical perspectives in a context of which nobody can deny the dramatic intensity. It is impossible for Art Focus 2008 to ignore the stakes that are lying ahead: the curators of this new edition, Ami Barak and Bernard Blistène have decided to solicit an answer from artists and creators from all walks of life around the question: “Can art do more?“ It is everybody’s duty to answer this question, it is also everybody’s liberty to do so.

Some sixty artists will respond to the proposal, among whom about fifteen are Israeli. “Can art do more?” will be a crossroad of events and works from all kinds just as much as a place for talks and exchanges to be organized about what is at stake and around the possibilities opened by contemporary art. Through the bringing together of artistic proposals, the ideas of community and sharing will be underscored, as they have been expressed at different moments by modern and contemporary art. Facing an idle world, the curators insist on the necessary as well as on the possible impact of any artistic act.

The place that was chosen is the result of a deliberate choice. In a city charged with history and memory, likely to be interpreted in all kinds of ways, and a neighbourhood marked by work and commercial initiatives, the space of the ‘Pavilion’ will act as an area for encounters of the third kind, inhabited by contemporary art, a crossroad under construction in a dynamic zone, in the edge of usual contemporary art places: a multiple meeting place for multiple proposals, a turmoil of alert experiences. “Can art do more?” hopes to insist on the urgent necessity to work together and aims at being an expanse of vitality and energy first and foremost.

Borrowing Gilles Deleuze’s words, the art of the present is probably bound to ‘formulate an escape that wouldn’t be escapism’, seeking alternatives to consequences of mass culture, inventing projects that would enable us to put a togetherness into words, and to build perspectives. The risk at stake is the loss of identity of the individual living in contemporary societies which are ‘desubjectivising’ machines. What is also at stake is the capacity of the present-day artist to confront different forms of power where it is exercised. And let us also remember the plurality of individuals and of the possible alternatives to the different forces that oppress them.

Can art do more? thus brings together certain works typical of the artistic utopias of the 1970s that will function as points of reference from which will be articulated the other projects of the artists invited for this edition. The extreme diversity of the projects being shaped up in the present times probably stems from a desire to multiply the critical perspectives and react against the standardisation of our contemporary world. On the other hand, the focus put by most artists on the singularities and idiosyncrasies of their histories comes from their desire to work within the specific moulds of their own culture. 21st century art is the product of the singular-declined-in-the-plural and makes improbable and vain any attempt to reduce things to one movement, even less to one common style.

So, we will go from one piece to another, from one proposal to another, with the desire to find new paths to think and articulate the stakes and the necessary utopias of our world to come. We will meet for Can art do more?, at Art Focus 2008 in Jerusalem, between October 12th and November 14th to multiply encounters and debates, talking and watching. Can art do more? will be an experience of space and time, which invites you to share it.

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