Image, Action, and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art 9780271080840

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Image, Action, and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art

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Samantha Baskind, General Editor Editorial Board Judith Baskin, University of Oregon David Biale, University of California, Davis Katrin Kogman-Appel, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Laura Levitt, Temple University David Stern, University of Pennsylvania Ilan Stavans, Amherst College Volumes in the Dimyonot series explore the intersections, and interstices, of Jewish experience and culture. These projects emerge from many disciplines—including art, history, language, literature, music, religion, philosophy, and cultural studies—and diverse chronological and geographical locations. Each volume, however, interrogates the multiple and evolving representations of Judaism and Jewishness, by both Jews and non-Jews, over time and place.

Other titles in the series: David Stern, Christoph Markschies, and Sarit ShalevEyni, eds., The Monk’s Haggadah: A Fifteenth-Century Illuminated Codex from the Monastery of Tegernsee, with a prologue by Friar Erhard von Pappenheim Ranen Omer-Sherman, Imagining the Kibbutz: Visions of Utopia in Literature and Film Jordan D. Finkin, An Inch or Two of Time: Time and Space in Jewish Modernisms Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky, Once@9:53am: Terror in Buenos Aires

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Image, Action, and Idea in Contemporary Jewish Art

Ben Schachter

The Pennsylvania State University Press | University Park, Pennsylvania

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Schachter, Benjamin, author. Title: Image, action, and idea in contemporary Jewish art / Ben Schachter. Other titles: Dimyonot (University Park, Pa.) Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2017] | Series: Dimyonot : Jews and the cultural imagination | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Offers a new criticism of contemporary Jewish art, showing how Jewish artists bring their use of action and process to Jewish ideas. Bringing together exhibition catalogs, midrashic texts, and artist statements, this book addresses abstraction, conceptual art, performance art, and other styles that do not rely on imagery for meaning”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2017028245 | ISBN 9780271079127 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Jewish art—20th century. | Jewish art—21st century. | Judaism and art. | Art criticism. | Action in art. Classification: LCC N7417.6 .S33 2017 | DDC 700/.48296—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2017028245

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Copyright © 2017 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in Canada Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992. Additional credits: page ii, detail of Andi Arnovitz, A Delicate Balance, 2012 (fig. 20); page vi, detail of Archie Rand, Boneh, 2006 (fig. 5)

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Contents

Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1

1

Images and Actions in Art Criticism and Jewish Thought 23

2

3

Contemporary Jewish Art 68

4

Visual Midrash and Artistic Interpretation 105

Melakhot, Creative Activities, and Artistic Practice 39

Epilogue Becoming a Jewish Artist 133

Notes 141 Bibliography 147 Index 154

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Illustrations

1

Allan Wexler, Spice Box for the Havdalah Service, 2005. Photo courtesy of the artist. 14

2 Nechama Golan, You Shall Walk in

Good Ways, 1999. Photo courtesy of the artist. 35

3 Joshua Neustein, Wine into Water,

2005. Photo courtesy of the artist. 36

4 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/

Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, 1973. Photo: Allen Phillips / Wadsworth Atheneum. 54

5 Archie Rand, Boneh, 2006. Photo

courtesy of the artist (Mary Faith O’Neill). 58

6 Doug Rosenberg, Meditations:

Labor, 2010. Photo courtesy of the artist. 60

7

Doni Silver Simons, Homage to a Fairy Tale, 2012. Photo courtesy of Shulamit Nazarian. 61

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8 Ken Goldman, With Without, 2011.

Photo courtesy of the artist. 75

9 SO-IL (Solid Objects—Idenburg

Liu), In Tension, 2010. Photo courtesy of Yeshiva University Museum (Zachary Paul Levine). 80

10 Ben Schachter, Instant Eruv, 2007.

Photo courtesy of the artist. 89

11 Jacqueline Nicholls, Draw Yomi,

Shabbat 75, 2012. Photo courtesy of the artist. 92

12 Ken Goldman, Chevrutah, 2013.

Photo courtesy of the artist. 96

13 Andi Arnovitz, Dress of the Sotah,

2009. Photo courtesy of the artist. 99

14 Tobi Kahn, SAPHYR, Silver Omer

Counter, 2011. Photo courtesy of the artist. 101

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viii

15 Doni Silver Simons, 49

Days: Women Who Count (A Performance), 2015. Photo courtesy of the artist (Eric Minh Swenson). 102

16 Donna Sternberg, 49 Days: Women

Who Count (A Performance), 2016. Photo: Mara Zaslove. 103

17 Victor Majzner, I Would Have

You Mouth to Mouth, 2009. Photo courtesy of the artist. 115

18 Ruth Weisberg, The Scroll (detail

Impure from the Temple), 2001– 2006. Photo courtesy of the artist (Richard McBee). 122

20 Andi Arnovitz, A Delicate Balance,

2012. Photo courtesy of Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. 125

21 Ben Schachter, Nine Nights of

Hanukkah, Menorah for Shammai and Hillel, 2015. Photo courtesy of the artist. 126

22 Arik Weiss, Netaneh Tokef, 2010.

Photo courtesy of Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. 128

Illustrations

from “Creation”), 1987–88. Photo: Susan Einstein. 116

19 Archie Rand, The 613 (Expelling the

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Acknowledgments

Last week I put up our sukkah for my family. It is made from two-by-fours with metal hangers just like the ones used to build decks across America. Like so many Jewish rituals, dwelling in a sukkah involves more than barbecuing outside under a trellis; it takes preparation. Judaism is an active religion, requiring us to “do” many things to follow tradition. But more and more, I see that each thing that I do not only prepares for this or that holiday but also builds a Jewish life. And there is only one person with whom I want to do that: Abby, my wife. It is to her that I owe more thanks than can be put into words. I put up the sukkah once a year with intermittent help from the kids, but I build love, family, and joy with Abby every day. Without her support and encouragement, I would never have started this book. Gratitude is also due to my four children: Sonia, Theresa, Pearl, and Isaiah. They teach me more about myself with each passing day. I am also thankful to my brother, Dan, who never ceases to make me laugh when we talk on the phone, and to my parents and in-laws, the mekhutonim who provide the most wonderful role models of family. Collectively, they have been married for more than one hundred years. I am also profoundly grateful to Ann Fishman. Her herculean efforts to edit the entire manuscript helped me clarify and enrich my thinking. I am tremendously grateful and humbled to have a sister-in-law so willing to step into the role of colleague as readily and generously as she did. Other opportunities helped clarify my thoughts. Elizabeth Pergam invited me to participate on a panel at the College Art Association,

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Acknowledgments

x

and subsequently that paper became part of an edited volume entitled Drawing in the Twenty-First Century. I have also benefited from the Conney Conference on Jewish Art, organized by Doug Rosenberg at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. That conference nurtured some of the ideas scattered through these pages. Several people, including Matthew Baigell, Allan Wexler, and Diane Samuels, also shared their ideas on Jewish art and encouraged me in mine. Diane was particularly supportive through the trials and tribulations of grant applications. Steven Mansbach, my art history thesis advisor from over a decade ago, and Lisa Peschel, a more recent acquaintance, accepted the task of reviewing an early draft of the book proposal. Many other friends and colleagues also offered guidance and critique along the way. To all who contributed to my thinking, my thanks. I would be remiss if I were to neglect my colleagues at Saint Vincent College, to whom I extend my gratitude for providing a model of hospitality that continues well after crossing the threshold. If one ever wants to know what it means to be intellectually and spiritually hospitable while sharing gracious curiosity, get to know the faculty and monks at Saint Vincent College. There, deep explorations into religion take many forms and welcome even the novice. Thank you to the librarian Bridget Hornyak, who greeted each request for a book as if it was I who was doing her the favor; to Michael Krom for reading drafts of the first chapters; to Fr. Thomas Hart, Fr. Rene Kollar, Vice President John Smetanka; and to the Faculty Research Grant Committee who supported this project—their collective enthusiasm heartened me along the way. I also would have liked to share this work with Br. Nathan Cochran, who will be missed. Samantha Baskind, the series editor, saw in my proposal the promise that is now in your hands. I am immensely grateful for her prescience and encouragement. Similarly, I am thankful to Patrick Alexander of Penn State University Press for being just as enthusiastic, patient, and forthright, as well as Alex Vose and everyone else at the Press for guiding me through final edits and production. I would like to thank the artists who graciously agreed to share their insights and beautiful work with me. Emails and phone calls with Allan Wexler, Archie Rand, Kenny Goldman, Doni Silver Simons, and others refocused my energies without fail. This book is dedicated to my wife, Abby, but if a close second could be listed, it would be the artists. Turning their

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xi

Acknowledgments

work into speech is quite difficult. The most I can hope for is a reliable echo, perhaps a tad more faithful than a mirage. R. G. Collingwood, the philosopher, observed that there are two types of scholars interested in art. First, there are those who know what they are talking about but talk nonsense. Second, are those who talk sense but do not know what they are talking about. I think of myself as someone who knows what I’m talking about for several reasons, not least because I am a practicing artist. But that leaves the risk that I talk nonsense. Even so, Collingwood’s bon mot, or gut vort, bodes ill for my writing. Nevertheless, this is my best effort to mix and match the qualities of art writing that Collingwood puts forth. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if I’ve matched and mixed the right ones.

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Introduction

Criticism surrounding Jewish art leans, almost without exception, on the second commandment’s prohibition of graven images. The commandment reads, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water that is underneath the earth.”1 Broadly interpreted, it is a denial of art; at a minimum, it creates suspicion of images. Continual appeals to one single commandment limit the contributions that Jewish thought might add to criticism, a criticism already rich with interpretive methods for Conceptual art, performance art, and other styles that do not use imagery to create meaning. In other words, what might Judaism have to say about contemporary art? Even Harold Rosenberg, the famous art critic, hit the barricades of the second commandment. Famously, he wrote, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act. . . . What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”2 But when he tried to define Jewish art in numerous ways, he had nowhere else to turn but the prohibition. “Jewish art, then,” Rosenberg wrote fifty years ago, “may exist in the negative sense of creating objects in the mind and banning physical works of art. In this sense, the second commandment was the manifesto of Jewish art.”3 What inhibited the man who forged a new criticism and drew him back to the second commandment? Can the answer be that the prohibition holds sway over art criticism to such a degree that no other Jewish texts garner

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2

even the most cursory interest? More likely, the prohibition is a talking point with extraordinary sticking power, which is remarkable because Judaism revels in debate. It is astonishing that no other writing successfully challenges, or provides an alternative, to one paragraph of text. Even now, art criticism, as read in the pages of magazines and newspapers, lags behind other disciplines that explore the complexity of aesthetic elements found throughout Judaism. It is time for an expansion of Jewish art criticism. The prohibition on graven images is not, nor should it be, the “foundation” of Jewish thought on art. This book provides a radical departure and starts its examination of Jewish art using the fourth commandment: “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” What does the Sabbath have to do with art? A lot. And it’s not what most people would think. The fourth commandment opens up Jewish art to criticism centered on action. Rosenberg’s ideas provide an entry point; however, they are just a beginning. Once action is broached as an artistic idea, a robust Jewish art criticism tackles ritual, observance, and all of the commandments in a much more fruitful way. Most importantly, my new approach provides a way to understand what artists make today, particularly when their interests have little to do with the pictorial image and much more to do with process. Ultimately, no single approach to criticism covers all art; however, my work balances previous scholarship founded on the second commandment with a critical method beginning with the fourth. Image and action, together, inform contemporary Jewish art.

Image, Action, and Idea

Aesthetics in Jewish Studies, Art History, and Theology

Approaches to art and Judaism, as well as art and religion, vary. Disciplines include history, philosophy, aesthetics, feminism, and others. Recent scholars have made significant progress dismantling two dry stereotypes that view Judaism as aniconic and religion and art as antagonistic. In Religion and Art in the 21st Century (2015), Aaron Rosen compiles a collection of artworks from a wide range of religious traditions. His critical gaze encompasses sculpture, painting, installation, and other contemporary forms. At the start, Rosen acknowledges the separation between art and religion: “With politicians, media, museums, and artists all benefiting to a greater or lesser

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3

Introduction

extent, it is no surprise that the stereotype of the blaspheming modern artist has had such staying power.”4 Rosen encourages the reader to “set aside old assumptions about the antagonism between art and religion and look at the topic with fresh eyes. When we do so, we discover a tremendous potential for reciprocity.”5 Also, Rosen describes a common habit among artists to diminish formal religious references. “Rather than risk restricting their potential audience or interpretations of their work,” Rosen argues, “many artists . . . tend to fall back on predictable shibboleths” and deny association with organized religion. Rosen is skeptical of artists’ statements and explains them as covering up deeper concerns. “Disguised within . . . [the] neutral term [spirituality] is usually a conflicted assertion about the ways in which someone does and does not see themselves as religious. And these tensions, and the ways they surface in works of art, are much more interesting.”6 Zachary Braiterman takes a philosophical approach and examines the intersection of aesthetics and modern Jewish thought in The Shape of Revelation (2007), which discusses a shared vocabulary between the two disciplines. He writes, “There are no religious and spiritual phenomena apart from aesthetic sensation (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) and aesthetic creation (architecture, music, poetry, painting) at their base.”7 Here, Braiterman equates religious and aesthetic phenomena. Braiterman calls attention to “the affinity between early twentieth-century German Jewish philosophy and the history of early German modernism” and in so doing describes how “art and aesthetic theory pull Jewish philosophy away from a simple focus on God, text, and community by recasting it as ‘form,’ ‘presence,’ ‘pathos,’ ‘time,’ ‘space,’ and ‘eros.’”8 Braiterman demonstrates that these descriptions act as productive critical terms with respect to both Martin Buber’s and Franz Rosenzweig’s thought as well as Wassily Kandinsky’s painting. At the same time, these terms are historical. Braiterman suggests that current scholarship might discover an updated vocabulary—that while “undogmatic universalism; the primacy of ethics; cooperative community; prophecy and messianic politics; material existence and the body; devotion to Jewish law; and a critique of the state . . . remain essential building blocks for contemporary religious thought, they are not postmodern topoi. They belong to early German modernism, to Hermann Cohen and Walter Benjamin, not to American postmodernism. In actual fact, a robust postmodern aesthetic of copies and fakes, semblance

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Image, Action, and Idea

4

and artifice, has barely begun to make an impact on contemporary Jewish thought.”9 Braiterman acknowledges the limits of his study and invites future analysis of Jewish thought and a “postmodern aesthetic of copies and fakes.” Margaret Olin takes a historical approach to Jewish art. She describes how the impulse to assimilate during the middle of the twentieth century coincided with the belief in universal Modernism. In the third part of her book The Nation Without Art (2001), Olin argues, “Art offered Christians as well as Jews a secular religion to replace faith lost in the Enlightenment, or conversely, an expansion of religion beyond narrow denominationalism.” Moreover, formalism “offered a comfortable refuge, making art appear a pure realm of visuality, free from specific racial, ethnic or political agendas—and religious ones.”10 Olin notes that the appeal of Modernism’s universality was not confined to the artists but extended to the critics, notably Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. They reinforced the universal, nonparochial possibilities of modern art. “Even when the painter Barnett Newman used explicitly Jewish subject matter,” Olin writes, “Rosenberg took pains to disassociate him from it, carefully distinguishing Newman’s interest in the Kabbalah and his design for a synagogue from an identification with Judaism, even though elsewhere Rosenberg espoused an ethnic definition of Jewish identity by referring to the Jews as Newman’s ‘tribe.’”11 Similarly, “Formalism . . . trapped Greenberg into resorting to an ‘eternal Jewish soul’ to describe ‘biblical landscape[s.]’”12 For the most part, Olin describes in her book how modernism’s appeal coincided with artistic interests; artists wanted to be identified as individuals and not as members of a minority group.13 However, not all artists desired to separate themselves from Judaism completely. Instead they emphasized their attachment to personal conviction or used biblical narrative as a tool to express artistic concerns. Samantha Baskind studies biblical and religious iconography used by artists recognized for other work. She argues that overlooked subjects reveal a lot about artistic motivations. Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America (2014) explores how Jack Levine, George Segal, and Audrey Flack, among others, depicted “biblical topics for various reasons, but what they have in common is a desire to reconfigure traditional religious Judaism to make it meaningful in modern America, tying the past to the present while exploring the customs of their heritage.”14 Baskind stresses how contemporaneous art historians and critics neglected this work and noted that nearly half of

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Introduction

all artworks procured in 1973 by the Vatican for the then-new Collection of Modern Religious Art were made by Jewish artists.15 Although they depicted biblical scenes and persons, Baskind quickly points out, the artists in her study did not make devotional, sacred, or theological art. “Even though at its core the Bible serves as a holy volume, the artists understand it in a secular manner while exploiting the longstanding Jewish legacy of learning and engagement with one particular book.”16 In addition to these various approaches, some scholars have narrowed their focus on Jewish art to the second commandment. Kalman Bland, in The Artless Jew (2001), provides a detailed study of the prohibition and how it was used in opposing directions. The law ostracized Jews, and Jews used it as a mark of identity. Anthony Julius, an important litigator in England, is the author of Idolizing Pictures: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Jewish Art (2001). In one part of his book, he focuses on a postmodern view of iconoclasm, the act of destroying pictures. However, instead of attacking or destroying a picture, Julius suggests a more powerful strategy: mockery. Komar and Melamid, a pair of expatriate Russian Jews, use socialist realism to ridicule the communist regime they lived under. Their work “articulates the official truth of the regime, but with a literalist enthusiasm that jars. In its ironic over-eagerness, it undermines what it purportedly celebrates. It is a kind of derisive applause.”17 Julius argues that ridicule created by overstatement is more powerful than dismemberment. A destroyed statue can always be replaced, but the defaced icon shows two things: the original image plus its critique. “To engage the idol in a war of annihilation is to pay it an unwarranted compliment. Turn it on its head, decorate it with graffiti, give it a funny moustache—these are gestures of disrespect which rob the idol of its aura. They leave the idol itself standing, but more effectively diminished.”18 Julius also has a second objective; he wants to make clear that idolatry and iconoclasm are not only artistic concerns, but they also reflect how citizens view the governments under which they live. Both “art works and the State become idols,” he writes, “alienated from their makers and given a false sovereignty.”19 Julius recognizes that idols are not confused with the divine; however, he fears the state uses art to convince citizens to surrender freedom. Unlike Julius’s political approach, feminist theologian Melissa Raphael argues in favor of the primacy of vision to a theological understanding of Genesis. In Judaism and the Visual Image: A Jewish Theology of Art (2009),

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the second commandment figures prominently. She writes, “the Second Commandment remains, in my view, highly significant, and meaningful though, if its jurisdiction is over-extended, occasionally harmful. The commandment should not fall into disuse . . . the Second Commandment has, in fact, been variously observed in modern Jewish art, though whether out of deference to religious loyalties and sensibilities, or merely cultural ones, is difficult to say.”20 At the same time, vision proves crucial to Raphael’s theological understanding. Raphael looks to Genesis and the story of creation. She observes that God created, saw, and then judged his work good. Raphael stresses that the order of events is theologically significant. “God’s first judgment is not an ethical judgment because it is extra-historical; primordially, the aesthetic precedes the moral. The moral commandment is consequent on what God has first seen to be visual [sic] pleasing. Creation’s original goodness is aesthetic. It consists not in moral qualities that could only be a potential function of its historicity . . . Beauty is a cosmological symbol of readiness for the ethical, but ethics is born with human freedom.”21 The theological importance of vision is therefore a foundational element of Raphael’s work. In addition to these political, cultural, and theological contexts, scholarship has also placed the second commandment alongside the Holocaust, supporting the trope that neither the divine nor the horrific murder of millions of people can be pictured. For example, Lisa Saltzman connects the prohibition on images to an inability or reluctance to depict the Holocaust. Using Theodor Adorno’s edict, “After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric” as her point of departure in her essay “To Figure, or Not to Figure: The Iconoclastic Proscription and Its Theoretical Legacy” (1999). Saltzman demonstrates that “Adorno’s statement has nevertheless come to function as a moral and aesthetic dictate for the postwar era. Further, although the historically motivated pronouncement speaks of the present, a time ‘after Auschwitz,’ its aesthetic ethics remain deeply embedded in the past.”22 Margaret Olin extends Saltzman’s argument that the prohibition remains a ghost against which Jewish art still resists. In The Nation Without Art, Olin expands upon an earlier essay, “Graven Images on Video? The Second Commandment in Contemporary Jewish Identity” (2000) and offers a rich interpretation of an art installation by Chantal Akerman titled Bordering on Fiction: Chantal Akerman’s “D’Est” (1995). In the first of three rooms, the film D’Est (1993) plays continuously. The second room includes eight groupings

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of three video monitors placed on black pedestals. The third room, the one to which Olin devotes much of her analysis, includes a television monitor on the floor. The viewer hears the artist’s voice as she reads the second commandment in Hebrew and in English. The “Ashkenazic melody for Kol Nidre” plays in the background. Olin writes, “Kol Nidre asks release from vows that one cannot fulfill or that one violates unintentionally.” She continues, “Since in the installation the melody provides the background to a reading of the Second Commandment, the broken vow presumably refers to the commandment.”23 However, this interpretation is only part of what Olin discovers. Olin continues her analysis of Akerman’s work beyond the artistic conundrum posed by the prohibition. The soundtrack in the third room, Olin notes, makes allusion to the Holocaust. The artist’s voice says:

7

of faces and bodies placed one next to the other of faces flickering between robust life and the possibility of a death which would strike them down without their having asked for anything. . . . Once the film is finished, I said to myself, so that’s what it was:

Olin interprets “that again” as a reference to the Holocaust and then attaches the Holocaust to the prohibition against graven images. She concludes that since “any attempt to represent God is bound to result in a false image. . . . If one extends the argument to the Holocaust, the notion of the horrific replaces that of God. It is an error to represent the horrific, because we confuse the horrific itself with our representation.”25 Olin and Saltzman demonstrate that the prohibition against graven images extends to other unimaginable subjects, and because of the connection, the refusal to represent horror carried an ethical weight similar to the original commandment. From across the religious chasm, scholars of Catholic studies have also constructed theological aesthetics. Jonathan A. Anderson and Daniel A. Siedell envision art criticism from their faith tradition. Anderson, like others, recognizes the division between art and religion. His solution is to adjust “the boundaries of what is allowed into the critic’s interpretive

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Introduction

that again.24

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8

evidence base and field of reference.”26 Anderson is an artist and author who attempts to construct a “theological” art criticism. Siedell, in God in the Gallery (2008), worries that if a separate Catholic art criticism is developed, then the art it interprets will be reduced “to merely another theory or ‘ism’ or identity, like Marxism or feminism” and be confined to a niche market.27 Even so, Siedell describes how the art market is part of our reality and therefore should be examined through a Catholic gaze. “The contemporary art world,” writes Siedell, “deserves a robust and thick sociological analysis from a Christian perspective, that we live ‘between the times,’ in the ‘already’ and ‘not yet’ of the old and new world.”28 Elsewhere, he translates his Catholic theology into critical language. “Christianity presumes a metanarrative, or an overarching unified story, in which ‘all things’ are made through, and held together in, Christ (Col 1). One of the many tensions between art and the Christian faith is that art and metanarratives fight against one another. . . . The role of art criticism, in this context, is to demonstrate how a work of art fits securely into this schema.”29 Both Anderson and Siedell agree that theology is another “metanarrative” into which art is placed, just like Marxism, feminism, or some other critical theory.30 The relation between religion and art commands great attention from diverse scholarly interests; however, of those deeply engaged with graven images, no one has sought to balance the prohibition with another biblical text in order to inform art criticism as practiced by artists and art critics. Until now, as far as the Bible and rabbinic exegesis are concerned, the second commandment remains the dominant text. This book aims to challenge that dominance by offering another commandment that is equally important to art criticism, particularly as artists and art critics writing for popular magazines and trade publishers practice it. As the scholarship just outlined shows, the scholarly field of Jewish thought, aesthetics, and critical theory is well under way, and yet art criticism’s reliance on the second commandment lacks a substantial opposing force.

Graven Images Prevent Jewish Art Criticism from Advancing

The need to find another approach to Jewish art criticism appears in sharp focus in Rosenberg’s essay “Is There a Jewish Art?” (1966). Rosenberg tried

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Introduction

to define Jewish art in various ways: art made by Jews, art made for Jews, art with Jewish subjects, and so forth. These definitions were unsatisfactory to the critic. (A decade later Steven Schwarzschild also rejected defining Jewish art on these terms.31) Rosenberg then described how Jewish abstract painters, including Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, and Louise Nevelson “helped to inaugurate a genuine American art.” Abstraction celebrated, for Rosenberg, the individual as the creator of each painting irrespective of a collective cultural zeitgeist: “To be engaged with the aesthetics of self has liberated the Jew as artist by eliminating his need to ask himself whether a Jewish art exists or can exist.”32 Put simply, the Jewish artist should drop the question of Jewish art entirely. “Is There a Jewish Art?” makes no mention of the ideas for which Rosenberg was most famous. In “American Action Painters,” he argued that the canvas was an arena and a picture was an event. Increasingly, a painting’s meaning was found in how it was made. Paint splatters, smears, and drips remained visible and were emblematic of the new style. “Action painting” was as much about the activity of painting as it was its result and made manifest the “genuine American art” Rosenberg later championed. Yet his critical approach varied. When discussing abstraction, he was perfectly willing to develop a critical language that could account for artistic process and action; yet, when Rosenberg turned his attention to Jewish art, he reverted back to stale, generalized critical analyses of the prohibition against graven images. Today, the second commandment’s prohibition against graven images remains the dominant biblical or rabbinic lens through which art criticism gazes, even as other methodologies emerge. Even more importantly, there is little motivation to find a scriptural alternative. Some critics and artists lament this situation, and in so doing, I argue, they reinforce the dominance of graven images even in the face of a growing body of scholarship concerning Jewish aesthetics and art history. Elisheva Revel-Neher, an art historian, describes the commandment as a scholarly blind spot. She laments that Jewish art remains shackled to the second commandment when she rhetorically asks, “Is Jewish art in modern times to be defined only by a return to the prohibitions of the second commandment, the absence of figurative art replaced by abstraction? This would be too restrictive, allowing only certain kinds of expression or basing art on a misconception of the prohibition of idolatry.”33 Olin wonders “why artists

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choose to apply [the second commandment] to anything at all. . . . Many Jewish artists who find meaning and relevance in the second commandment, however they may observe the other commandments, rarely try to apply them to art.”34 These comments suggest, to me, that the prohibition remains a stumbling block to the growth of Jewish art criticism. Moreover, critics and artists exhibit little sustained curiosity to see what else Judaism, and Jewish law in particular, has to offer art criticism, even as the prohibition is commonly thought to be too restrictive a foundation for critical inquiry.

Image, Action, and Idea

Critical Turn to Action

Since Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” was published, artistic processes have undergone nearly eighty years of development. Artists in the 1960s explored simple actions in an effort to expand artistic methods and to move away from the energetic self-expression common among modernist paintings. Minimalism, Conceptual art, and postmodern dance came into being at that time. For example, Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre created sculptures with firebrick and, later, flat metal tiles placed on the floor. Viewers were invited to walk on the nearly unnoticeable artworks. Mel Bochner was a pioneering Conceptual artist. His seminal work, Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, presented at the School of Visual Art in 1966, encouraged viewers to flip through three-ring binders filled with pictures, sketches, and other documents. Bochner created doubt regarding the kind of objects he made; they were “not necessarily” artworks, even though the binders were placed on pedestals in a gallery. Choreographer Trisha Brown created Accumulation (1961) by repeatedly adding one new movement to an ever-growing sequence. Later, in the 1970s, artists sought to discuss societal concerns that remained unfulfilled by the strategies developed by Minimalism and Conceptual art. Feminist art, in particular, used craft processes because of the associations connected with otherwise mundane tasks. Jewish artist Judy Chicago created her monumental work The Dinner Party from 1974 to 1979. That work, made with embroidery, ceramics, and other crafts, consisted of thirty-nine formal place settings arranged on three tables.

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The artistic process and the form reinforced the subject matter. Today, artistic meaning is created with more than just appearance. One must also recognize and understand how something is made. Contemporary Jewish artists build on the historical developments of the last fifty years and look to action for meaning. Learning the lessons that Conceptual art, Minimalism, postmodern dance, and feminist art had to offer, artists use action in myriad ways. Artists refer to both actions of a generic nature and actions that refer to ideas. Chapter 2 discusses actions of a generic nature that are important to Jewish texts. Artists who directly reference these activities give meaning to ordinary activities in a new way. Chapter 3 demonstrates that some actions have specific cultural and religious influences, often based in Jewish law. In order to understand artistic use of these activities, the viewer must already know the ritual or textual reference. Contemporary Jewish art uses some of the same artistic strategies developed in the 1960s and 1970s in unique ways. Artists discover neglected interpretations, develop personal responses, present conflicts between religious law and lived experience, and try to redress grievances. A new criticism that can discuss action in Jewish art must address contemporary art, performance, and artists’ engagement with rabbinic and biblical texts.

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In this book, actions and process are motifs that carry specific meaning. Action motifs enrich individual artworks and correspond to meaning that is recognized by a community of artists, critics, and interested audience members. Jewish artists’ appeal, in this case, to shared knowledge is a radical departure from the typical contemporary artist’s desire to make a new visual language. A contemporary artist’s oeuvre is a world unto itself; to interpret it requires a fresh start with each individual, or even with each artwork. Contemporary Jewish artworks, however, aim to become part of a communal conversation about Jewish ideas and texts. The implications of this turn to community make Jewish art unique but also demonstrate a willingness to marry the artistic avant-garde to traditional ideas. Motifs are important to art history and criticism. My approach to action expands art-historical criticism. Erwin Panofsky, the great twentieth-century

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Introduction

Actions as Motifs

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art historian, defined motifs as “representations of natural objects such as human beings, animals, plants, houses, tools and so forth . . . their mutual relations [that are called] events; and . . . expressional qualities as the mournful character of a pose or gesture, or the homelike and peaceful atmosphere of an interior.” Motifs are then assigned meaning: “Artistic motifs and combinations of artistic motifs (compositions) [are connected] with themes and concepts.”35 Put another way, a recognizable picture of a creature, a depiction of an event, and the expressive quality of a picture are motifs that are then given meaning. Motifs are very useful for interpreting an artwork. This book extends Panofsky’s method to action and artistic process. In addition to analyzing pictures, Panofsky can be paraphrased this way: a recognizable “activity”—be it a type of handicraft, a ritual, or a cultural habit—is a motif that is then given meaning. Furthermore, how an artwork uses action varies. An action motif can be depicted, demonstrated as part of a process, or enacted by the artist or someone else. Depicted actions are represented in images. These can be found in painting and photography. Enacted actions are witnessed. They are found in video and performance. Demonstrated actions can be part of the artistic process but may also be directly witnessed; their effects usually remain visible. Action painting is an example of demonstrated action. Action motifs are observable either directly or by some remaining evidence. Historically, artists drew from a library of motifs commonly known among those who looked at and enjoyed artworks. In the hands of the Jewish artist, that library has an entirely new wing that includes action.

Image, Action, and Idea

Jewish Ideas and Conceptual Art

I characterize contemporary art as Conceptual and Minimalist art and postmodern dance. Examples of each will be discussed throughout the book. These three styles taken together, for me, had the greatest impact on art in the last half-century. Moreover, these styles share common characteristics that apply to many artworks. For example, written texts act as procedures, directions, or choreographic scores. These styles confound the difference between text and image because a text can be understood as either a set of instructions to make an artwork or a description of how it looks. Even

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Introduction

more startling, the description might act as both the instructions and the description. Contemporary Jewish art uses the same strategies developed by Conceptual art, Minimalist art, and postmodern dance to explore Jewish ideas and texts. These artworks are not devotional or used in religious ritual—though some of them can be—nor do they simply illustrate Jewish customs. Artistic concerns range much more freely than that. In this book, I acknowledge that artists explore social issues such as feminism and environmentalism as well as cultural identity; however, I am more interested in different connections that contemporary art can forge with Jewish ideas. What does art, particularly process and action, have to do with Jewish ideas? The Bible contains numerous detailed descriptions of buildings and religious objects. For example, the Mishkan, the Tent of Meeting, was the portable temple the Israelites carried through the desert. Biblical descriptions of this structure delineate, to a high degree, how many fasteners were used to tether the fabric walls of the tent, what they were made out of, and even the order of assembly.36 The way the text is written suggests one of two things: either that the text is a set of instructions for the tent, or that this section of the Bible simply describes what the tent looked like. One reading suggests that the text is a list of instructions and came before construction, and the other reading hears the text as a description of the finished building. As we will see, the dual nature of instruction or description crops up in contemporary Jewish art and was particularly confounding for critics of Minimalist art. In this way, some Jewish artists examine other biblical and rabbinic passages that describe how to make some ritual objects. Contemporary Jewish artist and architect Allan Wexler distills those rules to their most basic components. Spice Box for the Havdalah Service (2005, fig. 1) is a good example that demonstrates how an artist transforms the traditional object while creating an action motif. Spice Box for the Havdalah Service is a contemporary reimagining of the small censer that is smelled at the end of the Sabbath. Havdalah is a short ceremony during which participants pay attention to the corporeal senses, including sight and smell, that symbolize a return to the mundane world after a holy day of rest, contemplation, and prayer. Wexler’s spice box has no formal or material resemblance to the typical tower-shaped spice box made from wood or metal—the besamim

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box—passed from person to person during Havdalah. Wexler’s strange contraption, unrecognizable as a ritual object, relates to tradition only in the manner in which it is used. In the photograph, the artist is seen wearing the “box,” enjoying the smells of peppermint, nutmeg, clove, and lemon peel. Theoretically, the spices can be swapped out to suit the user’s taste. Wexler’s Spice Box is made from a paper respirator from which several plastic hoses travel to valves attached to lids of various store-bought spice bottles. The object dictates how it is to be handled and worn. While, practically speaking, the spice box can serve its ritual purpose, its design focuses attention on olfaction. How the object is used, not its design or appearance, carries meaning. Understanding how Jewish art turns actions into motifs is important. When motifs are once again repeated within artworks, a shared language develops with which artists can more directly engage their audiences. This overt reference to common knowledge is profoundly different from how the art world currently operates. In fact, a Jewish art criticism that draws upon such shared traditions can enrich our understanding of contemporary Jewish art and may also be a salve for the atomized art world in which every artist develops a unique style, attends to individual interests, and is otherwise independent from others. Jewish art, seen in this light, builds a cross-disciplinary, interconnected landscape of artistic production. Some recent Jewish art explores contemporary issues such as the role of women in society. Dvora Liss, curator of Judaica at the Mishkan Museum of Art, describes how Jewish feminist artists look to feminist art. Both mainstream and Jewish feminist art explore “power and oppression, body image,

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FIG. 1  Allan Wexler, Spice Box for the Havdalah Service, 2005. Dust mask, plastic tubing, containers, and spices, dimensions variable. Commissioned by the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Wexler’s object reimagines the traditional spice container used during Havdalah, a ceremony conducted at the end of the Sabbath, the Jewish day of rest. Havdalah means separation, and the ritual marks the end of the Sabbath and the by recognizing physical experiences such as the sense of smell. Ordinary spice boxes have a rectilinear shape and sometimes look like small houses or towers. Wexler highlights the act of smelling by including a paper respirator.

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Introduction

beginning of the workweek. The change from sacred to profane experience is symbolized

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women as periphery, object-subject relations, blood and menstruation,” and other shared motifs; however, “Jewish feminist works add a stratum of halakhic experience to those concerns.”37 (Jewish religious laws are called halakhah.) At times, this added religious stratum sits awkwardly atop a feminist work, but if Jewish law is the beginning of the artist’s exploration, then something unique emerges. As will be shown, Liss provides examples of the latter type of art.

Image, Action, and Idea

Jewish Terms

Not all the examples discussed in this book look at religious law as strictly or as seriously as Liss suggests. Some artists, such as Wexler, explore Jewish law playfully and with great wit. In all cases, if you know the laws an artist explores, then what you see is far richer. This is demonstrably true of Marc Chagall’s paintings. Ziva Amishai-Maisels revealed in 1978 that many of Chagall’s paintings included visual illustrations of Yiddish phrases. Amishai-Maisels points, for example, to The Holy Family (1910). There are four figures in the picture who presumably are Joseph, Mary, and Jesus—who sits on his stepfather’s lap—and a fourth figure who might be John the Baptist. None of the iconography is specifically Christian; however, the child already has dark hair and a full beard. Amishai-Maisel explains this curious detail by sharing a Yiddish proverb: “Every Jewish child is born old.”38 Amishai-Maisel’s article, “Chagall’s In-Jokes,” contains many similar examples. Perhaps more importantly, Chagall’s hidden language communicates to different groups. First, it shares an interest in the esoteric with fin-de-siecle Symbolists who were gratified when only a few people understood their imagery. Second, Chagall speaks to people who speak Yiddish and those who share his Jewish background.39 Chagall’s paintings welcome different interpretations depending on the audience to which the viewer belongs. This is perhaps most visible in regard to the Christ child. Although Christ traditionally appears as either an adult or a child, Chagall’s bearded infant conflates these representations in a way that is legible and humorous only to Jews. Just as Chagall’s paintings come to life when the viewer knows Yiddish expressions, the artwork in this book appears richer when the audience knows the Jewish law these artists explore. Artists refer to law as a text that

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Introduction

informs their work in the same manner as Conceptual artists (and Chagall) did. Further, without sharing the same cultural or religious background, it is impossible to get an “in-joke” when it appears. And isn’t that part of the fun of contemporary art, “getting it?” Here is a primer to explain some terms now so that I don’t have to explain the joke later. Use this section as a resource, should you need it, as you continue through the book. Judaism has many holidays throughout the year. Some last for one day, while others extend over a week. The exception is Shabbat. Shabbat, or the Sabbath, is a weekly holiday. It is described in the Ten Commandments as a day when no work is to be done. Work is defined by a list of thirty-nine specific activities called melakhot. Practically speaking, Orthodox Jews and other shomer Shabbat (those who abide by all the rules of the Sabbath) do not cook, drive a car, turn on lights, or use electrical equipment during the holiday. A rich culture of preparing food on Friday afternoon, keeping it warm throughout the following day, leaving some lights on overnight for the morning, and many other customs have developed around the Sabbath. At the end of Shabbat, a brief ceremony, Havdalah, marks the beginning of the workweek and a return to everyday reality. During Havdalah, songs are sung; the light of a braided candle with multiple wicks is enjoyed and then doused; and a small box of aromatic spices, besamim, is passed around. Chanukkah, the Festival of Lights, commemorates the military victory over the Syrians, as the Maccabees retook Jerusalem and rededicated the Temple. Chanukkah means “dedication.” After the victory, not enough oil was left to light the lamp in the Temple. Miraculously, a little oil lasted for eight nights, long enough for more oil to be prepared. This is the origin of the menorah, or chanukkiah, with eight branches that are successively lit during the holiday. Today, the holiday is marked by presents, songs, and children’s games . . . and anything fried in oil. Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is a solemn holiday when each person asks for forgiveness and focuses on returning to a life dedicated to goodness. It is a day of fasting and prayer. Pesach, Passover, commemorates the flight of the Israelites from enslavement in Egypt. During this holiday, Jews gather for a seder, a ritual festive meal, during which the story of the Exodus is retold. A seder plate is arranged with food symbolic of the Exodus story. The period of time between Passover, the commemoration of the Exodus, and Shavuot, a celebration in honor of receiving the Torah, is a time of spiritual reflection.

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Throughout this forty-nine-day period, Jews are commanded to “count the Omer.” The term omer has two uses: it was a unit of measure for the wheat offering given daily at the Temple in Jerusalem, and it also refers to the forty-nine-day period of time, as in “during the Omer.” Sukkot, a harvest festival in the fall, takes place not long after the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah). Jews are commanded to “dwell” in a sukkah, a modest, three-walled hut with a flat roof, for eight days. The building is reminiscent of temporary dwellings farmers build while reaping. The sukkah also commemorates the portable houses the Jews built while wandering in the desert. The rules governing how to build a sukkah are extensive; the structure is meant to guide the gaze upward while one is inside. The regulations concerning the roof are therefore quite specific; one must be able to see the stars through the roof. As with many religions, Judaism has numerous ritual objects, known collectively as Judaica. Some objects have significance only during particular holidays, while others form part of daily prayer or are awarded continual respect. The most holy object is the Torah, a handwritten scroll of the five books of Moses. The Torah is handled with respect, covered when not in use, and often adorned with a mantle and crown (rimonim). When the Torah is read, a pointer, yad, is used to keep one’s place, as the text is written in a rich, calligraphic, ancient style. Other ritual objects, such as the mezuzah and tefillin, also contain written scripture. The mezuzah is a small box attached to the doorpost of a home; tefillin are a pair of small boxes, also containing texts, that are bound to the forehead and upper arm with leather straps during prayer. All objects that contain written texts are handled with a heightened sense of respect and ceremony. The lulav and etrog are two ritual objects used during Sukkot. The etrog is a citrus fruit similar to a citron, and the lulav is interwoven willow, palm, and myrtle branches and leaves. Unlike most ritual objects, the etrog and lulav are organic and must be repurchased annually. The etrog, with its citrus scent, is sometimes used as one of the spices for Havdalah. Ritual items also include fashion. A prayer shawl, tallit, is worn during prayer, recognizable by the fringes at the corners, known as tsitzit. Head coverings include modestly sized round skullcaps, called kippot in Hebrew or yarmulkes in Yiddish, and sheitls, which are head coverings for married Orthodox women who are observing the laws of modesty. Judaica also include

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Introduction

ordinary objects used for ritual purposes. These include Kiddush cups, for the blessing over wine or grape juice recited before meals, and candlesticks used to mark the beginning of Shabbat and other festive holidays. While used during ritual, many of these objects are not sacred; it is the act that matters. Another large ritual and symbolic object transforms space. An eruv is a boundary that symbolically combines different houses into one communal home. Ordinarily, carrying outside of the home—that is, anywhere outside of one’s private property—is forbidden on the Sabbath. A small child, household items, and food can be brought out to a patio if a fence encloses the exterior space, because the overall private property is clearly marked off. Thus, the eruv acts as a neighborhood fence around multiple homes, metaphorically unifying the yards as if to say that this is one extended private space. The eruv boundary is only relevant on Shabbat, when carrying is restricted. In addition to holidays and ritual objects, daily practice forms a significant part of observant and Orthodox Jews’ experience. Some individuals study the Torah and other religious texts every day. The central text of Judaism, spiritually and intellectually, is the Torah, the five books of Moses. However, there are numerous other texts, such as the Prophets, that make up the corpus of Jewish scripture.40 The Torah is also referred to as the written law. At the same time, there are accompanying interpretations that constitute the oral law, eventually written down and forming what is known as the Talmud. The Talmud is a palimpsest of texts from different time periods, geographic locations, and scholars. Each page is laid out with the Mishnah, the oral law, at the center of the page. Interpretations of the Mishnah written by Maimonides, a medieval doctor and rabbi, and other important figures line the top, sides, and bottom of each page (of course there are variations if any interpretation is particularly long or does not have much to add). Even though all of these texts are now available as printed and handwritten texts, sometimes the Torah is referred to as the written law, and the Talmud—and all its parts—is called the oral law. While rabbinic authority in these texts is very strong, deference is given to the Torah on matters of law. Talmud study is traditionally a daily activity called daf yomi, a page a day. It is done in pairs, known as chevrutah. This is a very old pedagogical technique that welcomes the students to get to know one another; thus, personal stories and experience inform the material under discussion.

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In addition to study, Judaism includes rules, or mitzvot, by which individuals conduct their daily lives. For example, the dietary laws of Kashrut determine what can be eaten and how some foods must be prepared. The laws include the proper way to slaughter an animal, which animals must not be eaten—these are treif—and the law that states, “a kid must not be cooked in its mother’s milk.”41 From this last law, a rich tradition of keeping meat and dairy products separate has grown. A kosher kitchen, one organized so that the rules of Kashrut can be kept, includes a set of pots and dishes for both dairy and meat recipes and meals. Similarly, Jewish marriage is a sacred bond; it is also a legal agreement. Like civic society that has a marriage license, Judaism has a marriage contract, called a ketubah. Judaism also has a writ of divorce called a get. A get must be offered by the husband to the wife even if she is the one asking for the divorce. Currently this religious law is getting significant attention in religious communities, as some husbands extort money from their wives before agreeing to a divorce. Among the ideas artists have tackled, none is so peculiar as the biblical case of the woman accused of adultery, the sotah. To prove her innocence, such a woman must undergo the test of the bitter waters, a concoction including macerated paper that has words written upon it.42 There is no evidence that this practice was ever conducted, yet the law is studied equally along with everything else in the Torah. It is an unusual story and has garnered the attention of at least one artist. This primer is an introduction, in no way comprehensive, to many of the ideas that the Jewish artists discussed in this book tackle in their work. The artists are all Jewish, but their connection and faithfulness to the rituals and religious laws that they examine vary. For some artists, their familiarity with holidays, objects, and daily observance informs their work. In other cases, the connection between the artists’ work and religious practice is less clear, yet their knowledge of Judaism, or particular elements of the religion, influences the work they make.

Who Should Read This Book

This book is for everyone who wants to learn more about Judaism and art, religion and art, and art criticism. Teachers may find ways to widen the

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selection of Jewish texts typically explored through creative assignments. In particular, texts on Jewish law, halakhah, find new life as seen through an artistic lens. Art historians may find avenues of research that go beyond one infamous commandment or ways to share critics’ interest in the rediscovery of motifs in contemporary art. And for the many artists, with whom I most strongly identify, I hope what I write in some measure puts into words latent thoughts already in one’s mind. Finally, this book is for anyone who has ever wondered whether Judaism has anything more to say about art beyond, “Thou shalt not!” Be encouraged; there is plenty.

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This book has four chapters, each of which builds on the previous one. By the end, Jewishly informed Conceptual, Minimalist, and performance strategies will balance graven images as critical approaches to Jewish art. Chapter 1, “Images and Actions in Art Criticism and Jewish Thought,” shows that Jewish art criticism has been, and still is, limited to the image. Formalism—attention to color and composition, a critical method made famous by Clement Greenberg—still colors attempts to define or describe Jewish art. By limiting art criticism to the appearance of the finished work of art, many other artistic concerns never come into play. These concerns include the artistic process and performed action. Chapter 1 makes the case that it is time for a wide reevaluation of Jewish art criticism. Chapter 2, “Melakhot, Creative Activities, and Artistic Practice,” constructs a criticism of Jewish art based on the fourth commandment: “Observe the Sabbath.” The Sabbath is a day of rest, prayer, and contemplation. The commandment states that one should do “all your work” the rest of the week and that the “Sabbath is a day of rest.”43 Over many centuries, rabbis interpreted the commandment and clarified what activities constitute work. Today, work is defined as any one of thirty-nine activities, known as the melakhot, or “creative acts.” Chapter 2 compares the melakhot to experimental artistic activity from the 1960s and 1970s, when many artists used simple activities to avoid individualism and symbolism in their work. What emerges from this comparison is a common question: “What is work?” Religious and creative answers to this question differ, and yet they maintain important similarities.

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Introduction

Chapters

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Image, Action, and Idea

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Chapter 3, “Contemporary Jewish Art,” looks at specific examples of action in Jewish art. Actions are taken from both formal ritual and the everyday tasks necessary to live an observant Jewish life. Often artworks resemble Judaica, but this is not always the case. Some rituals do not have an object associated with them. In those cases, artists invent new things and assemble strange contraptions in order to reference ritual or custom. Chapter 3 also highlights how actions can be thought of as motifs, because actions refer to specific ideas that are shared among artworks. For example, different artists make artworks involving the same activity from the same Jewish source, yet the meaning of each artwork varies according to artists’ use of the action. Chapter 4, “Visual Midrash and Artistic Interpretation,” places Jewish art within the longue durée of Jewish interpretation, called midrash, and in so doing highlights two significant aspects of contemporary Jewish art heretofore unclaimed. First, midrash refers to a corpus of historical texts and a method of interpretation. Roughly divided into two categories, interpretations examine biblical stories and adjudicate religious law. Some artists and art educators have used art to create visual interpretations of biblical stories; however, the entire category of legal exegesis is virtually nonexistent in art criticism. Chapter 4 will expand Jewish art criticism to include artists’ exploration of legal ideas for the first time. Second, it will show how contemporary Jewish art informs the wider field of art criticism. Motifs form a shared language common among the creators and critics of Jewish art that fosters a distinct artistic community independent of mainstream artistic practice. Moreover, this community contributes to a larger whole, beyond the art world, that engages with and explores Jewish text and relates it to the modern world. Several artists, including R. B. Kitaj, Archie Rand, and Victor Majzner, address their vision that art will become part of Jewish intellectual life beyond the confines of the studio. This book is a quest to find out what else Judaism has to say about art made today. Action is at the heart of this inquiry. Action is also central to Judaism. To know Judaism well requires an intimacy and familiarity that is only gained through practice. Jewish artists are in the unique position to demonstrate how religious and artistic practices inform one another.

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1. Images and Actions in Art Criticism and Jewish Thought

The main difference between Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s criticism was that Greenberg concentrated on the completed work of art and its historical antecedents while Rosenberg concentrated on the artist’s creative process and how it was affected by social forces. —IRVING SANDLER

Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg represent two main streams of art criticism. The first attends to the finished work of art, and the second examines the process by which it was made. Jewish art criticism, in the main, follows the principles of the first approach, because critical methods often rely on an artwork’s appearance. However, much Jewish contemporary art does not depend on representation or even the image. Such artists avoid symbols and painterly styles, and they disregard the background noise caused by the prohibition against graven images, while critics inadvertently reinforce the second commandment when they restate it as a foil against which artworks stand. The second commandment is an ineffective interpretive tool with respect to Conceptual and performance art, because meaning is found in action, performance, and material choices; criticism based on images, or “the image,” diminishes the importance of these other characteristics. Contemporary Jewish art requires an approach founded on different Jewish ideas. This chapter will contrast critical methods based on

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the image with methods that analyze action. Action will then be shown as a promising step toward a robust Jewish art criticism that is independent of “the image” (or, more broadly, the finished artwork) as a carrier of meaning. In later chapters, I will look at action in a number of ways, including as a form of work, ritual practice, and other customs. Ultimately, this new critical approach balances the overdetermined attention to the image as it is found in Jewish art criticism. Mainstream art criticism is obviously not limited to one method. Art criticism developed a range of approaches that emerged during the middle of the twentieth century. Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg both admired Jackson Pollock and the other New York School painters, but they were interested in different characteristics of what they saw. Pollock made his most famous work by dripping and pouring paint on canvases that he rolled out on the floor of his studio. In assessing such work, Greenberg insisted that the viewer look at the composition of a painting: how shapes, colors, and textures come together to create a whole image. This formalist critique relied solely on the appearance of the finished work of art. Formalism influenced much thinking on art while abstraction dominated mid-twentieth century art. Rosenberg, on the other hand, suggested that Pollock’s drips and smears exemplified the painting process. Pollock’s splatters, Rosenberg observed, demonstrated the artist’s movements while he painted the picture, and the painting technique remained visible to the viewer. Rosenberg asserted that the artistic activity responsible for the artwork became increasingly meaningful. Greenberg and Rosenberg influenced later theories of art. The formalists maintained interest in the finished artwork, while others found meaning in the process. From that view, a painting is judged by how well the paint strokes demonstrate the energy and force required to make them. Later, performance art relied even more on actions. In fact, performance art often left no physical work of art to see.

Greenberg’s Image and Rosenberg’s Action

In his essay “Modernist Painting,” Clement Greenberg characterized what he saw as modernism’s purpose. He wrote, “The essence of Modernism lies,

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Images and Actions

as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.” Appealing to Immanuel Kant, the nineteenth-century philosopher whose work influenced generations of aestheticians, Greenberg constructed a modernist artistic “self-criticism” based on Kant’s attempt to use “logic to establish the limits of logic.” Greenberg restated Kant’s philosophy in artistic terms. Art’s “self-criticism,” he argued, is made manifest in the way each artistic medium focused on what was most important. “Each art had to determine, through its own operations and works, the effects exclusive to itself. By doing so it would, to be sure, narrow its area of competence, but at the same time it would make its possession of that area all the more certain.” Eventually each artistic medium would remove all extraneous technique and subject matter to arrive at a “pure” state that would “guarantee . . . its standard of quality as well as of its independence.”1 According to Greenberg, the “characteristic method” of painting was the application of color, and painting’s ultimate “limit” was flatness. Pure adherence to this method accepts the limitations of paint on canvas. For example, painting had historically attempted to create an illusion of space on the flat painting surface. However, what was once a fault of the medium became its central quality: “The limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigments—were treated by the old masters as negative factors,” Greenberg wrote. “Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors.” Ultimately, Greenberg reasoned that the only characteristic unique to painting was flatness, the physical surface of the canvas.2 Even with his observation that painting ought to stress flatness, Greenberg recognized that representational art is not completely ruled out. Pictures can refer to nature, the observable world, or expression and emotion so long as the image abandons “the kind of space that recognizable objects can inhabit.”3 Still, when it came to titling a work, Greenberg favored formal compositional description above naming what was represented in a picture. Greenberg’s rhetoric was very strong. Some people understood his essay as a polemic defining what modernist painting ought to be. To correct this misapprehension, Greenberg wrote a postscript to “Modernist Painting” in 1978 to clarify his intentions: “There have been some further constructions

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of what I wrote that go over into preposterousness: That I regard flatness and the inclosing of flatness not just as the limiting conditions of pictorial art, but as criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art; that the further a work advances the self-definition of an art, the better that work is bound to be.”4 Greenberg’s postscript was a summary of how his essay was understood. He lamented that his observations were taken as prescriptive guidelines rather than as observations of the artwork being produced in New York City at the time. Regardless, Greenberg’s formalism, as his critical methodology is known, focused on the compositional image. His critical method remained a strong influence on artistic production and critical analysis for several decades. Harold Rosenberg was perhaps Greenberg’s staunchest critic. In 1952, Rosenberg wrote “American Action Painters” and shifted the critical gaze from the finished artwork to the process that created it. Rosenberg described the canvas, quoted earlier, as “an arena in which to act,” and he continued, “What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”5 The artist no longer focused on an outcome, the image—or so it seemed to Rosenberg. The canvas ceased being a surface upon which to represent reality or an emotional state, but instead became a place where something happened. Each artistic action drew aesthetic judgment. Consequently, everything the artist did or made was as important as everything else: “If a painting is an action, the sketch is one action, the painting that follows it another. The second cannot be ‘better’ or more complete than the first. There is just as much significance in their difference as in their similarity.”6 The entire series, traditionally thought of as a progression from sketch to final execution, is equally important. The preliminary study is as much a finished work of art as a well-developed composition. Rosenberg’s criticism placed new importance on the artistic technique being used as well as the exact moment of creation. Modernist art, he argued, could only be produced under certain conditions of environment, psychological preparation, and physical activity. In this way, the artwork became indistinguishable from a moment in time: “A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life—whether ‘moment’ means the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas or the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-painting is the

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Images and Actions

same metaphysical substance as the artist’s experience. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.”7 For Rosenberg, the brushstrokes, paint smears, and other signs of activity that remained visible were important; like handwriting, they represent the uniqueness of each artist. To fully understand the artwork, one must have a strong acquaintance with how the artist experienced that particular moment. Rosenberg’s interpretation described more than practical methods; it also pointed to an ideology that saw the artwork as a remnant full of the vitality and expression of the moment it was made. Modernist painting—or, as Rosenberg called it, “Action Painting”—favored direct experience over preconceived plans. Art comes into being through the dialogue or confrontation between the artist and the materials. Rosenberg’s ideas had a profound influence on later artists. Writing only six years later, Allan Kaprow, an artist and writer famous for his performance art, expanded Rosenberg’s position. “[Pollock] created magnificent paintings,” he stated. “But he also destroyed painting.”8 Kaprow did not mean that people stopped painting pictures, but rather that he believed Pollock made it possible for artists to explore the creative process and redefine painting and the other arts.9 Kaprow, like Rosenberg, described the way in which the viewer sees both the finished image and the processes that led to it at the same time. “The Pollock image, therefore, is at some point an immediate reference to the action that created it, and this, in the mind’s eye, amplifies what is on the canvas into a far more complex theme, amounting, for the sensitive observer, to a re-creation of the whole circumstance of the making of the picture.”10 The “sensitive observer” sees a Pollock painting in two ways simultaneously; it is a record of past activity and a cue to imagine its creation. The creative process vies for attention with the resultant composition. Kaprow generalized Rosenberg’s “Action Painters” to every action. The artist could do anything to create a work of art. For Kaprow, Rosenberg’s arena—bounded by the canvas—opened up into a lived space that Kaprow termed a “Happening.” “A Happening is always a purposive activity, whether it is gamelike, ritualistic, or purely contemplative. (It may even have as its purpose no purpose.) Having a purpose may be a way of paying attention to what is commonly not noticed. Purpose implies a selective operation for every Happening, limiting it to certain situations out of countless options.”11 Kaprow believed that the only limiting element for an action to be used as a

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creative technique is artistic intention. In fact, the closer the artist’s activity is to ordinary life, the better. Kaprow extended Rosenberg’s interest in action even further into artistic motivation; what is important is not what is done, but the type of attention with which the artist focused. Other artists explored the nature of work in general terms. Walter de Maria, best known for Lightning Field (1977), a grid of metal poles placed at regular intervals across a desert in New Mexico, considered how work could have no significance. “Meaningless work,” declared de Maria, “is obviously the most important and significant art form today.” Work of this kind “does not make you money or accomplish a conventional purpose.” At its best, meaningless work should be conducted alone; otherwise it may be seen as “entertainment.” However, de Maria did not demand that such activity be devoid of meaning; in fact, it may share “all the best qualities of old art forms such as painting, writing, and so on,” and the person engaged in meaningless work might think about “nature, history, time, philosophy, [or] nothing at all.”12 It would seem that any significance that meaningless work might have is incidental to the task being performed. Rosenberg objected to how his ideas were interpreted, just as Greenberg disliked how his ideas were understood, believing that Kaprow, in particular, took them too far. “From Action Paintings to ‘happenings,’” writes Rosenberg, “which carry painting and sculpture over into theatre, took only a single logical step—a final step, by the way, which in art one would always hesitate to take. In the ‘happening’ the art object . . . is abandoned altogether and composition turns literally into an event.”13 Rosenberg lamented the demise of the art object; in fact, he resisted any allowance for visual art to be other than object based. Once the artwork is no longer a painting it “[carries] . . . over into theatre” and, to extend his language, ceases to be visual art. Greenberg and Rosenberg represent a sharp divide between criticism of the image and the process. Clement Greenberg discussed abstract painting as being about the completed picture. His essay “Modernist Painting” posited that an artwork should examine the limits of its own materials. Greenberg’s formalism has little interpretive interest in nontraditional arts such as performance or Conceptual art. On the other hand, Harold Rosenberg contended that an artwork becomes a record of an artist’s activity. Jackson Pollock’s drips and smears are a clear example. Later artists, such

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as Allan Kaprow, expanded this idea to include any action—even when no evidence of the act remained. Greenberg’s formalism and Rosenberg’s view of action continue to be highly influential ideas, influencing many generations of art critics and artists. The division between an analysis of the picture and the process remain.

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The division between Greenberg’s and Rosenberg’s criticisms has implications for contemporary Jewish art. An art object nearly always provides something to see. Many different types of art criticism are well equipped to examine how something looks. Important studies on Jewish art, aesthetics, and graven images, several of which were outlined in the introduction, are far ranging, yet even within these studies, a common habit is to look at the finished artwork—its composition, imagery, style, and the like—as the focus of meaning. Quite naturally, as soon as issues of representation are considered—irrespective of the style used, naturalistic, abstract, or otherwise—the specter of graven images awakes, even if it is quickly dispelled. However, how something is made within the realm of Jewish art is overlooked. This is understandable, because action and artistic process only rose to critical attention in the mid-twentieth century. Nevertheless, Jewish art criticism has not yet fully engaged action. An approach in Jewish art criticism determines what is allowable via a specific interpretation of the second commandment. This view sees abstraction as a way to work around graven images. Lionel Kochan, a British historian, wrote extensively on the second commandment and demonstrated that biblical texts favored abstraction. Kochan’s intention was not to place the law in a historical or cultural context but to look at it aesthetically. His primary goal in works like “The Unfinished and the Idol: Toward a Theory of Jewish Aesthetics” was “to try and answer the question why a complete representation is utterly prohibited whereas, in certain circumstances and subject to certain conditions, an incomplete depiction is permissible.”14 To answer this question, Kochan engaged in a stylistic analysis. For example, a representational image could be made “incomplete” by cutting off an ear or the nose, as some Jewish texts recommend one do

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Images and Actions

Formalism and Graven Images

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Image, Action, and Idea

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with idols, or the artist could abstract the image so that it looks less like reality.15 Kochan conflated the rabbinic ordinance to destroy idols with abstraction: “Clearly, the more complete the depiction of the human being,” wrote Kochan, the more repulsive the image becomes, “and that, I suggest, accounts for the abhorrence with which a Jewish aesthetic regards the three-dimensional statue to the extent of declaring it utterly impermissible.”16 His view echoes Steven Schwarzschild, who saw abstraction as the “‘quintessential and aboriginal’ Jewish aesthetic.”17 However, there is a significant flaw in Kochan’s reasoning: his habit of equating an incomplete image with an abstract one. He sees them both as a way to address the prohibition. Abstraction was important to Kochan for another reason. As the viewer looks at an abstract painting, an understanding of what one is looking at slowly emerges. In other words, it takes time to interpret what one sees. “The physical entity” is subject “to temporal rather than spatial demands, that is, the physical entity becomes in need of time to attain completion.”18 Abstraction seems to come alive, not in a literal or depicted sense, but in one’s mind. Kochan gave this experience a particularly Jewish coloring: “But in whatever way incompleteness and thereby temporality are achieved, the effect is to bring about an entity in need of tikkun and thus constitute the antithesis to the closed, totalizing and reified world of the idolater. In the last resort, the whole of the struggle against idolatry can be deconstructed and narrated in terms of the struggle against finitude, and the exclusion of the possibility of conceiving of the world as other than it is.”19 Abstraction leaves a work incomplete and in need of healing (tikkun). Here Kochan alluded to Tikkun Olam, the mitzvah, or commandment, to repair the world. The struggle against idolatry is not theological, per se, but a fight against the metaphorical rigor mortis of the still picture. Kochan’s writing conflated religious and aesthetic thought and set up a dialectic: at one extreme, the more realistic an artwork is, the less room viewers have to exercise their imagination; on the other, the more abstract the image, the more viewers can “heal” the image and engage the imagination. Kochan referred to Steven Schwarzschild’s work numerous times. Schwarzschild wrote “The Legal Foundation of Jewish Aesthetics,” in which he asked “whether the philosophical-theological principles that Judaism employs in looking at and relating to the world as a whole also

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Images and Actions

entail principles that determine its aesthetic outlook.”20 To address that idea, Schwarzschild outlined what the Shulchan ‘Aruch, a sixteenth-century text, had to say about prohibited images. He asserted, “It has never been doubted in Jewish history that abstract, nonrepresentational art (in the past, decorative forms, in modern times, abstraction in general) is no way restricted by Jewish religion.”21 Nevertheless, abstraction had its limits. Schwarzschild wrote, “It has thus become clear that we are talking not only about modern non-representational painting but, in a strict sense, about all non-naturalistic depiction, at least in principle. Religious symbolism before the Renaissance, the play of light over Rembrandt’s human figures, El Greco’s or Modigliani’s elongations, etc., are thus, in varying degrees, legitimized. On the other hand, artistic efforts at ‘pure empiricism,’ whether in the Greek classical form, in its Renaissance revival, or up to French pointillism, must be regarded as, in varying degrees, approximating illegitimacy.”22 Schwarzschild’s analysis distinguished between abstraction and “pure empiricism” in an unusual manner. Light, color, and form abstracted from reality are within the bounds of the law. Rembrandt’s use of light, though naturalistic, dramatically hid and revealed certain parts of his figures, and Amedeo Modigliani’s elongated necks and graceful fingers created unique aesthetic experiences. Schwarzschild argued that objectivity was not the aesthetic intention in either case. Yet any attempt by an artist to faithfully render reality garnered suspicion. This is even true of pointillist paintings such as those painted by Georges Seurat. Seurat’s painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–86) is painted with small colored dots. Seurat prescribed to the scientific principle, developed at the time, that colors mixed together in the eye. Seurat’s artistic method, reliant on a scientific theory, sought objective truth and thus became suspicious under Schwarzschild’s rubric. Schwarzschild’s view of abstraction cast a wide net, capturing many different styles of art within what is permitted by Jewish law. However, not all critics agreed that abstraction got to the heart of the prohibition against graven images. Art historian Lisa Saltzman has written, “Whereas abstraction might allow for the dialectical possibility of representation without figuration, the fundamental import of the biblical prohibition for the Judeo-Marxist tradition is not its ethical stance toward the making of images. Rather, the biblical prohibition speaks against the worshipping of images.”23 Saltzman describes abstraction as “representation without

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figuration,” thus making it permissible under the second commandment. Yet this is ultimately unnecessary, because the prohibition is specifically stated to outlaw idolatrous worship and not the general creation of images. Ultimately, abstraction is not a way around graven images so much as a way to reconcile Jewish thought to modern art and formalism. Some scholars express their desire to move beyond definitions of Jewish art that are reliant on style, abstraction, or the image. In Imagining Jewish Art, Aaron Rosen writes, “When I began this project, one of my first tasks was to dispel the myth of Jewish aniconism, the notion that Jews possess some intractable reluctance or inability to make visual art.” 24 Similarly, Elisheva Revel-Neher describes art-historical neglect of the first artist mentioned in the Bible, Bezalel. His divinely granted gifts of “‘wisdom and discernment and the knowledge of workmanship’” are routinely overlooked, and “art historians [have] ignored these texts” that describe the source and application of creativity.25 Revel-Neher’s unspoken hope is that some scholar of modern and contemporary art will take up the topic of Bezalel to see where it might lead. From other disciplines come additional voices. “While theologians may have not studied Jewish art for theological purposes,” writes feminist theologian Melissa Raphael, “there is a considerable body of historical scholarship on Jewish art and the interpretation of the Second Commandment that contextualizes the theorization of Jewish art, especially its modern (rather than contemporary) phases.”26 Further, Zachary Braiterman, a professor of philosophy and Jewish studies, writes, “Passing from modernism to postmodernism, art and revelation lack any clear-cut power to transcend material existence, fix the social order, and redeem physical suffering. As they enter into the current imaginary, the gestural acts and historical memory that circumscribe art and religion refract in the light cast by television, neon, movie projectors, and computer screens.”27 Such musings have been voiced for decades. Even Rosenberg hoped that a new perspective was possible. Rosenberg opined that Jewish art may “exist in the negative sense of creating objects in the mind and banning physical works of art,” yet he was reluctant to pursue such lines of inquiry, calling them “fanciful ‘modernist’ theory.”28 These dynamic and inconclusive voices speculate broadly on the future of Jewish art. How will graven images be expressed in the future? And yet these far-ranging examinations do little directly to address art criticism as

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artists and historians practice it. Where might their attention turn? How might a more generous examination of Jewish texts and law contribute to art criticism? The second commandment remains the only commandment consistently related to contemporary art. Art criticism must look more broadly at Jewish texts to construct a critical language that can move beyond the canvas and traditional notions of the image.

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The lack of an adequate Jewish art criticism hampers appreciation for contemporary Jewish art. This becomes clear when artworks are made to be touched or used. Similarly, object-based sculpture—artworks that resemble ordinary things but might be made from strange materials or assembled collage—call to mind what it would be like to use them. Consider the following examples that are best understood when action is the critical lens through which the artworks are interpreted. Each one represents a slightly different approach to action examined in the following chapters. Nechama Golan, an artist known for her religiously informed feminist art, made a woman’s high-heeled shoe out of photocopies of Talmud pages that discuss marriage. You Shall Walk in Good Ways (1999, fig. 2) puts Western expectations and religious limitations in conflict. “Juxtaposing the uncomfortable shoe that limits women and fixes their image as objects of desire with the Talmudic text on marriage and its traditional view of it as ownership, the work is a metaphor of the rules and tenets imposed on women by the patriarchal culture—both religious and secular.” The artist transforms “halakhic practice into an integral part of her work of art: halakhic notions become artistic practices, and vice versa.”29 Put another way, the shoe demonstrates that there are restrictions in both the assimilated world of modern culture and the traditional world of religious life. You Shall Walk in Good Ways presents the desire and conflict evident in either choice. Golan’s sculpture cannot be used but suggests what it would be like to wear it. Ken Goldman was born in the United States and immigrated to Israel. He makes artworks that refer to specific Jewish texts; however, much of his work reflects a personal experience with religion and emigration. His work Boots (2014) consists of both a modified pair of army boots and embossed

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Images and Actions

Jewish Art off the Canvas

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Image, Action, and Idea

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prints made by the impression of the rubber soles. The soles have been carved so that instead of creating the typical tread pattern on the ground, the Hebrew quote “Vi’tachzireinu Bi’shalom” (Return in peace) is printed in the soil—or into the paper. The phrase, taken from the traveler’s prayer, expresses the wanderer’s hope for protection. The boots were a symbolic gift to the artist’s son to ensure his safety as he served in the Israeli Army. Goldman’s boot can be worn, though it would seem a symbolic or ritualistic action to do so. Allan Wexler is an artist trained as an architect whose work, to a large degree, draws on this training. Spice Box for the Havdalah Service, already discussed in the introduction, is a ritual object, but of a most curious sort. Wexler’s spice box is a radical departure from the traditional house-shaped censer. Accentuating the act of smelling, the artist’s object is equipped with a face mask. Spice Box is paradigmatic of Wexler’s other works that are curious, even playful contraptions that verge on the impractical. Like ritual, the humor inherent in his work pulls awareness out of its habitual slumber. Even more strikingly, Spice Box exposes how avant-garde juxtaposition no longer shocks, but has become a tradition in its own right. At the same time, Judaism is replete with conditions designed to draw one’s awareness to action. How artists go about engaging and inviting us to this sort of attention is informed by art, but it is also part of ritual practice. Wexler’s spice box can be used. Joshua Neustein is an installation and Conceptual artist who has been active for decades. With Georgette Battle and Gerry Marx, he made the Jerusalem River Project (1970), a temporary environmental sound installation. River Project broadcast the sound of running water along a dry riverbed extending from Jerusalem, a location that will only provide water “in biblical prophecies . . . [such as] the vision of the prophet Ezekiel.”30 For the viewer in 1970, the sound of copiously running water in the desert was surprising. Neustein’s more recent work includes Wine into Water (2005, fig. 3), a video in which a glass of wine, placed under a dripping faucet, is slowly diluted. The title is an inversion of the Christian parable of Christ turning water into wine.31 Yet, as the dark red wine slowly flows over the rim of the glass and becomes clear, several other associations emerge. The overflowing glass first suggests the tradition of filling a wine glass to overflowing—a symbol of bounty and blessing—when reciting the blessing over wine, Kiddush.

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FIG. 2  Nechama Golan, You Shall Walk in Good Ways, 1999. Photocopies of Talmud pages and polymer glue, 30 × 12 × 18 inches. This paper shoe is made from layers of photocopies from the Talmud, the oral Law, which is a compilation of rabbinic texts. The artwork critiques how women are viewed in both traditional Jewish law and contemporary society. The text on the shoe comes from religious laws concerning marriage, in which the wife is legally given to the husband. At the same time, the high-heeled shoe demonstrates aspects of contemporary society’s expectations of sexuality in fashion.

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FIG. 3  Joshua Neustein, Wine into Water, 2005. Video still. Film direction: Wendy Shafir. Editor: Matan Berkowich. The title is an inversion of the Christian parable in which Jesus turned water into wine. In this video, the dripping faucet slowly dilutes the wine from burgundy red to clear water. Neustein relates dilution to cultural assimilation.

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Images and Actions

Later, a puddle of red wine grows on the plate, recalling part of the Passover Seder during which drops of wine are spilled when the description of the ten plagues is read aloud. Finally, Neustein relates the dilution to the Hebrew term for assimilation, equating dilution with cultural mixing. Neustein’s glass demonstrates an action. These works create meaning with action, whether it is literal or suggested. Golan demonstrates how Jewish law and contemporary culture are both easily critiqued. Goldman’s boots reflect distant parental care with each step his soldier son takes. Wexler’s face mask exaggerates Havdalah to an almost absurd degree. Neustein’s video records actual change as the liquid becomes clear, associations shifting with the changing color. Obviously, these works are not served by criticism based on the second commandment’s prohibition against graven images, for several reasons. First, they are not images in the same sense that the idol or representational picture is; rather, these objects change, they are touched, and they do not stand at some aesthetic distance from the viewer. Something is neglected if consideration of action is put aside. These artworks are objects that can be used, even if only in an imagined way. Because of that, they are not interpreted in the same manner as an image. Formalist critique, primarily concerned with the compositional arrangements of color and texture of the artworks, would only very partially address the meaning the artists wish to communicate. Golan, Goldman, Wexler, and Neustein made objects that can be used or that suggest what it might be like to use them. Actual and imagined action is critical to each of them. However, even Rosenberg’s analysis of Action Painting limits how we interpret these examples. The artists do not demonstrate how these objects were made, as a Pollock painting does; they come closer to a prop or utensil of the sort used by Kaprow. Beyond that, though, these works communicate symbolic, emotional, and religious meaning. They are not just props used in a Happening. Furthermore, the actions these artworks call to mind relate specifically to Jewish ideas, ritual practice, and law. Thus, art criticism that can examine action as a bearer of specific meaning is sorely needed. This chapter began with a discussion of two strains of art criticism: the first focuses on the image and the second examines artistic process. Until now, Jewish art criticism fit within the first strain, criticism based on the image; currently, no critical method looks at process in a sustained way.

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Within a Jewish context, examination of images is colored by the second commandment, rightly or wrongly. The law is only useful when applied to artworks whose meanings rely on depiction, style, and analysis of the “image.” Scholars plumbed the depths of the second commandment well, and undoubtedly will continue to do so. However, for contemporary art unconcerned with images, “graven” or not, a new critical method is needed. That method must be able to examine action and process and balance the critical gaze currently overdetermined by the image. The next two chapters will develop a Jewish art criticism founded on the fourth commandment, to keep the Sabbath, and accompanying definitions of work.

Image, Action, and Idea

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2. Melakhot, Creative Activities, and Artistic Practice

To roll, to crease, to fold, to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist, to dapple, to crumple, to shave, to tear, to chip, to split, to cut, to sever, to drop, to remove . . . —RICHARD SERRA

The main classes of work are forty save one: sowing, plowing, reaping, binding sheaves, threshing, winnowing, selecting, grinding, sifting, kneading, baking, shearing wool, bleaching, hackling, dying, spinning, stretching the threads, the making of two meshes, weaving two threads, dividing two threads, tying and untying, sewing two stitches, tearing in order to sew two stitches, capturing a deer, slaughtering, or flaying, or salting it, curing its hide, scraping off its hair, cutting it up, writing two letters, erasing in order to write two letters over the erasure, building, pulling down, extinguishing, kindling, striking with a hammer, [and] carrying out from one domain to another . . . —MISHNAH SHABBAT

In the last chapter, Clement Greenberg’s formalism and Harold Rosenberg’s Action Painting were discussed. Greenberg’s critical method looks to the image for meaning, and Rosenberg’s analysis focuses on process and action. Like Greenberg’s formalism, Jewish art criticism’s attachment to the second commandment’s attention to the image inhibits the development of art

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criticism. Thus, a different foundation, based in Jewish ideas, that addresses action is necessary to expand Jewish art criticism. Such a foundation is found in the fourth commandment, which defines the Sabbath as the day of rest, or a day without work. Furthermore, work is defined as one of thirty-nine specific actions, the melakhot, that are specifically prohibited. This chapter, along with the next, develops a new critical language rooted in Jewish ideas that can be used to interpret and critique contemporary Jewish art productively. To do this, biblical definitions of work are compared to artistic views of process from the 1960s and 1970s. The comparison of Jewish and artistic ideas highlights the unique elements of the Mishnah’s definition of creative work and informs how we look at contemporary Jewish art. The lists that opened this chapter provide a perfect starting point. At first they appear to be two catalogs of verbs. The first, by Minimalist Richard Serra (who is of Jewish descent), catalogs activities that could be performed to make an artwork. Many of his sculptures, as will be discussed later, demonstrate one or more of these verbs. The second list, found in the Mishnah, is a list of actions forbidden on the Sabbath: the melakhot, which can be translated as “creative activities.” As similar as these two lists seem, the meaning behind each is quite different. Even though artists and rabbis alike explored the nature of actions and work, their reasons for doing so were vastly different. Artists and critics asked “what is work?” to challenge artistic convention. Artists in the 1960s who explored the nature of work developed Conceptual art, Minimal art, postmodern dance, and performance art, examples of which will be presented later in the chapter. Artists developed individual working methods and used materials tailored to each artwork. Artists’ experiments challenged the limits of traditional artistic techniques, such as painting and carving, by including ordinary activities as part of their métier—eventually demonstrating that nearly any kind of “work” could be employed to make art. In many instances, both the finished work and the creative process are important to the artwork’s meaning. However, to advise those who wished to observe religious law, rabbis asked, “What is work?” It turns out that what Jewish law requires for an action to be called work shares many similarities with expanded creative processes. Yet not all actions are creative. Only the melakhot, as will be shown, are thought to be creative. Work must be cutting, sowing, weaving, or any

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other of the thirty-nine activities listed at the opening of this chapter—but the criteria do not stop there. To be work, the action must create something that lasts and that has a purpose or benefit. In fact, with respect to creativity, in Jewish law, process and its effects are indelibly linked. An action is not creative unless certain additional criteria are met, one of which is that the action has a permanent result. Rosenberg, it is interesting to remember, refused to allow action by itself to be a work of art—an artwork must still be a painting, sculpture, or other physical object. More simply, whatever effect an activity has must be permanent. Rabbinic discussion is more than an exercise into the nature of creativity. Defining “work” has a theological purpose that brings us back to considerations of the fourth commandment. The rabbis wanted to understand exactly how to follow its injunction to honor the Sabbath, one of the most important holidays of the Jewish calendar and the only one explicitly mentioned in the Ten Commandments. Even so, the interplay between artistic process and rabbinic definitions of work brings us closer to a critical understanding of contemporary Jewish art.

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The Sabbath is commonly thought of as the day of rest, a time of prayer, community, and contemplation. The fourth commandment reads: “Remember the Sabbath, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is Sabbath unto the Lord Your God, in it you shall not do any manner of work . . . for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh.”1 At first glance, the commandment sounds like a general statement forbidding work on the Sabbath. However, a closer reading, which requires the use of interpretive tools, offers a different interpretation. Biblical interpretation, or exegesis, follows a set of conventional practices. First, exegesis assumes that word choice is important. If two different words are used, then they must refer to two different things. Second, if two passages contain the same word or repeated text, then there is a connection between them. Passages linked by repetition can be far apart. These two interpretive tools, using different words to mean different things and repeating a word or

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Melakhot, Creative Activities, Practice

Judaism’s Definition of Work

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Image, Action, and Idea

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phrase to draw a connection between ideas, develops a rich reading of the fourth commandment. To discover this meaning, it is necessary to read the text one line at a time. The commandment begins, “Six days you shall labor, and do all your work.” In this sentence, the Hebrew word for labor is avodah, and the word for work is melakhot. Following the first interpretive principle, the words “labor” and “work” refer to two different kinds of activities. Additionally, these words are connected with an “and,” which further highlights their difference. The commandment continues with, on the Sabbath, “you shall not do any manner of work.” Since word choice is important, only work (melakhot) is prohibited on the Sabbath, not labor (avodah). The commandment then ends by repeating the story of creation in which God created the world. The restatement of Genesis creates a link between when God created the world, and rested on the seventh day, and the workweek that is followed by the Sabbath. Through the repetition, human and divine work and rest are related to one another. Work is forbidden on the Sabbath and is the human equivalent of whatever God did when he created the universe. God did not labor; he worked. But what exactly is work? What are the melakhot and how are they different from labor, avodah? Scriptural exegesis developed a very particular answer that relies on the second interpretive tool—when a word or phrase is repeated, even in discontinuous sections, a connection can be made between the two parts of the text. For example, the term melakhot refers to more than one thing. First, it refers to the kind of work forbidden on the Sabbath outlined in the fourth commandment. Second, it describes Bezalel, the first artist in the Bible described in the book of Exodus. Bezalel was endowed “with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.”2 The word “workmanship,” used to describe Bezalel’s abilities, and “work” share the same Hebrew root and are interpreted to have the same meaning, given biblical exegesis. Bezalel was responsible for making the Mishkan, the tabernacle that the Israelites carried with them through the wilderness, as well as its ritual objects and the garments the priests wore.3 After Bezalel’s attributes are described, the commandment to observe the Sabbath is restated again. According to biblical exegesis, the repetition of the fourth commandment therefore equates Bezalel’s activities to those things that are forbidden on the Sabbath. Similarly, the fourth commandment is

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Creative Work’s Other Criteria

Additionally, work as creativity has three additional criteria. First, the melakhot must be performed in an ordinary manner. If one pretends to hammer a nail or hammers it with a water balloon, the nail may get wet but it is not driven into the wood; therefore, this action is not thought of as work. The Mishnah, the oral law that elaborates on the Torah, contains specific examples, one of which concerns writing. The Mishnah states that writing

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followed by a restatement of the story of Genesis. These repetitions link the story of creation, the fourth commandment, the Sabbath, and Bezalel’s activities. Still, what are melakhot, specifically? For theological purposes, we need to determine precisely what activities are prohibited so that we know how to honor the Sabbath. Vague descriptions of “all your work” or even Bezalel’s crafts are not sufficient to comply with the law. The rabbis determined a precise definition of work based on the specific tasks Bezalel performed as he built the tabernacle and its accompanying ritual objects. The list of melakhot the rabbis developed is a comprehensive accounting of all the activities involved in building the tabernacle. It includes what are thought of as craft processes, such as weaving threads to make linen, and all the steps that lead up to creating the fabric. For example, linen comes from flax that is grown. Therefore, sowing, reaping, and spinning flax to make linen fiber are included. From today’s perspective, farming has little to do with spinning and weaving, so to the modern ear, the list of melakhot seems to include art and craft processes, agricultural tasks, building construction, and tanning leather. Nevertheless, the exclusion of the melakhot from the Sabbath is the human parallel of divine creation and highlights the idea that creation— creating—at any level is important. Ultimately, then, Judaism sees work in a radically different way than mainstream society does; work is synonymous with creativity. Those who honor the Sabbath recognize God’s creation, but they also recognize the (creative) work they completed during the week, hoping it can be found to be “good,” just as God did at the end of the story of creation.4 The Sabbath, the day of rest, is set apart from the rest of the week because it is the day God finished his (creative) work.

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two letters is one of the melakhot. However, if one were to do it, say, “with the back of his hand, with his foot, with his mouth, or with his elbow,” then one has not broken the laws of the Sabbath, because these are not ordinary ways of writing. Second, an action must create a lasting effect. If one were to write with clear water, fruit juice, dust, or in sand, the letters would either evaporate or wash away; they do not “endure,” and therefore this activity is not work.5 Third, the activity must bring a project closer to completion. Any action that is part of a longer process is creative work. One rabbi in the Mishnah reasoned that every strike of the blacksmith’s hammer is creative work because it improves the metal and brings the project a little closer to completion.6 Overall, Judaism has a unique definition of work. All work is creative and must also be purposeful, lasting, and improve something. This definition distinguishes melakhot from avodah, work from labor, and is a curious distinction not typically made in English.

Image, Action, and Idea

Artistic Definitions of Work

Artists have also considered the question, “What is work?” Their answers have had some of the same characteristics as those discussed by the rabbis in Jewish texts, such as an action that has a physical result. In the 1960s, artists experimented with processes and materials. Their experiments were responses to Abstract Expressionism’s dominance, an art that prized the hand of the artist and embraced the idea that the personality and vitality of the artist could be seen in the way paint was applied to the canvas. A few years before Minimalism became recognized as a style, Robert Rauschenberg deflated the belief that the gestural mark carried expressive qualities unique to the artist with his Factum I and Factum II (1957), on which he placed matching smeared and dripped paint strokes on two separate canvases. The repeated “action” contradicted Rosenberg’s view that a painting is a reflection of a unique moment in the life of an artist. Although Factum I and II may have only influenced a handful of artists directly, challenges to Abstract Expressionism continued, particularly to Rosenberg’s notion that artworks reflect their creators’ unique personality. Minimalist artists preferred to make their artwork as plain and straightforward as possible, and they developed artistic methods accordingly. Their interests gave rise to

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several different styles, including not only Minimalism but also Conceptual art and postmodern dance. Unlike Allan Kaprow, however, who wanted art to be indistinguishable from ordinary experience, and Walter de Maria, who equated the best art with “meaningless work”—both discussed in chapter 1—most other artists still made objects for the gallery and performances for the stage. Minimalism, Conceptualism, and postmodern dance were particularly marked by the motivation to reduce individual expression. Richard Serra and Yvonne Rainer are two artists who wanted to remove all personal qualities from their work. They developed methods using simple actions that resulted, respectively, in sculptures and choreographed dances. Serra and Rainer, among others, avoided self-expression and minimized the uniqueness of the individual in several ways. Minimalist sculptors hired fabricators to make their sculptures; Conceptual artists developed instructions that either they or others followed to make an artwork; and postmodern choreographers used untrained dancers. Each of these three strategies demonstrated how artistic process became as workmanlike and mundane as possible. Serra, known for sculptures made out of thick sheets of steel that lean and bend to support themselves, proposed that ordinary activities could generate a work of art. In this, he was representative of other artists working in New York in the 1960s. His “Verbs to Relate to Oneself ” (1967–68), an excerpt from which opened this chapter, inventories dozens of actions one might perform. Serra’s “Verbs” might be thought of as the blueprint for many of his early works, such as One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969), constructed with four high-gauge sheets of steel that lean against one another like a house of cards. Reflecting on his early work more than a decade later, Serra wrote, “When I started, we were hand-manipulating pieces. These pieces were not joined in any permanent manner. The only possible means to erect them was with the help of other people who were choreographed in relation to the material.”7 The artist described the precariousness of these early sculptures and the simple construction, reliant on only human strength and gravity. Serra described building the work as choreography that highlights the organized, handmade aspects of his process. Other Minimalists used newly available materials and manufacturing processes to further reduce personal expression from the final product. In her book Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective, art historian Frances Colpitt

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calls attention to the type of materials the Minimalists employed. Newly available industrial materials such as sheet metal, Plexiglas, and plywood were affordable and offered novel opportunities. Donald Judd, a Minimalist sculptor and art critic, worked with plywood because it was both easy to work with and readily available.8 The choice of materials had another effect. “Industrial materials also contribute to the sheer abstractness or nonreferential quality of the objects,” Colpitt writes. “Aside from the materials’ obvious origin in the practical arts, they do not seem to have a history outside of the works of art themselves. They are plainly the stuff of which the object is made.”9 Artists intentionally left the materials used to make the sculpture visible. Colpitt explains why Minimalist artists were attracted to manufacturing processes. “Minimal artists tended to treat the process of making the work of art as logical and practical,” she describes, “pursuing the efficiency and innovations of science and technology, which were very much a part of the space-age 60s. Recognizing that the primacy of conception demanded clear formal articulation, the artists called upon fabricators for the ability to do a better job.” It was not a matter of the artists doing it themselves, but rather finding others who could do it quickly and well. Like several others, Donald Judd retained manufacturing and engineering firms to assist him. Likewise, Sol LeWitt, a Conceptual artist known for giving instructions to others to make his wall drawings, said, “it was a matter of getting it done in a factory with people who knew how to do it.”10 Not all artists disavowed the artist’s hand. Eva Hesse, a Jewish émigré and close friend to Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and other Minimalists, made anthropomorphic sculpture. Repetition Nineteen III (1968) is a group of nineteen “bucket-like” fiberglass and polyester resin forms.11 The forms are handmade and irregular, unlike her peers’ work made by fabricators. At the same time, her use of numerous individual units, made from newly available materials and viewed as one sculpture, connect her work to Carl Andre’s floor sculptures and Donald Judd’s Untitled Stack (1967), a column of discrete metal boxes. At the same time, Hesse’s sculpture has a sensuality distinct from other Minimalists that invites different interpretations. Art historian Anna C. Chave writes, “In lieu of the apparently neutral and neutered forms commonly identified with minimalism, Hesse tendered forms more idiosyncratic, more suggestive of the body, and more patently open to

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the metaphoric valences that Minimalists claimed to abhor.” Comparison of her work to her male compatriots’ cool sculpture suggests to Chave that Hesse was a “protofeminist.”12 The work, though abstract in form, attracts because of its irregular surfaces. Hesse also openly discussed her life story and interpreted some Minimalism through her experience. Describing Andre’s metal tile floor sculpture, she said, “It does something to my insides. His metal plates were the concentration camp for me. [T]hey were those showers that they put on the gas.”13 Impersonality, for Hesse, had significant personal and historical meaning. The Minimalists turned to a type of work and materials originating from outside of traditional artistic practice. In most cases, artists turned to manufacturing and technology because these approaches limited personal expression. Art produced by blueprint and specification redefined artistic work. The use of fabrication had another effect; the artwork began to resemble mass-produced goods churned out by the factory worker rather than a unique object that only the artist could create. Choreographers also developed working methods to reduce personal expression. Many of them used simple actions to compose dances. Some choreographers presented ordinary motions as dance. A group of choreographers who organized concerts at the Judson Church in New York City explored how a dance could be made with simple actions. “Once such ordinary movements were used as choreographic possibilities, eating, walking, sitting, standing, talking, and other actions were embraced as dance movements,”14 said Yvonne Rainer, who was a member of the Judson Church collective. In Room Service (1964) she included a mattress that was carried in and out of the theater, “creating a formal, choreographic parallel between the two moving things—the body and the object. A kind of equality or duet resulted.”15 Carrying a mattress is a particularly cumbersome activity. There is no graceful way to do it. The mattress’s bulk shifted the dancer’s focus from performing in front of an audience to completing a task. Postmodern dance of the 1960s relied heavily on the idea that the demonstration of an action was enough to be a choreographed dance. In most of these artistic experiments, self-expression as a marker of the artist’s unique vision was shunned in favor of straightforward demonstration. Another choreographer, Simone Forti, applied the same strategy in her work Slant Board (1961). During the performance, dancers manipulated

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ropes tied to a board erected at a sharp incline against the wall. By pulling the ropes, the dancers could walk up and down the surface, suspend themselves off the floor, and otherwise get into other unusual positions, all the while pulling, tugging, and tying the ropes about their bodies. Forti’s choreography resembled workmanlike tasks rather than dancelike movements.

Image, Action, and Idea

What Did the Critics Think of Plain Action?

Critics had a difficult time understanding Minimalism and postmodern dance. Critical methods exercised in the past were no longer adequate to parse the new artwork. Greenberg’s formalist analysis, with its interest in color, composition, and expressive marks, had little meaningful to say about Serra’s demonstrations of propping or bending, for example. Similarly, an artist’s unique experience of painting, important to Rosenberg’s analysis, offered no insights into either sculpture or dance. Minimalist sculpture and postmodern dance, in fact, rejected any psychological or expressive character associated with artists’ movements in front of either the art object or the audience. Without a critical stance from which to describe the new work, critics had difficulty understanding what the Minimalists made. The work was lampooned as boring and “Know-Nothing Nihilism.”16 However, there were a few critical voices trying to understand what the artists were doing. One approach was to compare several recent works instead of attempting to discover artistic precedent. Even though Rainer’s dances included ordinary movements and awkward tasks, the experiential character of her performances was distinct from Kaprow’s Happenings, which were loosely scripted performances during which participants were given tremendous latitude to determine the manner in which to carry out simple directions. Describing the difference, Jill Johnson, a prolific dance critic, wrote, “I much prefer [Rainer’s choreographic] dallying . . . to that clatterbanging burlesque of a fertility rite that didn’t dally enough to be interesting Art and wasn’t real enough to be a moving experience.”17 Johnson noted a difference between Rainer’s composed dances and Kaprow’s “clatterbanging burlesque.” To the critic, Rainer’s movements seemed to have a purpose, albeit vague at times, while she could find no meaning in Kaprow’s Happenings.

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Another critical approach shared the same central questions asked by the artists, namely, “What is work?”—or “What constitutes a work of art?” Philosopher and art critic Richard Wollheim described why viewers had such a hard time with Minimalism. In his landmark essay, “Minimal Art,” he focused his attention on sculpture. One of the objections, as he saw it, was the appearance that very little effort was visible. If an artist simply provides a set of instructions to a fabricator, it seemed to Wollheim, then artistic skill was unnecessary. “Minimal Art,” he argued, contained “minimal art content.”18 Furthermore, as artists delegated tasks to fabricators or museum staff, the traditional role of the artist was diminished. The audience’s skepticism was quite understandable. Coming on the heels of Abstract Expressionism—in which every nuanced brushstroke was in some way telling of the artist’s genius—a plain gray box or chalked line appeared paltry in comparison. Wollheim wrote, “I suspect our principal reason for resisting the claims of Minimal Art is that its objects fail to evince what we have over the centuries come to regard as an essential ingredient in art: work, or manifest effort. And here it is not an issue, as it was in certain Renaissance disputes, of whether the work is insufficiently or excessively banausic, but simply whether it took place at all.” Banausic, or uninspired, work is still work; however, the audience had expectations of the artwork, and when those were unfulfilled the art was not well received. “For the production of an art object consists, first of all,” Wollheim protested, “in a phase that might be called, perhaps oversimply, ‘work’ tout court: that is to say, the putting of paint on canvas, the hacking of stone, the welding of metal elements.”19 Simply, the artist must do something. In his extended aesthetic treatise Painting as an Art, Wollheim recognized that the activity of painting does not always lead to the development of an artwork: “Painting does not acquire the status of art as a direct reward for the intentions that cause it.” To put paint on a surface is simply an activity; for that activity to become part of an artistic process requires that “unintentional aspects of the painting” be converted “into intentional aspects.” Wollheim sought an adequate description of the moment at which the result of painting a collection of marks is transformed from a record of an activity into a proper picture. This happens only when certain conditions are met. “From mark all the way to image the thematized aspects I have isolated have been aspects of the painting that readily get captured by words.”20 To

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say it another way, the manner in which the collection of marks coalesces into an image is style. However, Wollheim is not simply after a philosophical understanding of painting. He differentiates painting a picture from its ordinary procedural twin of painting a wall, for example. While his extended examination of painting focuses on traditional artistic practice, he recognizes in Minimal Art that some artists no longer require or even seek an unequivocal conversion of the basic act of applying pigment to a surface into an artistic process. Frank Stella’s “Black Paintings” confound the difference between utilitarian painting and artistic painting that Wollheim seeks. Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) is organized around central vertical and horizontal axes. Perpendicular black stripes follow the shape of the four quadrants until the entire canvas is filled. Stella left space between each stripe, exposing the bare canvas below. The artist’s painting method is utilitarian insofar as the arrangement and manner of application is matter-of-fact. Stella’s working method echoes that of the Minimalists already discussed. Wollheim, then, might view Stella’s actions as not quite achieving an artistic result, or at best having only “minimal art content.” But viewing Stella’s painting on purely formal terms disregards the chosen title. Die Fahne Hoch! is one of three paintings with titles that reflect Stella’s interest in World War II and Nazism, and yet, when a retrospective of his work was organized at The Museum of Modern Art in 1970, the curator William Rubin intentionally refrained from engaging the meaning of the titles too greatly in the catalog.21 Overall, the artists working in the 1960s were intent on experimenting with what artistic processes could be and what constitutes a work of art. For artists like Serra and Stella and choreographers such as Rainer and Forti, the outcome had to still be a thing or recognizable performance. More generally, artistic methods expanded to include factory fabrication, the demonstration of a verb (to use Serra’s terminology), and commonplace movements. The artists showed that plain actions were, in fact, sufficient to make a work of art. Be it sculpture, painting, or dance, the simple fact that something occurred seemed enough for the artists. Minimalists and postmodern choreographers were intent on creating works of art that demonstrated activities. Meaning and subject matter, when present, appeared more or less incidental. These artists did not set out to make work about a subject or to refer to a narrative. They simply aimed to demonstrate action.

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The deadpan, seemingly meaningless work produced by Minimalists and postmodern choreographers of the 1960s influenced art produced in the 1970s. The clearest influence was the continued use of ordinary actions as part of an artistic process; however, the straightforward demonstration of an action ceased to satisfy the next generation of artists, and even some who had been active in the 1960s. Instead, artists increasingly wanted to make work about the problems they faced. One such subject that rose to prominence in the 1970s was the place of women in society. Several artists for whom feminist ideas and practice were of interest used craft processes or performed household chores, traditionally associated with women, as a way to connect ordinary activities with this theme. For example, Rosemarie Trockel used women’s work—needlework and handicraft—as a means to refer to the status of women in society. Similarly, Mierle Laderman Ukeles compared housework and menial labor in her performance art. In each of these examples, the artists were not just demonstrating that simple actions could be used to make a work of art but rather that the tasks themselves already had associative meaning that could become part of the artwork’s meaning. Trockel’s knitted paintings were formalist compositions of color and texture, made with yarn instead of paint on canvas. According to art historian and critic Paula Owen, “the feminist contentions of . . . Trockel’s knitted works are dependent on the anachronistic, usually domestic or quotidian means of fabrication.”22 While Trockel’s compositions were informed by abstract painting from the middle of the twentieth century, knitting puts an ordinary activity in opposition to the high-minded ideals of painting. As Trockel used it, the mundane act of knitting became symbolically significant. In “Fabrication and Encounter: When Content Is a Verb,” Owen discussed how handicraft and needlework expanded and challenged the limits of fine art. She was particularly interested in Process art, artworks that demonstrate the techniques used by the artist. “Driven in part by a reaction to Minimalism and more recently to Conceptualism, the rise of process art can also be attributed to the critique of the canon of Western aesthetics by feminist and non-Western artists.” Owen saw Trockel’s knitted paintings

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Meaningful Actions

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and Process art as offering redress to the limited view of art history that highlights painting and sculpture as vehicles for aesthetic contemplation to the neglect of the physical senses. “In these works, the content is not wholly fixed but occurs—at least in large part—during production.”23 Furthermore, “this kind of art replaces detached contemplation with physical engagement and the visceral response that accompanies it.”24 Handicraft challenged the aesthetic detachment associated with Minimalism. Jewish performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles is another person for whom action bears meaning. Beginning in the late 1960s, she proposed the radical notion that housework and maintenance activities, though not generative of new things, were just as important as creating a work of art. This idea emerged as Ukeles’s artistic career collided with her responsibilities as a mother. Jessica Weisberg, a writer and editor, recounted this conflict in an interview she conducted with the artist. Laderman Ukeles became interested in boredom when she became a mother. “I had become an artist to live a life of freedom,” she said. “I would have run a mile a way [sic] to avoid repetitive tasks. I avoided anything, to the extreme that wasn’t ‘my work.’” When she and her husband, Jacob Ukeles, had their first child, in 1968, those tasks became impossible to avoid; the hardest work she did each day, far harder than constructing the Minimalist inflatable sculptures she was working on at the time, was the host of exhausting tasks necessary for keeping her children clothed and healthy. But this wasn’t considered work in the circle she ran with. “People would be like, ‘Do you do anything?’ I felt myself sliding out from this entitled class. And it was stupid.

Image, Action, and Idea

It pissed me off,” she said.25

Ukeles equated the neglected and difficult housework she abhorred to fine art. Given the earlier generation of artists’ interest in performing non-art-like tasks to make art, cleaning the floor or another household chore might seem to fit in quite well. However, Ukeles wasn’t interested in simply expanding what actions could be considered artistic; she very clearly limited her expansion of process to maintenance activities for a reason. Unlike so many others, she understood that whatever gains artistic experimentation may have created, without preservation or constant reminder, all would be forgotten. Her “Maintenance Art Manifesto” from 1969, an

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artist’s statement, described how, while not glamorous, maintenance preserves aesthetic gains.26 The manifesto begins with two definitions.

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The Death Instinct: separation; individuality; Avant-Garde par excellence; to follow one’s path to death—do your own thing; dynamic change. The Life Instinct: unification; the eternal return; the perpetual, and of the species; survival systems and operations; equilibrium.

Ukeles saw a dynamic relationship between the development of new ideas and a need to maintain and sustain them. The avant-garde related to the “death instinct” while maintenance was connected to life. Her statements seem to fly in the face of the common belief that creativity thrives when rules are broken. Ukeles took the opposite view and associated complete artistic freedom, near anarchy, with death, while the life instinct required continual care. There are a few quintessential examples of Ukeles’s work, including the pair entitled Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Inside (1973) and Washing/Tracks/ Maintenance: Outside (1973, fig. 4). In both, the artist scrubbed the floor on her hands and knees. Referring to these as “floor paintings,” Ukeles defined her activity as art and traced its lineage at least to Pollock, who painted on the floor of his studio. Furthermore, when Ukeles cleaned a vitrine in the museum, the glass case ceased being a protective object and became a “dust painting.” The care of the vitrine was transferred from the janitorial to the curatorial staff.28 More than simply comparing dusting to painting, Ukeles demonstrated a different ideology of work. Work that maintains, cleans, and prepares for the next day is just as important, though different from, creative work that generates a new object or invention. Helen Molesworth, an art historian and critic, drew out the connection between the advance of art with the need to refresh and preserve in Ukeles’s work. “Ukeles’s Manifesto insists that ideals of modernity (progress, change, individual creation) are dependent on the denigrated and boring labor of maintenance (activities that make things possible—cooking, cleaning, shopping, child rearing, and so forth). Incisively, Ukeles does not refer to maintenance as domestic labor, or housework, for it is evident that such labor is not confined solely to the spaces of domesticity.”29 Under this rubric, many ideas and activities became maintenance: the care of children, the

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nance

mainte -

27

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needs of community to create an ordered society, and art’s need for an audience. Moreover, Ukeles revealed a vision that equates creation with renewal. Molesworth’s erudite discussion of Ukeles and several other feminist artists described an underlying utopia:

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Feminism has long operated with the power (and limitations) of utopian thought. It is telling, then, that these artists have dovetailed the “what if” potential of both art and feminism.Yet they have not collapsed the distinction between art and life; rather, they have used art as a form of legitimated public discourse, a conduit through which to enter ideas into public discussion. So while all of the works expose the porosity between public and private spheres, none calls for the dismantling of these formations. Fictional as the division might be, the myth of a private sphere is too dear to relinquish.30

FIG. 4  Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside, 1973. Photographs and text, ed. 1/2, 65 1/4 × 76 5⁄8 inches. Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. In honor of Andrea Miller-Keller, Contemporary Art Purchase Fund, 1998.25.4. The image presented here is a documentary photograph of a performance during which Ukeles washed the floor and exterior stairs of the Wadsworth Athenaeum. She compared the act of scrubbing the floor to painting. This work demonstrates an artistic trend in the 1970s whereby artists began to use nonartistic activities to make an artwork.

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In the end, Ukeles is still an artist. She does not suggest that janitors and others who clean buildings make art. Nor is she suggesting a utopian view of a future in which equality between men and women has been achieved, where all contribute equally to housework, childcare, and breadwinning. Instead, she highlights the necessity of maintenance across all aspects of society. Her ideas can be generalized slightly to suggest that there will always be a need for different kinds of work; new things must be created and someone has to be there, as she says, to “pick up the garbage on Monday morning.”31 The “Maintenance Art Manifesto” requires equilibrium between invention and renewal.

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More important than the expansion of artistic practices is the intellectual and experiential relationship between creation and maintenance inspired by her activity. Ukeles does not present an impossible utopian vision because, in Molesworth’s words, “utopian language is vague, and for some time now such vagueness has produced frustration and dismissal. However, [Ukeles’ work] is a utopian language without the problematic proscriptive nature of previous utopian thought. Similarly, it is not a theoretical language that ends with a description of a system of an ideology. Instead, it offers speculation.”32 Ukeles’s ideas are speculative, not proscriptive or absolute. Moreover, her work demonstrates the slippery nature of action. An action can simply be the movements of a person in the middle of a task, but it can also achieve a goal, change an object, or be a bearer of associative meaning. Maintenance art is an excellent example of an artist’s ability to demonstrate both the simplicity of what it takes to make an artwork and also the complex meaning to which simple action can point.

Image, Action, and Idea

Melakhot in Contemporary Art

Thus far, this chapter has introduced several ideas. First, Judaism defines all work as creative. The melakhot, creative activities, form the basis of a practical understanding of what creative work entails, an understanding that is central to the observance of the fourth commandment. Judaism’s definition of work also requires that an action’s effect endure or be part of a process that leads to creating something. Second, artists in the 1960s and 1970s expanded definitions of creative work. Serra and Rainer demonstrated that simple actions could generate an artwork. Third, artists like Ukeles applied the same strategies as the Minimalists and postmodern choreographers, but they exploited meaning already associated with particular actions. Actions can be simple demonstrations of an activity or bear meaning from another source. We now turn our attention to the way Judaism’s definition of work—the melakhot—informs art. Some artists used the melakhot explicitly to plumb the associations between that specific list of activities and the Jewish meaning ascribed to it. But simply performing a particular action may not be enough to draw out the connection between it and Jewish thought. In this section, artists who

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are making the connection between the melakhot and artistic process will be discussed along with a few examples of incidental demonstrations of the melakhot. The difference between artistic references to Jewish thought and simple demonstration of one of the melakhot is critical. If an artist chooses an action because of its associated meaning, then the artwork can comment on that meaning directly. Archie Rand is known for brightly colored comic-book–like paintings. His series The 39 Forbidden Labors of the Sabbath, exhibited in 2006, includes a painting for each of the thirty-nine melakhot. Boneh (2006, fig. 5) depicts a woman walking along a city street under a scaffold. “Boneh” is written in a speech bubble coming from the upper-right corner of the image. Like Rand’s other work, this image draws on pulp fiction and other various cultural references. The setting captures the booming construction of 1930s New York, during which workers looked down from steel girders at the city street below. The thought bubble, “Boneh,” could just as easily be thought of as a catcall coming from an unseen construction worker in the rigging above. Rand’s series puts the melakhot into a modern setting. Artists need not refer to melakhot directly, though connections to them can be found in titles and in artists’ writings. Videographer and filmmaker Doug Rosenberg alludes to melakhot in several videos. Meditations: Labor (2010, fig. 6), a three-channel video, shows the artist pulling a large tree branch across a field in two of the screens. In the middle screen, the artist emerges from over a rise, carrying a bundle of firewood in his arms toward the viewer. Allusions to the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, during which the boy brings the wood for his own sacrifice, are clear, as is the fact that carrying is one of the melakhot. In another work, Lift/Carry/Hold (2010), the artist lifted and held a person for as long as he was able. The titles of both works invite the viewer to ponder the nature of labor, lifting, and holding. The titles also allude to a range of emotional states enacted by the performers. Doni Silver Simons, based in California, explores the melakha of untying in a series of works consisting of bare canvas, out of which she delicately pulled the weft and let the remaining strands hang loosely along the sides of the material. As she worked on Homage to a Fairy Tale (2012, fig. 7), Silver Simons thought about the miller’s daughter from “Rumpelstiltskin,” whose father boasted that she could spin straw into gold. Silver Simons compares the

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FIG. 5  Archie Rand, Boneh, 2006. Acrylic, enamel on canvas, 24 × 18 inches. This image is one of thirty-nine paintings that make up the Melakhot Series. The melakhot are creative activities specifically prohibited on the Sabbath. This image refers to one of those activities, construction. Instead of depicting a person building a house, Rand shows the view from a scaffold looking down at a woman walking on the street. Rand does not think of construction in the general sense, but in terms of building skyscrapers in New York City.

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impossible fairytale task to the one she assigned herself; the process of pulling one thread out at a time slowly turns ordinary material into something else. Along the way, the artist contemplated how something as simple as cloth could be turned into something meaningful. This transition was, for her, an attempt to seek the unknowable.33 Transforming materials and seeking the unknowable are two powerful motifs closely connected to the melakhot. Rosenberg and Silver Simons have found a correspondence between artistic ideas and Jewish thought. Their work quite explicitly discusses the two realms simultaneously. In a most gentle, yet powerful way, Meditations: Labor and Homage to a Fairy Tale do not beg the question, “What makes them Jewish?” Instead, something far more radical is asked: “What is artistic in Jewish thought?” This question is far wider than isolating Jewish content or iconography. Yet, to approach an answer, Rosenberg and Silver Simons have assimilated the lessons of the avant-garde of the last century into their work. The same can be said of Ken Goldman’s work. Goldman extends the idea of erasure, another forbidden activity, to cancelling a stamp. He designed a stamp that the United States Postal Service accepted as an official postal mark. The design, in elegant Hebrew print, bears one name, “Amalek.” Each time a stamp is cancelled, the United States government follows the commandment to “blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.”34 The commandment demands that Amalek’s name be blotted out, but it ends with “Thou shalt not forget.”35 One must both remember Amalek and erase his name from history. The dual commandment to remember and forget suggests constant repetition, much like the stream of cancelled stamps Goldman’s work calls to mind. The custom to erase Amalek’s name is longstanding. Some people test a pen by writing “Amalek” and then crossing it out. The cultural practice,

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FIG. 6 (opposite)  Douglas Rosenberg, Meditations: Labor, 2010. Video stills. This is a three-channel video that is projected onto separate screens. In two of the images, the artist drags a large tree branch across a field. In the central image, the artist approaches the camera from just over the rise of a hill, carrying a bundle of firewood. The title refers to a reflective examination of work. Carrying is one of the melakhot. FIG. 7  Doni Silver Simons, Homage to a Fairy Tale, 2012. Wooden structure, canvas, and durational performance, dimensions variable. Shulamit Nazarian Los Angeles. This is a photograph of the remnant of a performance during which the artist unraveled the edge of a plain cotton canvas. Each frayed strand was then collected in a separate container. The artist associates her activity with the character of the miller’s daughter, from the fairytale “Rumpelstiltskin,” who was forced to spin straw into gold; some alchemical change occurs, turning something plain into something beautiful. The act of unraveling is also one of the melakhot.

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to test a pen by crossing out Amalek’s name, is deeply ingrained; Goldman’s design brings the practice into the present. Goldman’s gesture relates to a commandment, a cultural expression of that commandment, contemporary interest in art in the public sphere, and one way to practice “blotting out” in contemporary society. Moreover, meaning is intimately tied to action. Rand, Silver Simons, Rosenberg, and Goldman use melakhot in a variety of ways. Each artist sees action not only as a process but also as a carrier of meaning within a Jewish context. Their art is only possible now, when action-qua-art is no longer radical but a natural outgrowth of the art of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, the melakhot as artistic process have been used, inadvertently, by avant-garde artists. Therefore, one must be careful to recognize when an artist turns to the melakhot in order to reference Jewish ideas and when this is not the intention. Take, for example, Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953), which exemplifies erasure, or Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield (1982), which includes sowing and reaping. These examples are important because they show that action, by itself, does not create meaning, but rather that Jewish artists intentionally access meaning from their tradition. In 1953, Robert Rauschenberg made a series of white paintings, some of which included several panels covered in house paint. As the series developed, Rauschenberg decided to make an image by erasure. In an interview, he described being unsatisfied with erasing his own drawings; something seemed to be missing. To erase one’s own work might simply be part of the process of developing a drawing—not a true erasure, one that destroyed an image. To execute the idea of erasure properly, Rauschenberg needed to erase an already finished artwork. Robert Rauschenberg recounts the day when he approached de Kooning for a drawing to erase. “Bill De Kooning was the best-known acceptable American artist that could be indisputably, [sic] considered art. And so I bought a bottle of Jack Daniels and hoped that he wouldn’t be home when I knocked on his door. And he was home. And we sat down with the Jack Daniels and I told him what my project was. He understood it and he said, ‘OK, I don’t like it, but I’m going to go along with it because I understand the idea.’”36 De Kooning then proceeded to select a drawing for Rauschenberg to erase. De Kooning decided it could not be just any drawing, but one that he’d miss. Further, he chose a picture that included crayon, pencil, and charcoal to make erasure difficult. It took Rauschenberg a month to erase it.37

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Giving Action a Religious Purpose

Thus far, we have compared melakhot to artistic and creative work. Action was limited to a specific view that included Judaism’s definition of work. Work is creative, enduring, productive, and limited to one of the thirty-nine

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While the White Paintings inspired the impulse to erase something, the work passed over subsequent conceptual hurdles. The artist could not just erase one of his own drawings, because that activity was already part of artistic revision; he needed to erase something that was already a completed work of art. De Kooning added yet another dimension: it needed to be something important, at least to one person. Moreover, if Rauschenberg really wanted to highlight erasure, then de Kooning wanted him to work for it. Perhaps that last hurdle was just as much a challenge as it was an opportunity to really involve erasing as an activity. Agnes Denes’s Wheatfield—A Confrontation is another work coincidentally demonstrating some of the melakhot: sowing and reaping. Denes tilled and planted two acres of wheat in lower Manhattan on landfill that extended from Manhattan Island into the Hudson River. Wheatfield was a site-specific and temporary piece that required preparing the soil, planting the seed, tending the plants, and harvesting the grain.38 “I believe that the new role of the artist,” Denes wrote eight years later, “is to create an art that is more than decoration, commodity, or political tool. . . . My concern is with the creation of a language of perception that allows the flow of information among alien systems and disciplines, eliminating the boundaries of art in order to make new associations and valid analogies possible.”39 Like other work previously discussed, Denes created meaning through her choice of work. Nevertheless, viewing Rauschenberg’s erasure and Denes’s sowing as analogous to the melakhot would be a mismatch between critical method and artwork. I do not intend to bring Erased de Kooning or Wheatfield into the fold of Jewish art. Nor am I trying to find within them a Jewish character to construct a broad and inclusive canon. My intention is to point out what Wollheim noticed about painting, restated in a Jewish context—that using one of the melakhot can refer to Judaism’s definition of creative work or it might simply be an expansion of artistic processes.

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melakhot. However, there are other ways to view action in Jewish thought and tradition. Perhaps the most apparent is ritual. Jewish rituals include lighting candles on the eve of Shabbat or Chanukkah, baking and eating a special bread called challah, washing hands, wearing a prayer shawl while praying, and many others. Reciting blessings, or brachot, accompanies these actions. Most blessings describe the action to which they are connected. For example, the blessing recited after lighting the Sabbath candles honors God, who “commanded us to light the Shabbat candles.” Objects used during these rituals are called Judaica and include candlesticks, menorahs, lavers, and prayer shawls. It should be noted that these objects are not sacred in and of themselves most of the time; they are simply used to perform a commanded ritual. For example, any pair of candlesticks will do, even though it is customary to use beautiful objects or family heirlooms whenever possible. Many artists augment or transform Judaica as they explore meaning and subject matter. Reinventing Ritual, an exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum mounted in 2009, centered on artistic explorations of ritual objects. Objects on display commented on contemporary issues, including environmentalism, feminism, and the continuing political unrest centered on Israel. Then-curator Daniel Belasco assembled this collection of artworks to present what he saw as artists’ central concerns. In his view, Judaica serves a double purpose. First, it connotes ritual action, which when used as art expands the definition of artistic process. Second, it provides a legible and material way for artists to communicate what is valuable to them. Setting their political and cultural values into a religious context gives their ideas added urgency. Belasco compared ritual with Rosenberg’s Action Painting, following the same reasoning found elsewhere in this chapter: as artistic processes expanded, virtually any activity could be used to make art. But for Reinventing Ritual, Belasco limited the scope of activities to Jewish rituals. Moreover, Jewish ritual colored by the inclusion of political and social subject matter creates a hybrid activity. Belasco developed a new term to describe this mixing of religious and political ideas: “Jewish action.” “Rosenberg’s notion of action can be recuperated and deployed in a different way,” Belasco argued. “To identify contemporary Jewish art and design, one must first identify what a Jewish action is.”40 Belasco believed that

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artists are interested in a synthesis of religious meaning and social issues. The artists in the exhibition turned to Jewish forms because they sought greater significance for daily activities, in opposition to what Belasco saw as the emptiness of consumer culture:

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Yet in reaction to the pervasiveness of consumer culture, artists today are using the essential things that all humans share—food, adornment, and the environment—as the materials of art. Because these commonalities are patterned and structured according to ritual and religious codes with symbolic and mythic resonance, artists wishing to discover deeper values and authentic experience in the everyday have renewed interest in traditional faiths. Many works, structured by direct and immediate exchanges and relations among people, objects, and experiences, create a small space of spiritual

For Belasco and the artists he described, contemporary culture lacks “deeper values and authentic experience” that religion offers. Moreover, the way we dress, eat, and use the environment is “patterned and structured according to ritual and religious codes.” The synthesis of contemporary mores and religion is a natural fit, according to Belasco. Overall, Belasco’s “Jewish action” is not merely a description of physical ritual but a conjunction of two ideas, Jewish ritual with political action. These works support the contemporary predilection for art that enlightens and, through its content, supports social change. Many of the artworks in Reinventing Ritual present political, social, or environmental ideals while appropriating religious forms. However, ritualizing current social mores may not always sit comfortably with the traditions and ethical values of Judaism; at times the oeuvre grafts social mores to religious belief too tightly.42 The challenge for many of these artworks is to develop a rich synthesis of religious and political ideas. Often the artist’s critique of environmentalism, feminism, or politics remains applied to the surface of the object as intellectual decoration. The most successful objects unify the physical activities that are part of the religious ritual with cultural critique. The next chapter will continue to investigate artistic examination of ritual. There, Jewish ritual includes more-than-common forms of Judaica and is the subject of artistic interest rather than a foil against which other ideas are placed.

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presence within the impersonal consumer lifestyle.41

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Other artists create new rituals, thereby removing narrow interpretations or specific references to established religions. Performance artist and filmmaker Joel Tauber grew up in an Orthodox family. His work explores ritual as a way to achieve the impossible, be that a connection with the divine or unaided flight. In Seven Attempts to Make a Ritual (2000–2001), a twenty-four-minute video, the artist buried himself up to his neck and placed himself in other precarious underground situations. During some of these excursions, the artist’s voice can be heard laboring under the self-imposed conditions and describing the experience.43 Just like Judaica, ritual becomes the frame within which artistic exploration takes place. This chapter examined the melakhot as artistic processes. At first glance, the Jewish definition of work seemed limited because it only contained thirty-nine possible activities; however, Judaism differentiates between work, which is creative, and labor. Similarly, artists have wrestled with the notion of work for decades. Artists in the 1960s and 1970s began to use everyday activities to make their work. Their experiments led to a range of artistic styles, including Minimalism, Conceptual art, and postmodern dance. Later, artists turned to actions and tasks that already had meaning. They exploited the associations that were connected to particular actions, such as needlework or mopping the floor, to create artworks that addressed specific subject matter. Evidence of action remained visible in the finished piece; however, some artworks highlighted meaning associated with the process, while others left the action bare. When one of the melakhot is used as artistic process, that action can be demonstrated plainly or it can contribute to richer meaning. Amalek Stamp is most meaningful when the stamp is cancelled and blotted out. Before that moment, the artwork only has the potential to elicit an action. Homage to a Fairy Tale is a performance as well as the result of that performance. Silver Simons invites the viewer to watch her unravel the cotton fabric. Even after the activity is completed, her actions remain visible by the frayed fabric. These works make reference to specific melakhot. Furthermore, the melakhot are key to understanding Judaism’s definition of creative work. The requirement that there must be a result or that something must be accomplished stands in contrast to artists such as Kaprow or de Maria, who are content with an activity without a result; their action is labor, avodah, as opposed to creative work, melakhot.

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The Jewish definition of work can inform mainstream art criticism, but, more importantly, it is a clear path toward a criticism of Jewish art. A new set of questions emerges: When do artists explore this definition, and when do they turn away from it? What does it mean for some actions to be creative and others not, particularly for working artists? How might artists respond to this new critical lens? This chapter provides a connection between the melakhot and artworks that allow the viewer to see some part of the artistic process. Examining artistic processes is not new; however, placing them in a Jewish context expands Jewish art criticism and balances image with action. By focusing on action and the melakhot, based on an interpretation of the fourth commandment, we construct an alternative to the second commandment as the foundation for Jewish art criticism. Moreover, we develop a critical method appropriate for contemporary Jewish art.

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3. Contemporary Jewish Art

These artists are steeped in Jewish tradition but walk freely in the secular realm of art and design as well. . . . Their art can only be fully understood by people acquainted with the ceremonies and rituals to which they allude. —DVORA LISS

In the previous chapter I proposed a criticism of Jewish art that relies on the fourth commandment. Our discussion of the nature of work, according to Jewish sources and based on the melakhot, allows us to focus on action. We see that meaning is derived, in part, from artistic process. This chapter builds on generic actions and turns toward actions that have established meaning: actions as motifs. Actions come from a variety of sources. In the last chapter, we saw how artists expand their working methods in idiosyncratic ways; they use actions derived from formal Jewish ritual, ordinary tasks that enable religious observance, and cultural customs. Formal rituals are activities that bear religious meaning and are accompanied by blessings, brachot. Blessings typically offer thanksgiving to the divine and then conclude with a phrase along the lines of “and commanded us to . . . ,” followed by a description of the action that accompanies the recitation. Formal rituals are not just markers of religious identity; they number among Judaism’s commandments. The first ten are well known, but there are many others. Formal ritual often has an object

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associated with the task. These include candlesticks, prayer shawls, menorahs, Kiddush cups, and tefillin (for a primer on these objects, turn back to the introduction). Decorated ritual objects add beauty and sanctity to the activity. Adding sanctity with beauty is called hiddur mitzvah; however, the artists in this chapter are interested in highlighting the act itself. Some ordinary tasks precede formal ritual. These activities prepare for religious observance but are not themselves required. These tasks include organizing a kitchen so that Jewish dietary laws, Kashrut, can be observed, as well as preparing for the Sabbath by cooking and cleaning the day before. While these activities typically occur the same way and at the same time each week, blessings do not accompany them. These ordinary tasks and some customary activities, which are either passed down through the family or locality, tolerate certain variation. Artists draw attention to these activities in interesting ways. Strategies include exaggerating the task by slowing it down, focusing on one of the senses in a heightened manner, or inviting the viewer to manipulate and touch the artwork. These strategies, along with other influences, come from contemporary art. Artists repurpose functional things; present activities in a deadpan, straightforward manner; and create surrealistic juxtapositions of elements that seem to be at odds with one another. It should be stressed that contemporary Jewish art is not limited to modified Judaica. Artists might explore traditions, customs, and laws that do not have an object or utensil associated with them. For example, Orthodox and traditional Jews study a page of Talmud every day; this tradition is called daf yomi, a page a day. Other than the text found in a book, wound in a scroll, or on a screen, study does not require standard utensils. By focusing on action, be it formal ritual or not, a picture of contemporary Jewish art comes into focus. This chapter aims to describe an emerging artistic sensibility drawn to the actions outlined in Jewish texts and traditions. The artists draw connections among contemporary artistic practice, the use of nontraditional materials and performance, various activities of ritual, and daily observance. These connections can be practical, as in how to perform a ritual, or conceptual, as some artworks refer to esoteric legal matters. The integration of Jewish thought and contemporary ideas is not arbitrary. The artists who are attentive to the connection between Judaism and art do not use Jewish art as a way to add an air of

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religious import to contemporary issues; rather, contemporary issues are only addressed if the artist finds a significant correspondence between the issue and an appropriate Jewish idea. At times, an artwork might even challenge a particular Jewish law, demonstrating that Judaism is not thought of as a monolithic, infallible religion, but rather should be subject to caring inquiry. Furthermore, the examples of Jewish art presented here do not aim to make Judaism more accessible. Instead, artworks demonstrate the congruence between Jewish thought and art in order to develop a robust criticism of Jewish art.

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Jewish Artists Today

As a group, contemporary Jewish artists neither seek an absolute break with the past nor aim to compel religious faith through a contemporary idiom. David Sperber, a curator whose work examines the differences between religious and secular art in Israel, describes the current situation: “The renewal in religious Jewish art creates a world of imagery that can be used to subject Judaism to a critical but loving examination. This kind of affinity can therefore challenge hegemonic discourse, which has adopted modernistic approaches according to which art is perceived solely as a field,” devoid of religion.1 Sperber highlights the willingness on the part of artists to explore Jewish texts as a way to understand Judaism and to challenge “modernistic approaches” to art, specifically the formalist attention to composition and the general rejection of identifiable religious subject matter. At the same time, some artists enrich religious motifs with contemporary issues. However, the artists included in this chapter are not so much anti-establishment; rather, they seek redress of grievances. Their work may challenge religious conventions, but the goal is not wholesale abandonment of tradition. Sperber finds that religious feminist art, in particular, differs dramatically from its secular twin. He writes, “A scrutiny of the difference between religious-feminist and secular-Israeli art does not confirm common dichotomous distinctions between validation of tradition on the one hand, and freedom and defiance, on the other.”2 Religious feminism is a testament to the seriousness with which women take their positive roles in society and their religion.

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Religious feminism exists beyond the arts. Tali Berner accentuates a new perspective that looks to art as a vehicle to critique and promote religious views. She writes, “The choice of religious women not to concede their feminist commitment—or the choice of feminist women not to concede their religious faith—is neither simple nor obvious, but most of the women who are active in religious feminism view it as critical and essential, and refuse to forfeit either of these important components of their identity and consciousness. It is this resolute determination that spawned religious feminism, the history of which remains unwritten.”3 An example of the “resolute determination” to blend Judaism with feminist concerns has emerged in the new religious and scholarly title maharat, an acronym for manhiga hilkhatit rukhanit toranit, meaning a woman trained in Jewish law and spiritual leadership.4 The maharat credential grants women the authority and permission to interpret Torah and to rule on religious law within the Modern Orthodox community, activities traditionally reserved for rabbis; however, they are not female rabbis.5 The women who pursue this education demonstrate a commitment to orthodoxy, including different responsibilities and honors for the sexes. Maharat represents a continuous dialogue between tradition and modernity in which the preference for secularism, the historical predilection, is measured against the benefits of tradition. Religious feminism serves as a good example to help us understand the perspective of religious art throughout this book. Artists reinforce their ability to admire and learn from Judaism even though they express its ideals in nontraditional and at times challenging ways, irrespective of their individual level of observance. Their love of Judaism is expressed in connection with their love of art. The tandem exposure to Jewish law and contemporary art creates fertile ground for artists. They notice surprising correspondences between the two traditions. No single characterization adequately explains from where these interests come; it is multidirectional. For example, religious Jews turn to the arts. In fact, some religious institutions now offer art as part of their curriculum.6 Other artists examine Jewish texts beyond narrative. These artists focus on Jewish ritual, custom, and law and come from a range of religious backgrounds. Some are children of Orthodox rabbis and continue to live religious lives. Others identify primarily as artists but find synergy between their studio practice and certain Jewish ideas. These artists are drawn to

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Jewish art because of the connections between art and Judaism that they discover in the studio.

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Critics Focus on the Wrong Things

Critics have a difficult time with religious art. Preconceived ideas of religion in art tend to distract attention away from engagement with some artworks. A common view sees religious art as sentimental, spiritual, or devotional in purpose. Moreover, there is occasional suspicion that religious art intends to proselytize, or put another way, that some artists have unspoken ulterior motives. Some critics voice extreme views against any religious references. “I think contemporary art just doesn’t do religion,”7 stated Kajri Jain, professor of visual studies, during a symposium on art and religion at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal in 2010. In essence, Jain contends that contemporary art and religion are mutually exclusive, and that a rejection of religion is characteristic of what it means to be contemporary. Art historian and critic James Elkins had previously tried to describe in more precise terms how artists, curators, and museum professionals view religion. He writes, “The art world can accept a wide range of ‘religious’ art by people who hate religion, by people who are deeply uncertain about it, by the disgruntled and the disaffected and the skeptical, but there is no place for artists who express straightforward, ordinary religious faith.” To be fully assimilated into the art world, one must have “second thoughts about religion . . . because otherwise it looks as if art is playing propagandist.”8 Elkins allows for the use of religious subject matter so long as it is ridiculed or viewed with suspicion. Some in Israel share these views. Gideon Ofrat, a curator and critic, writes, “I have no interest in calling for removal of the kippah in practice—merely for its conceptual removal, albeit temporary and partial—the moment one walks into the studio. As if to say: ‘Take your kippah off your head, for the ground where you are standing is—not holy!’”9 As colorful as this remark is, his rejection of religious art goes even further. “Observant artists . . . tend to assert faith and ideology as artistic content [that] weighs them down until they drown in a shallow swamp having absolutely nothing to do with the formal and content-based complexity of 150 years of

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modern (not to mention postmodern) art.”10 Ofrat defends the “formal and content-based complexity” of the last century and a half with full disregard for the nuances and contradictions that contemporary religious artists find as they explore the connections between contemporary art and Judaism. Others take a more clear-eyed approach. Jeremy Biles, philosopher and editor of Chicago Artists’ News, suggests that the fault of misunderstanding lies not with misplaced devotion on the part of the artists but with those attempting to understand contemporary religious art. “It is not these artists,” opines Biles, “who are somehow out of step or retrograde; rather, it is the art critics and theorists who are lagging in their failure to register the religious (re)turn that has for some time inflected other realms of discourse, such as philosophy and literary theory.”11 Art criticism that summarily rejects religion can be recognized by its quick judgment of religious imagery as parochial. “One symptom . . . among some critics is the almost reflexive association of religion with sentimentality, saccharine expression, and candid public affect. But to mechanically associate religious belief and expressions with sentimentality, schmaltziness, or kitsch is simply to ignore the most interesting and vital forms of contemporary religious thought, which . . . is rife with skepticism and risk, guided by critical inquiry, and informed by a sophisticated irony.”12 Biles contends that religious art may in fact contain all of the elements Elkins and Ofrat require: skepticism, risk, and critical inquiry. David Morgan diagnoses the gap between religion and art differently. Assigning no blame, he recognizes that different disciplines have different concerns. Those who study religion and religious practice ask different questions than art historians and critics who are not directly concerned with “lived religion and its many everyday visual practices.”13 In other words, most art theorists are far removed from the day-to-day lives of practitioners. Moreover, there is little willingness to participate in interdisciplinary study. “The bridge-work necessary to connect the two disparate domains—critical theory of art and the world of religious institutions, on the one hand, and the popular culture of religious visual practice, on the other—is not highly developed.”14 He recognizes a difference between religious cultures as lived by adherents and how artists, art historians, and others view religion. As a result, “critical theory” rarely attempts to appreciate the intricacies of practical religious observance. Art theory and criticism have concerns other than getting to know the ins and outs of religious life; thus, critics miss

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the blending of practical religion and artistic development that takes place in artists’ studios across the globe. These critics summarily reject religious subject matter and hold on to formalist criticism and topics they deem appropriate to contemporary art. Religion is not among them. There are a few daring scholars who ignore the argument that art and religion are at odds with one another. They see the dichotomy as a false choice—and it is. In Israel, curators have examined both religious feminist art and ritual. In addition to Sperber, discussed above, Dvora Liss, curator at the Mishkan Museum of Art, has mounted exhibitions that focus on ritual objects. In the United States, art historian Matthew Baigell, critic Richard McBee, artist and curator Tobi Kahn, and artists’ groups engage the subject.

Image, Action, and Idea

Jewish Art and the Divide Between Religion and Art

There are contemporary artists who plumb the depths of Judaism for subject matter. Many of these artists are religious and turn aspects of their daily religious practice into artistic practice, while others who are neither traditional nor Orthodox find particular Jewish ideas and customs compelling for a variety of reasons. These artists find meaning in Jewish activity and use it as both religious and artistic process. As Morgan noted, the “bridge-work” needed to connect an understanding of religious practice to contemporary art is underdeveloped—except in the work being produced by these artists. It is exactly the link between religious and artistic thought and practice that motivates much of the work discussed in this chapter. Action is the link that ties them together most fruitfully. Questions of assimilation and identification are important, but they are not the sine qua non of the artworks in question. For example, Ken Goldman made a kippah out of his own hair. At first, his work may appear to be about identity, using fashion as a marker of group identification, as other artists have done. However, the artist has a different target: critics of Jewish art. In With Without (2011, fig. 8), Goldman presents a digital print of a performance showing a man wearing glasses and a white collared shirt, seen from behind. The perspective is from just above the figure, looking down over his left shoulder. His hair is trimmed close to his head except for a circle where the kippah would sit, if there were one. The hair

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FIG. 8  Ken Goldman, With Without, 2011. Performance, digital print. This is photographic documentation of a performance in which the artist shaved his head except for the area upon which a kippah, or skullcap, would rest. This gives the appearance that the artist is in fact wearing a head covering even when he is not. The artwork critiques the idea that religion and art are exclusive realms.

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is just a bit longer on the crown of his head—a reverse tonsure. Upon first glance, it appears that the man wears a knitted kippah. Even more striking, this work is a performance. The artist wore his hair this way until it grew in.15 About With Without, Richard McBee writes, “What happens when by some unforeseen circumstance no head covering is available? Is one perforce ‘naked’ or does a ‘ghost kippah’ of your own hair grow in its place?”16 McBee suggests religious fervor so corporeal that the body is trained to it. With Without also touches on identity in the same way as another work discussed by Norman Kleeblatt in his essay “‘Passing’ into Multiculturalism” (1996). Kleeblatt, then chief curator of the Jewish Museum in New York City, discusses how assimilation and group identification pose a dilemma between fitting in and accepting difference. In his essay, Kleeblatt discusses Dennis Kardon’s double self-portrait, Lover’s Quarrel (1994). As in With Without, the painting depicts two figures, seen from the back, wearing head coverings. Kleeblatt describes the disposition of the men. They are, “attached . . . as if they were Siamese twins. A scar appears at the joint between the two nearly identical figures. One of the likenesses is wearing a baseball cap—the current popular male fashion accessory—the other a skullcap. These two selves, the secular and the religious, signal Kardon’s continuing dilemma—a legacy of the assimilatory values that still affect many minority Americans—about whether to separate or integrate these two aspects of self.”17 Kardon presents assimilation as a personal dilemma. This is not the case for Goldman. Goldman, like some other religious artists, ostensibly rejects the separation between art and religion, not to mention religion and contemporary society. He applies strategies and processes established by modernist and contemporary art; however, Goldman’s work is not simply a creative demonstration of identity. He challenges the notion that art and religion are separable. While all this discussion about identity and assimilation is interesting, Goldman’s real target is Ofrat and the critic’s demand that the artist must leave his religion at the studio door—and for that matter, any critic who demands a separation between art and Judaism. Goldman metaphorically thumbs his nose at Ofrat in With Without. Goldman recognizes Ofrat’s demand for what it is: a false choice. If Jewish art is about Judaism, then it does not have to be about some abstract notion of faith, spirituality, or

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blind rejection of modernism. What’s more, Jewish art forcefully states that religion is part of the modern world, and therefore the art world.

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Motifs

Building and Dwelling in a Sukkah

In recent years, the sukkah has garnered the attention of architects and writers on the built environment. A sukkah is a small shack or booth built on the holiday called Sukkot. Traditionally, it is a rectangular, three-walled structure with a flat roof. The sukkah commemorates the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt by re-creating the temporary dwellings they transported, built, and lived in while in the desert. Additionally, the sukkah has also been

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Contemporary Jewish Art

The artworks in this chapter share a desire to examine Judaism as a religion, inclusive of its laws, customs, and even of its issues that are worthy of critique. However, describing Judaism as a religion limits possible interpretations of texts. Some artists see Jewish law as the way to live a religious life, while others see them as texts to be carefully interpreted. Many communicate their understanding of a text in nontraditional forms, within the framework of visual art. Some work includes assembled or modified things, influenced by Dada and Surrealism, that look as if they can be handled, used, or worn. Such qualities evoke both art-historical references and the activity associated with the object. Sometimes the viewer can handle the artwork, and at other times the action is only imagined. In all cases, artists make objects that refer to actions associated with Jewish laws. Therefore, to fully understand what these artists make, it is important to know what action the object represents. This requires knowledge of Jewish texts. The following examples are organized around a series of motifs. Each motif is an action. The shared meaningful component for each motif makes reference to how something is made or what is done with it. All the motifs derive from Jewish laws, texts, and customs. Each section begins with an explanation of the motif followed by a description of related artwork. It is important to note that I am not organizing the artworks by category of Judaica, but rather by activity. The result is a list in which each heading describes an action.

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compared to temporary dwellings that farmers build during the harvest. On Sukkot, one is commanded to “dwell” in a sukkah as if it were one’s permanent home. While the basic form of the sukkah is very simple—three walls and a flat roof made out of organic material—the Talmud provides extended construction guidelines. Talmudic texts describe the placement and size of walls but offer strange possibilities. First, particular attention is paid to how high off the ground a wall can be. In common experience, walls must touch the ground; however, the text imagines walls made of fabric stretched between posts. Second, the text discusses how close to the ceiling each wall must reach. Third, if walls do not meet at the corners, they must be within a certain distance of one another. Finally, the most specific discussion concerns what materials are used to make the roof. The roof must be made out of organic material harvested or cut from the ground. It should also not shed leaves, flowers, or fruit into the sukkah. Other possibilities seem fairly outrageous: a sukkah can be built on a boat, on top of another sukkah, and even on the back of a camel.18 Recent studies characterize the sukkah as vernacular architecture. Attention paid to variations in construction from all over the world highlight local customs and design requirements. The Israeli Museum published A Moveable Feast: Sukkahs from Around the World in 2003, and more recently Mimi Levy Lipis wrote Symbolic Houses in Judaism (2011), in which she examines the home as a hybrid form that is both physical and metaphorical. Her fieldwork, photographs of sukkot from around the globe, illustrates her findings. For example, Lipis includes photographs of buildings that have hinged roofs that, when opened, expose the interior to the sky, under which sukkahs are then built. These roof hatches have a purpose: since, in modern-day London, space is limited, skylights enable Jews to build indoor sukkahs. In another photograph of homes in Ivanova, Ukraine, from 1916, Lipis suggests that an interior sukkah may have been necessary to avoid being the target of anti-Semitic violence.19 These studies demonstrate the wide range of sukkah construction in different urban and political environments. Beyond religious practice, artists view the sukkah as a site for artistic exploration. Periodically, organizers of design competitions invite artists to interpret the Talmudic rules in new ways, and selected designs are built.

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For example, Sukkahville has been held in Toronto since 2012.20 Also, in 2010, Sukkah City rose in Union Square Park in Manhattan. The organizers of the event invited individuals and teams of designers to imagine the sukkah as creatively as they wished, so long as the designs were faithful to Talmudic restrictions.21 Twelve nontraditional sukkahs appeared in Union Square Park, open to visitors. SO-IL’s In Tension (2010, fig. 9), one of the winning designs, pushes the logic of the sukkah beyond recognition. Three supports teeter nearly to the point of collapse. The only thing keeping them in place are tethers holding the posts together. Each post leans at an awkward angle, askew from its partners. The walls are made of nets, while vegetation is stacked in the inverted conical space above the leaning posts. The permissibility of this design rests on what the laws do not say. For example, the rules for the design competition paraphrased Talmudic law, reading, “When the two complete walls face each other, and an incomplete wall greater than four handbreadths is perpendicular, it must be within three handbreadths’ distance from one of the complete walls.”22 However, if no two walls face each other, then the third wall’s placement is not restricted. In Tension does not have two opposing walls, thus rendering this regulation irrelevant. As early as 1999, a similar invitation resulted in a display of contemporary sukkahs. The Indiana Sukkot Project exhibited six such designs.23 Describing their design, Joe Dowdle and Andrea Swartz restated Talmudic guidelines in a contemporary architectural idiom: “This sukkah’s temporal nature is expressed in the clear articulation of structure and the highly ordered connection details. Polyurethaned white oak . . . is used for both the vertical and horizontal structure; unfinished poplar is used for the skin. Connections are clearly expressed with mechanical fasteners (galvanized bolts). This detail expression facilitates the users’ understanding of how the shelter is to be assembled prior to the celebration of Sukkot, and disassembled after the festival. In this regard, careful consideration was given to the transportability and weight of the various component panels.”24 The designers translated Talmudic law in terms appropriate to their discipline; “skin” refers to nonstructural external wall coverings, and “articulation” refers to the exposed joinery, in this case heavy metal bolts. Overall, sukkah design festivals demonstrate something that all designers and architects know: design specifications do not limit creativity. In fact, it is through the

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balance of the client’s needs, building codes, and the physical properties of materials that innovation thrives. More theoretically, Aaron Betsky, while curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, connected the sukkah to architectural history. He described how some architects seek the “first things” of architecture by considering its most basic requirement: shelter.25 While outlining several founding myths of the discipline, Betsky brought the sukkah into dialogue with architecture’s mythical origins: “As architectural historian Joseph Rykwert has pointed out, the sukkah is a version of the primitive hut or aedicula that many architects propose as the core of their discipline, its Rosetta stone and essence.”26 The essence of architecture includes several basic components: shelter, a place to gather, and in the case of the tent, portability.27 Architect Allan Wexler, whose work was introduced in chapter 1, seeks to discover what is possible given a set of materials or “variables.”28 His oeuvre consists mainly of what in the architectural world would be called models, scaled-down versions of projects that offer quick inspection of a possible reality. However, Wexler’s models are not intended to become full-scale constructions. They are better described as architectural sketches, ideas being worked out with modest materials in a manageable size. Each work suggests intriguing possibilities on its own, but Wexler’s ideas come into focus best looked at as a series. Three different sukkah designs will draw out this point. Garden Sukkah (2000) is a complex example of Wexler’s work. First, it is a moveable, permanent shed. The floor joists extend out beyond the

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FIG. 9  SO-IL (Solid Objects—Idenburg Liu), In Tension, 2010. PVC pipe and steel cable, nylon netting, cut logs, living and synthetic flora, 11 × 10 × 16 feet. Gift of the artist and exhibited at Sukkah City 2010 in Union Square, Manhattan. It is a sukkah, a small temporary shelter built during the holiday of Sukkot to commemorate the Israelites’ flight from Egypt. The structure demonstrates how religious rules, when thought of as design limitations, invite designers to explore creative solutions. The three leaning poles, in tension with one another, frame three walls. The ceiling is formed from a pile of organic material caught in netting that is also held in place by the supports. This design is a far cry from the traditional three-walled rectangular sukkah.

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Sukkah City, Study Collection of Yeshiva University Museum. In Tension was originally

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perimeter of the shed on one side so that they can be used to lift the building as one would a wheelbarrow. Second, the pitched roof opens to allow the prerequisite view of the stars. Third, utensils for meals as well as tools for gardening are secured along the interior walls. As the old workshop adage directs, “a place for everything and everything in its place”: each wine glass, plate, spade, bucket, and trowel has a designated holder for secure transit. Even the windows are placed so that the person wheeling the structure can look through the openings and avoid obstacles. Wexler’s Sukkah (1988) is a small building composed of four sheds that open up to create a larger interior space. Each has “two doors which open and join the doors of other sheds to become the walls of the dining room.”29 A third sukkah, Sukkah with Furniture Made from Its Walls (1990), takes the logic that the sukkah must be constructed afresh each year and applies it to its furnishings. Wexler cut the pieces for the chairs and table from the panels used to construct the sukkah’s walls. The resulting building has strangely grouped and oddly shaped windows. Sukkahs are perhaps the ideal form for Wexler. As small houses, their impermanence fuels the artist’s propensity to explore constant change. Axiomatic of his oeuvre, parts of each architectural design perform multiple functions: floor joists as handles, doors as walls, and furniture cutouts as windows. Betsky described Wexler’s choice to make small buildings this way: “What they lose in their potential to represent inhabitation they gain in their ability to highlight the act of architecture.”30 Wexler’s designs only demonstrate ideas; they are impractical. A design unrelated to the sukkah, Vinyl Milford (1994) is a small building that includes built-in storage for chairs and tables. Rather than make a closet, however, Wexler created storage compartments that match the profile of each piece of furniture. The chairs and tables must be carefully slid in and out of silhouette-shaped openings.31 Moreover, the resulting chair-shaped compartment sticks out from the other side of the wall. No longer rigid, immovable, and load-bearing, any wall becomes a membrane upon, within, and through which the interior can be enriched. Even the solid black markings called poché, which depict walls and building supports on architectural drawings, take on a different character in Wexler’s work. Lois Weinthal, professor of interior design history, describes Wexler’s fluid designs this way: “Wexler’s curiosity resides in these types of thresholds

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where walls are treated as permeable surfaces and poché is altered to register activities on both sides. Where a wall is typically passive, Wexler integrates functions normally found in the interior and pushes them into the wall, embedding functional interiors within passive interiors.”32 Wexler’s sukkah designs and other small buildings investigate the nature of architecture. “I propose a concern with the primitive hut as the core of Wexler’s work,” Betsky hypothesizes. “This preoccupation is most evident in the series of sukkahs that he designed between 1988 and 1990. . . . Rooted in his heritage as a Jew and as an architect, these pieces make remaining solely within that heritage impossible in the same way they confound our attempts to see the structures as the serene shelters we might expect.”33 Wexler’s work maintains a steady balance between the functionality of design and the expressivity of art. “It is the status of these objects as both art objects and architectural models, and the tension Wexler manages to maintain between these two states, that gives them their force and originality. As such, they point to the beginnings of architecture and thus to the most fundamental questions about what make [sic] us at home in the world. They also refer us to the mundane reality of everyday life.”34 These small houses examine the nature and history of architecture, and they also relate to the everyday. Though Wexler’s designs are not practical, as we commonly think of that term, each building draws attention to how spaces are used and what constitutes a dwelling. At the same time, Wexler’s work always seems incomplete. His work has an indefinite status inappropriate to full-scale construction or the range of activities typically required of the architect. Betsky writes,

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Wexler is acting as a tinker or mechanic. His working method is a strange combination of the deliberate and the ad hoc, mixing rigid rules for construction (time limits, material choices, geometries, typologies) with a sense that went into its construction. In this sense, Wexler is engaged in explorations of form that mix the rational traditions of architecture with the more intuitive methods of what we consider art. What brings these two together is another all-American notion—that of the maker, whether artist or architect, as a tinker who operates on a reality that is always new and fresh and transforms it through objects that are meant to be both importations into and condensations of this landscape. From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd

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Contemporary Jewish Art

that the whole thing is thrown together so that one can see all the pieces

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Wright to Frank Gehry, architects have engaged in such forms of making, but one can also find this tradition in the work of such artists as Joseph Cornell and Robert Rauschenberg.35

Image, Action, and Idea

Wexler revels in the temporary and transient nature of the sukkah, transposing these qualities not only onto the structure but also onto the entire environment. It seems that this impermanence softens the walls as well as any rigid understanding of architecture. Built as architectural amusements, follies, these structures are neither functional nor intended to be understood as proposals for full-scale construction—they would be a little too small and able to attend to only one or two activities at a time.36 Rather, “[Wexler’s designs] are assemblies that work within the tradition of Schwitters’s Merzbau, Malevich’s investigations into new forms for a new century and a new society, van Doesburg’s elaboration of neo-plastic forms into cafes and houses, and Mario Merz’s igloos for postmodern nomads.”37 Betsky grounds Wexler’s work in art history; however, this view marginalizes the rhetorical nature of Wexler’s sukkah designs. Merzbau and other neo-plastic works are wonderful explorations into form, yet Wexler’s work is more than that. As a “rhetorician,” Wexler calls to mind the playful argumentation of the Talmud. The effect of each decision changes the outcome of others and reveals new possibilities. Wexler’s sukkahs go beyond the need for shelter. His designs include elements such as furniture and garden implements that inform what it means to dwell in these spaces, unlike other designs that attend to the form of the building alone. These buildings are appealing because the designs are full of whimsy and invite the viewer to consider alternative possibilities. Underneath all the play and near-confusion, the sukkah is recognizable and accessible, and because of this it offers a good starting point for the motifs that follow. Carrying in the Eruv

Other Jewish architectural ideas are a bit more esoteric. Jews who are shomer Shabbat (literally, “guard the Sabbath”) do not carry anything from their home into public spaces on the Sabbath. In the parlance of the commandment, objects must not be carried from one domain into another; this kind of carrying is one of the melakhot discussed in chapter 2. In practice,

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Contemporary Jewish Art

furniture, plates, and typical household objects can be carried about in one’s home, but not out into the street. However, if there is a garden wall or fence around one’s property that clearly marks privately owned from public space, then objects can be carried out into the yard for a picnic or other outdoor activity. If fenced-in properties abut one another, the overall perimeter of the adjoining spaces could be thought of as an extended boundary that blends multiple properties into one communal domestic space, a shared home. The surrounding fence becomes the eruv boundary and unifies multiple private yards. In this way, small children and food can be carried between neighbor’s houses on the Sabbath and families can enjoy the holiday together. In many Jewish communities today, the boundary is often composed of wire pulled taut between poles. Often these wires go unnoticed because power lines may serve as the markers. If not, the extra eruv line hides among utility lines and disappears into the urban landscape. In fact, the boundary can be made of nearly anything from the environment so long as it forms an unbroken line around the neighborhood. The perimeter might include bearing walls, power lines, chain-link fences, and so forth. Extensive Talmudic regulation describes placement, construction, and maintenance of an eruv. The perimeter is not simply a line traced around an area; rather, its design emulates architecture from the period in which the Talmud was written. At that time, architecture was based on post-and-lintel construction. The eruv reduces post-and-lintel construction to its component parts, where a wall could be built out of a series of posts, with lintels running across the top like a series of doorways. So long as the “appearance of an entrance,” or doorway, is maintained, the materials out of which the eruv is built can vary widely.38 The basic unit, two posts and a lintel, can be abstracted to a high degree. The lintel can be made from wire, as previously described, and it does not need to touch the posts, but simply pass over them. However, the lintel must be parallel to the ground. In Modern Orthodox (2010), Elliott Malkin, an artist and designer based in New York, engages with both the technical and ephemeral problems posed by the eruv. A typical boundary is made of wire, which is susceptible to damage in inclement weather or by a downed tree. If the wire should break, the perimeter is destroyed. Malkin designed an eruv that fixes itself. Modern Orthodox is based on traditional post-and-lintel construction; however, instead of wood or wire, Malkin uses chalk and a laser. The artist

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chalked vertical posts up the sides of two buildings on opposing sides of the street. Across the top, for the lintel, Malkin placed a laser. The discreet laser unit sat in a window just over the chalked post on the far side of the street. The light targeted a video camera installed facing the post. As the laser hits the video camera, the resulting image appears on a television screen. Checking the eruv becomes a simple matter of looking at the monitor. Modern Orthodox demonstrates the idea that an entire eruv could be built with one laser and a series of reflecting mirrors to direct the line around a neighborhood. Best of all, a laser light is resistant to damage; should a tree limb or passing truck momentarily break it, the boundary would immediately be repaired once the obstruction moved on. Modern Orthodox is Jewish Conceptual art; it presents a futuristic vision of religion, even if the practical solution it offers may not stand up to current rabbinic authority. Malkin’s work was included in exhibitions at Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music and at Yeshiva University Museum that focused exclusively on this obscure Talmudic law.39 Other works in these exhibitions included sewn paintings, decorated backpacks, and three-dimensional representations of an eruv’s growth.40 Some artists and designers discuss the eruv in terms relating to urban studies, landscape architecture, and design.41 It is a pseudo-public space that defines and strengthens community and demarcates a unique blend of domestic and communal activity. To build an eruv requires more than a perimeter; it also requires a community meal and often permission from the local municipality.42 Acquiring permission has led to interesting and heated debates among residents of some communities. All the same, the eruv, an ancient form, has piqued the interest of artists and designers and has proven to be relevant to today’s built environments.43 Sophie Calle, an artist known for her surveillance works, created The Eruv of Jerusalem (1996). The installation includes photographs of eruv poles and written interviews she conducted with Jerusalem residents. The artist asked people to bring her to public places where something private occurred. The stories they shared included romance, childhood memories, and other events.44 The interviews draw attention to the differences between private memories and the public spaces in which the events happened. Basing her work on video interviews, Maya Escobar, a Latina artist whose work addresses identity, created a conceptual work called Berlin’s Eruv. In

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this case, the artist interviewed Berlin residents and asked them to consider what the city would be like if there were an eruv. What sort of community would be necessary to support it? How would they view German history differently? Escobar’s eruv exists only in the mind; there is no eruv in Berlin. Some designers relate the eruv to wider questions of city planning and public space. A Spatial Practice, a “think tank and design collaborative,” sees a connection between the eruv and the ideas presented in Henri Lefebvre’s book The Urban Revolution (1970). According to its members—Isaac Cohen, Isaac Hametz, and Rachel Vassar—Lefebvre, a scholar whose work has influenced urban studies, describes abstract and social space. Abstract space is “hierarchical” and “[controlled] through the use of codes, laws, and capital.” Social space “is the everyday lived space that is made manifest by the action of all members of society through incremental acts of appropriation and practice.”45 The eruv fascinates A Spatial Practice because it exists as a hybrid between abstract and social space. But more than that, it offers an alternative to Lefevbre’s assumed effects of each type of space.

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Moreover, the hierarchical intent of eruv is not to control, but to free individuals and communities to move within a territory collectively determined and agreed upon through deliberation and discussion. In fact, even the process through which the codes of eruv have been and continue to be determined reflects an ongoing negotiation between abstract and social space; between Talmudic scholars and the laypeople who constitute eruv communities. . . . It has highly specific dimensional requirements without any material specifications—allowing space to emerge from found conditions or through minor alterations or additions to pre-existing objects. In contemporary cities, eruvin must also be physically present and visually absent—a material reality cam-

In this passage, a Talmudic principle has been translated into a contemporary design idiom. An eruv has “highly specific dimensional requirements,” meaning specific construction elements, but no “material specifications”: it can be made out of almost anything. Moreover, an eruv has inherent contradictory characteristics, as it must be physical and yet close to invisible. I have also been working with the eruv as subject matter since 2007. My eruv paintings refer to the irregular shapes of a community eruv. The

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Contemporary Jewish Art

ouflaged in a field of urban infrastructure.46

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silhouette of each shape corresponds to the perimeter of an actual boundary. The paintings are acrylic on paper, and the line is stitched with blue thread to emulate the wire that is often used to create an eruv. More recent paintings utilize Google Maps to integrate neighboring eruvin into one image. The eruv also demonstrates the do-it-yourself nature of Judaism. The eruv can be erected by the community or by any person who needs one. Instant Eruv (2007, fig. 10) illustrates the do-it-yourself nature of the boundary. Moreover, the artwork, an edition of 200, looks as if it were a dollar-store item one could pick up on the way home on Friday afternoon. (For more on my work, see the epilogue.)

Image, Action, and Idea

Wearing a Prayer Shawl

A prayer shawl, or tallit, is worn during prayer. Men wear them when praying in private and congregational settings. Women also wear them in some egalitarian and liberal congregations. Tallitot, the Hebrew plural of tallit, have knotted fringes on the corners, tsitzit, that numerically symbolize all the commandments in the Torah. Two examples suffice to show how the prayer shawl can be a marker of Jewish and gendered identification as well as an experimental instrument. Escobar made a prayer shawl with fashion logos emblazoned all over it. Kosher Davening (2006), as I wrote in an exhibition catalog essay, “creates a fashion akin to a Louis Vuitton print where the fabric is paradigmatic of luxury. [Escobar’s] Hechshered Tallis brings high fashion and religion together in a satisfyingly truthful and critical way. Even more interesting is the way Escobar’s work comments on different traditions and laws through fashion. Escobar’s oeuvre highlights denominational fragmentation by drawing attention to certain details of Jewish life.”47 One wonders who would wear a haute couture tallit. Robert Gluck turns ritual objects into a collection of instruments in his series Sounds of Community. In his hands, the prayer shawl becomes a musical instrument. He is an ordained Reconstructionist rabbi and experimental music composer. His recent musical compositions include instrumentation for an electronic shofar, a horn made from a ram’s horn, traditionally blown on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Gluck’s earlier experiments involve interactive sculpture. These works resemble Judaica; however, as the viewer—or more appropriately

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FIG. 10  Ben Schachter, Instant Eruv, 2007. Plastic, digital print, and string, 6 × 8 inches. An edition of 200, this work emulates a dollar-store item, something that can be purchased in a convenience store. The humor of the piece lies in the fact that an eruv can be made with any piece of string regardless of its packaging. An eruv is an architectural form discussed in the Talmud. It includes a boundary that temporarily blends multiple private properties and their courtyards or exterior spaces into one single home during the Sabbath.

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player—manipulates the object, sounds are heard. Two works, eTallit1 and eTallit2, appear to be fabric prayer shawls, but upon donning them over one’s head, it becomes immediately apparent that these are not ordinary items. The wearer’s movements—forward, backward, rocking, and side-toside—trigger prerecorded musical passages to play. In eTallit2, the recording includes the Shema prayer sung by solo and group voices.48 The movements that trigger the music emulate traditional motions made during prayer. Gluck wanted to reinvigorate the “dry ritual” of communal prayer he had experienced as a child.49 “Creating [eTallit1] was an attempt to experiment with the connection between physical movement and prayer,” writes Gluck. “To a person familiar with Jewish religious practice, the movements that trigger eTallit1 are familiar and natural, although the musical results are novel.”50 Gluck also created a series of Judaica-like objects that worked in a similar fashion: a menorah that emits different sounds depending on which candlestick is touched with the shamash (the candle used to light the other candles), and a pointer that, when run along a surface, triggers sounds of chanting and other voices. Gluck balances innovation and tradition. “The enactment and transmission of religious ritual generally reflects values of cultural conservation, not innovation. It is generally accompanied by conservative attitudes regarding the nature of religious and cultural expression. In this installation, sculptural design seeks a middle path as a creative expression of traditional models.” The balance between innovation and tradition is difficult to strike; even his audience has difficulty understanding what it is they are seeing. He recalls some visitors asking, “Is the work about religious ritual or musical performance?”51 Gluck’s experiments are noteworthy for their integration of technology and sound. His observations also point out that the general public has difficulty determining what contemporary Jewish art is. The question he remembered might be interpreted as, “How is this artwork supposed to be understood? Is it religious or is it aesthetic?” In fact, it is both; however, to appreciate contemporary Jewish art as both religious and aesthetic takes a new perspective. Wrapping Tefillin

There are many other laws and customs performed by individuals. To the outsider, these practices can seem strange. Even the person living an

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Orthodox life occasionally discovers contradictions that must be worked out. However, as much as Judaism favors doing, it is balanced by learning. The commandment to perform ritual and learn about it limits the likelihood that rituals and commandments will be performed mindlessly. The following examples consider daily routines familiar to Orthodox Jews and those who follow a traditional lifestyle. Tefillin have drawn the attention of several artists. Tefillin, or phylacteries, are a pair of small black boxes that are bound to one’s head and arm. The boxes contain handwritten prayers, including the one that commands the use of tefillin. The Shema prayer reads, “bind them as a sign upon your hand, let them be a symbol before your eyes.”52 Today, tefillin are worn during weekly morning prayers, but not on the Sabbath. Those who wear tefillin during prayer come to know it as part of one’s meaningful morning routine; it is a daily practice. At the same time, wrapping the leather strap around one’s body is seen as a metaphor for binding oneself or cleaving to God; this experience can be emotionally and spiritually demanding. Artists have responded to this challenging commandment. In Stamped (2012), Goldman uses tefillin to temporarily impress his arm with both the parallel bands of the strap and three Hebrew words. The photograph of this performance “records the physical effect of binding tefillin on one’s arm, the lines the straps make, explicated with the Hebrew verse, ‘and you shall bind them as a sign,’” observes Richard McBee in a 2014 review. “The verse normally hidden in the boxes becomes explicit as part of the act of binding as public sign upon the male body.”53 While external effects cause the impressions, so too does the arm, straining against the leather. The tension of the body, an internal pressure added to the external wrapping, suggests a physical connection between the focused religious attention, kavanah, and willingness to bind oneself to God. There is equal force between internal and external pressures bringing the binding, or cleaving, to fruition. The title also offers a second reading. Rather than “bound” or “marked,” which would more accurately reflect the action associated with tefillin, the title calls to mind stamped serial numbers on concentration camp survivors’ arms. The juxtaposition of the forced, unwilling, and scarred body is perfectly contrasted with the accepted imprinting on Goldman’s arm. The captive struggles against the bonds; the faithful use them as power.

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Arik Weiss focuses on the binding in his Ye Shall Cleave series (2008). His artful tefillin use tape printed with the words of the prayer in place of the traditional leather strap. Seeing his arm wrapped in this manner highlights cleaving in a different way; it is more bandage than restraint. Although the tape is wrapped, one is hesitant to remove it because of the pain it would cause. Such impending discomfort generates a reluctance to untangle oneself from the act of prayer and, by extension, to distance oneself from the divine. Both Stamped and Ye Shall Cleave demonstrate that restriction can be self-imposed, powerful, and active. Rigorous religious practice is difficult. However, these works suggest that even when certain activities become rote, the body, if not the spirit, continually accepts responsibility.

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Studying Texts

FIG. 11  Jacqueline Nicholls, Draw Yomi, Shabbat 75, 2012. Pen and ink on paper, 8 × 12 inches. This image is one of a large series of drawings. Each drawing illustrates the artist’s impressions of passages from the Talmud as she studies one page of text each day. Daf yomi is the traditional practice of studying a page of Talmud each day and is conducted by many Orthodox and traditional Jews. Draw Yomi is a play on words referring to that practice. Like the cycle of daily study, this series will take seven years to complete.

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Contemporary Jewish Art

Judaism’s ritual practice is rich, and so is its investment in study. The Orthodox and a growing number of other Jews study the Talmud every day. The tradition to study one page of Talmud each day is called daf yomi. It takes seven years to read the entire opus, at which time the cycle begins anew. This activity was historically done in pairs, known as chevrutah. Chevrutah describes the pair of people but also the pedagogical practice of learning with one other person over an extended period of time. Though one partner may be more knowledgeable than the other, their roles are equal. Jacqueline Nicholls is a British artist who has studied architecture, anatomical illustration, and fine art. For her, the demands of daf yomi require a bit of encouragement. Draw Yomi (2012–ongoing, fig. 11) is a collection of drawings made daily based on a page of the Talmud.54 The title is a play of words on the tradition from which it draws. Nicholls’s project, while following a well-defined and accepted custom, extends religious study to the visual. Nicholls began the project to become familiar with the Talmud.

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Having received basic instruction in school, she wanted to know what else was in it. But more than merely illustrating the text, she uses drawing as a method of interpretation and an aid to memory. Like any Talmudic scholar, Nicholls says she forms “links between disparate subjects” and discovers “resonances with things going on in real life.” Her commitment is a kind of endurance performance that will yield seven years of drawing. Nicholls finds that by uploading images to her website, she feels public pressure to complete the project.55 In many ways, this is akin to the demands of traditional Judaism. The social pressure, indeed requirements, of religious practice compels those involved to participate. In this case, Nicholls uses social media to ensure that her self-assigned communal responsibilities are met. Rigorous daily routine also has a legacy in postwar art. A defining example is On Kawara’s Today series, one painting of each day’s date, which he began on January 4, 1966.56 The compositional design of all the paintings is the same, but the date to which they correspond is different. Interpreting this series, scholars relate it to Conceptual art as well as paintings that explore time.57 However, the Today series hides a more specific meaning. The artist stored a newspaper clipping from each day with the paintings.58 Furthermore, Kawara kept a journal of the headlines from each clipping that also served as subtitles for each date painting. The headlines, often sensational in character, create a snapshot of history, telling us that on each day different things happened: April 7, 1966, “Rioters in Saigon burned an American jeep and Danced around the flames;” April 12, 1966, “A violent Atlantic storm killed two passengers on Italian liner Michelangelo for New York.”59 Kawara, like other Conceptual artists and Pop artists such as Andy Warhol, structured his work so that the particular events of the day, be they horrific or ordinary, were treated in exactly the same manner; the emotional response is diminished, and the artworks appear distant or cool. Nicholls’s work shares Kawara’s rigor but welcomes personal reflection and interpretation; what strikes the artist’s ear makes it into the drawing. Some drawings focus on one phrase, while others synthesize larger sections of text. At times, Nicholls repeats motifs, just as the text itself has repetition across chapters. She also chooses her materials, the paper and the color, to reflect the general theme of each section. Daf yomi is a process of discovery and growth. The strenuous nature of the task is difficult, but those who

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Laws Concerning Women: Dress, Divorce, and Sexual Purity

Jewish laws pertaining specifically to women refer to modesty; ritual purity after menstruation, intercourse, or illness; and the legal status of marriage and divorce.61 Some of these laws are no longer practiced, while others are common within Orthodox communities. Modesty and refraining from touching a member of the opposite sex, shomer negiah, are motifs examined

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study, including Nicholls, find meaning in the text, and by extension, might bring meaning to their day. Traditionally, daf yomi is done in pairs. More than simply study partners, chevrutah often develop an understanding of each other’s personalities and life experiences that become part of the team’s understanding of the text. Goldman’s seesaw, Chevrutah (2013, fig. 12), invites viewers to rock back and forth as they learn together. The physical activity of rocking is an embodiment of debate. It also symbolizes the rigorousness and playfulness inherent in Talmud study. Made of modest material, the arched sled is equipped with a lectern, shtender, at each end. The two learners face each other as they rock and discuss. While Nicholls develops a personal relationship to daily study, Goldman responds to the physicality associated with chevrutah by transforming learning and debate into a physical activity.60 Chevrutah, and Jewish education in general, has historically been reserved for men. Hadassa Goldvicht, an artist living in Israel, comments on this gendered exclusivity in a video of herself licking candied letters in Writing Lessons #1 (2005). The letters are on the obverse of a clear window. Writing Lessons #1 is based on an initiation that welcomes three-year-old boys into their education, whereby they are invited to lick honey off of pages printed with the Hebrew alphabet. In this way, the sweetness of education and the Torah is made real. More than a change of gender roles, Goldvicht’s video also eroticizes this traditional cultural practice. As discussed earlier, women increasingly study Torah, suggesting that Writing Lessons #1 is both a protest and a mark of the gains women have made in the study hall. Goldvicht’s work also uses ingestion as a metaphor for learning. This conceit demonstrates a particular taste, forgive the pun, of Judaism. It is natural to think that a child could be tempted with sweets. Yet performed by a grown woman, the artist’s actions are not childlike or innocent, but rather, through exaggeration, become sensual and erotic.

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FIG. 12  Ken Goldman, Chevrutah, 2013. Metal and wood, 110 × 30 inches. This sculpture is an adult-sized seesaw; however, instead of seats, it is outfitted with shtenders, lecterns, at which two riders position themselves. The title refers to the tradition of studying Talmud with a partner, and the resulting rocking motion is a metaphor for the ups and downs of debate between the pair engaged in study.

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by several artists. The artworks present the difficulty of conforming to religious custom in the face of contemporary society. Other works address Jewish divorce. To be religiously divorced, the husband must grant written permission, a get, to his wife. In some situations, the husband simply does not want to get divorced, while in other situations the husband demands payment for the get. Without a proper divorce, neither partner can get remarried within Judaism. Women whose husbands do not offer a get are called “chained women,” agunot. Modesty and divorce are two central themes in recent contemporary Jewish art. Several of the works presented here have been included in exhibitions that focus on religious feminist art. The issues they present are important. Here, however, the focus is on the characteristics shared among Jewish feminist art and the other artworks in this chapter. Those characteristics include the way in which meaning is created through action, choice of materials, and reference to Jewish texts. As addressed in the previous chapter, the use of fabric, sewing, and other women’s work is characteristic of much feminist art as a way to appropriate craft that has been assumed by some to correspond to the role of women, either historically or as second-class artistic media that are less important than painting. Moreover, garments are fundamental to legal discussions of modesty, accusation, and redemption. Thus, clothing is doubly appropriate to contemporary Jewish art, because it integrates artists’ predilection for materials and techniques related to feminism and makes reference to texts that are unambiguously taken from Jewish sources. You Shall Walk in Good Ways (1999, fig. 2), Nechama Golan’s shoe made out of photocopied Talmud pages, compares two cultural conventions: the uncomfortable high-heeled shoe and strict codes of modesty. Golan suggests that the leniency of one culture is in fact not as free as one might at first assume. Moreover, in Sperber’s words, “halakhic notions become artistic practices and vice versa.”62 The interaction of religious law and artistic practice can also be seen in other works. For example (and from a younger generation), Maya Escobar examines cultural norms of modesty in a radically different way. Conformity in dress and not touching someone of the opposite sex can be modest behaviors but can also be suggestive. Escobar’s Shomer Negiah Panties (2005) bear the unlikely phrase “shomer negiah” (I abide by the rules of modesty)

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across the buttocks. Colorful cotton emblazoned with silkscreened letters, the undergarments are reminiscent of high school athletic tee shirts. As if pronouncing, “Look, but do not touch,” Escobar draws attention to marital modesty and mainstream impropriety.63 Further demonstrating how garments can be meaningful, Andi Arnovitz (b. 1959) uses dressmaking and other fiber arts to examine the get and create commentary on marital laws. Coat of the Agunot (2010) is made from reproductions of ketubot (wedding contracts) cut into pieces and quilted together. The patchwork alludes to the practice of cutting up the marriage contract upon divorce and forms a beautiful yet bittersweet garment. Cut up, the ketubot represent lost love and destroyed commitment, as well as lives reassembled after the trauma of divorce and whatever precipitated it. Coat of the Agunot also refers to the plight of the “chained women,” those who seek a divorce but cannot get one. Dress of the Sotah (2009, fig. 13) comments on how Jewish law says the accused adulteress, or sotah, should be treated. She must stand half-naked before the court and drink an elixir called “bitter waters” that includes among its ingredients pulverized written texts.64 Arnovitz’s dress is made from rice paper fabric imbedded with hair, dirt, and film—materials related to the elixir the accused woman must drink. The short tunic design calls to mind another garment, the kittel. Men traditionally wear this plain white linen jacket during Yom Kippur and during the marriage ceremony, symbolizing ritual purity. Thus, Dress for the Sotah is contrasted with the pure state in which one weds and asks for repentance. The unclean coat disables forgiveness from reaching its wearer. Even so, Arnovitz’s gesture to clothe the accused—even barely—shows compassion. Taken together, Coat of the Agunot and Dress of the Sotah examine the legal position women hold within Jewish law in contemporary religious courts and in historical texts.

FIG. 13  Andi Arnovitz, Dress of the Sotah, 2009. Rice paper, dirt, hair, and film. © Andi Arnovitz, www.andiarnovitz.com. This translucent dress is meant for the sotah, a woman accused of adultery in rabbinic law. The accused is to face trial, naked and shamed, in front of the court, and to prove her innocence she must drink an elixir called the bitter waters. Historically, it is unknown if this trial ever occurred, yet the appearance in rabbinic literature of this strange test informs Arnovitz’s work.

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Other laws regulate sexual purity. Though both sexes’ behavior and cleanliness are regulated, women bear the lion’s share of responsibility. The laws of niddah, sexual purity, limit when husbands and wives may be intimate. Women must refrain from intimacy until seven days after their last day of menstruation.65 At the end of menstruation, women go to a ritual bath, mikveh. In practice, it is the wife’s responsibility to ensure this tradition. Several artists comment on this tradition, including Helène Aylon. My Clean Days, a twenty-four-foot artwork of the artist’s monthly cycle marked off on calendar pages, documents an intimate portrait of Aylon’s bodily rhythms and, by extension, her relations with her husband over ten years. The work formed part of My Bridal Chamber, an installation including My Clean Days and My Marriage Bed, works that both refer to the laws of niddah. My Clean Days relates to other works concerned with women’s experiences. Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document (1973–79) records the birth and development of her child over a five-year period. The work of art is an archive that includes cataloged samples of soiled diapers, writing excerpts, diary entries, and other memorabilia. Kelly’s work tracks her experience as her child grew, while Aylon’s work documented her menstrual cycle before, during, and after having children, and, importantly, while married to her husband.

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Counting the Omer

The period of time between Passover and Shavuot, the Omer, is marked by personal reflection and growth. Jews are commanded to count the number of days that have passed from its beginning to its end. Some artists have explored the Omer and what it means to be engaged in a daily routine. Tobi Kahn’s SAPHYR, Silver Omer Counter (2011, fig. 14) includes a wall fixture and forty-nine abstract pegs. The pegs are put in place, one per day, until the entire grid of holes is filled. Doni Silver Simons also explores counting in the Conceptual/performance piece Counting the Omer (2009). In this work, strips of raw canvas were hung on the wall. Each was marked with forty-nine dashes, grouped in fives, running from the top of the strip. Each day the artist and other participants pulled threads out from the bottom of the fabric, the number of which corresponded to the day of the Omer. For instance, on the first day they pulled one strand, and on the last day forty-nine. At the end, the floor was littered with small threads, and the strips of fabric became tassels of loosely hung strands. Counting the Omer is

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FIG. 14  Tobi Kahn, SAPHYR, Silver Omer Counter, 2011. Acrylic on wood. © Tobi Kahn. The Omer is the period of time between Passover and Shavuot. During that time, the forty-nine days are counted. This seven-week period is marked by introspection. The forty-nine pegs of Kahn’s Silver Omer Counter are added to the piece, one per day, until the composition is completed.

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FIG. 15  Doni Silver Simons, 49 Days: Women Who Count (A Performance), 2015. Collaborative sound installation with movement. This sound composition includes women’s voices counting the period of time between Passover and Shavuot. This forty-nine-day period is called the Omer. Counting includes reciting which day it is, such as, “This is the tenth day.” The voices are recorded on different tracks and are layered

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over one another.

similar to Silver Simons’s Homage to a Fairy Tale in that both artworks utilize untying to highlight something hidden. In both works, the artist removes the weft from cotton fabric, revealing the long strands that run the length of the bolt. Silver Simons meditated on the character of the miller’s daughter from “Rumpelstiltskin” while making Homage to a Fairy Tale; that character was forced to spin straw into gold.66 The artist performed the same task in Counting the Omer, but her meditation instead follows Jewish tradition. The long strands are metaphors for the difficulties, sins, and contrition hidden within each person. Both the naked strands and the act of unraveling the fabric contribute to the metaphor. Silver Simons continues to work with the Omer and collaborates with other artists. 49 Days: Women Who Count (A Performance) (2015, fig. 15) is

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FIG. 16  Donna Sternberg, 49 Days: Women Who Count (A Performance), 2016. Choreography. Photo © Mara Zaslove. Performed on April 2–3, 2016, by Donna Sternberg & Dancers with community member participants. The performance includes repeated movements performed by different dancers, yet when sequences repeat, they change. Sternberg likens the slowly modified movement to the way memory changes as time

both a sound work of women’s speaking voices and a choreographed performance. As the women count each day in Hebrew, the repetition of the word yom, or day, creates a meditative layered sound in the recording. The dance performance (fig. 16), choreographed by Donna Sternberg for Donna Sternberg & Dancers with community member participants, includes the same use of repeated and layered movements to form canons, movement sequences, that “refresh and reshape” with each occurrence.67 Sternberg likens the slowly modified movement to the way memory changes as time passes.68 49 Days demonstrates both artistic collaboration and examination of Jewish texts by artists who work in different disciplines. Contemporary Jewish art has come into its own. The artworks in this chapter, as well as the previous, demonstrate artists’ interest in action. When

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passes.

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action comes from undertaking a ritual, artworks often refer to Judaica, but artists do not limit their interests to modified Judaica. Artworks refer to custom, minchag, and the preparations necessary to follow commandments. In some cases, there are no ritual objects associated with particular Jewish texts or ideas, and artists are free to design or assemble contraptions that might serve a need—or, if they are not intended for utility, point out a new observation. Overall, artists look collectively at formal ritual and informal customs that encompass a wide range of ideas, texts, and daily activities. The next chapter will show that as artists develop motifs, they not only expand the contours of Jewish art but also participate in Judaism’s long tradition of textual interpretation.

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4. Visual Midrash and Artistic Interpretation

Just as the rock is split into many splinters, so also may one Biblical verse convey many teachings. —TB SANHEDRIN 34A

The task of interpretation is virtually one of translation. The interpreter says, Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A? That Y is really B? That Z is really C? —SUSAN SONTAG

This book makes the case for and develops a new criticism of action. The artists discussed here present actions in two primary ways. First, the artistic process remains visible to the viewer. Second, artists choose actions with which they associate meaning. These actions come from Jewish texts, formal ritual, or informal customs. To understand the artwork, the viewer needs to know something about the source of these actions. Meaningful action does not exist in isolation but rather fits into a larger interpretive tradition. While this book has taken a strong position in favor of Minimalist, Conceptual, and performance—contemporary—art, this chapter reconciles art criticism based on images and actions. These artists choose subjects already understood by their audience, and then they present new interpretations

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through process, material choice, and action. In addition to advancing artistic traditions with nontraditional working methods, the artists in this book contribute to a long history of interpretation; this tradition is called midrash. Midrash not only aims to clarify a text; it also attempts to enrich sparsely worded narratives, to relate ancient texts to lived experience, and to educate. This chapter shows how artists interpret texts and Jewish ideas with their art. Taken as a whole, image-based artworks, reintroduced in this chapter, and action-based artworks express, restate, and otherwise interpret Jewish texts. Some artists self-consciously think of their work as the most recent addition to Judaism’s tradition of interpretation. These artists look to midrash as a way to approach subject matter. Calling their work “visual midrash,” artists want to present their own biblical and rabbinic interpretations. However, the connection between midrash, the Jewish tradition of biblical explanation and exegesis, and artistic interpretations of ideas has been left quite ambiguous. Sometimes the connection is expressed primarily through giving a nonrepresentational painting a title that refers to scripture. Other artistic exegesis is more complex. First, I will draw out more specifically the connection between midrash and art. How are they related? Second, I will introduce a new category of visual midrash. The term has been applied ambiguously to any art that examines biblical texts from a Jewish perspective; however, when looked at more closely, artworks that have been identified as visual midrash almost exclusively refer to biblical stories and characters. As should by now be obvious, the artists in this book are less interested in biblical narrative and more engaged by ideas, customs, and law. These subjects appear in a different category of midrash. Interpretations that illuminate narrative and character are called midrash aggadah, while answers to religious questions, legal discussions, and rabbinic declarations of Jewish law are called midrash halakhah. Visual midrash, therefore, will be divided into two subcategories in the same manner as biblical exegesis. These categories are based on subject. “Visual midrash aggadah” interprets narrative and character, and “visual midrash halakhah,” my new category, explains and critiques customs and laws using strategies employed by contemporary artists. These two kinds of visual midrash clarify the ideas that the artists present. Most importantly, this broader view of visual midrash opens new opportunities for Jewish art criticism, and it forges a clear connection between contemporary art and Jewish interpretive tradition.

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Midrash Defined

Midrash is an umbrella term for Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and other texts. The term refers to written exegesis as well as other types of interpretation. Written midrashim (the plural of midrash) can include individual or collected texts or describe the overall corpus of written and oral interpretation.1 Formally, the term refers to a specific collection of texts;

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It should be obvious that artists do not perform the same role as rabbis who interpret laws. Jewish artists engage in a different project: integrating artistic practice with Jewish thought. Therefore, the phrase “visual midrash halakhah” refers more to an artwork’s content and the artist’s actions and not to any legal purpose to which halakhah, or legal exegesis, is typically applied. Visual midrash aggadah complements already extant artistic interpretation, while visual midrash halakhah contributes a method by which Conceptual artworks can be interpreted within Jewish tradition. More generally, halakhah is important to Jewish intellectual discourse, and when it informs artistic production, art’s role in Jewish thought has greater potential to become part of our historical conversation. Before turning to artworks that demonstrate this phenomenon, a brief overview will examine the connection between art and midrash. First, what is midrash? Interestingly, there is little consensus beyond “interpretation.” Second, a brief description of some scholars’ attempts to connect Jewish midrash to literary theory will be presented. Third, dissenting scholars will argue that midrash cannot and should not be equated to a literary theory. Fourth, visual midrash is described. Here, for the first time, visual midrash will be divided into two kinds: visual midrash aggadah, artworks that interpret narrative and character, and visual midrash halakhah, artworks that examine laws and customs. Visual midrash aggadah often relies on representation and style, ideas that are well trodden by art critics. Visual midrash halakhah, on the other hand, uses contemporary artistic processes influenced by Minimalism and Conceptual art. Our earlier discussions on action will inform this part of the chapter. Finally, a few closing remarks will return visual midrash, both aggadah and halakhah, to the wider tradition of Jewish discourse.

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informally, it refers to a much wider array of interpretive texts, creative writings, and criticism. When the term describes a type of interpretation, the definition is less clear. The common translation for midrash is “to interpret,” but it has also been translated as to trample upon, to press hard, to thresh, to examine, to dispute, to demand, and to visit, among others. Additionally, there are other characteristics of midrash, including—as M. Gertner, a scholar of biblical interpretation and translation, points out—“strict hermeneutical rules [and] metaphorical or allegorical interpretation.” Some of these rules have been used in the discussion of melakhot. Midrash also has a purpose: to educate. It is not just interpretation for the sake of discovery. Gernter describes that midrashic interpretation has several stages: “[a] question is asked, the answer is found, and the result is then conveyed to others. This is, then, the complete process of midrashic procedure.”2 Interpretive discoveries must be effectively shared with others. More specifically, what is shared is “homiletic and moralistic” instruction, using proverbs for proper behavior and how to live a moral life.3 These discoveries might emerge through playful examination of each letter, word, and phrase of a biblical passage.4 Overall, the forms that exegetical texts take include explanation, moral tales, and other literary forms dependent on the lesson the speaker wishes to convey. Louis Isaac Rabinowitz, rabbi, philosopher, and editor of the Encyclopedia Judaica, acknowledged that the playful quality of midrashic interpretation can be misunderstood as frivolous: “One tends often to dismiss these interpretations as mere jeux d’esprit, whose connection with the text is of the flimsiest.” Nevertheless, these interpretations are often highly nuanced, either in the way that they relate to biblical narrative or by the intricacy of their moral edification. Furthermore, “It is in these cases that it is not so much with what the text says that the Rabbis are concerned, but with making it a peg upon which to hang a profound and far-reaching thought, or a psychological observation.”5 Midrash aims to educate the individual in proper, moral behavior as much as to explain or elucidate text. Overall, the balance between explanation and edification is critical, even though each interpretation may favor one over the other. Again, there are two kinds of midrash, aggadah and halakhah. Both provide the moral and ethical education already described, but the texts

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under examination differ significantly. Midrash aggadah focuses on biblical narrative and character, and it often takes the form of parables or stories that fill in the gaps of sparsely worded biblical passages. These stories explain the interior experience or motivation behind certain choices made by figures in the Torah. Midrash halakhah is legal explanation of religious law. These texts, written by rabbis, answer questions regarding how to properly follow a commandment, settle disputes between individuals, and provide precedent for future decisions. With this background, we can now turn our attention to midrash and art.

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Midrash is of interest not only to observant Jews. Since the 1980s, midrash has periodically drawn the attention of literary critics. Such scholars are not confined to religious or moral instruction but look to midrash as an open-ended method of interpretation. For example, midrash has been described as a “literary phenomenon,”6 or more colorfully, as something too elusive to define: “studies have already not defined midrash in ample detail, there is little purpose in our not defining it again here.”7 Even so, scholars have discovered similarities between the seeming boundlessness of midrash and literary theory: “In the hermeneutical techniques of midrash, critics have found especially attractive the sense of interpretation as play rather than as explication, the use of commentary as a means of extending a text’s meaning rather than as a mere forum for the arbitration of original authorial intention.”8 More simply, interpretation does not seek “authorial intention” or try to figure out what the text really means; rather, interpretation adds meaning to an original text. In this context, criticism works not in opposition to but in concert with a text, thereby creating a larger whole. Some scholars consider midrash as an intellectual precursor to their own efforts, because it seems to be so in line with their attempt to blur the distinction between original text and interpretation.9 Geoffrey H. Hartman, professor emeritus from Yale and editor of Midrash and Literature, admires Judaism’s interpretive tradition precisely for this characteristic. He is particularly struck by the amalgam of original with interpretive texts: “A full-scale

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Recent Scholarship on Midrash

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rethinking of the dichotomy of creation and commentary is in process.” Moreover, contemporary scholars admire how a text stands on equal footing with the interpretations that surround it. Hartman continues: “We [rabbis and literary theorists] have no statement more radical . . . than that both Oral and Written Law were given on Sinai, for this legitimates Talmudic commentary as strictly coterminous with Scripture.”10 This is a radical statement because it suggests that the original text is not more or less important than the commentaries written to support it; they are equal. Of course, such a view favors the connection between literary theory and midrashic methods. Hartman puts aside the possible historical contexts in which rabbis may have wanted to use religion to buttress their authority and enforce biblical law as they saw it. Nevertheless, in the context of literary criticism, religious thought and practice take a back seat to expansive interpretive methods. Midrash also relates to art history. Samantha Baskind describes it as “parables, folk stories, and conversations imagined between biblical figures. While exegesis is a facet of the process of clarifying the Bible, midrash is, to use scholar Ithamar Gruemwald’s words, ‘chiefly concerned with the creation of meaning.’ New historical circumstances, such as modernity, impel the interpreter forward with fresh expositions inspired by scripture. This postmodern mentality imbues the interpreter with enormous imaginative power over a book that can never reach limits.”11 Midrash is not subservient to the original text, nor is interpretation mere restatement. Ultimately, when criticism ceases to oppose its object and becomes part of the creative process, an entirely new and expansive vista of scholarly work becomes possible.

Image, Action, and Idea

Midrash’s Discontents

Not everyone is eager to attach midrash to literary theory. Contemporary scholarship is “not adequately supported by the requisite familiarity with the [biblical] material under discussion,” scholar David Stern argues, providing something that is “more wishful than knowledgeable.”12 Stern objects to the fact that the basic similarities between midrash and contemporary criticism are stressed while the important, nuanced differences between them are ignored. Even more troubling to some scholars is the misunderstanding that midrash—and interpretation more generally—is unrestrained: “The

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very advance of contemporary theory toward Midrash makes Jewish scholars more zealous to avoid contamination,” writes Hartman. “There is a fear that the motive for Midrash will be mistakenly reduced from Everything is in the text, and what the text signifies is its relevance to the actions or thoughts of the interpretive community to Everything is text, and the text is a structure of imaginary relations, a tissue without issue.”13 Traditional midrashic interpretation has different limits than postmodern or contemporary literary theory. Furthermore, the relationship between midrash and criticism has a rocky history. Susan Sontag, a noted cultural critic active during the 1960s and 1970s, views interpretation as destroying a text. She takes particular aim at rabbinic sources. In her famous essay, “Against Interpretation,” she argues that creative restatements become a “radical strategy for conserving an old text” which had “become unacceptable.”14 The interpreter acts in a dubious manner by not disclosing erasures and revisions: “[H]e claims to be only making [the text] intelligible, by disclosing its true meaning. However far the interpreters alter the text (another notorious example is the Rabbinic and Christian ‘spiritual’ interpretations of the clearly erotic Song of Songs), they must claim to be reading off a sense that is already there.”15 Sontag takes it for granted that interpretation will cause irreparable damage. She is particularly critical of interpretive methods that look at every word or phrase. Her quotation that opened this chapter demonstrates such animus. Well before Sontag, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the famous nineteenth-century philosopher and writer, had a similar view of Judaism’s intellectual tradition. Emerson wrote, “If Minerva offered me a gift and an option, I would say give me continuity. I am tired of scraps. I do not wish to be a literary or intellectual chiffonier. Away with this Jew’s rag-bag of ends and tufts of brocade, velvet and cloth-of-gold; let me spin some yards or miles of helpful twine, a clew to lead to one kingly truth, a cord to bind wholesome and belonging to facts.”16 Emerson creates a metaphor relating the midrashic interpretive practice of examining every phrase, word, and letter for potential undiscovered revelation to the schmattas and rags a Jewish merchant might sell on the street. He concludes that pieces of texts are as useless as the Jew’s bits and pieces of textiles. Midrash, when looked at cursorily, is thus misunderstood, as Sontag did by accusing it of replacing an unacceptable text with an acceptable one, suggesting that there is a single correct interpretation; or as Emerson did, by describing a process that atomizes the text into little, unrelated pieces that lose

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context and meaning. In both cases, Sontag and Emerson view interpretation as a violent attack on the original text that prevents the reader from seeing the forest for the trees. Sontag and Emerson have it wrong. Interpretation does not destroy a text; rather, interpretation is imagined as the sparks from a fractured rock, according to the Talmud, offering multiple readings of the same text, as described in an epigraph to this chapter. Thus far, the discussions of the benefits and pitfalls of accepting midrash as an interpretive practice are beneficial. They help define the scope of the artistic endeavor. The artists discussed here do not search for correct interpretations. Instead, they create new meaning through visual and active means.

Image, Action, and Idea

Midrash in Art

Several artists refer to their work as midrash and think of it as interpretation, not just representation.17 Some artists, motivated to connect their work to Judaism, as in previous discussions, bandy about the term “midrash” and only go so far as to give an abstract work a biblical title. However, there are a few artists who take the topic seriously and develop individual artistic understandings of exegesis. They include R. B. Kitaj, Archie Rand, Victor Mazjner, and Ruth Weisberg. R. B. Kitaj was an American artist who spent much of his life in England. He used bright colors and active compositions that distort space and the figure. He also wrote accompanying explanations of his paintings. Reflecting on this practice, Kitaj wrote, “The ‘text-centeredness’ of the Jews. I can’t remember who said that, but keep doing it in Jewish pictures and commentary about them, alerting enemies.”18 Kitaj viewed his paintings as commentary and even referred to both the images and his texts as midrash. “My Commentaries (about my own pictures), hated by about 50% of art people I’d guess, are something like midrash, the commentaries to be found interspersed in the Talmud in the form of poetic digressions, parables, legends, allegories, tales, etc.”19 Furthermore, Kitaj recognized that interpretation is fluid and accepting of some amount of indeterminacy.20 Indeterminacy informed which influences Kitaj willingly accepted. He did not limit himself to Jewish texts but looked also to art history and Western culture. In his Second Diasporist Manifesto, Kitaj listed artists Joseph

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Beuys, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg and intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud, Erwin Panofsky, Albert Einstein, and others as possible influences.21 Kitaj viewed his exegesis as an important element of his work. Moreover, he advocated for interpretation and invited others to engage in the same way of thinking. “As a Jew, I am for interpretation. As a post-20th century painter, the very idea of no commentary bores me: I love to read commentaries about painting by terrific minds. . . . It’s human, even for an unterrific mind like my own.”22 Archie Rand is another artist engaged with exegesis. His approach is equally as broad as Kitaj’s written commentaries. Rand was born in 1949 and lives in Brooklyn. Notably, Rand received the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship as well as the Achievement Medal for Contributions to the Visual Arts from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. In the past, he collaborated with poets. These collaborations paired terse clipped language with active images and became a foundational element of much of his work. Rand often works in series. Each of his Chapter Paintings, a series of fifty-four, is based on Torah portions read weekly (on some Shabbat, two portions are read). For example, the painting Bereshith is a panel evenly divided down the center—one half is white, the other black. The illustration represents the creation of light and darkness as a key moment of Genesis. As straightforward as they are, the Chapter Paintings were initially shocking to viewers and critics. Rand’s use of religious texts, coming at the end of the twentieth century—particularly from a Jewish artist—challenged the universal assumptions of modernism. In the prevailing opinion of the time, art was to be an intellectual activity, and if religion was involved at all, it was best presented critically. References to specific narratives could be made, but only obliquely and certainly not as direct illustration or interpretation of the Bible. When Rand invited Norman Kleeblatt of the Jewish Museum to see the series, the curator felt embarrassed by the “purposeful vulgarity . . . [that] rendered [the series] too embarrassing to be exhibited.”23 This awkward, embarrassing moment inspired Kleeblatt to organize an exhibition entitled Too Jewish?, the rhetorical question being, “Can an artwork be too Jewish for the Jewish Museum?” Rand and Kitaj work in similar fashion. Both use garish colors, cartoonlike figures, and energetic compositions. They also view their work as interpretation. Both Rand and Kitaj write about their work and frequently refer to music, Jewish folklore, and other artists.24

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Victor Majzner also sees his painting as midrash. He was born in Russia and migrated to Australia in 1959. In 2008, he completed his own cycle of fifty-four paintings based on the Torah. A few years later, in 2014, he completed another cycle related to the Song of Songs. Majzner’s interest in Jewish art grew over a period of time. At first, only his titles referred to the Bible; later he turned to specific Jewish subject matter.25 Like the biblical cycle, the Painting the Song series “developed . . . by gathering ideas from numerous Jewish sources. [He] was learning Torah and grazing freely amongst other Jewish texts, especially the Midrash and various Torah commentaries.”26 Majzner’s paintings accept a wide range of Jewish influences, including biblical texts, midrash, and other commentaries, plus the artist’s visualization of these texts. For example, I Would Have You Mouth to Mouth (2009, fig. 17) depicts the sound of God’s voice as the Israelites received the Torah. Majzner cited a midrash that informed his visual decisions. “All natural events were reversed,” it states, and “the people saw the sound of the words as they emerged from God’s mouth and heard the images of these words.”27 Additionally, Majzner’s paintings refer to poems by Deborah Masel that are also based on the Song of Songs. The title for I Would Have You Mouth to Mouth comes from the first two lines of Masel’s first of her Song of Songs poems. One reviewer characterized Majzner’s sources as “purely Jewish” insofar as the midrashim and commentaries he draws from differ from the sources commonly used in Christian art.28 Irrespective of their purity, Majzner’s set of influences differs from those of Kitaj, who looked broadly at Jewish texts and intellectuals from a wide array of disciplines. Majzner limits his influences to those solidly placed within biblical and rabbinic interpretation as it is expressed within his circle of friends and rabbis. Unlike Kitaj and Rand, Majzner restricts his influences to traditional sources and other works that directly address Jewish texts. Instead of making discrete paintings for each Torah portion, Ruth Weisberg made one continuous image comprising an entire pictorial cycle of biblical pictures. In The Scroll (1984, fig. 18), which is nearly one hundred feet long, Weisberg interweaves biblical narrative with personal, yet common, experiences. Noted art historian Matthew Baigell, who has written extensively on Jewish art, describes Weisberg’s intentions: “Just as Weisberg makes connections between past and present historical events,

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FIG. 17  Victor Majzner, I Would Have You Mouth to Mouth, 2009. Acrylic and canvas, 72 × 66 inches. The title of this painting comes from a poem inspired by the Song of Songs. Mount Sinai dominates the picture as hands descend from the sky; the fingers sign letters suggesting that sound can be seen. Words from the poem, written in a font reminiscent of grade-school penmanship and neon signs, collect at the bottom.

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FIG. 18  Ruth Weisberg, The Scroll (detail from “Creation”), 1987–88. Mixed-media drawing, 4 1/2 × 97 feet. From the collection of Skirball Museum, Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles. Purchased with funds provided by Sandy and Adrea Bettelman, in memory of Al and Leah Bettelman. This is a monumental drawing. The artist elaborated on the Old Testament by making the narrative relate to personal experience and reflect modern history. This scene from Genesis shows a woman enjoying a quiet moment with her son. It can be assumed that this is Eve. However, it could also be anyone, including God. The artist suggests that every mother has these moments of joy and awe with her children.

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she wants her narrative, when drawing on the Bible, to have contemporary relevance and to be viewed in human rather than metaphoric or mythical terms. To keep the Bible from becoming a fossilized document, she feels that its basic meaning need not be changed, but that new interpretations and points of departure must be found within it. For her, art is visual commentary, another way to renew texts.”29 One section of The Scroll is subtitled “Creation” and includes a woman resting peacefully with her child on white sheets. Both figures are seen from above, as their heads are turned to each other. The woman smiles from underneath a lock of tousled hair. Her eyes are closed, and yet it seems that she is awake while listening to the sounds of her baby, who looks at her lovingly. The figures and the sheets are drawn in a representational style, while the space around them is shown in streaks of black and blue. The image of mother and child is autobiographical yet universal. Countless mothers know that unique mixture of fatigue, pleasure, and love that one feels intermittently during the first few weeks of parenthood. Yet by including this detail to represent the story of creation from Genesis, the artist adds more. First, human life begins in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. Only later, after they are expelled from the Garden, does Eve have children. Second, the woman is dressed, further suggesting that this scene is after Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge (at which point she and Adam realize that they are naked and cover themselves). However, if this is Eve, who is the child? Cain? Abel? If the child is her “creation,” does the woman become the Creator? Perhaps the title is more straightforward than that; this could be an autobiographical portrait in which a mother enjoys her progeny. Seeing the figure as Eve heightens the psychological drama. Eve found a moment of happiness between the Expulsion and the fratricide that was to come. Ultimately, it is unnecessary to reject one interpretation for the other; the image is both autobiographical and biblical. Weisberg demonstrates the timelessness of the biblical narrative. Weisberg’s work takes midrashim in a different direction. Her exegesis relates biblical stories to modern life. She writes, “I make art out of all aspects of my identity, finding in the process that art integrates my experiences, beliefs, and heritage. I am particularly nourished by the history of art, the history of the Jewish people, and by the unwritten history of women. I believe that art creates meaning and can be transformative for

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both the artist and their audience. I seek to create realms of the imagination in which the viewer can also project their struggles, stories, and desires.”30 Her autobiographical images use a feminist idiom and also relate directly back to the purpose of midrash, to refresh old stories for new audiences. Restating biblical stories in a contemporary idiom is appropriate when one remembers the purpose of midrash: to educate. Kitaj, Rand, Majzner, and Weisberg present unified visions of art and midrash. Each accepts different influences, and yet all of them perceive their work as part of a longstanding tradition. Moreover, several of these artists see their oeuvre within the broader tradition of interpretation and exegesis; for them visual midrash is the most recent development of interpretive methods. No longer is an artwork a standalone object onto which the viewer projects personal interpretation, but rather, the artwork is placed within the history of religious, cultural, and intellectual interpretation. The following examples demonstrate some of the ways artworks interpret texts, specifically midrash aggadah and halakhah, and interpret specific stories and laws.

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Visual Midrash Aggadah

Visual midrash aggadah interprets biblical stories. While the artists just discussed have looked at the Bible comprehensively, another way for an artwork to add information to the original biblical narrative is by illustrating something that is not in the text. Eden Morris’s work demonstrates how an image can enrich biblical narrative. Yet another way is to leave out information, creating meaning through a simplified form. A fabric work by Chana Cromer will show how emotion can be presented by removing narrative details. Sarah’s Nightmare (2010) by Morris is an excellent example of visual midrash aggadah. The piece includes imagery from three sources: the sacrifice and binding, or Akedah, of Isaac, found in Genesis; written midrashim that elaborate on characters’ psychological states; and new visual invention. In the foreground, a demonic figure looms over Sarah, Abraham’s wife, who lies across the bottom of the painting while Abraham and Isaac are in the upper right corner. Several midrashim inform Morris’s composition. One written midrash describes what Isaac was thinking as his father brought him up the mountain to be sacrificed. Midrash Tanhuma reads:

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“R. Abbin Berabbi the Levite said: While they were walking, Satan came to Isaac on his right hand and said, ‘Alas, wretched son of a wretched woman, how many fasts did your mother fast until you came? Now the old man has gone mad in his old age and here he is going to slaughter you. Isaac turned back and said to his father: Look at what this one is saying to me! He said to him: He has come to confuse you, but the Holy One shall not confuse us, as stated. . . . God will see to the lamb for a burnt offering.’”31 This story is found in the Torah; however, R. Abbin Berabbi provides insight into Isaac’s emotional state. Soon after Abraham brings Isaac to Mount Moriah, where the sacrifice would have occurred (ultimately an angel intervenes to prevent Isaac’s death), Sarah dies. There is no scriptural link between the Akedah and Sarah’s death, but another written midrash explains that while Abraham and Isaac were away, Satan visits Sarah in the guise of her son and tells her that Abraham had bound him on an altar and took up a knife to kill him. The story suggests that Sarah died as she heard the tale. This interpretation is supported by the proximity of the two stories in the biblical text.32 These two written midrashim expound on what Isaac and Sarah experienced and increase the dramatic tension in places where the original text is silent. More than that, the stories add another level of meaning and human experience to the reader’s understanding of the text. Morris includes the Akedah in the upper right corner of the composition, reserving primacy of place for the midrash detailing Sarah’s experience. Richard McBee notes in his essay “Contemporary Jewish Art: An Assessment” how the painting’s main subject is from midrash and not a biblical story.33 In the painting, the central figural group is a ram-headed man leaning over a woman. Seen in profile, the ram has a muzzle and thick horns. His eye simultaneously belongs to the animal and a man’s face. The creature becomes both Isaac and the ram that is sacrificed in his place. In the upper right corner of the painting, surrounded by a dark background, is the sacrifice scene, the Akedah. Isaac, appearing again, is bound as his father raises a knife. These figures are smaller and further away. The woman below the man/ram tears at her face with her fingers. She is suffering not merely a nightmare, but terror. McBee writes, “As Isaac becomes simultaneously the sacrificial ram and Sarah’s haunted son, the artist has appropriated both biblical and midrashic texts to place the horror she perceives at the center of the narrative.”34

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In effect, Morris’s painting is more than the sum of its parts; it is a new midrash. While the biblical story makes no mention of Sarah during the Akedah, Midrash Tanhumah connects them by describing Sarah’s despair upon hearing the news of her son. Sarah’s Nightmare adds even more. What did Sarah see? How did it make her feel? What event is so powerful as to elicit an overwhelming emotion terrifying enough to kill the sufferer? Sarah’s Nightmare proposes to answer some of these questions. Moreover, painting enabled the artist to overlay the image of the ram upon Isaac in a way that text cannot do. The figure is simultaneously the sacrificial ram, Isaac, and Satan disguised. Morris uses layered images and in so doing creates a new interpretation, making her painting visual midrash. Visual midrashim such as Sarah’s Nightmare and The Scroll enrich and elaborate on specific texts using a variety of rhetorical devices. Another device is removal. An artist might provide interpretation not through addition but by removal of information, adhering to the old creative adage, “Show, don’t tell.” In fact, an artwork can leave quite a bit out and still elicit a powerful response. Chana Cromer, an artist whose work has been called midrash, created The Child Is Not in 2010. The work is a hand-dyed, light-colored tunic: “The plain linen is reminiscent of a shroud, so the piece signifies not only the mourner, but the mourned.”35 The emotional effect, however, comes from knowing the story to which the title refers—that of Joseph, whose brothers sold him into slavery. Genesis tells us that when Reuven, the eldest brother, discovers this treachery, “he returned to his brothers and said, ‘The boy is not there; as for me, where am I to go?”36 Knowing the story helps the viewer call to mind Joseph’s colorful coat, a gift of love from his father, Jacob; however, what is seen is pure white, as if all the pigment from that coat—and from Jacob’s face upon hearing of the news of his son’s death—has suddenly gone pale. Art historian Susan Nashman Fraiman describes the artwork this way: “An off-white garment open at the sides like a tallit katan [an undergarment with fringes] is torn at the front in a kind of zigzag.” Expanding her description, Fraiman continues, “Suddenly, we see and feel the implication of Joseph’s disappearance at the hands of his brothers, through his brother Reuven’s response, extrapolated to his father, Jacob’s, response. And, by extension to the loss of any child.” Cromer’s work demonstrates how sparse visual information can yield tremendous emotional response.

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As these examples of visual midrash aggadah show, imaginative yet intensive examination of Jewish texts is inherently important to artists. Visual midrash aggadah has many tools at its disposal, including elaboration and simplification. Morris overlapped the figure of a ram with Isaac to create a fiendish figure, an elaboration that is difficult to achieve with words; Cromer, through reduction, created a psychological impression of surprise and mourning. Both of these methods, laying one picture over another and using a simple object as synecdoche, are tools that are distinctive of visual midrash.

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Unlike midrash aggadah, midrash halakhah has a specific purpose: to adjudicate religious law. Midrash halakhah offers guidance on how to follow Jewish law. Artistic exploration of halakhah does not seek to decide matters of religious law, of course, but it does look to the commandments and rabbinic legal debates as subject matter. Artists depict laws, demonstrate differing opinions, and make artworks that examine the nature of jurisprudence, namely, the difficulty of applying laws to lived experience. Jewish art focuses on religious laws but also points to the conflict between any legal system, which by necessity must be clear and unambiguous, and the messiness of lived experience. The conflict between law and society makes visual midrash halakhah particularly compelling. Archie Rand spent five years completing The 613 (2001–6, fig. 19), a monumental work including more than six hundred panels. Each modestly sized painting depicts one of the 613 commandments, as cataloged by Maimonides in his commentaries. Maimonides, a philosopher and rabbi from the medieval period, itemized all of the commandments in the Torah, including animal sacrifice and how to honor the widow. Today, only a fraction of the commandments are practiced. Rand’s The 613 includes every commandment Maimonides listed, artistically following the adage that every person must write his own Torah. Rand has done this in paintings. Peter Steinfels of the New York Times writes that Rand’s paintings “are rendered in the style of comics and pulp fiction book jackets, a dash of Mad Magazine, a spoonful of Tales of the Crypt, some grotesques, some

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Visual Midrash Halakhah

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FIG. 19  Archie Rand, The 613 (Expelling the Impure from the Temple), 2001–2006. Studio installation, 2008. This is a monumental series of paintings that depict every one of the commandments cataloged by Maimonides, a medieval rabbi and philosopher. This image is trimmed in gold, like a Byzantine icon, and shows a man being kicked in the face. The pulp-fiction style and bright colors change the tenor of the law and place it in a modern idiom.

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superheroes, always action, emotion, drama. The palette runs to lurid blues, greens, yellows, purples and rose, ‘vulgar, discomforting colors,’ Mr. Rand says, suitable for the acrylic paints but also ‘to steer away from an accepted aesthetic.’”37 Some of the panels use narrative to depict a commandment, but midrash aggadah is not Rand’s main project here, unlike some of his previous work.38 Rather, in this group of pictures, Rand presents halakhah. Each painting corresponds to one of the commandments enumerated by Maimonides. The first commandment, to know there is a God, “shows an astronaut floating upside down, with a large purple planet over his left shoulder,” as described by critic Menachem Wecker. “Rather than presenting a nostalgic image of a bearded medieval saint praying from his book to portray the believer, Rand picks a modern, accessible one: an astronaut seeking to discover the mysteries of creation and the universe.”39 Rand’s popular, mass-media, pulp style opens Maimonides up to contemporary eyes. In this way, Rand’s work exhibits a particularly important quality of midrash: to make the text accessible and relevant to changing audiences.40 Wecker, who frequently writes about Jewish art, makes this point directly: “It is perhaps most informative to think of Rand’s efforts to visually grapple with the commandments as a neo-Maimonidean enterprise. Just as the medieval scholar wrote works that made the Bible more accessible, Rand develops an accessible visual iconography that confronts the text.”41 Wecker has it right, but perhaps he is too understated. The collection of paintings reads as a suggestive graphic novel, but the immense size of the work creates a golden, altar-like glow throughout the room. Even more unsettling is the juxtaposition of sacred and profane. The images are inspired by pulp fiction and are filled with intrigue, mystery, eroticism, and violence, yet they depict the core of Jewish faith, the Torah. Often when one thinks of religious laws such as “I am the Lord your God” one thinks of unyielding doctrine.42 Rand’s cartoonish, accessible style softens the severity of the law, at least aesthetically. In Expelling the Impure from the Temple, another commandment, a boot forcefully takes up a majority of the picture as it swings out toward the viewer. In the lower left corner, a contorted face receives the blow. The comic-book–like composition actively depicts the violent action with diagonal lines. Saturated colors provide even more power to this image, heightening the effect. The gold

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borders surrounding all of the paintings complicate the connection to popular culture by placing the pictures in dialogue with Greek Orthodox icons. Moreover, the sheer scale of the panels creates the unavoidable suggestion that to live a religious life is, in fact, a significant challenge. Yet Rand chose not to make one massive mural but a collection of small paintings. This may highlight the sacredness of each commandment. Goodness is brought to the world one deed at a time.43 Visual midrash halakhah does not need to refer directly to biblical law. It can also refer to rabbinic adjudication. Andi Arnovitz examines the difficulty of following religious law in contemporary society. A Delicate Balance (2012, fig. 20) includes hundreds of tightly wound small scrolls tied to opposite ends of fragile suspended metal rods. Each scroll resembles a claf, the parchment of prayers tucked into a mezuzah, giving whatever is written on the scroll religious import. Acting as balances, the metal rods are then suspended from the ceiling. Each pair of scrolls includes a text from Jewish law and a contemporary news item that relates to the religious edict, showing the difficulty and delicacy of maintaining tradition while adapting to contemporary life. When this work was exhibited at the Mishkan Museum of Art at Ein Harod, viewers had to walk through the hanging balances to proceed through the exhibition. Arnovitz noticed that some viewers took care not to touch any hanging balance, while others trod on through, disturbing the equilibrium and on occasion accidentally knocking them down.44 The artist saw these varied manners as metaphors for how people deal with religion and jurisprudence. A Delicate Balance demonstrates the challenges faced when religious life and contemporary society are inevitably brought into proximity. Another subject examined by artists is the debates between rabbis found within the Talmud. The Talmud includes rabbinic disagreements regarding how to observe certain commandments. Often one point of view is

FIG. 20  Andi Arnovitz, A Delicate Balance, 2012. Paper, metal, and string, dimensions variable. Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. This photograph is of an installation of small metal balances suspended along a hallway. Each balance keeps a pair of scrolls in position. Each pair includes a Jewish law and a contemporary news item relating to it. The work metaphorically shows the difficulty of adjudicating Jewish law in the modern world.

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FIG. 21  Ben Schachter, Nine Nights of Hanukkah, Menorah for Shammai and Hillel, 2015. Graphite and charcoal on paper, 19 × 24 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist. This drawing shows a design for a double menorah. Traditionally one candle is added on each subsequent night of Chanukkah until all eight candles are lit. The Talmud records a debate between two rabbis, Shammai and Hillel. Hillel argued that the holiday should start with one candle, and another should be added each night. Shammai argued that the holiday should begin with eight candles, and one should be taken away each night. This menorah enables both views to be followed at the same time; however, when this is done, nine candles will be lit each night. This work demonstrates how a visual interpretation of a text sometimes reveals different insights not as easily accessed through the written word.

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accepted over the others, yet the debate leading to that decision is included in the text. My drawing Nine Nights of Chanukkah, Menorah for Shammai and Hillel (2015, fig. 21) demonstrates a debate between rabbis. Shammai and Hillel were both influential rabbis of the rabbinic era. Their influence was so great that many students formed two schools, following the interpretations of one or the other rabbi. One such debate concerned how the Chanukkah menorah should be lit. Hillel thought that the menorah should be lit so that one candle is added every night, while Shammai thought one should begin with eight and take one away each night. Nine Nights of Chanukkah presents a double menorah so that both approaches can be performed at the same time. If this were ever to be done, however, a strange paradox would emerge: every night, nine candles would be lit. On the first night, one gentleman has one candle and the other fellow has eight; on the following night there are two and seven, and so on. Nine Nights is not intended to be a practical menorah; it illustrates rabbinic discourse. But Nine Nights of Chanukkah also demonstrates that some ideas and observations—interpretations—come to light through visual means. The double menorah compounds Hillel’s and Shammai’s views into one. Additionally, the circular form also suggests that the two scholars would face one another as they lit the candles, as if in continuous discussion with one another. Artists do not need to appeal to the commandments or jurisprudence directly to comment on halakhah. Arik Weiss’s Netaneh Tokef (2010, fig. 22), makes manifest a liturgical poem, a piyyut, recited during Yom Kippur services, called Unetaneh Tokef (“Let Us Cede Power”). The solemnity of the poem, as it speaks of the future each of us will face in the coming year, brings mortality into sharp focus. The poem lists many ways in which one’s life might end. “Who by fire and who by water / who by sword and who by beast.” The repetition of “who by” is rhythmic and meditative.45 The overarching metaphor is of a celestial ledger into which the life or death of each soul is written on Rosh Hashanah and then sealed on Yom Kippur. A seal, or signet, is a royal mark only the king can give. Unetaneh Tokef is a poem about what God will grant. Only through prayer, charity, and faith can the divine edict be softened. Weiss is a graphic designer by trade. His seals are not royal signets, but instead a set of rubber stamps on a metal carousel, an office fixture of a bygone era. Typically, these stamps would be used on official documents and

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FIG. 22  Arik Weiss, Netaneh Tokef, 2010. Stamps, 14 × 14 × 11 inches. Mishkan Museum of Art, Ein Harod. Netaneh Tokef is a liturgical poem that lists various ways one’s life might end: “Who by fire, who by water. . . .” Each stamp includes one of the phrases from the poem. The metaphor in the poem is of a divine judge inscribing names in ledgers of life and death. Weiss’s sculpture puts that ultimate decision into a bureaucratic setting, turning the existential moment into a thoughtless procedure.

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include such phrases as “closed” or “cancelled” or “confidential” or “paid”; instead, they read, “by fire,” “by water,” “by drought,” and so on. These are not the implements of a royal edict or a divine judge, but rather an anonymous bureaucrat to whom no appeals can be placed. One can almost hear such a person say, “I’m just doing my job. If you want to appeal, fill out this form.” Weiss’s stamps are not that simple. Suddenly the faceless person behind the desk wields the ultimate power—yet, tasked only with following protocol, the unidentified civil servant cannot hear appeals. As with many of the examples in the previous chapter, the artist’s choice of object alloys physical actions with textual meaning. Weiss’s carousel of stamps carries existential weight; his repurposing of a simple office tool does more than present it for aesthetic contemplation. The stamps, in a Kafkaesque fashion, wrest judgment from the divine and deposit it in the hands of a government machine. This chapter introduced visual interpretation that specifically addresses Jewish law. However, much of the art discussed throughout this book can fall under the category of visual midrash halakhah as well. These other examples refer to ritual actions. Looked at this way, nearly any ritually informed action can be thought of as visual midrash halakhah. Earlier, a ritual was described as an action that is accompanied by a blessing. That blessing often begins with thanksgiving and then a description of the action to be performed: “commanded us to. . . .” Therefore each ritual action is a commandment, a law. Artworks that specifically address the ritual activity also comment on Jewish law. For example, Wexler’s Spice Box for the Havdalah Service, the opening illustration to this book, is made from a dust mask and a series of hoses that lead to various packaged spices. Unlike other modified Judaica, the subject of Wexler’s spice box is the ritual to smell aromatic spices; other social ideas are not explicitly laid on top of this unusual piece of equipment. Similarly, both Goldman’s Stamped, in which the artist impressed marks into his arm, and Weiss’s Ye Shall Cleave, which included tape wrapped around the arm—two artworks based on tefillin—give the word in the commandment, “bind,” new life. There is one other way in which visual midrash halakhah operates; that is, by thinking of laws as design limitations instead of as divine, unyielding edict. Halakhah describes how to do some very practical things, such as

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how to build a sukkah. If practical Jewish laws are thought of as a set of rules to be followed as a procedure, which many of them are, halakhah can be read in the same way that instructions for design competitions might be read. Sukkah festivals already do this. Designers and architects read the regulations and discover room for variation within the codified form. Earlier, SO-IL’s In Tension was discussed as a nontraditional sukkah. The piece is made of three leaning poles that remain standing because of a series of ropes and netting. The roof is filled with vegetation and looks more like an unfortunate fisherman’s catch than traditional s’chach, the leaves and branches usually laid out flat across the roof. In Tension demonstrates that when designers read Talmudic law free of the associations of religious rigidity, they view it as a design challenge. Directions that impose height restrictions, describe how close together the walls must be, where a sukkah can be built, and so forth are not commandments, per se; they are design limitations. The point of view shifts away from a single-minded determination not to break any rules toward an expansive quest for what is still possible. In the previous chapter, the sukkah and the eruv laws were examined by artists and designers. These laws determine size, materials, and structure. The laws also determine how these spaces can be used; however, as is made evident by the popularity of sukkah festivals and the number of design firms that have participated, the secular way to think of these laws is as design restrictions or Conceptual art procedures. The examples of visual midrash halakhah presented in this book show that artists explore Jewish law, adjudication, rabbinic argument, and creativity within a certain set of limits. Artists present their observations, interpretations, and responses to Jewish texts in their work. Some artists refer specifically to traditional written midrashim and others pursue new avenues of inquiry. As an interpretive framework, distinguishing between visual midrash aggadah and halakhah helps to clarify artists’ intentions. For clarity’s sake, only artworks that specifically make reference to written midrash, Jewish laws, and biblical texts were included in this discussion, but the principle can be applied to a wider array of artworks. More importantly, visual midrash aggadah and halakhah demonstrate how artworks contribute to Judaism’s continuing tradition of interpretation, be it through an artwork or artistic action. Artworks add to a conversation that extends backward into history for thousands of years. The visual

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mode of the interpretation and the contemporary setting are new, but not the religious and cultural framework to which visual midrash contributes. Artists invite and encourage us to see visual midrash as the newest layer of exegesis and interpretation of biblical and rabbinic texts. The artists who do so are countercultural, artistically speaking, because they use religious ideas as subject matter, openly and without reservation. The artists are also countercultural because they place their work within a conversation focused on common ideas and actions instead of focusing exclusively on artistic individuality. Their attitude aligns with Judaism’s tradition of debate and discussion and with those who continue to balance Jewish tradition and the modern world. As more artistic midrash and Jewish art are produced, artists’ place within Judaism’s tradition of active interpretation will become richer. Contemporary Jewish art will extend Judaism’s tradition of debate and discussion into artistic action.

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Epilogue: Becoming a Jewish Artist

In graduate school I studied in Venice, Italy, over a summer. The city was as much an education as my classes. Streets wove under buildings and over bridges. The Venetians, it seemed to me, did a running stitch through the city every day on their way to work, as they followed the walking streets that rose over obstacles and descended into stairwells. These paths had dimension. Perhaps I experienced Venice this way because I thought a lot about lines in space, specifically electrical wiring. During that time, I was making sculptures and installations with electrical hardware. A large work riffed on Rauschenberg’s White Paintings; I covered panels with nightlights that turned themselves on and off as shadows and reflections passed over them. It was while working on the electrical paintings that wiring began to seem to me like a three-dimensional drawing complete with rules, much like those made by Conceptual artists, but instead of making my own procedures I took them from another source. I was fortunate to have my light bulb chess set included in Light x Eight at the Jewish Museum in 2002. I first saw the Venice eruv map in 2007. I instantly remembered my experience in that city, but I also understood the space in a radically different way. The eruv boundary navigated all the same obstacles as the people, but with another layer of meaning. Though the eruv is based on rabbinic law, the way it was built had to conform to the intricate city. In response, I made Venice Eruv that same year. For the boundary I stitched blue thread into paper and painted the shape with white and blue paint. The stitching made

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sense because it simulated my experience of walking through Venice, while blue lines represented the canals, yet another network flowing through the city. Even more importantly, the challenge to balance the urban terrain with rabbinic discourse intrigued me. I began collecting eruv maps. Each one told a story about the urban environment it represented. The Denver, Colorado map is more or less a square, following the gridded streets; Teaneck, New Jersey, near my hometown, has a map that navigates across a major highway; the Manhattan eruv has grown twice since I started making these pictures. For some images I added more detail, such as canals, tunnels, or an odd map of a “winter eruv.” One painting is historical and based on the eruv map of Krakow. All in all, I have nearly two hundred maps to work from. Soon after starting the series, I presented my work at the Conney Conference on Jewish Art. Stimulating conversation with Doug Rosenberg and witty audience questions, such as “Is there a kosher ‘style’ painting?,” haunted me for months. Laura Kruger included my work in Envisioning Maps at Hebrew Union College, where a chance meeting with Richard McBee proved to be providential. As anyone who knows him can attest, his enthusiasm for Jewish art is infectious. Later, I served as artist-inresidence to the American Jewish Museum in Pittsburgh, where Melissa Hiller challenged me to engage my audience in new ways. Confronted by curious passersby, I honed my explanation of the eruv and my work. At the same time, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art invited me to mount a solo exhibition, where I displayed “kosher” paintings made from homemade milk paint. In 2010, I was invited to install a large-scale drawing at the Mattress Factory. Perhaps the most formative experiences were two shows exhibited virtually simultaneously, one curated by Peg Olin at the Institute for Sacred Music at Yale University and the other curated by Zachary Levine at the Yeshiva University Museum. These two exhibitions demonstrated to me that there is, in fact, a community of artists conducting a significant conversation on Jewish law through artwork. I knew that at some point I wanted to read the laws of the eruv in the Talmud, so my wife and I walked into Westside Judaica to buy the two volumes of Tractate Eruvin. I have to tell you that if I were in a lineup, I’m not the sort of person who would be singled out as the guy who wanted to buy Tractate Eruvin (“That’s him! He’s the one!”). Perhaps that is why, instead of saying “Of course, it’s right over here,” the salesman said, “Why would

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you want to read that?” From his reaction, I knew I was onto something. Then, when I actually read the rabbinic rules that describe how to make an eruv, the text read, quite naturally, as a Conceptual art piece—the most complicated Sol LeWitt wall drawing ever! I started imagining how I might demonstrate or model the form and variations described on each page. As I was reading, I found that a curious phrase kept cropping up. As discussed, an eruv is thought of as a series of post-and-lintel doorways. The lintel of each “door” must pass over the posts, but it does not need to touch them. The phrase that kept cropping up was “appearance of a door.” I thought, “Appearance?” How can legal discussion, particularly religious law, rely on a subjective measure? I’ve continued reading and found other examples of spatial, formal, and aesthetic thinking in the Talmud. Not to get too far into the “rabbinic” weeds, here is what is currently on my mind. Another volume of the Talmud, Baba Metzia, discusses what to do when you find a lost object. Several questions guide the process. They include: How can you tell that something is really lost? If you find something, can you keep it, or must you try to return it? It turns out that some things do not need to be returned, like money. First, everyone will claim it, and second, there is no way to prove who had it last. But are there any exceptions to this rule? Yes—if the money is in a wallet, someone else can claim the money, because the wallet can be recognized. But suppose several coins are scattered on the ground. They were probably inadvertently dropped, and you can take them. But suppose they are stacked in neat little piles. (In a world without paper money, perhaps this was more common.) The rabbis argue that someone must have left them there intentionally; therefore, they belong to someone. One final opinion takes this a step further: each pile must be shaped like a small tower, with the smallest coin on top. In that case, it is very clear that the coins did not accidentally fall into exactly that arrangement. Why go through such imaginative exercises? That is a very good question that I’ll leave to the rabbinic scholars reading this book to determine. (Incidentally, I had a roommate who stacked his loose change on his desk in little tower-shaped piles. I’m sure he was more obsessive-compulsive than he was Talmudic.) But why do I find this interesting? Because rabbis make reasonable decisions based on the arrangement of the coins; perception guides religious, legal ruling. Put another way, composition, form, and action create

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meaning. The scattered coins look different from the stacked ones, and we assume that the “action” responsible for each arrangement means something. Until 2007, Jewish art did not command all that much of my attention. Perhaps the most formative experience before then was seeing Too Jewish? at the Jewish Museum in 1996. At that time, I had just graduated from college and was excited to see all sorts of art, but how I saw the exhibition was quite different from the curatorial intention. I saw avant-garde, Conceptual, postmodern Jewish art. Kardon’s Jewish Noses, casts of famous sniffers, made me laugh, and inventive Judaica provoked thought. However, it was two other works that influenced me the most. The first work, Helène Aylon’s The Liberation of G-d (1990–96), caught my attention not for its feminist politics, but for its process. Aylon’s idea determined how to make the work; she highlighted every gendered reference to the divine in the Bible through translucent paper so as not to deface the original text. More importantly, the work required endurance. For me, Aylon integrated three critical things: care for tradition, persistence, and intellectual engagement. The second work, Seth Kramer’s film Untitled (1994), is a short documentary showing the artist trying to comprehend the magnitude of the number six million. To do that, the artist counted six million grains of rice, storing them in various glass jars and containers. The number, of course, corresponds to the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust. Again, my interest was not in identity or politics, but rather the scale of the artist’s task. Since his film, others have counted paper clips, can tabs, and other things, reducing the provocativeness of Kramer’s original film. The task, once profound, is now kitsch. Yet these two works, more than the others, showed me how to transform mundane activities into meaningful action. As I wrote earlier, the insecurity behind the exhibition’s theme competed against what I actually saw: I saw avant-garde Jewish art. Aylon’s work was countercultural because it tackled the Bible directly, unlike midcentury monumental Jewish abstraction, and Kramer’s work demonstrated the contemporary artist’s fascination with monotony. Taken together, these works integrated tradition with contemporary art. I suddenly saw Judaism in a new light, and it was exciting. These works were not “too Jewish”; on the contrary, they were, for me, authentically Jewish. Even more profoundly, these artworks seemed countercultural because my religion gave them edginess

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I had not yet seen. Judaism became avant-garde. That’s what I saw at Too Jewish?, but it would be another ten years before Jewish art came back into view for me. I’ve been asked if I worry that I marginalize myself as a Jewish artist. It’s a curious question, because I believe that if I made work about my Jewish identity, personal experience, religious insecurity, or other themes along those lines, the question would not be as sharp. However, because I make art about Jewish ideas that are not shared across the religious divide—such as spirituality, or generic ideas of ritual—my work belongs to a particular oeuvre. Quite frankly, I do not worry about those things. In response, I say, “I dare you to show my work.” Besides, all modern art was marginalized at one time or another. What Jewish artists must learn quickly—and this is the crucial point and the deepest of ironies—is that as much as Jews dominate the art world, an entirely new market for contemporary Jewish art must be created. Jewish art can, in fact, be “too Jewish” for the Jewish Museum. Should we work to overturn that perception? Sure, but artists should also be entrepreneurial and create new markets for their work. What would a contemporary Jewish art market look like? I don’t know. But I can describe what a contemporary Jewish art community looks like. Contemporary Jewish art is in a unique position. It is the only genre of art within which artists collectively engage the same ideas over and over again. Though many may think it parochial or retrograde to turn back to the Bible or religious law for content, I do not see it that way. First, being in the minority is not inherently wrong. Second, art in no manner has examined the corpus of Jewish texts. Even once every motif is hit, subsequent artists would treat each one differently. When that happens, then Jewish art will truly become commentary. This is not as farfetched as one might think. Artists have debated their ideas in their art before. The artistic debates throughout history, including the Byzantine era and the Protestant Reformation are clear examples. Artistic debate also occurred during the modern period. Picasso made works in response to his rivals, Matisse and Braque, and they reciprocated. Even now, Jewish artists are jousting with one another in very much the same way. While writing this book I was encouraged to read R. B. Kitaj. Kitaj listed a litany of influences, such as Hasidic folk tales, Freud, Einstein, fellow painters, Saul Bellow, historical midrash, the Talmud, and of course

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the Bible. Moreover, he encouraged artists to accept the same sources and, implicitly, any other combination of influences that feed artistic creation. Kitaj looked at all his influences in the same way he read Jewish texts; everything was part of the same whole. As those who study Torah sometimes say, “go back to the sources.” Kitaj took his “sources” from anywhere he chose, secular and nonsecular material alike. However, the last sentence of his Second Diasporist Manifesto reveals a little truth: “You’ve been reading a long unfinished poem called how to do a jewish art.”1 This is not the same title as the one on the front cover. Why? It seems to me that Kitaj eventually passed through Diasporist art, with its complexity and variation, and came to see his work as Jewish art. While his entire book entreats the reader to learn from him, Kitaj’s last sentence is an invitation to learn with him. This is already happening. Jewish artists appeal to motifs already understood by other artists and their audience. Artists, critics, and viewers have shared knowledge of texts, stories, characters, laws, and themes. The way in which artists restate, combine, and synthesize this shared knowledge is critical. In some respects, this is a return to a traditional outlook on art. Historically, artists used motifs, copied poses, and used standard compositions to make connections between the newest work and an artistic tradition. By making these connections to the past, artworks extended tradition into the future. Kitaj, Rand, and Weisberg recognize that looking back at motifs and compositions pulls on non-Jewish art history. So long as the new strand of Jewish art carries on, parts of it will eventually become the sources and influences that future artists pick up. For now, contemporary Jewish art involves themes and motifs drawn from art history and texts not yet connected to that canon. In 2013, the Jerusalem Biennale mounted its first exhibition. The organizer, Ram Ozeri, solicited curatorial ideas from artists working all over the world. The Biennale was exhibited in several locations throughout the city. What made this festival unique was the focus on Judaism as artistic subject matter. Some of the artists included in this book exhibited their work at the 2015 Jerusalem Biennale.2 Many of the artworks in these exhibitions can be seen as interpreting Jewish texts, laws, or customs and thus demonstrating how contemporary art is engaged in a serious and far-ranging examination of Judaism.

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Art galleries and festivals are not the only places where contemporary Jewish art is needed. This book is a model for educators who wish to enrich Jewish arts-based education. Some educators study how creative assignments improve student engagement with the material.3 Just as important, visual interpretation invites students to become “active participants in the chain of textual transmission.”4 Moreover, an artwork informed by Jewish texts and midrash is not just a way to engage students; it is the latest in a long line of interpretation. Artists interpret and offer their interpretations through material and active means. Jewish art is fast becoming, and rightly so, a model of deep analytical and personal reflection, yielding exegetical discovery, albeit through unconventional methods. Jewish educators who are looking for ways to use the arts to engage students may be well advised to see how artists are doing it for themselves. The use of motifs in art is significant beyond the confines of Jewish art. The return to shared literary sources and lived experiences might be emblematic of artists’ intentions to form stronger intellectual communities or connect to the viewer in direct ways. Shared references and common motifs address a desire to assuage the intellectual and aesthetic gap between artist and audience. More specifically, artists who engage in Jewish art strike out on their own, unconcerned that they will be ostracized for work that is too Jewish. The risk faced, ever diminishing, is less than the appeal of drawing out artistic and aesthetic ideas from Jewish texts and exploring lived Judaism through contemporary art practice.

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Notes

Introduction

1. Exodus 20:3. 2. Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 57. 3. Rosenberg, “Is There a Jewish Art?,” 59. 4. Rosen, Religion and Art, 15. 5. Ibid., 17. 6. Ibid., 22. 7. Braiterman, Shape of Revelation, xxii. 8. Ibid., 2. 9. Ibid., 260–61. 10. Olin, Nation Without Art, 163. 11. Ibid., 161. 12. Ibid., 164. 13. Ibid., 161. 14. Baskind, Jewish Artists and the Bible, 5. 15. Ibid., 1. 16. Ibid., 7. 17. Julius, Idolizing Pictures, 23. 18. Ibid., 59.

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19. Ibid., 26. 20. Raphael, Judaism and the Visual Image, 20. Italics in text. 21. Ibid., 45–46. 22. Saltzman, “To Figure, or Not to Figure,” 67. 23. Olin, Nation Without Art, 182. 24. Ibid., 186. 25. Ibid. 26. Anderson, “The (In)visibility of Theology,” 63. 27. Siedell, God in the Gallery, 159. 28. Siedell, Who’s Afraid of Modern Art?, 49. 29. Ibid., 25. 30. Ibid., 25–26, and Anderson, “The (In)visibility of Theology,” 72. 31. Schwarzschild, “The Legal Foundation of Jewish Aesthetics,” 29–42. 32. Rosenberg, “Is There a Jewish Art?,” 60. 33. Revel-Neher, “‘With Wisdom and Knowledge of Workmanship,’” 24.

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34. Olin, “Graven Images on Video?,” 41. 35. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 5–6. 36. Exodus 26. 37. Liss, “Tzena Ure-ena,” 194. 38. Amishai-Maisels, “Chagall’s Jewish In-Jokes,” 80. 39. Ibid., 76. 40. Hazony, Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, 32. 41. Deuteronomy 14:21. 42. Numbers 5:11–26. 43. Exodus 20:10.

Notes to Pages 10–46

Chapter 1

1. Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” 195–96. 2. Ibid., 196. 3. Ibid., 197. 4. Ibid., 201. 5. Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” 57. 6. Ibid., 57. 7. Ibid., 58. 8. Kaprow, “Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” 2. 9. Ibid., 4. 10. Kaprow, “Impurity,” 39. 11. Kaprow, “Pinpointing Happenings,” 88. 12. De Maria, “Meaningless Work,” 240–41. 13. Rosenberg, “Art Object and the Esthetics of Impermanence,” 122. 14. Kochan, “Unfinished and the Idol,” 125.

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15. Tractate Avodah Zara 4:5, Babylonian Talmud. 16. Kochan, “Unfinished and the Idol,” 126. 17. Schwarzschild, “Aesthetics,” 3. 18. Kochan, “Unfinished and the Idol,” 129. Emphasis added. 19. Ibid., 129–30. 20. Schwarzschild, “Legal Foundation of Jewish Aesthetics,” 109. 21. Ibid., 112. 22. Ibid., 114. 23. Saltzman, “To Figure, or Not to Figure,” 69. 24. Rosen, Imagining Jewish Art, 105. 25. Revel-Neher, “‘With Wisdom and Knowledge of Workmanship,’” 13. 26. Raphael, Judaism and the Visual Image, 7–8. 27. Braiterman, Shape of Revelation, 256–57. 28. Rosenberg, “Is There a Jewish Art?,” 59. 29. Sperber, “Feminist Art in the Sphere of Traditional and Religious Judaism,” 152. 30. Zalmona, Century of Israeli Art, 274. 31. John 2:1–11. Chapter 2



1. Exodus 20:8–11. 2. Genesis 31:3. 3. Genesis 31:6–11. 4. Genesis 1:31. 5. Shabbat, 104b, Babylonian Talmud. 6. Shabbat, 102b, Babylonian Talmud. 7. Serra, “Rigging (1980),” 600. 8. Colpitt, Minimal Art, 10.

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37. Ibid. 38. Denes, “The Dream,” 929–30. 39. Ibid., 920. 40. Belasco, “Chopping Noodles,” 2. 41. Ibid., 3. 42. See Sinclair, “How Jewish Is Jewish Environmentalism?” 43. Boris, New Authentics, 120.

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Chapter 3

1. Sperber, “Israeli Art Discourse,” 129. 2. Sperber, “Feminist Art in the Sphere of Traditional and Religious Judiaism,” 154. 3. Berner, “Religious Feminism,” 179. 4. Yeshivat Maharat, “Mission and History.” 5. Ungar-Sargon, “Orthodox Yeshiva Set to Ordain Women.” 6. Drisha Institute, “Arts Fellowship.” 7. Elkins and Morgan, Re-Enchantment, 112. 8. Elkins, On the Strange Place, 47. 9. Sperber, “Israeli Art Discourse,” 126. 10. Ibid., 122. 11. Biles, “Re-Imagining Religion,” 188. 12. Ibid., 188–89. 13. Elkins and Morgan, Re-Enchantment, 18. 14. Ibid. 15. Personal email correspondence with Ken Goldman, February 10, 2015. 16. McBee, “Art Review: Off Label.” 17. Kleeblatt, “‘Passing’ into Multiculturalism,” 11. 18. Tractate Sukkah 2, Babylonian Talmud.

Notes to Pages 46–78

9. Ibid., 11. 10. Ibid., 18–19. 11. Museum of Modern Art, “Repetition Nineteen III, Eva Hesse.” 12. Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” 156. 13. Ibid., 151. 14. Schachter, “Michael Fried and Yvonne Rainer,” 50. 15. Ibid., 50. 16. Rose, “A B C Art,” 275. 17. Banes, Democracy’s Body, 33. 18. Wollheim, “Minimal Art,” 387. 19. Ibid., 395–96. 20. Wollheim, Painting, 25. 21. Godrey, Abstraction and the Holocaust, 96. 22. Owen, “Fabrication and Encounter,” 88. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 86. 25. Weisberg, “The Hardworking Artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles.” 26. Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” 123. 27. Ibid., 122. 28. Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 78. 29. Ibid., 78. 30. Ibid., 95–96. 31. Ukeles, “Maintenance Art Manifesto,” 122. 32. Molesworth, “House Work and Art Work,” 96. 33. Silver Simons, De-noue-ment-(n). 34. Deuteronomy 25:17, 19. 35. Deuteronomy 25:19. 36. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, “Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing.”

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19. Lipis, Symbolic Houses in Judaism, fig 4.4, 156; fig 2.25, 71. 20. See www.sukkahville.com. 21. The poster is online at www. sukkahcity.com/sukkah-city.pdf, accessed April 27, 2017. 22. Ibid.; for the actual Talmudic regulation, see Tractate Sukkah 6b, Babylonian Talmud. 23. Dowdle and Swartz, “The Sukkot Project,” 46. 24. Ibid., 48. 25. Betsky, “Furnishing the Primitive Hut,” 11. 26. Ibid., 13. 27. Ibid., 13–15. 28. Ibid., 130. 29. Wexler, “Sukkah 1988.” 30. Betsky, “Furnishing the Primitive Hut,” 19. 31. See Wexler’s Vinyl Milford House (1994) in Betsky, Custom Built, 74–75. 32. Weinthal, Introduction to Aaron Betsky, “Furnishing the Primitive Hut,” 199–200. 33. Betsky, “Furnishing the Primitive Hut,” 11. 34. Ibid., 25. 35. Ibid. 36. I use the term “architectural folly” while Betsky refers to some of these structures as furniture. See Betsky, Custom Built, 25–27. 37. Betsky, “Furnishing the Primitive Hut,” 21. 38. Tractate Eruvin 1, Babylonian Talmud. 39. While many works, such as the author’s, were based on the laws

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and geography of the eruv, other artists used broader interpretations. Sophie Calle’s Jerusalem Eruv (1996) included interviews of people who live within its limit. My “Eruv Paintings” were included in both exhibitions. 40. Using eruv maps as source material, I stitched blue thread into paper to create the silhouette. I painted the interior shape bright white to keep attention on the stitched line. Thread emulates the wire that is often used to construct an eruv. 41. Cohen et al., “Expanding Eruv,” 160–61. 42. Mintz, It’s a Thin Line, xv. 43. I have used the eruv as subject matter in my artwork since 2007. Work includes paintings of eruv maps and drawings of rabbinic “building codes.” 44. Olin, Shaping Community, 21. 45. Cohen et al., “Expanding Eruv,” 160–61. 46. Ibid., 161. 47. Schachter, Tzit Tzit, n.p. 48. Gluck, “Sounds of a Community,” 40. 49. Ibid., 37. 50. Ibid., 39. 51. Ibid., 43. 52. Shema, The Complete Artscroll Machzor, Yom Kippur, 344. 53. McBee, “Art Review: Off Label.” 54. Nicholls, Draw Yomi. 55. Jacqueline Nicholls, e-mail correspondence to author, August 11, 2013. 56. Rorimer, “The Date Paintings of On Kawara,” 120.

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Chapter 4

1. Gertner, “Terms of Scriptural Interpretation,” 9. 2. Ibid., 4–7. 3. Hartman, “Midrash as Law and Literature,” 346.

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4. For a description of exegesis that looks at texts at the level of letters and words, see Hartman, “Midrash as Law and Literature,” 345–46. 5. Rabinowitz, “The Study of a Midrash,” 143. 6. Porton, Understanding Rabbinic Midrash, 5. 7. Boyarin, Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, viii. 8. Stern, “Midrash and Indeterminacy,” 132. 9. Ibid., 132. 10. Hartman, “Midrash as Law and Literature,” 342. 11. Baskind, Jewish Artists and the Bible, 4. 12. Stern, “Midrash and Indeterminacy,” 133. 13. Hartman, “Midrash as Law and Literature,” 343. 14. Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” 6. 15. Ibid., 6. 16. Hartman, “Midrash as Law and Literature,” 338–9. 17. The interest in midrash in the arts is growing in Jewish education. As recently as 2015, a study of art education in Jewish education by Matt Reingold discussed how artistic practice is a form of learning and textual interpretation. See Reingold, “Parshanut Through Art,” 399–401. 18. Kitaj, Second Diasporist Manifesto, verse 78. 19. Ibid., verse 153. 20. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto, verse 63.

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Notes to Pages 94–112

57. Ibid., 122–23. Rorimer relates the Today series to the Impressionists’ interest in the color of sunlight as it changed throughout the day. 58. Woo, “On Kawara’s ‘Date Paintings,’” 63. 59. Ibid., 66. 60. The Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco has an exhibition series called Chevutah in which an artist and a scholar from different disciplines work together. See www​ .thecjm.org/on-view/in-the-past/in -that-case-havruta-in-contemporary -art/new-media. 61. Some of these laws, and others, pertain to men as well, though these particular laws are rarely examined through a male-centered gaze. 62. Sperber, “Feminist Art in the Sphere of Traditional and Religious Judaism,” 152. 63. Schachter, Tzit Tzit, n.p. 64. Numbers 5:11-26. 65. The laws of niddah are extensive and found in Tractate Niddah 1–10. 66. Silver Simons, De-noue-ment (n.). 67. Email correspondence with Donna Sternberg, March 22, 2016. 68. Ibid.

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21. Kitaj, Second Diasporist Manifesto, verse 131. 22. Ibid., verse 236. 23. Kleeblatt, Too Jewish?, ix. 24. Rand, The 613, n.p. 25. McKenzie, “Victor Majzner, Painting the Torah.” 26. Majzner, “Personal Journey.” 27. Majzner, “Painting the Song.” 28. McKenzie, “Victor Majzner, Painting the Torah.” 29. Baigell, American Artists, Jewish Images, 164. 30. Jewish Women’s Archive, “Ruth Weisberg.” 31. Townsend, Midrash Tanhuma, 129–30. 32. Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire, 123. 33. McBee, “Contemporary Jewish Art,” 40–41. 34. Ibid., 41. 35. Fraiman, “A Jewish Art,” 76–77. 36. Genesis 37:30. 37. Steinfels, “An Artist Brings Religion into His Work.” 38. See Archie Rand’s “The Chapter Paintings,” in which he represents each parsha of the Torah. 39. Wecker, “‘Beyond Insane’ Biblical Paintings.” 40. Wright, Midrash: The Literary Genre, 59.

41. Wecker, “Beyond Insane’ Biblical Paintings.” 42. Leviticus 26:13. 43. While most likely unintended, this reading reflects different outlooks among sections of the Orthodox community between people who insist that all laws are followed at all times and those who welcome any attempt to perform even the slightest mitzvah. 44. Arnovitz, “Entwined Identities/ Mutual Concerns.” 45. Unetaneh Tokef, The Complete Artscroll Machzor, Yom Kippur, 531. Epilogue

1. Kitaj, Second Diasporist Manifesto, n.p. 2. See http://www.jerusalembiennale​ .org/the-jerusalem-biennale. 3. See Miller, “Visual Reflective Learning,” 67–78, and Reingold, “Moses’ Black Wife,” 99–120. 4. Reingold, “Creative Responses to Educational Challenges.”

Notes to Pages 113–139

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Bibliography

All biblical citations come from the Tanakh, Jewish Publication Society edition, 1985, found on Sefaria.org, http://www.sefaria.org/texts/Tanakh unless otherwise noted in the text. All references to the Babylonian Talmud come from the William Davidson Talmud edition, originally published as the Koren Noé Talmud edition by Koren Publishers, which can be found on Sefaria.org, http://www.sefaria.org​/ texts/Talmud unless otherwise noted in the text.

Alexenberg, Mel. The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age. 2nd ed. Bristol, U.K.: Intellect, 2011. Amishai-Maisels, Ziva. “Chagall’s Jewish In-Jokes.” Journal of Jewish Art 5 (1978): 76–93. Anderson, Jonathan. “The (In)visibility of Theology in Contemporary Art Criticism.” In Christian Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century: Prospects and Perils, edited by Thomas M. Crisp, Steve L. Porter, and Gregg A. Ten Elshof, 53–79. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014. Arnovitz, Andi. “Entwined Identities/Mutual Concerns: The Art of Andi Arnovitz.” Lecture presented at the Conney Conference on Jewish Art, Los Angeles, March 25, 2015. Baigell, Matthew. American Artists, Jewish Images. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Banes, Sally. Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Baskind, Samantha. Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abstract Expressionism, 44 abstraction to get around graven images, 29–32 Lionel Kochan on, 29–30 Lisa Saltzman on, 31–32 Steven Schwarzschild on, 30–31 action as a religious purpose, 63–67 Daniel Belasco on, 64–65 challenge of, 65 rituals, Jewish, 64, 66 actions as motifs. See motifs of contemporary Jewish art activities to perform art, 39, 40 Adorno, Theodor, 6 aesthetics in Jewish studies, art history, and theology, 2–8 Jonathan Anderson on, 7–8 Samantha Baskin on, 4–5 Zachary Braiterman on, 3–4 Anthony Julius on, 5 Margaret Olin on, 4, 6–7 Melissa Raphael on, 5–6 Aaron Rosen on, 2–3

Schachter, Image.indb 154

Daniel A. Siedell on, 7, 8 stereotypes, 2, 3 Amalek on postage stamp, 59, 62, 66 Anderson, Jonathan, 7–8 Arnovitz, Andi, 124, 125 artistic definitions of work, 44–48 Baskind, Samantha, 4–5 becoming a Jewish artist (author’s story), 133–37 Belasco, Dan action as religious purpose and, 64–65 on consumer culture, 65 Jewish action term coined by, 64, 65 on Rosenberg (Harold), 64 Berner on religious feminism, Tali, 71 Boneh (Archie Rand), 57, 58, 59 Braiterman, Zachary, 3–4 Calle, Sophie, 86, 144n39 Chagall, Marc, The Holy Family (1910), and Jewish in-jokes, 16–17 Chevrutah (Ken Goldman), 95, 96 Colpitt, Frances, on Minimalist art and artists, 45–46

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dance. See postmodern dance A Delicate Balance (Andi Arnovitz), 124, 125 Denes, Agnes, 62, 63 divide between religion and art, 74–77 Dress of the Sotah (Andi Arnovitz), 98, 99 Draw Yomi, Shabbat 75 (Jacqueline Nicholls), 92, 93 eruv as a motif, carrying in the, 84–88, 89 Berlin’s Eruv, 86–87 boundaries, overcoming, 84–85 city planning and public space connection, 86, 87, 144n43 The Eruv of Jerusalem, 86 Instant Eruv, 88, 89 Modern Orthodox shows problems posed by, 85–86 requirements for, 86 A Spatial Practice on, 87 Talmudic regulation of, 85, 86, 87, 134

Schachter, Image.indb 155

Escobar, Maya, 86–87, 97–98

155

feminism, religious, 70–71, 95, 97–98, 100 Formalism, 21, 24 graven images and, 29–33 Clement Greenberg and, 21, 26, 28, 29 49 Days: Women Who Count (A Performance) (Doni Silver Simons), 102, 102 49 Days: Women Who Count (A Performance) (Donna Sternberg), 103, 103 fourth commandment content of, 41 interpreting, 41–43, 67 Jewish art criticism and, 2, 21, 40 work definition and, 41 Gluck, Robert, and prayer shawl motif, 88, 89 Golan, Nechama, You Shall Walk in Good Ways, 33, 35, 97 Goldman, Ken, 33–34, 37 Boots (2014), 33–34, 37 Chevruth (2013), 95, 96 erasure and art, 59, 62 separation between art and religion and, 76–77 Stamped (2012) and tefillin, 91, 93, 129 target of his work, 74 With/Without, 74–76, 75 Goldvicht, Hadassa, 95 graven images abstraction as way to get around, 29–32 challenge to, 8, 23 Formalism and, 29–33

Index

conceptual art and Jewish ideas, 12–15, 40, 45, 46, 86 contemporary Jewish art, 68–104 artists today, Jewish, 70–72 critics focus, 72–74 divide between religion and art, 74–77 melakhot in, 56–63 motifs. See motifs of contemporary Jewish art religious feminism, 70–71 rituals, 68–69 creative activities. See melakhot (creative activities) and artistic practice critics focus for Jewish art, 72–74 Cromer, Chana, 120, 121

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156

graven images (continued) future of, 32–33 Holocaust and, 6, 7 idolatry struggle defined, 30 prevent Jewish art criticism from advancing, 8–10 second commandment and, 1, 2, 6–7 Greenberg, Clement on abstract painting, 28 appeal of Modernism and, 4 on biblical landscapes, 4 on characteristic method of painting, 25 finished art as his criticism style, 23, 24, 28, 39 on flat surface as limitation, 25, 26 Formalism and, 21, 26, 28, 29 on modernism’s purpose, 24–26 Harold Rosenberg versus, 23, 26, 28 on titling a work, 25

Index

halakhah, 16, 21 Holocaust Theodor Adorno on art and, 6 graven images prohibition and, 7 Seth Kramer’s film Untitled (1994) reference to, 136 Margaret Olin on art and, 7 second commandment and, 6 Homage to a Fairy Tale (Doni Silver Simons), 57, 59, 61, 66, 102 I Would Have You Mouth to Mouth (Victor Majzner), 114, 115 images and actions in art criticism and Jewish thought, 23–38 Formalism, 21, 24 graven images and Formalism, 20–33

Schachter, Image.indb 156



Greenberg (Clement) versus Rosenberg (Harold) approach to, 23, 24–29 off the canvas, 33–38 In Tension (SO-IL; Solid Objects— Idenburg Liu), 79, 80, 81, 130 Instant Eruv (Ben Schachter), 89 introduction, 1–22 actions as motifs, 11–12 aesthetics in Jewish studies, art history, and theology, 2–8 critical turn to action, 10–11 graven images prevent Jewish art criticism from advancing, 8–10 Jewish ideas and conceptual art, 12–15 Jewish terms. See Jewish terms/ phrases defined “Jewish actions” definition, 64, 65 Jewish art definition, 1 Jewish artists today, 70–72 Jewish terms/phrases defined, 16–20 agunot, 97 avodah, 42, 44 besamim, 17 brachot, 64, 68 Chanukkah, 17 chevrutah, 19, 93 claf, 124 daf yomi, 19, 69, 93 eruv, 19 etrog, 18 every Jewish child is born old, 16 get, 20, 97 halakhah, 16 Havdalah, 13, 17, 18 hiddur mitzvah, 69 Kashrut, 20, 69 ketubah (ketubot plural), 20, 96

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Schachter, Image.indb 157

Kaprow, Allan activity without result style, 66 art indistinguishable from ordinary experience and, 45 expanding on Harold Rosenberg, 27–28, 29 postmodern dance and, 48 Kawara and studying texts (daf yomi) as motif, 94 Kitaj, R. B., and midrash art, 22, 112–13, 114, 118, 137–38 Kochan, Lionel, on abstraction of graven images, 29–30

157

LeFevbre, Henri, 87 Malkin, Elliott, 85–86 Mazjner, Victor, and midrash art, 22, 112, 114, 115, 115, 118 Meditations: Labor (Doug Rosenberg), 57, 59, 60, 61 melakhot (creative activities), and artistic practice, 39–67 action as a religious purpose, 63–67 actions forbidden on Sabbath, 39 activities must be permanent, 41 artistic definitions of work, 44–48 avodah versus melakhot, 42, 44 in contemporary art, 56–63 criteria, 43–44 feminist minimalistic art, 51–56 fourth commandment and, 21, 40, 41–43, 56, 66 Judaism’s definition of work, 17, 41–43, 44, 56, 66, 67 labor versus work, 42 meaningful actions, 51–56 plain action and what critics thought, 48–50 postmodern dance, 40, 45, 47–48

Index

kippot, 18 kittel, 98 lulav, 18 maharat, 71 manhiga hilkhatit rukhanit toranit, 71 mezuzah, 18 midrash, 22 midrash aggadah, 106 midrash halakhah, 106 mikveh, 100 Mishnah, 19, 43–44 mitzvot, 20 niddah, 100 omer, 18 Pesach (Passover), 17 Rosh Hashanah, 18 rimonim, 18 seder, 17 Shabbat, 17 Shavuot, 17 sheitls, 18 shomer negiah, 95, 97–98 shomer Shabbat, 17, 84 sotah, 20, 98 sukkah, 18, 77. See also sukkah, building and dwelling in Sukkot, 18 tallit, 18 Talmud, 19 tefillin, 18, 69, 91 Torah, 18, 19, 20 treif, 20 tsitzit, 18 yad, 18 yarmulkes, 18 Yom Kippur, 17 Judaism’s definition of work, 41–43 Julius, Anthony, 5

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Index

158

melakhot (continued) women’s role in society as art theme, 51 work, main classes of, 39, 40. See also work workmanship and work share same Jewish root, 42 midrash, visual, 105–31 aim of, 108 in art, 112–18 characteristics of, 108 definition of, 107–9 discontents, 110–12 interpretations of, 108, 109, 111–12, 129–30 purpose of, 108 Archie Rand and. See Rand, Archie, and midrash art scholarship on, recent, 109–10 types of. See midrash aggadah, visual; midrash halakhad, visual Ruth Weisberg and, 112, 114, 116–18, 116, 138 written, 107–8 midrash aggadah, visual, 118–21 definition, 106, 107, 109, 118 Chana Cromer’s The Child Is Not as example of, 120, 121 interpretations of, 130–31 Eden Morris’s Sarah’s Nightmare as example of, 118–20, 121 midrash halakhad, visual, 121–31 Andi Arnovitz’s A Delicate Balance as example of, 124, 125 definition of, 106, 107 interpretations of, 130–31 purpose of, 121 Archie Rand’s The 613 as example of, 121–24, 122

Schachter, Image.indb 158



Ben Schachter’s Nine Nights of Hanukkah, Menorah for ShammaI and Hillel as example of, 126, 127 Arik Weiss’s Netaneh Tokef as example of, 127–29, 128 Minimalism art/artists, 40, 44–47 Frances Colpitt on, 45–46 critics and, 48 feminist example of, 51–52 Hesse’s sculptures as, 46–47 manufacturing process attraction by, 46, 47 materials used by, 45–46 Frank Stella’s “Black Paintings” example of, 50 Richard Wollheim on, 49–50 Molesworth, Helen, 53, 55, 56 Morris, Eden, 118–20, 121 motifs of contemporary Jewish art, 77–104, 138, 139 building and dwelling in a Sukkot, 77–84 carrying in the eruv, 84–88, 89 counting the Omer, 100–104 definition, 11–12 laws concerning women, 95, 97–100 studying texts, 92, 93–95, 96 wearing a prayer shawl, 88 Netaneh Tokef (Arik Weiss), 127–29, 128 Neustein, Joshua Jerusalem River Project, 34 Wine into Water, 34, 36, 37 Nicholls, Jacqueline, and studying texts (daf yomi) as motif, 92, 93–94, 95 Nine Nights of Hanukkah, Menorah for Shammai and Hillel (Ben Schachter), 126, 127

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performance art, 40 plain action, what critics thought of, 48–50 postmodern dance, 40 critics and, 48 examples of, 47–48 motivation for, 45, 50 Rainer’s work, 47, 48 untrained dancers for, 45 prayer shawl as motif, wearing, 88, 90 Rand, Archie, and midrash art, 112, 113, 114, 118 The 39 Forbidden Labors of the Sabbath series, 57

Schachter, Image.indb 159



The 613 (Expelling the Impure from the Temple), 121–24, 122 Bereshith, 113 Boneh, 57, 58, 59 Chapter Paintings, 113 collaboration with poets by, 113 motifs studying by, 138 Peter Steinfels on art of, 121, 123 style of, 22, 57 Menachem Wecker on art of, 123 Raphael, Melissa, 6 Rauschenberg, Robert, 62–63, 133 Factum I and Factum II, 44 Revel-Neher, Elisheva, 9 Rosenberg, Doug, 57, 59 Lift/Carry/Hold, 57 Meditations: Labor, 57, 60, 61 Rosenberg, Harold, 44 appeal of Modernism and, 4 Daniel Belasco on, 64 critical approach to art, 9, 39 defining Jewish art, 8–9, 41 examines process of art as his criticism style, 23, 24, 26–27, 28, 29, 39 Clement Greenberg versus, 23, 26, 28 on Jewish art, 1, 2 Allan Kaprow expanding on, 27–28, 29 on Modernist art (action painting), 26–27 on objections to how his ideas interpreted, 28 on second commandment as manifesto of Jewish art, 1 Saltzman, Lisa, on abstraction of graven images, 31–32

159

Index

off the canvas, Jewish art, 33–38 Ken Goldman’s Boots, 33–34, 37 Nechama Golan’s You Shall Walk in Good Ways, 33, 35, 37, 97 Joshus Neustein’s Wine into Water, 34, 36, 37 Allan Wexler’s Spice Box for the Havdalah Service, 13–15, 14, 34, 37, 129 Olin, Margaret, 4, 6–7, 9–10 Omer as motif, counting the, 100–104 Orthodox/Orthodoxy children of rabbis who are, 71 daily traditions of, 91 fashion and, 18 laws concerning women, 95, 97–98, 100 Modern Orthodox by Elliott Malkin, 85–86 Sabbath and things not done by, 17 Talmud studying by 69, 93 Joel Tauber’s work and his, 66 women studying Torah who are, 71

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Index

160

SAPHYR, Silver Omer Counter (Tobi Kahn), 100, 101 Schachter, Ben, 126, 127, 133–37 Schwarzschild, Steven, and abstraction of graven images, 9, 30–31 The Scroll (Ruth Weisberg), 114, 116, 117, 120 second commandment and Jewish art abstraction to get around, 32 Chantal Akerman and, 6–7 art criticism and, 2, 5, 9, 23, 29, 39–40 challenges to, 8, 9–10 Holocaust and, 5 as manifesto of Jewish art, 1 Margaret Olin on, 6–7, 9–10 as only commandment related to contemporary art, 33 prohibition of graven images and, 1, 2, 7 Melissa Raphael on, 6 Elisheva Revel-Neher on blind spot of, 9 Serra, Richard on activities of art, 39, 56 One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969), 45 on removal of all personal qualities from artists work, 45 as sculptor, 45 Simons, Doni Silver, 57, 59, 66 49 Days: Women Who Count (A Performance), 102, 102, 103 Homage to a Fairy Tale, 57, 59, 61, 66, 102 The 613 (Expelling the Impure from the Temple) (Archie Rand), 121–24, 122 Sperber, David, on differences between religious and secular art, 70, 97

Schachter, Image.indb 160

Spice Box for the Havdalah Service (Allan Wexler), 13–15, 14, 34, 37, 129 Stella, Frank, 50 sukkah, building and dwelling in, 77–84. See also Wexler, Allan books describing differences around the world, 78 competition to build, 78–79 definition of, 18, 77–78 In Tension, 79, 80, 81 Indiana Sukkot Project, 79 specifications for, 78 Talmud building instructions for, 78, 79, 130 Talmud in art of Nechama Golan, 33, 35, 97 definition of, 19 eruv regulation in, 85, 86, 8, 134 Ken Goldman’s Chevrutah showing reading of, 95, 96 Geoffrey H. Hartman on, 110 R. B. Kitaj on his art and, 112 lost objects handling in, 135 Jacqueline Nicholl’s Draw Yomi and pages of, 93–94 rabbinic disagreements about observing commandments with, 124, 126, 127 study of (daf yomi), 19, 69, 93 sukkah building instructions in, 78, 79, 130 Tauber, Joel, 66 tefillin wrapping as motif, 90–91, 93 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 52–56 feminist performance art of, 51, 52–53 interview with, 52

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“Maintenance Art Manifesto” of, 52–53, 55 Helen Molesworth on, 53, 55, 56 Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside by, 53, 54, 55

visual midrash and artistic interpretation. See midrash, visual; midrash aggadah, visual; midrash halakhah, visual

Vinyl Milford (1994), 82–83 worked in scaled-down versions, 81, 82, 83 Wine into Water (Joshua Newstein), 34, 36, 37 With Without (Ken Goldman), 74–76, 75 Wollheim, Richard, 49–50 women (dress, divorce, and sexual purity) laws as motifs, 95, 97–100 work artistic definitions of, 44–48 fourth commandment and definition of, 41–42 Judaism’s definition of, 41–43, 44, 56, 66 labor versus, 41 main classes of (melakhot), 39, 40 questioning definition of, 40–41 rabbis’ basis for definition of, 43 workmanship and, 42

161

You Shall Walk in Good Ways (Nechama Golan), 33, 35, 37, 97

Index

Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (Mierle Laderman Ukeles), 53, 54, 55 Weisberg and midrash art, Ruth, 112, 114, 116–18, 116, 138 Weiss, Arik, 93, 127–29 Netaneh Tokef, 127–29, 128 Ye Shall Cleave, 93, 129 Wexler, Allan, 34, 81, 82–84 Betsky on, 82, 83–84 Garden Sukkah (2000), 81, 82 Spice Box for the Havdalah Service, 13–15, 14, 34, 37, 129 Sukkah (1998), 82 Sukkah with Furniture Made from Its Walls (1990), 82



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Typeset by Regina Starace Printed and bound by Friesens Composed in Adobe Garamond Pro and Univers Printed on 80# Rolland Opaque White

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