Jewish Advocate

Shulamit Reinharz

Shulamit Reinharz is the Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, where she founded the Women’s Studies Research Center and The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (hbi@brandeis.edu).

Is being Jewish relevant today?

By Shulamit Reinharz - Saturday May 17 2008

My recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art on 53rd Street in Manhattan was a real eye-opener. First of all, despite the sagging economy, the lines to buy tickets at $10 per person and purchase items in the museum’s store were very long. Art is in! And one reason I was willing to queue up was my interest in the work of Sigalit Landau, whose art I had seen at the recent “Global Feminisms” show at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum.
Although I have not yet used any adjectives to identify Sigalit Landau, those who know Hebrew have already figured out that she’s a woman (Sigalit) who is probably Israeli (Sigalit is an uncommon name in the United States). My reference to the “Global Feminisms” show puts her in the box of “feminist art.” So before knowing anything about her art, you suspect she is a female Israeli feminist. And you are right. The question is: Should we consider art in terms of the artist’s identity? And which identity categories are relevant?
After looking at Landau’s work at MOMA, I joined a lecture tour about one of the other major exhibits, “Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Now,” drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and organized by Deborah Wye, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Chief Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books. The lecturer was an articulate, relatively young (perhaps 35) woman with a thick Hungarian accent. As we walked into the second-floor gallery where “Directions” was on display, she told her group of about 20 people that the 1970s were important in art history, in part, as the period that witnessed the rise of feminist art.
The lecturer explained that during the ’70s, established values and institutions in the United States began to be questioned. The vivacious skepticism led to major shifts in art making, art makers, and art criticism. A “complicated artistic terrain” emerged, she told us, with widely divergent approaches that today would be called “pluralistic.” There were also new media, such as video, photography, and performance, which defied the hegemony of painting and sculpture. Artists left the studios and museums and took to the streets or the landscape. Women used their life experiences and their bodies as modes of artistic expression.
Given the wide array of work displayed in “Directions,” the lecturer could have focused on a multitude of themes, but she chose to comment on four feminist artists – Lynda Benglis, Jackie Winsor, Nancy Spero, and Louise Bourgeois. She thoroughly explained how Benglis’s metallic floor blobs, Winsor’s burnt wooden cube, Spero’s drawings, and Bourgeois’ installation were responses to male dominance and female exclusion from the art world. She showed the irony, mastery, and subtlety in their work and how these related to the artists’ biographies. However, she did not mention that Spero and Bourgeois were Jewish, and that being Jewish shaped their perspective on the world. Spero’s work was motivated by “tikkun olam,” in her case repairing the world that harms women. And Bourgeois’ work, in part, reflected her horror in response to the Holocaust. When I mentioned this point to the lecturer, I received a blank stare. I can’t help but wonder if the erasure of these artists’ ethnicity/religion would occur if they had a different ethnicity. Does the concept of “pluralism” include Jewishness? Is it only Jews who recognize the Jewishness of artists, or should non-Jews understand something about this as well?
These questions bring me back to Sigalit Landau. Four of her works were on view with wall text explaining that she explores “her native Israeli landscape in a performative way, primarily through a video trilogy that experiments with circular movements and the act of spinning.” In her mesmerizing “DeadSee” (2005), Landau floats nude in a spiral of slowly moving, gorgeous green watermelons that look like jade. The other two videos are of a person inside a house painting a large white or black circle around the outside perimeter of a window, referring to an ancient Jewish custom of leaving part of a house unfinished.
And finally, there is her best-known video, “Barbed Hula,” in which she gyrates slowly by the sea. Made of barbed wire, the “hula hoop” stays aloft only by the strength of its contact on her flesh, which bleeds as it is cut. Also to enjoy are her beautiful “sculptural lamp-like objects made of barbed wire that have been submerged in the salt-saturated Dead Sea and dried in the desert sun, forming a crystallized surface.” Sigalit Landau’s Israeli identity is always mentioned, just as is the feminist identity of Spero and Bourgeois. Why are these identities relevant and being Jewish is not?
  •   Advertisements
  • Find Jewish Roommates

Visit the Jewish Guide to Boston

subscribe now

sign up now