Recently, an interesting event occurred in Israel. A woman stripped down and walked through the area of one of Judaism's holiest sights, The Western Wall. The western wall one of the last remaining structures that formed The Second Temple and is the closest point to where the holy temple itself once stood and is considered the holiest place for Jewish prayer. The holy site has segregated areas for men and women, according to Orthodox Jewish belief. The woman managed to walk through a portion of the women's section until a woman ran after her with a cloth and tried to cover her, but the nude woman kept running and rejected the attempt by the other woman to cover her. She managed to walk all the way to the entrance to the men's section but was then caught, grabbed and brought to a bathroom near a police station. Israelis who reacted to this event claimed that this woman was mentally ill, or did this in order to cause a provocation. When I first heard about this event on Facebook, I started to think about performance and activist art. What I am interested in asking is what makes this event different from any performance art piece by Carolee Schneemann or Marina Abramovic?
Don't get me wrong, I a firm believer in G-D and a believer that The Western Wall is a holy place to the Jewish religion, but I find this event interesting from an art/activist perspective. I think that sometimes society lacks the artistic and activist thought process and knowledge in order to look beyond provocations as surface level battles with the law or with societal limits and instead approach these events as philosophical questions that could maybe help with future events or incidents, or could help people question their environment critically. What if this woman wanted to prove something to the government? What if she wanted to stand up for a political cause?
In the 1960s and 70s New York, women and feminist artists reclaimed the nude female body as an art form in order to protest abortion bills, for the purpose of liberating female sexuality and other political decisions that oppressed women. In today's world, we still have not completely fixed the issues which 60s and 70s feminist artists attempted to fix with their art. In the Bible, it is stated that a woman's body is a temple. In that case, why should a woman not be able to walk nude at THE temple? Another problem at The Western Wall is that it is controlled by the ultra-orthodox people, and any change in environment or prayers at the wall has to be approved by the ultra-orthodox. Due to their strict nature, they do not approve anything and other religious groups who do not align with the orthodox belief systems are marginalized and are banned from praying the way that they believe in at a holy site which is supposed to belong to all Jews, not just a select group.
In conclusion, I believe that it is sometimes necessary to create a scene or provocation in order to make society wake up and engage in conversations that are hard to have. In this instance, I do not necessarily take one side and fully believe the media reports or think that this was a political act, but I do like to think that there is more than one way to look at the situation.
