Justine Frank: Author, object, event, ghost

Abstract

The article analyses the workings of the Justine Frank phenomenon – a forgotten Jewish surrealist whose oeuvre was discovered in the early 2000s by the contemporary Israeli artist Roee Rosen. It discusses the question of the mutual creation of author functions of the critic and the artist, the researcher and the object of research, the predecessors and successors on the field of art. A reflection of Justine Frank’s ambivalent position in the history of (Israeli and European) art is concluded with a description of a proposed pragmatical approach to such art projects. Based on Massumi, Deleuze and Guattari, this approach does not focus on the creation, influences, formal procedures and produced meanings, but on the effects of artworks and events in the framework of social, political and cultural field into which they enter.