Art Faithfulness
Art. Dare we?
 
 
We are faced here with a question that haunts us time and time again. A question that could not be answered by any call for an active appeal for art’s sake. It is not simply a call for us to produce more artworks or pursue the possibility of exhibiting art in numerous and varied places. Needless to mention this here: we are not mere agents driven solely by the desire to see art prosper. This question speaks differently. It speaks differently as it also points at what we might call, even before that appeal, the need for as radical exposure as possible to the overcoming of the present. Since it demands of us, first and foremost, the intentionality towards the future. It requires from us thought guided by the future, and therefore commands us to surrender ourselves to what the future may still offer us. As if we bear one single responsibility at the very core of art – to compel the future to be said. And hence – to compel the future to keep on promising further than what the present can usually express. To believe the promise held at the very heart of the art – the only promise that could carry us towards what still wishes to be said beyond the contemporality of our world, the product of financial globalization, in which everything returns, time and time again, to the identical – well, that belief is verging on something akin to “madness”. Madness that perhaps we should re-learn to hear, and of which Nietzsche had said that it does not shape thought, but rather repeatedly undermines it, repeatedly deterritorialize it, and which emanates from the art. Jacques Derrida had written “a certain madness has to keep an eye open on, safekeeping, thought”. Well, let us call this madness – “art”. 
Let us call this madness which safekeeps thought - “art”. I anchor this idea in what I have found Hebrew to tell us about the word “Art”. I believe the connection between the Hebrew words for art – Omanut and faithfulness - Ne’emanut had not received enough attention, if any. Faithfulness as an event of art. But faithfulness to what? To whom? The temptation to try and identify an address to faithfulness is always perilous. Let us say, then, faithfulness to danger, indefinite faithfulness – or, also, “faithfulness unfaithful” to any determination, to anything that presumes to have the faculty or power to tell us what it is and where it is headed towards. “Unfaithful faithfulness” is also faithfulness to the chance embodied in the danger of repeatedly taking risks, that is, to dare and go on revealing what is still waiting for art’s utterance. Not only translate, but reveal, beyond translation, beyond redundant communication, the endless abundance of its gestures, its myriad routes, its reiterated ways and plurality of voices. It is also perhaps – you probably already realized – my way of conveying to you the story of an incomparable friendship, inalterable friendship.
 
 
Raphael Zagury-Orly