Hopeless Activities: On Performative Transplantations, Identity and Utopia in Pinchas Cohen Gan’s Early Work

In the first half of the 1970s, the Moroccan-born artist Pinchas Cohen Gan, who had immigrated to Israel in the 1940s, performed a series of artistic “activities” that played a significant part in the performative turn in Israeli art – that is, the shift from the art object to the act of its creation in time and place and to the artist’s self. This essay examines Cohen Gan’s autobiographical activities in the context of this performative turn, analyzes their characteristic methodology, and offers an interpretation of their socio-political significance in light of his identity politics, the historical circumstances and the revival of the utopian discourse. It shows that Cohen Gan’s activities not only reflected conceptualist trends and the de-materialization of the art object, but more importantly enabled him to gradually shift the emphasis from the artwork to his “self” and his identity in their historical, cultural and political contexts. This essay suggests that a prominent performative characteristic of Cohen Gan’s works was his use of the technique of “transplantation”: the insertion of a foreign element into a particular ecological, cultural and aesthetic environment in a futile attempt to assimilate it within that environment. More specifically, this method reflected Cohen Gan’s own failure, as a Jewish immigrant from a Muslim country, to assimilate in the Israeli “melting pot.” Drawing on Herbert Marcuse’s 1967 notion of “the end of utopia,” this essay further argues that Cohen Gan’s impossible transplantational activities criticized the prevalent idea, after the Six Day War, that the dream of a Zionist-Israeli utopia was coming true.