Tsion Avital (born February 21, 1940) is an Israeli philosopher of art and culture.
Biography
Tsion Avital was born to Avraham and Preciada Dorit Avitbol Avital, and grew up in the town of Sefrou in Morocco. Avital immigrated to Israel with his family in January 1951, when he was eleven. He studied philosophy and psychology at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and then pursued an MA in philosophy focusing on aesthetics, taking additional courses in the Department of Art History. His Master's thesis, "An Outline of Artonomy," was supervised by Yehuda Elkana and Eddy Zemach. While studying for his doctorate, he spent 1971–1972 at the University of Toronto in Canada. In the experimental aesthetics lab headed by Daniel Berlyne, he was able to verify his hypotheses on the structural paradigm in art. His doctoral dissertation, on "Artonomy: a new type of art and its implications for art education in the future" (1974), was supervised by Berlyne and Anatol Rapoport of the University of Toronto, and Moshe Caspi of Hebrew University.
Academic career
In 1973 Avital was appointed lecturer at Hebrew University. In 1976 he stopped teaching and managed a rubber and plastics plant in the Holon Industrial Zone for five years. In 1982 he resumed teaching at the Faculty of Design at HIT, the Holon Institute of Technology. In 1997 he was appointed Senior Lecturer, in 1999 was granted tenure and in 2003 appointed Full Professor. In 2011 he retired as Emeritus Professor at the Holon Technological Institute.
Tsion Avital is divorced and has three children.
Artonomy research
In his doctoral dissertation Avital claimed that modern art or, all visual non-representational art, both in painting and sculpture, is not art at all, because its works are completely arbitrary compositions, and so they lack a systemic structure which has been the central characteristic of art in the 40,000 years of its existence. He claimed that in order to revive art, a new type of art is needed, that would restore a systemic structure to art, but without returning to figurative art which had been exhausted. He called this art "Artonomy". Actually, from a higher point of view, figurative art and artonomy are the two sides of the same coin: one semantically or content oriented and the other structure oriented.
The decisive importance he attributes to the hierarchical structure in art derives from the fact that hierarchy is a universal ordering relation, and is the most general principle of order existing in the universe at all levels: macro and micro, in the physical, biological, social and noetic world.
Avital thinks that Figurative art served as an adequate and comprehensible depiction of things, real or fictitious, for tens of thousands of years just because it represented things in the world in a hierarchical order employing self-embedded pictorial symbols. From the moment that hierarchical order was erased from art, it also ceased to be a medium for the depiction of reality or anything else, and became arbitrary daubing of paint or at best, trivial graphic design. We have no difficulty in understanding prehistoric art from 32,000 years ago, but we are unable to understand any "abstract" painting made today. Avital's central research hypothesis was that if we expose test subjects who know nothing of systemic thought to a set of non-figurative paintings whose relationship is systemic, the subjects would be able to identify the correct order of the pictures comprising the system even if these were presented to them in random order. The hypothesis was tested in three different experiments, all of which showed that indeed subjects with no prior knowledge of the subject succeeded, consciously or unconsciously, in reconstructing the correct order of the visual systems that had been presented to them in a random order which differed for each subject. The tests results confirmed Avital's hypothesis above all expectation,
thus indirectly supporting Avital's mindprints theory.
Between the years 1974–1985 Avital initiated a number of exhibitions in Israel in which the principles of Artonomy in various arts were demonstrated, by Avital as well as other artists. It is worth noting that while all scholars who employ structuralism in their fields use it as an explicative method.
Avital argue that artonomy seem to be the only case in which structuralism is applied for both; explicative and generative method in art. Before the formulation of artonomy by Avital, there was a premature attempt to introduce systemic thinking in art. In 1966 the Guggenheim Museum in New York presented an exhibition entitled "Systemic Art".