Curator Yona Fischer and the transition from object to performance in Israeli art of the 1960s–1970s

From Object to Performance in Israeli Art: A Historiography

“…The exhibition was conceptualized to allow the participating artists to "work in situ for several weeks, aiming to make contact with the audience throughout their creative process" (Fischer 1975). Fischer, curator of Israeli and modern art in the Israel Museum and aficionado of the avantgarde, played a decisive part in fostering the performative turn in Israeli art (Harari 2017). In some of the exhibitions he curated -e.g., Labyrinth (February 1967), Concept + Information (February 1971), and most significantly in Open Workshop -he replaced the conventional "archival" logic of the museum, which accumulates and presents "tangible items supposedly resistant to change" (Taylor 2008:92), with the contingent methodology of what Diana Taylor recognizes as the "repertoire," that is, performance and "embodied praxis" (2003:17).…”