“Ha’Aretz” Michael Sgan-Cohen Edition

Abstract

Israeli painter and art critic Michael Sgan-Cohen’s triptych. “Untitled” (1978), painted on three of Ha’Aretz (Hebrew: “The Land”) daily newspaper front pages in their almost blank strike format, exploits and usurps the blank space, both literal and symbolic, left by the journalists. From the standpoint of art. he proffers an utterance connecting a biblical text, the press, the Hebrew language, the Hebrew alphabet, a map (both mental and physical) and locality. “The Artists’Edition ” is an invitation to a playful reading of Ha ’Aretz, rich in meaning of space/place and of time. It is analyzed as could a unique variation of chronotop, bringing together the private and the public(Lukacs 1971; Jameson 1981). W.J.TMitchell’s(1986)concept of image/text is added to enable full comprehension of the work’s complex structure as an opportunity to point out relations of power and the re-writing and representing time and place, shared by the biblical writer, the modern press an the artist.