zionist artists

Happy Birthday Martin Luther King Jr. - Outspoken Zionist

2012-01-15T22:40:00.000-08:00

Rev. King and Rabbi Heschel leading Selma Civil Rights March

"This I Believe: Selections from the Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." pp. 234-235.

You declare, my friend, that you do not hate the Jews, you are merely 'anti-Zionist.' And I say, let the truth ring forth from the high mountain tops, let it echo through the valleys of God's green earth: When people ...criticize Zionism, they mean Jews--this is God's own truth.

Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jewish people, has been and remains a blot on the soul of mankind. In this we are in full agreement. So know also this: anti-Zionist is inherently anti-Semitic, and ever will be so.

Why? Because Zionism is nothing less than the dream and ideal of the Jewish people returning to live in their own land.

The Jewish people, the Scriptures tell us, once enjoyed a flourishing Commonwealth in the Holy Land. From this they were expelled by the Roman tyrant, the same Romans who cruelly murdered Our Lord. Driven from their homeland, their nation in ashes, forced to wander the globe, the Jewish people time and again suffered the lash of whichever tyrant happened to rule over them.

The Negro people, my friend, know what it is to suffer the torment of tyranny under rulers not of our choosing. Our brothers in Africa have begged, pleaded, requested--demanded the recognition and realization of our inborn right to live in peace under our own sovereignty in our own country.

How easy it should be, for anyone who holds dear this inalienable right of all mankind, to understand and support the right of the Jewish People to live in their ancient Land of Israel. All men of good will exult in the fulfillment of God's promise, that his People should return in joy to rebuild their plundered land.

This is Zionism, nothing more, nothing less.

If you believe the Jewish people deserve to have an independent state, then you are a Zionist. It's that easy.

Participate in the Zionist Artists Project

2011-08-21T03:11:00.000-07:00

As Israel's right to exist is being challenged, Zionism being maligned, and Israel being attacked by those seeking its destruction, this Zionist Artists Project is most timely and significant.

If you are an artist, contribute an essay about your artwork and life (in Hebrew or English) for the new book: Zionist Artists in a Networked World / אמנים ציונים בעולם מרושת.

Your autobiographical essay should explore your life and art making in relation to Zionism and the ubiquitous networked world that intertwines life in Israel, life as a Jew in the Diaspora, and new directions in the arts emerging globally in our postdigital age. Chapters written in English should be e-mailed to melalexenberg@yahoo.com and those in Hebrew to amos.safrai@gmail.com. Submit your chapter as a Word document between 4,000 and 6,000 words.

Others who support Israel at this crucial time can become part of this important project by donating funds for the publication of Zionist Artists in a Networked World in Hebrew and English versions. Your name as donor will be acknowledged in the project's publications in both print and electronic forms. Donations for this project made to Emunah Women of America are tax deductible.

Editors of this project are Amos Safrai, head of Emunah College and Menahem (Mel) Alexenberg, head of the college's School of the Arts, former professor of art and education at Columbia University and Bar Ilan University, research fellow at MIT, and author of The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2011). It is being dedicated to the memory of the late Tzipora Luria z"l who taught Israeli Art at Emunah College and was a distinguished art critic.

The following introductory essay for the book by Alexenberg explores interrelationships between contemporary Zionism, the structure of Jewish consciousness, and art in the networked world of a posdigtial age (See Hebew version להיות אמן ציוני בעולם מרושת at http://www.melalexenberg.com/paper.php?id=32).
Other exemplary essays by Michael Bielicky, Shalom Gorewitz, Menachem Wecker, Gil Troy and Alan Kaufman written for the book are also posted on this blog.

For more information on contributing an essay or on participating as a donor, contact melalexenberg@yahoo.com

On Being a Zionist Artist in a Networked World

2010-06-27T00:35:00.000-07:00

by Menahem (Mel) Alexenberg

The great biblical miracle of liberating one nation of thousands from enslavement in the one country of Egypt after hundreds of years of exile pales in comparison with the Zionist miracle in our time of liberating millions of Jews from persecution, pogroms, and the Holocaust in scores of countries after thousands of years of exile and bringing them home to Israel. Choosing to be an integral part of this Zionist miracle, unprecedented in world history, offers me enthralling creative opportunities as an artist.

I draw inspiration from the Zionist challenge of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook to “renew the old and sanctify the new” as I explore the vibrant interface between the structure of Jewish consciousness, the realization of the Zionist dream in the State of Israel, and new directions in art emerging from postdigital creativity in a networked world. The wellsprings of my Zionism flows from my Jewish roots and values while the form and content of my art emerges from Jewish thought and experience in a networked world in which of art, science, technology, and culture address each other.

As an artist born and educated in the United States, I chose to leave a country that I love and that gave me wonderful professional opportunities to be part of the Zionist enterprise that permits me to be more fully immersed at the center of Jewish life. Zionism seeks to ensure the future and distinctiveness of the Jewish people by fostering Jewish spiritual and cultural values in its historic homeland (World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem Program, 2004). As a Zionist artist I strive to create both an intimate dialogue with the Jewish people and a lively conversation with people throughout the world.

Art crossing over into a new reality

The biblical story of the Jewish people begins with the journey of Abraham as he crosses over from his all too familiar past to see a fresh vision of a future in a new land. Indeed, Abraham is called a Hebrew (Ivri) – one who crosses over into a new reality. Abraham is told: “Go for yourself from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” (Genesis 12:1) This passage can also be read as: “Walk with your authentic self away from all the familiar and comfortable places that limit vision to a land where you can freely see.” Here, the dynamic Hebraic mindset is established as new ways of seeing emerge from the integration of our journey to the Land of Israel with our inner quest for spiritual significance.

The personal power of Abraham to leave an obsolete past behind and to cross conceptual boundaries into an unknown future presents a powerful message to me as a Zionist artist living in a democratic Jewish State in a postdigital age. Today in Israel and at the leading edge of technologically advanced societies worldwide, we are beginning to cross over from the digital culture of the Information Age to a Conceptual Age in which people in all walks of life will succeed most when they behave like artists who integrate left-brain with right-brain thinking. Industrial Age factory workers and Information Age knowledge workers are being superseded by Conceptual Age creators and empathizers who integrate high tech abilities with high touch and high concept abilities of aesthetic and spiritual significance.¹

Art debunking art

Subverting idolatry with a twist of irony has been the mission of the Jews from their very beginning. As a prelude to the biblical story of Abraham beginning his journey away from his father’s world to the Land of Israel, the Midrash tells that Abraham was minding his father’s idol shop when he took a stick and smashed the merchandise to bits. He left only the largest idol untouched placing the stick in its hand. When his father returned, his shock at seeing the scene of devastation grew into fury as he demanded an explanation from his son. Abraham explained how the largest idol had broken all the other idols. He could have smashed all the idols without saving one on which to place the blame. An idol smashing idols gives us clues for creating art to debunk art, art that aims to undermine undue reverence for art, art that challenges the established canon of Western art.

I am interested in creating art to knock art off its pedestal by displaying a creative skepticism not just towards art’s subjects but also towards its purposes. In his book on Jewish American painters in the twentieth century, Ori Soltis comments on my series of Digitized Homage to Rembrandt paintings, photomontages, computer-generated etchings, serigraphs, lithographs, and telecommunications events: “Alexenberg appropriates an iconic image from the Christian art tradition: Rembrandt’s angel, who wrestles with Jacob. But he transforms and distorts it, digitalizing and dismembering it, transforming the normative Western tradition within which he works as he rebels against it.” ²

Art emerging from Hebraic rather than Hellenistic consciousness

As a Zionist artist, I am joining artists worldwide in liberating art from Hellenistic dominance since its revival in the Renaissance. The 20^th century was a century of modernism that aimed to undermine the Hellenistic definition of art. The 21st century invites a redefinition of art derived from the Hebraic roots of Western culture rather than its Hellenistic roots.

"The Greeks and the Jews are the two peoples whose worldviews have most influenced the way we think and act. Each of them from angles so different has left us with the inheritance of its genius and wisdom. No two cities have counted more with Mankind than Athens and Jerusalem. Their messages in religion, philosophy, and art have been the main guiding light in modern faith and culture.” ³

Three thousand years ago, King David moved the capital of ancient Israel from Hebron to Jerusalem. Five centuries later during the Golden Age of Athens, the major temples of the Acropolis were built under the leadership of Pericles. In my MERIWIP: MEditerranean RIm WIkiart Project, a text inviting the participation of people from the 21 Mediterranean rim countries was posted on my art blog http://www.wikiartists.us in the many languages of these countries. Only Hebrew and Greek, the millennia old languages of the indigenous peoples of the Land of Israel and Greece are still in use and continue to be written with the same two ancient alphabets.

The Hellenistic definition of art as mimesis is reflected in the words for art in contemporary European languages: art in English and French, arte in Spanish, Kunst in German and Dutch, and iskustvo in Russian. The roots of all these words are related to artificial, artifact, imitation, and phony. In contrast, the Hebrew word for artist (oman) is spelled AMN with the same letters as the word amen which means truth. Its feminine form is emunah, faith, and as a verb l’amen means to nurture and educate.

This ancient Greek view of art as mimesis, imitating nature, arresting the flow of life, has become obsolete as new definitions of art are arising from Jewish thought and action that explore issues of truth, faith, and education as they enrich everyday life. In the classic book Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek, Hebraic thought is characterized as being “dynamic, vigorous, passionate, and sometimes quite explosive in kind; correspondingly Greek thinking is static, peaceful, moderate, and harmonious in kind.” ⁴ That it is the Hebraic rather than the Hellenistic roots of Western culture that is redefining art in a rapidly expanding networked world is argued throughout my books The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness⁵ and its Hebrew version Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Four Essays on Judaism and Contemporary Art.⁶

Art revealing the power of Hebrew letters in an era of digital and bio technologies

One of the Zionist enterprise’s greatest accomplishments is reviving Hebrew as the common everyday language uniting Jews who have returned to their homeland speaking scores of different languages. There is an aesthetic and spiritual power in seeing Hebrew letters dancing across storefronts in the Jewish State, flashing across TV screens, Googling and SMSing. Hebrew letters have a special meaning for the artist. The mishkan’s artist, Betzalel, is said to have had the divine secret of forging combinations of the 22 Hebrew letters to create new worlds. The digital era makes this kabbalistic notion of artistic creativity through making permutations of bits of information more than a quaint legend. It is computer science rather than mysticism, physics rather than metaphysics that lets us reveal in our times this ancient wisdom. All the multitude of words, sounds and images that we can access today on the Internet, CDs, and DVDs are encoded in bits strung together in groupings of eight called bytes. The 256 bit permutations in one byte are in turn grouped into billions of combinations that we perceive as a web site, a computer game, a text, a song, or a movie.

Jewish tradition sees the 22 sacred Hebrew letters as profound, primal, spiritual forces, the raw material of Creation. The numerous alternative arrangements of the letters in words results in different blends of cosmic spiritual forces that finds a parallel in natural systems where different numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons form the atoms of each of the 92 different elements. These atoms, in turn, combine into molecules, and molecules into supersized molecules like DNA in which the code of all life’s forms is written with only four letters: A-T, T-A, and C-G, G-C. The interplay between combinations and permutations of Hebrew letters in the spiritual realm, of atoms and molecules in the physical realm, and bits and bytes in the realm of digital media, provides raw materials for creating artworks that generate a lively dialog between the Jewish past and Israel’s future as a world center of digital and bio technologies.

Art revealing the spiritual dimensions of everyday life in the Land of Israel

The great transgression of ten of the leaders of the Israelite tribes who were charged to spy out the Land of Israel after their exodus from Egypt was their inability to discern the difference between hard work as slaves in Egypt and hard work building their own land. Only Joshua and Calev met the challenge. The Torah tells us that Calev of the tribe of

Judah

had “a different spirit” (Numbers: 14:24). Unlike the others, he was able to make the paradigm shift to recognize that the challenge of living in the Land of Israel was to see spirituality emerging from all aspects of life.

Ten of the spies chose to remain in the desert where they could live a totally spiritual existence learning Torah all day. They would not have to work at all since food was delivered daily for free at the opening of their tents. In the Land of Israel, they would have to grow their own food, build houses, fight enemies, and collect garbage which seemed to them like returning to the slavery they had just left. These ten spies were sentenced to death in the desert for their inability to see that the spiritual arises from the quality of one’s encounter with the material world. The descendents of Calev’s tribe of Judea are almost all of the Jews who have the great privilege of returning to our homeland and rebuilding it 3500 years later. Most of the descendents of the ten spies who lacked “a different spirit” have disappeared.

Calev’s great-grandson, the prototypic Jewish artist Betzalel, sets a direction for today’s Zionist artists by having created an environment that invites holiness into our concrete world – “God walks in the midst of the camp…therefore shall your camp be holy” (Deuteronomy 23:15). I invited my students at the School of the Arts at Emuna College in Jerusalem and at Ariel University Center of Samaria to reveal holiness by photographing divine light emanating from their everyday life in Israel. I created a blog to show their work: http://www.photographgod.com.

We can appreciate Calev’s alternative viewpoint through the 20^th century experience of the Rebbe of Sadegora, Rabbi Avraham Freidman (1884-1961). The Nazis attempted to humiliate the Rebbe in the eyes of his Hasidim by forcing him at gunpoint to work all day sweeping streets and collecting garbage and at night to march waving a Nazi flag. The Rebbe survived the Holocaust and moved to Tel Aviv where he rose early every morning in the week before Israel Independence Day to join the city’s sanitation workers in sweeping streets and collecting garbage. At night, he could be seen walking through the streets of Tel Aviv waving the Israeli flag. He marveled at the great privilege he had to keep his city clean and to honor his nation’s flag.

Art conveying its message through form and medium

At the beginning of the 20^th century, the first Zionist artists Ephriam Lilien and Boris Schatz, the artists who participated in the exhibition at the 5^th Zionist Congress in 1901, and the theoreticians of culture Martin Buber and Ahad Ha’am saw Zionist art only in terms of content and iconography.⁷ Landscapes of the Land of Israel, Jewish subjects, and biblical scenes idealizing the Bedouin types as if they were ancient Israelites were the content of their artwork expressed in alien European forms and media. These first Zionist artists did not liberate themselves from the Hellenistic definition of art that was plastered over their Jewish consciousness by centuries of indoctrination living in Europe.

The significance of form and medium in Jewish life is so strong that we only read the Torah portion in synagogue from a scroll hand-written on parchment. If we have no Torah scroll, we read nothing at all rather than read the identical content from a Hebrew Bible printed in a rectangular codex book form. Tradition teaches how the Israelites were enslaved in the malben, which means both brickyard and rectangle. The Torah trapped in a malben between two book covers cannot convey a message of liberation expressed by a free-flowing spiral scroll. The heart (spelled LB in Hebrew) of the Torah is the place where the last letter L in the word yisrael (

Israel

) is linked to the first letter B in b’reshit (In the beginning) in an endless flow. Both changing form and medium radically changes the message. A Torah written on Japanese rice paper is bizarre and one written on pigskin would be the ultimate anti-Semitic statement. We can recognize the life-affirming parallel between the double spiral of the Torah scroll and the DNA molecule in which all life forms are encoded.

To explore form and media in Jewish thought and experience, I invited fellow artists at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies to collaborate with me in creating LightsOROT: Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age,⁸ an exhibition for Yeshiva University Museum.Creating art in a digital age in a networked world offers Zionist artists unprecedented opportunities to invent alternative art forms and explore new media confluent with the structure of Jewish consciousness.

Art imitating the Creator rather than the creation

I am interested in being an active partner of the Creator of the universe in the on-going creation of new worlds. As a Jewish artist, it is not the Hellenistic vision of a complete and ideal nature to be copied that is the primary artistic value, but it is the emulation of the process of creation itself that is valued. Therefore, I studied in depth the creative process in art and science from a psychodynamic point of view that I present in my book Aesthetic Experience in Creative Process.⁹

Two millennia ago, the Roman governor over the Land of Israel asked Rabbi Akiva, “Which are greater and more beautiful, human creations or God’s?” The governor was disturbed by the rabbi’s response that human creation is more exalted than divine creation. While the Roman was questioning the rabbi’s unexpected response, the rabbi served a plate of wheat grains to the Roman and took cakes for himself. The puzzled Roman asked, “Why do you take cakes for yourself while you give me raw grains of wheat?” Rabbi Akiva answered, “You prefer God’s creation. I prefer the creations of human hands!”

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, first Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel and founder of Yeshivat Mercaz ha’Rav in Jerusalem, provides a poetic manifesto for the Zionist artist derived from the deep structure of Jewish consciousness:

"Whoever is endowed with the soul of a creator must create works of imagination and thought, for the flame of the soul rises by itself and one cannot impede it on its course…. The creative individual brings vital, new light from the higher source where originality emanates to the place where it has not previously been manifest, from the place that “no bird of prey knows, nor has the falcon’s eye seen.” (Job 28:7), "that no man has passed, nor has any person dwelt" (Jeremiah 2:6)"¹⁰

Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who served as president of the Mizrachi Zionists of America, proposes that the dream of creation is the central idea in Jewish consciousness – the idea of the importance of human partnership with the Almighty in creating new worlds. He writes:

"This longing for creation and the renewal of the cosmos is embodied in all of Judaism’s goals…. If a man wishes to attain the rank of holiness, he must become a creator of worlds. If a man never creates, never brings into being anything new, anything original, then he cannot be holy unto his God. That passive type who is derelict in fulfilling his task of creation cannot become holy. Creation is the lowering of transcendence into the midst of our turbid, coarse, material world." ¹¹

I attempt to act as partner of the Creator during six days of the week. However, I stop my creative work one day each week and step back to admire and honor the handiwork of the Creator of the universe. This Sabbath Day is both a Non-Art Day and an Ecology Day. Emulating Betzalel and his artistic collaborators who stopped building the mishkan on Shabbat, I stop my artistic activities on the seventh day to celebrate Non-Art Day. Indeed, all Shabbat observance is defined by artistic activity, by the 39 craft categories involved in building the mishkan. From when the sun sets on Friday evening to the time stars dot the sky on Saturday night, I celebrate Non-Art Day as well as Ecology Day by leaving the world they way I got it. I replenish my soul on Shabbat so that on the eighth day I can resume with renewed energies the role of partner with the Creator in tikun olam, actively making the world a better place for all humanity.

Art engaging the Torah in a playful spirit

As an artist, I engage the Torah in creative play through both my conceptual and aesthetic explorations. The Torah itself teaches us to approach it in a playful spirit. In Psalm 119:174, we read: “Your Torah is my plaything (sha’ashua).” Sha’ashua is a toy to engage children in play. In Proverbs 8:30, 31, King Solomon speaks in the voice of the Torah: “I [the Torah] was the artist’s plan. I was His [God’s] delight every day, playing before Him at all times, playing in the inhabited areas of His earth, my delights are with human beings.” This translation from the Hebrew original is based on the ancient wisdom on the first page of Midrash Rabba. God as the master artist played creatively with the Torah, His plan for creating the universe. Midrash Rabba uses these two verses from Proverbs to explain the first words of the Torah, “In the beginning God created.” God first created “Beginning” referring to the Torah as an open-ended blueprint for creating the world. We learn this from an earlier verse, Proverbs 8:22, “God made me [the Torah] as the beginning of His way, before His deeds of yore.” In human emulation of God’s delight, we are invited to play with the Torah as we create new worlds.

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook wrote a letter of congratulations on the founding of the Betzalel Art School in Jerusalem in 1906. By way of allegory, he refers to the revival of Jewish art and aesthetics after two thousand years of exile as a child in a coma who awakes calling for her doll.

"The pleasant and beloved child, the delightful daughter, after a long and forlorn illness, with a face as pallid as plaster, bluish lips, fever burning like a fiery furnace, and convulsive shaking and trembling, behold! She has opened her eyes and her tightly sealed lips, her little hands move with renewed life, her thin pure fingers wander hither and thither, seeking their purpose; her lips move and almost revert to their normal color, and as if through a medium a voice is heard: “Mother, Mother, the doll, give me the doll, the dear doll, which I have not seen for so long.” A voice of mirth and a voice of gladness, all are joyous, the father, the mother, the brothers and sisters, even the elderly man and woman who, because of their many years, have forgotten their children’s games." ¹²

Rabbi Kook saw artists at work as a clear sign of the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland. Their playful spirit nurturing sensitivity for beauty “will uplift depressed souls, giving them a clear and illuminating view of the beauty of life, nature, and work.” ¹³

Art educating through visual midrash
Not only are the Hebrew words for 'artist' and 'educating' related, but the Torah teaches that Betzalel and Oholiav are divinely endowed with artistic talent cooupled with the talent to teach (Exodus 35:30-34). Creating art can be an alternative method of Torah study that beautifies the mitzvah of study through creating visual midrash. Midrash is the unique Jewish literary form that combines commentary, legend and narrative explanations of biblical texts. In a sense, midrash fills the spaces between the written words to reveal deeper meanings of sciptual passages. Art as visual midrash provides fresh commentaries on biblical texts through miltimedia experiences that extend the verbal exploration of text into visual realms. 'Context' in is primal meaning is 'with text'¹⁴ while context is the defining characteristic of post modern art.¹⁵

In order to better understand the cultural context of my values as a Zionist artist in an era of globalization, I invited renowned art educators worldwide to redefine art and art education at the interdisciplinary interface where scientific inquiry and new technologies shape aesthetic and cultural values – local and global. This inquiry resulted in my book Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture.¹⁶

Art educating through community involvement

The Torah describes two prototypic Jewish artists – Betzalel and Oholiav. “See, I have called by name: Betzalel ben Uri ben Hur, of the tribe of

Judah

. I have filled him with a divine spirit, with wisdom, understanding, and knowledge, and with the talent for all types of craftsmanship” (Exodus 31:2). The literal translation of this artist’s name is: “In the Divine Shadow son of Fiery Light son of Freedom.” It honors the artist’s passion and freedom of expression. The Torah describes Betzalel’s partner, “I have assigned with him Oholiav ben Ahisamakh of the tribe of Dan, and I have placed wisdom in the heart of every naturally talented person” (Exodus 31:6). Oholiav’s full name means “My Tent of Reliance on Father, Son, and My Brother,” integrating the contemporary with its past and future. Father, son, and brother stand together with the artist in a common tent in mutual support of one another. Betzalel represents the psychological power of the artist and Oholiav the sociological impact on community. Working together, they create a shared environment of spiritual power.

My wife, artist Miriam Benjamin, and I collaborated with elders and youth from different ethnic communities in creating Legacy Thrones, monumental works of public art in Miami.¹⁷ In Israel, we created an Institute for Arts and Jewish Life in Yeroham to educate art teachers for community centers. We lived in Yeroham for seven years where we taught students from throughout Israel and the Diaspora to integrate the creative energies of Betzalel with the impact on community of Oholiav.

Art revealing beauty in processes of liberation and creation

Zionism and the visual arts interface as they emerge from the core values of Judaism as expressed in the Ten Commandments, which begins: “I am YHVH (Was-Is-Will Be), your God, who has taken you out of the Land of Egypt (Narrow Straits), out of the House of Slavery. Do not have any other gods before Me. You shall not make yourself any carved statue or picture of anything in the heaven above, on the earth below, or the water beneath the land.” (Exodus 20:1-14, repeated in Deuteronomy 5:6-18)

The biblical divine name YHVH is associated with beauty (tiferet) and the historic process of attaining freedom from slavery. YHVH is a verb, not a noun, combining the Hebrew words for was, is and will be, a process in time. YHVH is both the Liberator from narrowness and the Creator of the heaven, earth, and water. The biblical name for Egypt, mitzrayim, literally means from narrow straits, to teach that national liberation is the process of attaining independence from narrow-mindedness to experiencing expansive freedom in the Land of Israel. Indeed, when Moses sent scouts to explore the Land of Israel from the wilderness of Tzin to Rehov (Numbers 13:21). Joshua sent scouts four decades later who arrived at the house of Rahav (Joshua 1:1). Rahav and Rehov mean wide expanses. Having left slavery in the narrow straits the Israelites headed toward the freedom of wide expanses in their own land.

God is One, both Liberator from narrow straits and Creator of the wide expanses of heaven, earth, and water. Was-Is-Will Be is the Liberator from ancient

Egypt

’s cult of the dead and the Creator of a world overflowing with vibrant life. As a Jewish artist, I avoid creating art that freezes the lively process of creation and the dynamic process of liberation, arresting them in fixed images. I avoid stilling life meant to flow freely or solidifying in stone that which is in flux.

The Israelites exodus from Egypt’s narrow straits, from the land of the Book of the Dead and its immovable pyramids led to a process of liberation in the wide expanse of the desert, where they received of the Book of Life (torat chaim), and built a Lego-like moveable mishkan deconstructed and reconstructed numerous times during their four-decade journey. The Zionist challenge then as now is to settle in the Land of Israel with the expansive viewpoint of movement in the open desert without regressing to the narrow viewpoint engendered by a sedentary mentality. It is a land that devourers yoshveha, its inhabitants who sit still (Numbers 13:32) rather than those who are on the go (Genesis 12:1). Those residents of the Land of Israel who are not passive, but actively create movement, growth, and change are not in danger of being consumed.

An authentic Zionist arts movement encourages artists to create transformative artworks and adventuresome artforms that not only explore the intersections of Zionism and the arts, but reveal beauty in the dynamic processes of liberation and creation. Theodor Herzl wrote in his visionary Zionist novel Altneuland (Old-New Land):

"Beauty and wisdom do not die because their creators die. Just as the conservation of energy is self-evident, so must we infer that there is conservation of beauty and wisdom…. Have the sayings of our ancient sages perished? No, their flame burns brightly, even if in happy times it is less clearly visible than in dark days, like all flames. And what should we learn from this? That we should strive to increase beauty and wisdom in this earth, as long as we live." ¹⁸

Art expressing love for the land of Israel

Rabbi Kook stresses the intrinsic bond between the Land of Israel and the Jewish People that extends to a call to delight and rejoice in the beauty of the land:

"The Land of Israel is not something external, not an external national asset, a means to the end of collective solidarity and the strengthening of the nation’s existence, physical or even spiritual. The Land of Israel is an essential unit bound by the bond-of-life to the People, united by inner characteristics to its existence."¹⁹

"See the splendor of an attractive land, the splendor of the Carmel and the Sharon, the splendor of the pleasant and beautiful azure skies, the magnificence of the clear, pure, temperate air that reigns in its majesty and glory. Delight and rejoice in this desirable, fair and pleasing land, a land of life, a land whose air is the wellspring of the spirit. How beautiful and how graceful she is!" ²⁰

Some of my earliest memories form the beginnings of my education as a Zionist artist. I remember sitting on the counter in my grandfather’s Hebrew bookshop on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn in the 1940’s surrounded by images of the Land of Israel in the calendars, postcards, posters, and metal relief pictures from the Bezalel workshops in Jerusalem that he sold. I would often watch him carving mezuzot from mother-of-pearl and olive wood imported from Israel. My grandfather, Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Kahn, left the Telz Yeshiva in Lithuania in 1900 to participate in the 4^th Zionist Congress in London never to return. He settled to Boston where he was married and my mother was born. When he passed away four years before his Zionist dream was realized in 1948, my grandmother came to live with us. When I came home from school, she spread out the Yiddish newspaper on the kitchen table for us to sit together and search for pictures of Israel which we would cut out and paste in scrap books. On quiet Shabbat afternoons, we would often sit together immersed in a virtual journey to the Land of Israel through our scrap books.

When I first came to Israel in 1969, I sensed I had been there many times before. I had fallen in love years before in New York with Israel’s diverse landscape, from the green hills of the Galilee to the Negev desert where my son and his family now live, from Petah Tikva where I live to Jerusalem where I work, from the Dead Sea to the coral reefs of Eilat, from the surf at the Tel Aviv beach to the Western Wall, and from mountainous Tzfat to the Ramon Crater. This love of the land urges Zionist artists to explore, articulate, express, and document the landscape, from its gentle beauty to its overwhelming magnificence, and to create earth art and ecological artworks to honor the land.

Ezra Orion organized an environmental art event in which ten Israeli artists were invited to create works of earth art at Sodom at the southern end of the Dead Sea on Purim 5744/1984. I appropriated a hill blocking the wadi between the mountain ranges of Moab and Edom to create an earth artwork relating Sodom to Purim:
http://www.melalexenberg.com/artworks/Sodom.doc.

Art creating dialog between Israel and the Diaspora

Although living in Israel by a Jewish calendar, speaking Hebrew, walking on the soil of our ancestors is the Zionist ideal, the networked world provides unprecedented opportunities for Jewish artists in the homeland and those in the Diaspora to creatively interact with each other. Internet 2.0 generates alternative frameworks for global communities to form and flourish. Zionist artists can form virtual communities spreading rhizome-like across the surface of the globe.

Israel

becoming the central node in these worldwide communities is the realization of the dream of the cultural Zionists led by Ahad Ha’am at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. In addition, artists share their creative works through their websites, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Rhizome, Second Life, etc. Particularly vital to the Zionist future is creative dialog and collaboration between the two largest Jewish communities. Through inspired partnerships between artists in Israel, the world center of Jewish culture, and artists in the

USA

, the world center of artistic innovation, a new Zionist energy will emerge and flourish.

In addition to energizing the creative dialog between Jews in Israel and United States, it is important to the Zionist enterprise in a networked world to establish a creative dialog between Israelis and Americans of diverse backgrounds. To realize this extended dialog, I created a work of participatory blogart ‘JerUSAlem-USA’ linking the twenty places in the United States called ‘Jerusalem’ with the original in Israel: http://jerusalem-usa.blogspot.com. In this collaborative artwork, Americans send photographs of Jerusalems in USA to which Israelis respond with matched images of Jerusalem in Israel. This digital dialog creates an interactive network of people with shared values that deepens friendships between them. The Lubavicher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, teaches:

"The divine purpose of the present information revolution, which gives an individual unprecedented power and opportunity, is to allow us to share knowledge – spiritual knowledge – with each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywhere. We need to use today’s interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to interlink as people – to create a welcome environment for the interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions."²¹

Art confronting hatred, bigotry, racism, terrorism, and cults of death with moral outrage

In the tradition of Picasso’s Guernica, I have created a work of webart http://www.futureholocaustmemorials.org to warn the world of Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb to “wipe Israel off the map.” Just as the world’s acquiesce to Hitler’s raining bombs on the Basque village Guernica gave him the license to proceed with preparing for WW II and exterminating the Jews of Europe on his way to global conquest, the world’s indifference to the thousands of rockets launched against Israel by Iran’s proxy armies, Hamas and Hizbullah, are empowering Ahmedinejad to incinerate the Jews of Israel as a prelude to the Islamist’s global jihad.

My webart cries out “Never Again!” to the apathetic world of nations that did little to prevent the murder of six million Jews in Europe or collaborated with the Nazis in their extermination. It issues a powerful warning to these same nations now pressuring the Jews, the indigenous people of the Land of Israel, to surrender its historic heartland for establishing a Palestinian terrorist state. It exposes the fact that the majority of the Arabs living in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza freely elected the Iranian proxy Hamas thugs whose genocidal charter reads: “

Israel

, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims…. Muslims will fight the Jews…for the sake of Allah! I will assault and kill, assault and kill, assault and kill.”

Art promoting an aesthetic peace between the Jewish State and its neighbors

Pursuing peace is a central value of Judaism. The Hebrew word for peace, shalom, is mentioned 237 times in the Hebrew Bible and scores of times in the Jewish liturgy. Peace is offered in Israel’s Declaration of Independence: “We extend our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land.”

Despite virulent Islamist anti-Semitism and genocidal aims, Israel continues to seek peace. However, all political processes and road maps from Oslo to Obama are doomed to failure because the Arab conflict is not political but rather an aesthetic problem that calls for an artistic solution. In my artwork Aesthetic Peace Plan for the Middle East exhibited at the Jewish Museum of Prague²² and on the Internet at http://aestheticpeace.blogspot.com, I propose an aesthetic solution that creates a new metaphor for peace derived from Islamic art and thought.

Islamic art teaches Arabs to see their world as a continuous geometric pattern that extends across North Africa and the Middle East. They see

Israel

as a blemish that disrupts the pattern. It is viewed as an alien presence that they have continually tried to eliminate through war, terrorism, and political action. A perceptual shift that can lead to a genuine peace can be derived from Islamic art and thought. In Islamic art, a uniform geometric pattern is purposely disrupted by the introduction of a counter-pattern that demonstrates that human creation is less than perfect. Since Islam believes that only Allah creates perfection, rug weavers from Islamic lands intentionally weave a patch of dissimilar pattern to break the symmetry of their rugs.

Peace will come from a fresh metaphor in which the Islamic world sees

Israel

’s existence as Allah’s will. A shift in viewpoint where

Israel

is perceived as the necessary counter-pattern in the overall pattern of the Islamic world will usher in an era of peace. The Koran (Sura 17:104) teaches that the ingathering of the Jewish people into its historic homeland in the midst of the Islamic world is the fulfillment of Mohammed’s prophecy: “And we said to the Children of Israel, ‘scatter and live all over the world…and when the end of the world is near we will gather you again into the Promised Land.’”

Art combining pride in roots with an overview of the world as seen by others

The ingathering of the Jewish people into their ancestral homeland of Israel at the time that many other peoples are being dispersed into new host countries would seem to be a countertrend to the powerful forces of globalization. However, the rebirth of the Jewish State and the ingathering of the exiles plant roots that provide the sure footing required to play the fast-moving globalization game. Sixty years after its rebirth,

Israel

has emerged as a major player in the global world of hi-tech.

Vibrant Zionist art draws on the creative tension and energetic interplay between subjugation and freedom, between narrow unidirectional thought and open-ended systems thought, between spiritual and material realms, between traditional values and scientific and technological development, between war and peace, between hatred and brotherhood, between local action and global outreach, and between being rooted in one’s own culture and exploring others. This tension and interplay is the stimulus and raw material for creating art to revitalize Jewish culture while offering fresh directions for the growth of art globally.

Art that enables the mundane to rise up from the Land of Israel and touch the Divine

I conclude this essay on being a Zionist artist in a networked with Rabbi Yohanan's words in Tractate Taanit in the Babylonian Talmud that God declared: "I will not come to the heavenly Jerusalem before coming to the earthly Jerusalem." As Zionist artists, my wife and I have the great privilege to explore the dynamic interface between aesthetic and spiritual energies revealed in our earthly encounters with everyday life in the Land of Israel.

The networked world offers the blog as an ideal Jewish art form. A blog is a web log, an active diary of a living process, rather than still life entombed in a golden frame. Blogart is a new postdigital art form that my wife, artist Miriam Benjamin, and I use to celebrate our 52nd year of marriage living in Petah Tikva (Opening to Hope). We celebrate our love by collaborating on our "Torah Tweets" blogart project http://torahtweets.blogspot.com.

During each of the 52 weeks of our 52nd year, we post six photographs reflecting our life together with a Torah tweet text that relates the weekly Torah reading to our lives, past and present. The seventh photograph does not exist since Shabbat is a Non-Art Day on which we tune out, turn off, unplug, and honor the Creator rather than our creations.

The blog creates a dialogue between images and text. The images are observations of spirituality in our everyday life. The text is composed as "tweets," sentences of not more that 140 characters required by the Twitter social networking website. 140 is the numerical value (gematria) of the Hebrew word hakel, which means to gather people together to share a Torah learning experience as in Leviticus 8:3 and Deuteronomy 4:10.

The introductory quotations that we posted as the top blogspot gadget emphasize the centrality of down-to-earth spirituality in Judaism from the viewpoints of Talmud scholar Rabbi J. B. Soloveitchik, Hasidic Rebbe M. M. Schneerson, and American novelist E. L. Doctorow. Like instruments in an orchestra, A. Y. Kook, Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel at the beginning of the 20th century, sees individual actions combine into a symphony of Jews acting together as a nation in their own land to empower the mundane to touch the Divine. This is the essence of the Zionist challenge.

"Judaism does not direct its glaze upward but downward ... does not aspire to a heavenly transcendence, nor does it seek to soar upon the wings of some abstract, mysterious spirituality. It fixes its gaze upon concrete, empirical reality permeating every nook and cranny of life. The marketplace, the street, the house, the mall, the banquet hall, all constitute the backdrop of religious life.²³ ///// It is not enough for the Jew to rest content with his own spiritual ascent, the elevation of his soul in closeness to G-d, he must strive to draw spirituality down into the world and into every part of it - the world of his work and his social life - until not only do they not distract him from his pursuit of G-d, but they become a full part of it.²⁴ ///// If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it'll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else.²⁵ ///// The first message that Moses chose to teach the Jewish people as they were about to enter the Land of Israel was to fuse heaven to earth, to enable the mundane to rise up and touch the Divine, the spiritual to vitalize the physical, not only as individuals but as an entire nation." ²⁶

Notes

1 Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age. (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

2 Ori Z. Soltes, Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England and Brandeis University Press, 2003), p. 131

3 Winston Churchill, History of the Second World War, Vol. V (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), p. 532.

4 Thorleif Boman, Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek (New York: Norton, 1960), p. 27.

5 Mel Alexenberg, The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2011).

6 Menahem Alexenberg, Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Four Essays on Judaism and Contemporary Art (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass House, 2008) [Hebrew].

7 Haim Finkelstein. "Lilien and Zionism," Assaph: Studies in Art History, Section B, No.3 (1998) pp. 195-216, accessed 25 January 2009:

http://www.tau.ac.il/arts/projects/PUB/assaph-art/assaph3/articles_assaph3/11finkelstein.pdf

and Gilya Gerda Schmidt, The Art and Artists of the Fifth Zionist Congress 1901: Heralds of a New Age (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003).

8 Mel Alexenberg and Otto Piene, introduction by Rudolf Arnheim, LightsOROT (Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and New York: Yeshiva University Museum, 1988).

9 Mel Alexenberg, Aesthetic Experience in Creative Process (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University Press, 1981).

10 Abraham Isaac Kook, Abraham Isaac Kook: Lights of Holiness, translated by Ben Zion Bokser (New York: The Classics of Western Spirituality. Paulist Press, 1978), p. 216.

11 Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man, translated by Lawrence Kaplan (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1983), pp. 99, 108.

12 Abraham Isaac Kook, Rav A. Y. Kook: Selected Letters, translated by Tzvi Feldman (Ma’aleh Adumim, Israel: Ma’aliot Publications of Yeshivat Birkat Moshe, 1986), p.191.

13 Kook. Rav A. Y. Kook: Selected Letters, p. 193.

14 Arthur Green, Seek My Face, Speak My Name (Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1992), p. 138.

15 Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992).

16 Mel Alexenberg (editor), Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology, and Culture (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press, 2008).

17 Mel Alexenberg and Miriam Benjamin, “Legacy Thrones: Intergenerational Collaboration in Creating Public Art” in Angela M. La Porte (editor), Community Connections: Intergenerational Links in Art Education (Reston, VA: National Art Education Association, 2004), pp. 115-128.

18 Theodore Herzl, Old New Land, translated by Lotta Levensohn (Princeton: M. Wiener, 1997), p. 262. Original German edition published as Altneuland in 1902.

19 Abraham Isaac Kook, Orot, translated by Bezalel Naor (Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1993), p. 89.

20 Kook, Rav A. Y. Kook: Selected Letters, p. 239.

21 Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Toward a Meaningful Life: The Wisdom of the Rebbe, adapted by Simon Jacobson. New York: William Morrow, 1995, 191.

22 Michaela Hajkova, Mel Alexenberg: Cyberangels – Aesthetic Peace Plan for the Middle East (Prague: Robert Guttmann Gallery, Jewish Museum of Prague, 2004) [exhibition catalog]

23 Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man. p. 92, 94.

24 Menahem M. Schneerson, Torah Studies, adapted by Jonathan Sacks. London: Lubavitch Foundation, 1986, p. 320.

25 E. L. Doctorow, City of God. New York: Plume Book/Penguin Putnam, 2001, p. 254.

26 Gideon Weitzman, Sparks of Light, Northvale, NJ and Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 1999, p. 248.

About the Author

Menahem (Mel) Alexenberg is head of the School of the Arts at Emuna College in Jerusalem and professor emeritus at Ariel University where he taught the courses: “Art in Jewish Thought” and “Judaism and Zionism: Values and Roots.” He is former professor of art and education at Columbia University and Bar Ilan University, head of the art department at Pratt Institute, dean at New World School of the Arts in Miami, and research fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His artwork exploring digital technology and global systems are in the collections of more than forty museums worldwide. He is author of The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press), Aesthetic Experience in Creative Process (Bar Ilan University Press), in Hebrew Dialogic Art in a Digital World: Four Essays on Judaism and Contemporary Art (Jerusalem: Rubin Mass House) and editor of Educating Artists for the Future: Learning at the Intersections of Art, Science, Technology and Culture (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press). Alexenberg blogs at: http://www.artiststory.com/, http://torahtweets.blogapot.com/, http://www.future-of-art.com/, http://zionistartists.blogspot.com/, and http://jerUSAlem-usa.blogspot.com.

Media Golem: Between Prague and ZKM

2010-06-16T23:35:00.000-07:00

 by Michael Bielicky

Michael Bielicky, Norman M. Klien and Mel Alexenberg at ZKM

When I was four or five years old, my mother took me to visit the famous Old-New Synagogue of Prague. I ran around and suddenly climbed up onto a big chair and sat on it. A group of men nervously hurried to remove me from the chair. Many years later, I found out that it was the chair of the great Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the MaHaRaL of Prague. The synagogue stringently observed a rule that nobody should sit on this honored chair after the esteemed rabbi passed away four centuries ago. Perhaps it was this early experience that indirectly shaped my artistic interests in virtual environments.

A few years later, I read about Rabbi Loew in the chapter “Golem from Prague, Golem from Rechovot” in Gerschon Scholem’s book Judaica. The rabbi was a great scholar and mystic who possessed an encyclopedic knowledge. He is both the spiritual and biological forefather of the renowned aerodynamics and astrophysics expert Theodor von Karman. Von Karman recognized Rabbi Loew as the first genius of applied mathematics. In other sources, I learned that Rabbi Loew was not only credited with having created the Golem, an artificial human being, but was honored for his experiments with the camera obscura and with the magic lantern. These experiments impressed Emperor Rudolf II so much that he invited him to join a circle of alchemists, astronomers and artists whose members included scientists Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe and artist Giuseppe Archimboldo who painted human heads made of fruits, vegetables and sea creatures. It is said that Rabbi Loew accomplished a miracle one night as Rudolf II was seeking him out in his home. The rabbi transformed his house into a palace by using his magic lantern to project painted pictures of the interior of the Prague castle Hradschin onto his own empty walls. This gave the emperor the illusion that he was in a palace. One can, in this context, speak of a medieval virtual reality artwork.

I was seven years old at the end of April 1961, two weeks after the historical moment when the first human flew in space. My older brother and I were standing on the curbstone on the main street in our Prague neighborhood. An open limousine suddenly appeared with Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin waving to the crowds. As a small-sized person in a dense crowd not knowing in which direction to look, I missed seeing this hero of all humanity. Although I missed seeing him, I felt the vibrant energies of the cheering crowds for a long time afterwards.

Four years later, cheering crowds standing along the curb greeted Pope Paul VI waving from an open limousine driving down Fifth Avenue. In the crowd was a Korean man who had recently arrived in New York. He was holding the first black and white portable video camera shooting the scene. This young man was destined to become the father of video art. His name was Nam June Paik. I had the good fortune to be his student twenty years later only because of my escape to the West in 1969 after the Soviet tanks invaded the former Czechoslovakia.

In 1981, I drove a horse and open carriage down Fifth Avenue into Central Park. After studying medicine for several years on graduating from high school in Germany, I realized that my future was not being a physician like my father and brother, but rather in the realm of visual media. I moved to New York and lived in the Westbeth art community on the Hudson River. In order to pay my rent, I earned a license as a horse-cab driver.

Perhaps I should start somewhere else. We are in the year 1942 at my parents’ wartime wedding. They are wearing yellow stars on their chests, kissing their parents goodbye on the run, not knowing that they would never see them again. As a small boy, I could not understand how my friends had grandparents and even great-grandparents. I had none. When I was 12, I first learned about the Holocaust madness that had exterminated my parents’ entire family because they were Jews. It was not surprising that my parents did not speak to me about this unspeakable horror until I was 12, since we continued to live in the anti-Semitic environment of the former post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia where it was best not to be identified as a Jew.

In my home, the integration of art and science flowed naturally since my father was both a musician and scientist. He had survived the war years with my mother as a musician with false identification papers often playing piano at parties where the Nazis were celebrating. After the war, he studied medicine and became a medical scientist. He would come home after a long day at work and play piano while I sat beside him listening. My father was also a composer who composed Czech tangos and rumbas which were released as recordings and played on the radio.

Ironically, my Jewish identify was awakened after arriving in West Germany. I changed overnight from a young Communist Pioneer to a western hippie. I grew long hair, wore a goat-fur jacket embroidered with colorful flowers, started to socialize within the Jewish community of Dusseldorf, and joined a Zionist group. The true reason for joining this group had little to do with leaving for Israel. It gave me the opportunity to be accepted into a marijuana-smoking hippie circle of friends that helped transform the trauma of emigration into a positive experience isolating me from the brown shirt mentality of the older generation of Germans. It was even more difficult for my parents to relate to a generation with a Nazi past that included the murderers of their parents. I remember sitting with my parents in our new home in Germany watching the moon landing on our Czech black and white TV. This moment awaked in me the power of a real-time media experience.

When I arrived for the first time in my life in Israel in 1983, I had little idea about the Jewish State and the Jewish religion. I traveled to the Holy Land with two friends for a vacation in Eilat. After few days at this Red Sea resort town, I decided to travel without my friends to Jerusalem. I took a bus planning to stop on the way in Sodom on the Dead Sea to visit a friend of my brother who worked as a dermatologist in a clinic there. I had a simple map of Israel and somehow I thought Sodom was a small town. When the bus arrived in Ein Gedi, I asked when we would arrive in Sodom. With a smile in his face, the man sitting beside me explained that we have passed Sodom an hour ago. Panicking, I got off the bus and found myself in a silent, peaceful oasis. I checked in to a youth hostel and spent the night at Ein Gedi. The next morning, I decided not to go back to Sodom but to continue on my trip to Jerusalem. I went to the bus stop and sat on a bench. I sat there one hour, two hours, three hours, until a man passed by and asked me what I was doing there. I answered that I was waiting for a bus to Jerusalem. He smiled and told me there will be no buses at all during the coming few days because of the Pesach holiday and that the only way to get there is to use a sherut-taxi. I had no idea at that time what Pesach was, but I followed his advice. Finally arriving in Jerusalem was for me an exciting moment. I checked into a youth hostel where I met a young American college student. As we walked together to the Kotel, the Wailing Wall, a Chasidic man walked by and inquired if we were Jews. When we answered in the affirmative, he asked where we planned to spend the Seder. I had no idea what a Seder was. Then the Chassid told us if we would come to the Wall in a few hours he would arrange for us to spend the Seder with an Orthodox family. He asked if we prefer a Hebrew or English speaking family. I answered that I would prefer an English speaking family. My new found friend argued that he speaks enough Hebrew to understand everything and that he is willing to translate for me. A few hours later we met the same Chassid who took us to Mea Shearim, one of the oldest and the most Orthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem. We arrived at a rabbi's home filled with many children speaking Yiddish. Since I speak German, it was easy for me to communicate with them. In the end, it was me who translate for my friend.

I had no idea that twelve years later in 1995, I would create the first Internet art project using GPS technology. The title of the work was Exodus. I walked for four days through the desert tracing the steps of Moses. People worldwide could follow my trek. This performance artwork was my metaphor for the modern exodus of humankind into to the time-space realm of the Internet.

There were earlier fascinating media experiences in my Prague childhood that had impact on my work as a media artist – frequenting the cinema, developing photographs in my neighbor’s makeshift darkroom, immersion in a 360^o panoramic film happening, seeing early time-base imagery in a technical museum, and creating an instant camera anticipating Polaroid. There were two movie theaters near where we lived and my friend and I would go there nearly every Sunday for the morning matinee. We saw Karel Zeman’s fantastical films which are often shown today in university film schools and new media departments as early examples of compositing visualization. In contemporary terminology, it’s called a “virtual set” in which technology allows the combination of actual actors with virtual reality creating a virtual setting and even individual characters. Zeman was a pioneer with this technology, and later I became interested in it as well.

I remember another early experience with film when my father took me to the panoramic cinema at the Holesovice amusement park. Inside a round building there was a circular screen on which was projected a 360˚ panoramic film from a Russian projection system. Spectators didn’t sit as in a normal cinema but stood in the middle watching the changing view from an airplane. I remember that the plane began to bank making people lose their balance and fall to the ground. This was a powerful experience. In the same fair grounds in 1891, the artist Marold created a panorama, an image where reality and fiction were blurred, where three-dimensional objects emerged from a 360^o panoramic painting. This interaction between reality and fiction later became one of the main features of my work. My friend and I made a make-believe "camera" from a cardboard box in which we placed pictures we had drawn in advance. We would go to the park and ask people walking by if we could photograph them. If someone agreed, we would click the “shutter release” and pull from the “camera” one of the pictures to give to the person we had “photographed.” My childhood invention was the “precursor” to the Polaroid camera. A few years later, the son of my parents’ friends from New York came for a visit with an actual Polaroid. I wasn’t at all surprised.

When I was fifteen years old, I saw what appeared to be an action movie in the making hiking with my friend in the countryside not far from Prague. At the horizon, hundreds of tanks where rolling over the hills in the far distance. When we realized that what we were seeing on that summer morning in 1968 was not a movie, but the beginning of the invasion of the Russian army into Czechoslovakia, we ran down the road tearing down all the direction signs to make it difficult for the invading soldiers to find their way. This image will forever remain etched in my mind along with the horrible feeling of being helpless and powerless.

I was fortunate to have been born in Prague, a city permeated by the myth of the Golem, a pre-robotic being created by mystical algorithms four centuries ago invoked by Rabbi Judah Loew, the spiritual father of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetic theory. Prague is the city in which the Czech word “robot” was conceived, the Golem was born, and Kafka told the tale of the metamorphosis of a young man into a giant cockroach. It is also the city in which the first interactive cinema, “Kinoautomat,” and the phenomenon of “Laterna Magika,” the fluid transition between the stage and projected film, were invented. Publishing the first illustrated book for children in 1658, the visionary Czech educator Comenius pioneered in developing a system of media pedagogy of great significance in new media studies.

My high school in Düsseldorf was near the illustrious Art Academy. The Academy radiated out to the community at large, so I felt part of what was going on there. I couldn’t help but notice the reverberations being sent out by the life pulsating there. Near the Academy were a number of cafés and bars where students and professors congregated. I spent a lot of time in one such local hangout that was named Creamcheese. Its interior was created by members of the ZERO group, Otto Piene, Günter Mack and Heinz Ücker. It was later installed in Düsseldorf’s Museum Kunst Palast. This environment had a strong impact on me without my being entirely aware of everything that was going on there. In our neighborhood, I often saw Joseph Beuys. He was indeed larger-than-life, and not just because of his height and hat, but because he drove a Bentley. The strength of his personality and work wasn’t clear to me until two years before I entered the Academy. I became aware of the significance of the art scene in Düsseldorf when I saw a video installation for the first time in my life in the city’s Kunsthalle. Today, it’s considered a seminal piece. It was created by Shigeko Kubota, Nam June Paik’s wife, and was based on Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Although I appreciated the artistic energies in Dussledorf, I decided to study medicine that I enjoyed for three years and thought that this was going to be my profession. When I realized that the life of a physician was not what I really wanted for myself, I left medical school and left Dusseldorf for New York. I was always grateful for the ongoing support for my quest offered by my brother, Peter, himself a physician and collector of Czech avant-garde art.

Recently, I was shocked to find out that my former anatomy professor was a Nazi criminal who was the assistant of the monster doctor Augus Hirt who did experiments on live prisoners in the concentration camps during the World War II. The name of my former professor was Anton Kiesselbach and in the trial against him in the middle of the sixties he was freed because lack of proofs. It was a typical trial in that time in West Germany where a large number of the judges had themselves served Nazi Germany. No wonder that most of such trials ended with acquittals.

When I first came to New York City in 1978, the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the city was liberating for me, even though my existence there was very tenuous. It was important to me that no one asked who I was or where I came from. It didn’t matter. Being in New York gave me a burst of energy that dissipated when I relocated at the edge of a California redwood forest, in the beautiful mountains around Santa Cruz. In this perfect paradise where I did not have anything particular to do, I felt no motivation to do anything at all. I soon realized I needed the vibrant energy and existential challenge of a big city and returned to New York to begin intensive work in photography. A turning point came when I definitively decided to pursue photography as a profession. This came from meeting New York photographer Frederic Cantor, whose work I admired. He didn’t know it, but for me at that time he was a real guru. I tried to imitate his work in my New York photographs, created under Cantor’s influence, and helped me eventually get accepted to the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Art.

I returned to Germany to work for Monochrom magazine, which offered me the freedom to create a wide variety of photographs that it published. The magazine was very progressive for its time, sometimes even provocative, both in content and design. I mostly did portraits of friends, people I was acquainted with, strong personalities for the most part. The photos were pseudo-staged in often-bizarre situations that were created without a lot of prior preparation. The magazine soon folded. I suppose it was too experimental for its time. During this period, however, I never really considered myself a professional photographer even though it paid my rent.

I first applied to the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts in 1983. Although I was not accepted, something positive did come out of it as Joseph Beuys organized a special exhibition of those who were rejected. He was already so famous that he could invite the press. This exhibition of the rejected threw into doubt the very social status of the “Artist” and “Art.” The following year, I was accepted into Bernd Becher’s photography atelier at a time that photography was starting to become accepted on equal footing with the classical fine arts. My schoolmates, who continued with photography, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Thomas Ruff, later became successful artists. For me, the work in Becher’s atelier was boring. The conceptualism he encouraged did absolutely nothing for me although I appreciated it in Becher’s work. However, I found the work his students were producing banal and foreign to me. I met Nam June Paik by accident at the opening of an exhibition. I told him I’d like to study under him and he didn’t ask for any further details about me. He just said, “You are my student.” When someone came up to him, he introduced me as his new student. I was really lucky because it was not so easy to get into his atelier. He did not take everyone. When I began to study with Paik, a new period began for me. I felt like I had found my element working with video. Outwardly, he was very humble. He was even skeptical about his own work. But looking back now, I realize that maybe this was a tactic of his. What impressed me about Paik though was his lack of pretension and his interest in everyday things. I think that’s why students liked him so much. He never played the star and you could speak to him about anything. Most people do not know this, but there would be situations when if he liked a student’s work he would simply buy it. He didn’t do this because he was collecting these objects but so that he could use it in his own installations. He considered it a form of partnership. He wasn’t misusing his students’ work. For me of course what was most important about Paik was his openness with his students. That was the greatest lesson for me, the one I identified with the most. I try to maintain this sort of openness with my own students. I consider them more as partners who I can learn from despite their age or limited experience.

At the Academy, Joseph Beuys had created a space he called Freie Internationale Universität (FIU). It was a gesture on his part to represent a clear alternative to academic seclusion, an open space within a closed space. Beuys of course always had his devotees around him. My friend the Bolivian painter Ricardo Peredo and I began to associate with Beuys and his group. He was such a charismatic personality that he attracted us to him. On the other hand, we felt uncomfortable with his students who acted like members of a difficult to define sect. When Beuys spoke, it was like they were listening to a sermon. Beuys’s lectures themselves were incredibly inspirational and they forced us to think about the role of the artist and his work in a social context. He propagated a completely different type of artistic work. He thought the artist should create “social sculptures,” that is, the artist’s work should be focused on mending the world. I still mull this idea over today and always return to it and try to discuss it with my students as well.

My video-installations evolved into video-sculptures at the end of my studies in Düsseldorf. The difference between the two is not exactly clear. The term “video-sculpture” didn’t exist until it was used for the first time in 1986 (Videoskulptur in German) by the curator Wulf Herzogenrath for an exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. I guess one distinction is that video-installations use monitors as the central element. In a video-sculpture, the object itself is so central that if the monitors are switched off, it still can be a meaningful artwork. I created Menorah at the end of my studies without having any idea what sort of response it eventually would have. It had small TV monitors at the ends of each of seven braches of a large steel candelabrum. On the monitors’ screens, video images of flickering flames danced. These virtual flames emanated from a hidden video transmitter sending spiritual messages to antennas topping each of the seven monitors.

Menorah directly referenced my Jewish identity in a German context. The first place in Germany that provided me some comfortable surroundings was the Düsseldorf Jewish community. However, it took me a long while before I was ready to openly and publicly acknowledge my Jewishness. The first time I publicly displayed Menorah at the Academy, I placed a ring around it made of defunct fire extinguishers. They weren’t so easy to find because at the time everyone in Germany had the Baader-Meinhof Gang and other terrorist groups still fresh in their minds and their bombs were made out of old fire extinguishers. Nevertheless, I wanted to show the installation like this. I wanted to say that these old extinguishers were like old Nazis who no longer had the strength to snuff the flame of the menorah. This was the only time I used this literal interpretation when exhibiting Menorah. Actually, it was David Galloway, the noted curator and art critic writing for the International Herald Tribune, who convinced me that the object was powerful enough on its own. The work was in great demand. I won a number of awards for it and it went from exhibition to exhibition. Actually, there exist two copies of Menorah. One was bought from me by ZKM [Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie] in Karlsruhe as the very first work for its collection (so it was given identification number 001). The second was commissioned in 2001 by the Jewish Museum in Berlin at the architect Daniel Libeskind’s request.

Otto Piene, a German artist who headed MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies, was invited by the Düsseldorf Art Academy to judge the works of graduating students. Looking at my Menorah, I attempted to explain to him what a menorah was. He interrupted me to explain that he knew all about menorahs from his collaboration with Mel Alexenberg in creating a major exhibition of electronic art at MIT for Yeshiva University Museum in New York. He gave me a gift of the catalog for the 1988 show LightsOROT: Spiritual Dimensions of the Electronic Age with its introduction by Rudolf Arnheim and a dialog "Light, Vision and Art in Judaism" between Mel Alexenberg and Yeshiva University president Rabbi Norman Lamm. This catalog was to be an important influence on my thinking about both Judaism and new media art. When I just had returned to Prague from Thailand in 2002 where I was establishing a new media department of the university, I received a phone call from Mel Alexenberg. He told me the director of Prague's Center for Contemporary Art told him that he must meet Michael Bielicky after visiting the Otto Piene's retrospective exhibition at the Center. As soon as I heard that he was the Mel Alexenberg of LightsOROT, I rushed over to his hotel to meet him. We have been close friends and colleagues since.

Shortly after the fall of the Communist system in Eastern Europe in 1990, I was invited to return to Prague to found the first department of new media art in the region. When I spoke to my mentor Nam June Paik about the offer of a professorship in new media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, he told me “Go for it! Good luck!” and spontaneously gave me 5,000 German Marks to get the new department started. With this money and some additional sponsorship, I purchased two video cameras and three video editing systems. This very basic video equipment was the basis for creating a lively and creative department in a cubistic villa next to the main Art Academy building. In the first years, I worked with my students on some early communications art projects like IPI (International Painting Interactive) in collaboration with students in many other countries who collectively created a virtual painting using a graphics tablet and modem. We were also involved in a pioneering interactive television project (Piazza Virtuale) which was presented at the 1992 Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany. The seminal philosopher of media, Vilem Flusser, inspired my students with his highly original lectures. After his tragic death, we organized a series of “Vilem Flusser Symposia” in collaboration with Prague’s Goethe Institute.

During this period in Prague, I developed projects using locative media such as global positioning systems (GPS) that were presented at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. My Intelligent Mailman at Ars Electronica was the first GPS artwork ever. I integrated GPS and Internet technologies in a performance artwork that electronically transmitted my wandering through the Negev Desert. I also created virtual environments at the Babeinsberg High-Tech Center in Berlin and at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karsruhe.

Living at the intersections of Czech and German cultures was and continues to be an amazing trigger for creative thought and action. Switching time-space while reflecting on one’s encounter with changing environments is a great teacher for a creative person. I felt that the new found freedom in Eastern Europe produced a level of energy and creative potential at the time that was much stronger than what was happening in Western Europe. I traveled extensively throughout the former Communist world between 1990 and 2000 as advisor to the Soros Centers for Contemporary Arts creating educational departments and centers for new media art from Bucharest, Odessa, and Moscow, to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan. I began the new millennium lecturing on new media arts in Thailand and founding with Francis Wittenberger the New Media Arts Festival in Bangkok. My experience in Asia led me to realize how much more dynamic this part of the world was in comparison to the more staid culture of Western Europe.

The challenge in educating future generations in the field of digital arts is the rapidly changing conditions that make today’s media theory stale tomorrow. We know that ideas we taught a decade ago are irrelevant today. Perhaps, the most significant change is the democratization of video and computer technologies that makes everyone a potential digital artist. The aim to create Soros media centers in Eastern Europe modeled after the ZKM Center for Art and Media and MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies and Media Lab required heavy funding for sophisticated equipment and facilities. The concentration of digital art production in these centers has given way to powerful media tools that are cheap enough and compact enough for anyone to create serious digital artworks in their home. Prestigious media art festivals like Ars Electronica in Linz and Tranmediale in Berlin are having to reinventing themselves to claim to continue be innovative, risky, and fresh.

What is the role of the artist in society in the 21^st century is the primary question? We need to completely rethink stereotypic images of the artist and the concept of the art school that are becoming obsolete. Perhaps art schools can be replaced by mobile educational units that adapt to alternative cultural environments. We need to acknowledge the hundreds of millions of pictures produced worldwide daily. This enormous inflation of images is radically changing our sensibilities. It is causing cultural pollution of our environment that may be as great a threat to our mind and souls as physical pollution is to our bodies. Does it make sense to educate our students to produce more and more images? Perhaps we need to encourage the practice of cultural ecology by creating an ecological movement against image pollution of our environment like those acting against chemical pollution. Students in a post-digital age are already creating new forms of dematerialized art – net art, locative media, data and information visualization, telematics – that reaches into public spaces globally and even beyond our planet.

My 16 years teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague convinced me that the key to educating future digital artists is not the quality of the school, it is not the professor, but the quality of the student who gets accepted. In Prague, I was fortunate to always be able to choose the best of the best. Consequently, those students were from the beginning more my partners than students. My students in Prague were invited and won awards in such new media art festivals as Ars Electronica in Linz or Transmediale in Berlin where they were not considered as students but as professional artists!

I guess I was lucky again to be appointed as a full-time professor and head of the Digital Arts Department at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany. The fact that the school is situated at the same giant building as the ZKM Center for Art and Media is a great advantage for the students. They can see world-class media art shows, attend events with top international performers, and hear lectures by some of the most important artists and theoreticians in the world. After 16 years in Prague, I moved from a dreamy and poetic city to a more rational and functional Karlsruhe. This was my third emigration between the Czech Republic and Germany.

Although primarily conceptual in orientation, my department at the Art Academy in Prague was also a technological laboratory in which there was a lots of freedom given to the students who, in turn, were expected to assume individual responsibility. Most students understood this challenge. Others misused it to their disadvantage. I believe that it is important to work with the students on highly innovative, challenging, and risky issues. My experience taught me that project-centered study motivates students more and is generally a more efficient educational methodology than more formal methods. It has also taught me the significance of being open to learning from teachers and colleagues through ongoing dialogue. My long-term dialogue and friendship with key thinkers and artists, such as Nam June Paik, Vilem Flusser, Woody Vasulka, Mel Alexenberg, and Peter Weibel, has enriched me and facilitated my seeing alternative perspectives on life and art

Students should be encouraged to develop the need to break out of institutionalized frameworks. The young generation should learn to take risks rather than always follow their teachers. Often students exhibit fresh visions than exceed those of their professors. It is our duty to support their visions even when our egos are sometimes hurt. They should ask if the so-called art system (art school, gallery, museum, art critic, curator, art magazine, art fair, etc.) is the right framework for a digital artist at the beginning of the 21^st century knowing very well how much this system is corrupted where often financial interests dominate and manipulate the art market independent of the quality of the artworks.

My wife, Kamila Bielicka Richter, and I collaborated on a project that we call Falling Life. It operates completely outside of the art system. It is an ongoing project that was introduced for the first time in Berlin in August 2005. This urban screening project needs neither a curator nor a gallery. It does not need a fixed place or access to the electric power. We are equipped with a car, a laptop, a compact powerful projector, and a small power generator. With this very mobile equipment, we are able to create an instant presence in the urban landscape. We transform city architecture into dynamic and living organisms. Without any on-site preparation and without any permits, we operate a kind of guerilla-style projection. Within less than ten minutes, we can illuminate giant buildings with our artwork, reaching huge audiences that would probably never walk into a gallery or museum. We use a minimalist language of constantly appearing and disappearing pictograms. The moving icons often represent the collective reality of our interconnected globalized world. Falling Life was projected during the Czech Culture Festival in Berlin, as a subversive public interference in Ars Electronica in Linz, at ZKM in Karlsruhe, at the DOX Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, and in Barcelona, Bangkok, and Jerusalem.

We projected on the façade of the grotesquely gigantic building built by the brutal Romanian dictator Caucescu in Bucharest. With the fall of Communism and the murder of Caucescu, the building of the dictatorial regime is being shared by the parliament of a democratic government and a museum of contemporary art. There was an exhibition in the museum of social realist paintings glorifying the dictator which after his fall looked absurd and preposterous. Boorish parliamentarians did not get the satire of these kitsch artworks and accused the curators of promoting Communist propaganda. Perhaps it is a sign of Isaiah’s prophetic vision to beat swords into plowshares that the buildings of evil regimes are being transformed into centers for creative arts. The media department of the Dusseldorf Art Academy where I studied with Nam June Paik was housed in former Gestapo headquarters and I currently teach in an enormous building shared by my art school and ZKM Center for Art and Media that was a Nazi munitions factory where slave laborers manufactured torpedoes.

I was invited by the Jewish Museum Prague in 2005 to develop a project for the Guttmann Gallery, its gallery of contemporary art. With a small team of collaborators I developed a digital art project This Year in Jerusalem. This title updates the millennia-old Jewish prayer "Next year in Jerusalem." I aimed at virtually fulfilling visitors' dream – to be in Jerusalem now and not next year. I installed custom-made motion capture tracking technology in the gallery space. This device tracked people in the gallery space and defined their changing positions while creating a three dimensional representations of them called voxels (volumetric pixels). I simultaneously displayed on the wall of the gallery a live moving real-time motion image of activity at the Jerusalem Kotel, the Western Wall. When visitors entered the gallery space, they saw their shadow images (voxel representations) moving within the live Kotel image. They digitally mingled with the crowd at the Kotel. The gallery became a dynamic image experience merging Prague and Jerusalem.

My wife Kamila and I having been working for the apost several years on a series of projects dealing with what we call Data Driven Narratives. In 2007, we created Falling Times, an ironic translation machine for news. Falling Times is an everlasting and growing real-time news translation machine representing permanently appearing and disappearing information about our times. Falling Times refers to the extensive world of InfoPollution in which we live. The InfoSociety has created a new kind of consumer - the InfoConsumer! In our visualization, we reduce the content to headlines and key words that appear in the news most frequently. These reduced news items are translated into a dynamic pictogram language that attempts to be universal and instantly understandable. Online users have the opportunity to define collectively the meaning associated with each icon we created and decide what kind of news will be finally displayed. The information industry produces less and less meaning while creating a pattern that decorates our daily life and persuades us that we are connected to reality. This project was shown around the world, from New York, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Sydney, Berlin, to Prague. It was both displayed indoors and in outdoor public spaces as gigantic projections on building facades.

In 2010, we developed the artwork Garden of Error and Decay that tells the continuous story of current world disasters. The authors' input joins with Twitter users' tweets and stock exchange information to influence the story telling. Every time a disaster related topic is discussed in Twitter, it becomes displayed in the form of an animated pictogram. Users have the opportunity to either eliminate or multiply the disaster scenes with a shooting devise. However, it is not the user that has the power to decide what really happens. Like in real life, the narrative is driven by stock exchange dynamics that dictate whether it goes up or down. This project is not a film, not a game, and not a nonlinear interactive story. The Garden of Error and Decay reflects on the networked media reality of the 21st century that seems to have increasing impact on our perception of the world.

We believe that real time data like the news, Twitter feed or stock exchange data are becoming a new element in global story telling. This global newsfeed in dialogue with the authors and users influence the narration. In that sense, we are facing a radically new format which still has to be explored more deeply.

Inspired by Mel Alexenberg's term "Postdigital Age," I organized in November 2010 a small international conference at the ZKM Center for Art and Media that I called "Postdigital Narratives." (See video of the conference at http://vimeo.com/18704694.) The participants Mel Alexenberg, Timothy Druckery, Norman Klein, Adam Rafinski and Michael Rybakov discussed the humanization of today's digitized culture. Alexenberg spoke about how Midrash, two thousand years of creative narratives designed to elucidate the biblical narrative, spins out stories between the lines of the biblical text to reveal messages hidden in the white spaces between the Hebrew letters. This conference inaugurated a new Institute of Postdigital Narrative that I now head at the University of Art and Design in Karlsruhe.

Michael Bielicky is professor of Digital Media Art at the University of Art and Design in Karlsruhe, Germany, and head of the Institute for Visual Media at ZKM Center for Art and Media. He was born in Prague in 1954 and immigrated to West Germany in 1969. After studying medicine in Dusseldorf, he studied photography and worked as a horse cab driver in New York. He earned his Master of Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Dusseldorf under Nam-June Paik in 1989. He was then Paik's assistant for 5 years until he returned to the Czech Republic as founder and professor of the New Media Art Department at the Academy of Fine Arts Prague. In 2006, he accepted his current professorship in Karlsruhe. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions, festivals and symposia using communication, navigation, video and VR technologies. His recent artwork uses real time web-based information technologies in public spaces develped in collaboration with ZKM Karlsruhe, Ars Electronica Linz, High Tech Center Berlin-Babelsberg, etc. His innovative artwork has been exhibited in Centre Pompidou Paris, MoMA New York, National Gallery Prague, Kunsthaus Zurich, Jewish Museum Berlin, Sao Paulo Biennale Brazil, Seoul Biennale South Korea, Museum for Contemporary Art Warsaw, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, Gallery for Contemporary Arts Milan, Jewish Museum Prague, and State Museum of Contemporary Art Thessaloniki.

You Can Take the Artist out of Zion, but You Can’t Take Zion out of the Artist

2010-06-16T23:18:00.000-07:00

by Shalom Gorewitz

Everything in my artwork is real, but none of it is true. The empty spaces, blanks, ellipses are as expressive as the visuals. The silence is louder than sound. It’s always about emptying, which requires fullness. The frantic sequencing is meant to describe something slow. The long, almost photographic takes, are about speed. What might appear as confusion or ambiguity is carefully planned but not logical. I’m the interface between machines, the analog puppet with a digital master, pre-robotic prototype artist for the post-human era. I tickle the potentiometer and colors emerge; I pull a plug and rest. Water is not only water, it’s flow, it’s signal. Waves are not simply waves, but visualization of physics. It’s not the tree moving, it’s the wind. It’s not the highway, it’s heat, gravity, death. The mind melts while trying to make sense of it. Symbols, metaphors, puns, analogies trick us into meaning. Artworks come with code cards- red means, blue signifies, black describes, green is the new blue, yellow the new orange. The audience wants a story from the artist. Oh, yes, this is Kabalistic, see how all of the energy flows through these morphs and transformations. Vaguely Jewish symbols and alpha wave music. Can you see how this might be healing? Think about having it on your wall to catch new details. Think about telling your friends the story I told you.

What a story it is! Based on personal memories of things that have, might have, or could have happened. The stops and starts where the viewer has time to fill in. This is what the world looks like to me. Landscapes become personal. If I can tell the same story in different ways, it is no longer the same story. If I don’t care about the boundaries between fact and fiction, you shouldn’t either. This is a word journey, a roller coaster of verbiage. Over time it rises and falls; there are thrills and the anticipation of thrills. There is a delight in the certainty of uncertainty, of going along for the ride, just because you never know what might happen next. If you’re beginning to drift off into thinking about sex or something else important, I might also. Should I recall the muses, the mysterious ones, strangers who inspired the narratives? The one I shouldn’t have left in Tel Aviv? The one the goat will lead me to? Ghazals, Sufi songs for the Beloved; the Song of Songs, the Shechinah, momentarily physical, Solomon’s confusion of desire and faith. This is a template to explore sensuality, romance, and fantasy that is at once earthy and mystical. Religious pornography. We literally go to the tavern after the annual reading. We must eat, drink, dance with abandon in dedication to the divine. For one Friday night it doesn’t matter if it’s Shlomo Carlbach, Shefa Gold or the Rolling Stones.

Everything in my artwork is true, but none of it is real. It is not painting or sculpture, some have called it anti-Art since it has no commercial value. In the beginning I was driven with the passion that I could have such high frequencies and sequencing that the work might explode the TV set. On my cable show, Raster (1977-78) I realized I had to put a text warning that, in fact, the rapid field-cut fragments of images would not hurt the television. Only available in midtown Manhattan, most viewers hadn’t seen anything like it. Now it’s the only thing they see. Out of the revolution, complacency. Out of the subversion, consumption. Once the old rules were gutted, there was nothing left to do. The Internet is the first new medium without rules, beyond structure. When the enemy embraces you, it’s over. Experiments become entertainment. Galleries dedicate prime space to projections that show digital films that could be pilots for the arts cable channel, the new overground cinema. Hey, Roscoe, let’s watch some video art on YouTube. Check out this guy’s website. I’m tired; it’s time to go to sleep. Just take a look. Stimulated, charged, sensual rich colors, delicate light patterns, and shifting forms. It’s common for Hollywood films to lead to sex. Is there an artwork that creates peace? Silence, only the most faint of lines, how much to erase before it is blank?

So the plot thickens, the intrigues, affairs, seductions, long gone, as the electronic-primitives age, almost ready for Bart Friedman’s retirement home for old video artists. He did this, she did that. Writing, curating, vj-ing, angling back door to epic mural television, a place that is real, but does not exist in physical space, where people meet but don’t see each other, where ideals collide with convictions. A democratic medium, a local voice, an activist tool- there is a Whitman wanabee body-electric strain to the early efforts. After monochrome painters assassinated Art, after pop blended it with culture, after poetic cinema showed a way beyond literature, the raster scan pointillism of video was free to borrow from all disciplines, especially science and the humanities, to create itself. Right place, right time, David Jones, too much beer, sleeping under David Marsh’s editing bay. I nudge, he reaches behind the board to patch cables. I’m pushing through the night, only a few more hours left with this precious equipment. I can sleep tomorrow when the session is over. This is the way it was, some time before this time, when we could sleep next to imaging systems, the matrix, breathing visuals.

The art is neither real nor true, but neither is this statement. It comes from life, recorded on tape or an SD card. Everybody has a story. Everybody deserves to tell and be heard. Shoah stories are the hardest for me. I finally mourned my grandfather through a video fractured by damaged vision recorded in Poland and Romania. It begins with Reb Nachman’s niggun, the narrow bridge, chanted by a Christian Polish musician. Visiting the places I knew somehow from dreams. Sighet seemed familiar. Shavuot there with a minyan, drinking schnapps, and davenning. It’s easy to imagine my grandmother and grandfather, who I was named after, nearby. I remember her quick bursts of unexpected davenning in her Brooklyn apartment. We gossip in broken English, Yiddish, Hebrew about my mother’s family and life in America. The Iron Curtain had just disintegrated, the Coucescos executed, and they could speak freely with foreign visitors. They took us to where they said my mother lived, close to the house Eli Weisel grew up in. Some Russian tourists gave us one of their rooms so we could stay in the best of the Sighet hotels. Warner slept on the floor; the place smelled of kerosene. A Christian teenager who spoke some English became our guide. I gave him a digital camera and he learned photographic composition during the few days we were there. When I left, I gave him my Saturn baseball hat. His parents invited us for dinner and drinks. They had three b/w television sets piled up in their living room, like a Paik installation. At midnight, we watched the trial of the Coucesco son. A school teacher, an Ivri, invited us for lunch and drinks. He asked nonstop questions in perfect English that he learned from books, about life outside Romania and told us what it’s like to live in a state of constant fear.

I was influenced by Martin Buber and John Cage simultaneously during my last years of High School and started to think of myself as a Zen-Chasid. Buber helped me understand how the mystical Zionism of the Eastern European countries became part of the practical Zionism emerging in Palestine, Russia, and Germany. A Habonimnik growing up, my understanding of Zionism was that it was a progressive part of a universal labor movement that included equality and civil rights. This is what we got from Hertzl- “Nothing prevents us from being and remaining the exponents of a united humanity, when we have a country of our own. To fulfill this mission we do not have to remain literally planted among the nations who hate and despise us.” Habonim stresses Hagshama, the actualization of values. As a Socialist-Zionist, it was not cool to dwell on the Holy Land elements; for us, Israel would be a worker’s paradise. In response to Gandhi who believed the Jews should have remained in Europe and practiced nonviolent protest against the Nazis, Buber wrote- “We considered and still consider it our duty to understand and to honor the claim which is opposed to us and to endeavor to reconcile both claims. We could not and cannot renounce the Jewish claim; something even higher than the life of our people is bound up with this land, namely its work, its divine mission. But we have been and are still convinced that it must be possible to find some compromise between this claim and the other, for we love this land and we believe in its future; since such love and such faith are surely present on the other side as well, a union in the common service of the land must be within the range of possibility. Where there is faith and love, a solution may be found even to what appears to be a tragic opposition." Working and traveling in Israel and the West Bank during 1968-69, I better understood Buber’s prescience.

Attention sways to the here and now- this story and the next one. By now you can tell that I’m not a writer. You might be wondering if there is some order to this mess. Is he trying to make a collage with words? Is there some connection between Zionism and living on the edge, being a border crosser? Is this the mind of a peripatetic Hebrew, buzzing like an annoying mosquito in my ear? Will reading this essay result in an itch?

This really happened, but I won’t tell you why. 2009 – Hundreds of revelers in Ghana running toward me, circling me, grabbing for the camera. 1983 – AIR at Bronx Museum of Art – the punk asking me, what’s to keep him from taking my camera. I nod toward Malik el Amin, my friend and watcher, holding a heavy tripod. Oh. To get students into the workshop, I went alone door-to-door in apartment houses giving out brochures explaining the museum that had just moved into the abandoned synagogue on the Grand Concourse. People must have thought I was crazy, but I never felt personally in danger as I wandered around the burned out streets. The Bronx became a metaphor for things that are hard to understand, Reagan's military adventures in small countries, and search for identity. The lesson of hip-hop was familiar from my Fluxes oriented education- everything is fluid and mixable.

The Museum sent me to Morocco to create a video portrait of Mohammed Melehi for his retrospective exhibition. In Morocco I deeply felt my Semitic roots. Time in a relatively peaceful country where there is little separation between life and religion, turned me back to a search for essential tribal identity, i.e. one where spirituality is infused into every damn thing. Melehi took me to some mosques with painted ceilings hidden in road-less High Atlas Mt. villages. He told me that the Jews were crafts people and probably were among those who painted the delicate abstract forms that actually represented things in nature. He told me that the two communities shared the mosque for prayers. Each mosque had the following written statement: “only God is perfect.” I know life was hard for the Jews of Morocco who left for Israel as soon as they could; but I was astonished to hear of the levels of cooperation and co-existence among the cousins. At a cultural festival in Morocco where I was invited to show my videos, I met Palestinian poet, Iraqi lute player, and Tunisian printmaker. Paul Bowles, the daughter of the King, and many other dignitaries and art world luminaries appeared at the festival concerts and events. William Burroughs would have come, but he was in Kansas.

Memories are fictions based on mostly forgotten facts. Are the memories recorded on video and film more real than those recalled? There is a representational banality in the recording, subjective eye, often familial linearity, and mundane literalness in the representations. Documentaries (even verite) are reinvented narratives based on editing, composition, and soundtrack. It is always self-anthropology (Sol Worth) when the most narcissistic natives are given tools to record themselves. New media advocate Gene Youngblood said the first thing people do with video is bring it to the bedroom. Rosalind Krauss immediately identified video as a reverse mirror. While that urge or ploy (for sex and seduction) is always inherent in art, there is ultimately a maturation of intention and practice. Sexuality becomes just one part of personal voice.

I heard that some people were upset that I wrote something for the voice of a Caribbean man. It’s a letter I actually wrote to Heshi, my bio-bro living in Israel. Since promised land is a common theme in art, and my intention is metaphoric anyway, I asked musician Romeo Fontenelle to perform the letter in French and English. My bio-bro sometimes reminds me that I’m not black. I know I’m not. But we’re somewhat colored with traces of Romania, North Africa, and The Pale. In Israel people asked if I was Jordanian. On Eretz Broadway or Dizengoff, I blend. In Ghana, I’m pure white. Many people in Kumasi expressed fascination with Jewish beliefs and practices. Someone naively asked if Jews still used blood to make Matzah. The same person kept saying that she wished she was Jewish. Many Akan believe they are part of the Lost Tribes, the ones who left slavery in Egypt and went south instead of meandering toward Zion. I’m not surprised to see a range of skin tones and features in synagogues I attend. Like Roma, we assume the characteristics of the surroundings, even our looks, to be part of the dominant culture. Unlike the Roma, we are uncomfortable both in diaspora and at home. Exile is part of survival, but it’s never enough.

Curious that the alliance of mystical and political Zionism, once tightly bound, are now conflicted. How has Zionism, which is essentially an ideal, been divided into political extremes that make military decisions? How can someone who observes Jewish traditions and beliefs not be a Zionist? What is a secular Jew? Are there secular Moslems, Christians, Buddhists, Hindus? I’ve heard of lapsed Catholics. Can one be a lapsed Jew? What is a Jew when the word identifies believers and those who don’t care? If Jewishness is cultural, what is being celebrated? In a twist of Tao, isn’t it the one who doesn’t care, who just tries to live a positive life, closer to the divine? There are many Chasidic stories about communities being spiritually saved by a child or a simple person with a whistle, reciting the alphabet, dancing, or shedding a tear. Maybe secular Jews are so secure in their Jewishness that they don’t have to deal with questions of the Ultimate. In Islamic countries most people naturally pray as part of their daily lives. The people love their families and care for their neighbors. In Ghana we always said grace at the beginning of every meal, strangers holding hands, one breakfast, the sonorous voice of the president of the Bible society at the Guest House, as he thanks the One who provides. This is the way of the blessings, the most important meditations of the day, continuous consciousness toward the Bountiful One. Jeffrey Lew, Jew/Gypsy by birth, loved my grandmother. When he asked her what life was all about, after all of her tragedies, near escapes, and immigrant life, and she said, “nothing” Jeffrey labeled her a Buddhist.

As an imagist, I’m safe in abstraction. I create my own world, language, and animated behaviors. With words, there is danger of meanings. I can remember the rules we learned in art school, the ones on the BFA multiple-choice final exam:

When you are asked a question about art-
A. Answer the question with a question.
B. Manipulate a nearby object.
C. Walk away, pause and turn as if to say something, continue walking.

When you are asked about your art-
A. Lie in an honest way.
B. Be sincere but indirect.
C. Be direct but insincere.

When someone pushes for narrative-
A. Provide one that has nothing to do with the plot.
B. Provide details of something that once happened to you, or someone you know.
C. Deflect seriousness with humor.

When asked a technical question-
A. Pretend that you don’t understand the question.
B. Use technical terms from engineering and physics.
C. Make a spiritual analogy.

If someone in the art world asks if you are a Zionist-
A. Watch your back.
B. Explain hagshama (actualizing values).
C. Draw a penis.

When asked by an interviewer what my obsessions were, I answered, “being a good person.” This kind of response is death for the artist. Too much color is not cool. Passion, romance, and enthusiasm are ok if they are “ironic.” What happens when the radical desire to remain outside of the system keeps you out of the system? As the Talmud says, “The place honors not the man, ‘tis the man who gives honor to the place.” Is it true that when one enters Zion, Zion no longer exists? If Zion is a dream, when do we wake up? Does Zion mean the same for Rastafarians as it does to me, a descendent of Feivish Heller ha-Levi, and back? Chronology- R' Meshullam Feivish HELLER is a grandson of the Tosefot Yomtov, grandson of the great gaon and tzaddik R' Meir HaLevi of Radschen the son-in-law of the Yedei Moshe on Midrash Rabba, who is the son of the son of the Rashal, grandson of Rashi, Hillel the Elder, R' Yochanan HaSandlar back to King David. I am a distant cousin of Yeshua! Is this genealogy a documentary or an extended Biblical farce? Fact, fiction, or faction? The doctor asked, how did your grandfather die? He was killed by the Nazis. So stay away from Nazis and you should live a long life. I asked the draft board member, was I named Shalom to be a soldier? He changed my name to Roscoe and told me where to report.

My art work presents a false reality, one in which I can read Pier Marton’s mind while connected by satellite (Telepathos) and be Doug Davis’ twin/ghost in Four Places Two Figures One Ghost, the first networked telecast from a New York City museum. My Rabbi David Ingber said that Israel, usually translated as wrestler with God, can also be translated as embracer of the Holy One. I acknowledged the sensuality of body contact through classical wrestling during High School. I tried to macho myself by being part of the team that at once represented the purest form of fighting and hugging, the Jewish boy trying to be Greek. Before that my main sport was running away from bullies. At Antioch I studied boxing, maybe trying to be Black, but soon became a long distance runner, which is also the kind of artist I want to be.

At Kibbutz Hazorea as volunteer in 1968, I worked with cows and no one wanted to share a room. I would have walked barefoot though manure to be alone at night, except for the snakes. Ezra Milo, a psychologist and leading educator in the Shomer Hatzair community, was feeding me books (Maslow, Rogers, and Adler, among others) about existential psychology and serving as a therapist through almost daily conversations. Ezra, my spiritual father, had studied and worked with Buber. Confession- one calf followed me around as though she knew me from another life and I switched her tag when I heard she’d been sold. We had great trips through the newly liberated Golan Heights, Banyas (where I shot images that I later used for my first video), Jericho, Nablus, Hebron, and many other places where we walked freely. It’s too bad that when the Jordanians pulled out, the Israelis should have followed Buber and Brit Shalom’s advice to make friendly gestures to the Palestinians, trying to coexist. Ultimately force never works. I spent too much time at the end of the Valley, contemplating the border at Megiddo, the place prophesized for the Apocalypse.

I told Mrs. Zabar I still loved the “dry place,” a code for mystical Zionism. I’d given her my syllabus for Israeli-Palestinian cinema class I teach, but she cut me out of the loop of her Other Israel Festival when I told her that I was a you know what. Israel is a safe place to be Jewish, but not to be a human. Jerusalem is infused in me like DNA. But the longing is more powerful than the physical place. What does the Electric Jew do knowing ancestry, honoring parents, being true to idea of “Israel” a wrestler/embracer? How do the stories, the solutions, the moral laws get translated into some kind of Jewish art? Maybe all Jewish art includes wrestling and embracing. This covers Woody Allen to Jonathan Borofsky. I can literally mix myself into the work of a long lineage of Jewish artists; my teacher Allan Kaprow walked on water at the Sea of Galilee in Nam June Paik’s Allan and Allen’s Complaint. I have written about Paik’s fascination with Jewish themes- the centerpiece of his tour de force Guggenheim retrospective was Jacob’s Ladder. Consider the earliest vidiots- Beryl Korot, Ira Schneider, Bart Friedman, Jaime Davidovitch, and Shirley Clarke, to name a few. It is generally agreed that Wolf Vostell was among the first to use video in an installation. He lived in Berlin and dressed like a Chasid. For me, iShiviti, Psalm Flags, and Vidrash are templates, sources for inspiration. It is the substance of the artist’s being that leaks into the art, that is, the content is not what’s seen, but behind what is being shown.

In 1972, Allon Schoerner, an avant-garde curator, recruited me to do an audio installation for “Jerusalem Calling” a multimedia exhibition at the Jewish Museum in NYC, honoring Hadassah’s contributions to Israel. Since I was drafted, opposed to the war in Vietnam, and strongly considering giving up US citizenship and making Aliyah, this was an excellent opportunity to have a third visit to Israel while participating in an important art project. David Cort, an irrepressible/irresistible video artist and Bob Quinn, a respected light show artist and photographer, and I lived in Jerusalem for a month, under the protection of Mayor Kolleck’s office while collecting materials through exploring many sides of the city. It was a harsh winter. We had lots of equipment and tapes and sometimes conflicting ideas about our objectives. David, a secular Jew, comes from community activism and wanted to look for the problems in Jerusalem. Bob wasn’t Jewish and was happy taking pictures of everything. I was collecting sound for an audio installation that involved earphones, a dial to access the ten distinct channels, and piles of newspapers and magazines I brought back with me.

Our time in Jerusalem was too exciting. We got caught up with the Moroccan Black Panthers who led us on a tour of the slums. We later found out that our translator was exaggerating the responses of the people we met. We attended a demonstration and got caught in a police action in which they surrounded the gathering with buses and garbage trucks and choked us with exhaust. Several of the leaders were arrested. I interviewed an artist whose paintings had bullet holes from the cross fire of Israeli and Jordanian soldiers. The great Israeli filmmaker Ben Haim and his brother got us into Bethlehem Christmas Eve by driving around the city until they found a check-post manned by one of their cousins from India. From Manger Square we watched the sunset over a golden Jerusalem in the distance, always bigger than life, while listening to gentle Christmas chants and hymns in many languages. During our time in Jerusalem, I audiotaped interviews with artists, people on the street, wounded soldiers recuperating at Hadassah hospital, and activists. One night we witnessed a clandestine meeting in a café with young Palestinians and Israelis who were earnestly working on a peace treaty.

We showed our work to many television journalists who were still waiting for the latest ½” video technology to arrive at the Israeli TV news studios. I learned about how hard it was for these former soldiers, working several jobs with complex relationships amid political tension, and growing hostility from Palestinians, to have an apartment and families. I couldn’t imagine having access to the media and computer tools that I was obsessed with as a student and young artist, with the realities of television and art in Israel. I was selected for the project because of my previous experiences in Israel, familiarity with Hebrew, and enthusiasm. David began suspicious and critical. I returned to NYC with a dread about the draft and conflicted feelings about Israel. David remained for several weeks at a Yeshiva, before returning to edit and install work at the museum. He had found a Rebbe with a laugh as free and infectious as his.

Dreams don’t hurt, longings don’t wound, Zionism is heartbreaking. I’ve made several videos in Israel – nr. Banyas, frontier ahead; Excavations; and Jerusalem Road. I used 8 mm film that I’d shot in Banyas and Golan Heights in '68, stretching frames by playing with an electronic film scanner. Excavations (1979), was recorded at Kibbutz Gezer, over grown ruins of a Palestinian village, and in Beer Sheva. Jerusalem Road (1990) includes images from Masada, Mitspe Rimon, and Jerusalem. These are not documentary, fiction, fantasy, journalism, or experimental. They are plotless, but tell a story. They are nonverbal but not without words. They are cathartic, semi-abstract, and hybrid. As an Ivri, it is my job to cross boundaries. Like Joshua and the scouts, I have been recruited to look at the other side. In my metaphorical world, this means beyond structure, beyond methods, beyond meaning. Heshi, my bio-bro driving a tractor pulling irrigation pipes through a field; a tram ride up to Masada; snapped shots of the road from south to north, is this the final voyage, from the wilderness to the holy city? My eyes tear while davenning, relaxing at the seder, during studies when I read the utopian version of the earth’s future while looking around me at the growing number of catastrophes and blunders. In my vision, Jerusalem cries, too. Is it too naïve to hope? Too childish to imagine? Too Jewish to (not) suffer?

In 1989, I was asked by the USIS to support the efforts of the Beer Sheva Art Institute to add technological art to their curriculum and facilities. They were in the early stages of merging with Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and used university studio and mobile equipment. I consulted with the administration and faculty on ways that artists were using new technologies and suggested systems, design, and purchase options. I taught a workshop that inspired me probably more than the students. In the multi-generational group, many carried the tragic emotional wounds of lost family and friends; some the scars of Europe and the early days of Israel. I basically showed them the equipment, answered a few questions about process, then watched them make things. Some turned the camera on themselves as a mirror and confessional; others explored the landscape of the city. One day, we were suddenly surrounded by soldiers pointing rifles, demanding we erase anything we’d just recorded. One older man, a wonderful artist who lived on a nearby kibbutz, used the camera like a brush in the hands of an action painter. Through my time in Beer Sheva and touring with presentations of my videos, I began to fall in love with Israel again.

So let’s make a comedy, coming of age, a jump skip run story with a clear beginning and happy ending. Or let’s throw the camera into the bloody waters of the Gulf of Mexico, where gas/oil/chemicals kill fish and consume oxygen. Or we can combine them- how many politicians does it take to stop an oil leak? Maybe gallows humor is the only kind left. I can shout, I can play priest/prophet, I can sit for hours and meditate. I can transform images, making them more and less important than they once were. Someone asked me, does anyone even talk about Zionism anymore? Answer- only when there is an incident to condemn or a conspiracy being cooked. What does it have to do with my life? Everything and nothing. I was taught as a socialist/Zionist that religion, philosophy, political ideology, and authority, are all social constructs that give us a false sense of certainty. The church covering up sexual abuse; the synagogue rationalizing violence against others. I know about the long history of regional conflicts. Unfortunately, much of the world has been convinced that David is now a Philistine.

In my MFA program we were taught to answer questions about art, as if they could fit on a fortune in a Chinese cookie. Pick one from each column. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Art, life, time, energy, mood, light, colors, patterns, forms, textures, mass, negative space, and darkness; psychology, philosophy, religion, history, contemporary events, and familial relationships; identity, gender, sexuality, mysticism, and art collage the swirling pixels. Waves, duration, sequencing, buffering, frequency generation, and oscillations; moving, still, motioning, gesturing, and twisting; dancing, saturation, luminosity, and repetition recompose multiple channels of raging visuals. Electricity, physics, atmosphere, radiation, and percussion; fact, fiction, invention, discovery, and manipulation; questions, experiments, flexibility, and luck lead to good results.

My father taught me to live a crooked life, that is, to meander, find tangents, and accept disorder. My mother taught me to keep a low profile, under the surface, decisive in action, confident in retreat. They were socialists who remained relatively non-materialistic. Both had difficult childhoods- my mother escaped Sighet as a baby; my father’s father died just before his bar mitzvah which soured him on haShem, although he was a good hearted man who lived on balance, an honorable life. My mother was in the resistance in Antwerp and helped save many children and families. She maintains her faith in haShem and has had an active career as a Yiddish folk singer and storyteller. My father went into a coma while I was in Rio working with the Brazilian choreographer Regina Miranda, on a video backdrop for an evening length performance. I decided to remain and complete the project, believing that this is what he would want me to do since he was a great supporter and lover of modern dance. He survived and lived for a few more years. As I write, my mother (85) is preparing a trip to Jerusalem to visit her grandson and many friends and family in Israel. She is introducing her granddaughter Rosa (8), named after my grandmother, to Israel. I was there last in 2005 with Esther Murray and others working on a proposal for Ashdod’s 50th anniversary, meeting with curators, researching for my Israel-Palestine cinema class. I hope to return soon.

Zionism is a network created by Herzl and others to connect disparate, sometimes desperate people to a practical ideal adapted from spiritual longing. Zionism is an international television program with many channels and sub-channels- almost every tribe has its version of Zion, and every community in the tribe has its version as well. The inherent problem with Zionism or any other utopian dream is that a philosophy or vision cannot also be a place. Once something is inhabited, it loses its right to be called Zion. When Martin Luther King dreamed from the Mountain, was it physical or metaphoric? Zion, broadly a messianic faith and utopian point of view, loses its meaning, once it becomes physical. The problem with the settler movement, which I am not totally unsympathetic to, knowing how beautiful and serene the Palestinian landscape can be, is the need to still believe that Zion is somewhere out there, out the window of your house in a suburban oasis surrounded by hostile terrain and people. It’s not a realistic dream anymore. Maybe people can just live in Palestine and pay their taxes there if they want to maintain a Jewish presence in Hebron and near other Biblical holy sites. As Moses marched the Israelites to the gates of the promised land, he made peace whenever he could. The Biblical enemies are still in place. Can’t we give some gifts then go around them, the way Jacob did with Esau? Do we forever have to play out these bloody psychodramas that boil down to about being the favored son?

Zionism as a network loses its meaning when you are living inside Zion. It’s only when you are not “there” that it summons passionate dreams and heroic actions. If one searches for Zion on the Internet, it’s more likely to turn up gospel or reggae, than anything Jewish. Israeli’s live inside of its myth. This imagination extends from mystical Chasidism to political Zionism. The pious supplied the slogans; the politicians twisted them into words worth fighting and sacrificing for. As Israelis become more and more secular, as if they are living their Judaism by being b’eretz, but no longer moved by the Chasidic wails and pleas and hope, the magnetic power of the movement is lost. My mother might have been Shomer ha’Tzair, socialist and secular, but she grew up in an observant home. My grandmother was essentially a Budapest Buddhist, but she could daven with the best. Secularization in the diaspora is an immediate threat to the survival of the Zionist idea. Only those in the Diaspora can have a clear vision of Zion. Once a Jew lives in Israel, Zionism is no longer needed. I don’t daven or shuckle well, but I cry when I hear some of the prayers and chants.

Art naturally happens everywhere, artists can always find ways to be part of a community. Parties (it even has the word art and ties built into it!), receptions, social gatherings, fundraisers and other formal events are the main channels for sharing information. Art is international and has intentionally porous borders. The edges are encouraged, the center tolerated. Like the mystical Zion of the prayer service, it is generally peaceful, gently critical, and detached. At the Moussem (cultural festival) in Asilah, Morocco, I asked a Palestinian poet about the sources and themes of his writing and performance. My daughter played with the children of the mostly African and Middle Eastern artists. We might not agree about politics, religion, and gender roles, but we can discuss and share our work as observers. We can talk the language of music and dance in ways that fuse, rather than divide us. If I thought that Zionism was a “closed” idea, I would not have been able to have these dialogues where we meet as human beings. I could affirm my love of Israel and pain at the struggles with these colleagues without being shut out of the dialogue. Zionism was not intended as a dogma and we should not need bullet proof armor to defend ourselves, but through our actions convey a gently permeating river of kindness and empathy to others and the earth, remembering where we come from and to Whom we owe all.

About the Artist
Shalom Gorewitz has been working with video and computer technology since the late 1960's to create poetic, intellectual, and politically charged art videos relating to faith, relationships, and social issues. He works alone with prototype and low-end, accessible computer and video systems to collect, transform, and edit sounds and visuals. The results are lyrical contemplations of mundane realities in which the background becomes the landscape for imaginary scenarios. In addition to single channel videos, he has created and has collaborated on many installations, art documentaries, and telecommunication art events. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, NYC, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; Itau Cultural Center, Sao Paulo, Brazil; Kowasaki Museum, Tokyo, Japan; NY Public Library/Donnell Branch; Library of California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA; Getty Museum Video Art Archive, LA, CA. A 1989 Guggenheim Fellow, he has received support from the National Endowment from the Arts, Asian Cultural Foundation, Fulbright Foundation, and Arts America. Gorewitz is a Professor of Visual Arts at Ramapo College, a four-year comprehensive college in New Jersey.

On Being a Zionist

2010-06-10T23:04:00.000-07:00

Artists writing essays about their life and art for the book Zionist Artists in a Networked World may find inspiration from Gil Troy’s powerful statement published in The Jerusalem Post / JPost.com (7 May 2008). See the video Why I am a Zionist: A 21st Century Manifesto at his website: http://giltroy.com/zionismandisrael/wiaz2008.htm.
Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and author of the book Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.

Why I Am a Zionist
by Gil Troy

Today, too many friends and foes define Israel, and Zionism, by the Arab world's hostility. Doing so misses Israel's everyday miracles, the millions who live and learn, laugh and play, in the Middle East's only functional democracy. Doing so ignores the achievements of Zionism, a gutsy, visionary movement which rescued a shattered people by reuniting a scattered people. Doing so neglects the transformative potential of Zionism, which could inspire new generations of Israeli and Diaspora Jews to find personal redemption by redeeming their old-new communal homeland.

Tragically, Zionism is embattled. Arabs have demonized Zionism as the modern bogeyman, and many have clumped Zionists, along with Americans and most Westerners, as the Great Satans. In Israel, trendy post-Zionists denigrate the state which showers them with privilege, while in the Diaspora a few Jewish anti-Zionists loudly curry favor with the Jewish state's enemies. Jews should reaffirm their faith in Zionism; the world should appreciate its many accomplishments. Zionists must not allow their enemies to define and slander the movement.

No nationalism is pure, no movement is perfect, no state ideal. But today Zionism remains legitimate, inspiring, and relevant, to me and most Jews. Zionism offers an identity anchor in a world of dizzying choices - and a road map toward national renewal. A century ago, Zionism revived pride in the label "Jew"; today, Jews must revive pride in the label "Zionist."

I am a Zionist because I am a Jew - and without recognizing Judaism's national component, I cannot explain its unique character. Judaism is a world religion bound to one homeland, shaping a people whose holy days revolve around the Israeli agricultural calendar, ritualize theological concepts, and relive historic events. Only in Israel can a Jew fully live in Jewish space and by Jewish time.

I am a Zionist because I share the past, present, and future of my people, the Jewish people. Our nerve endings are uniquely intertwined. When one of us suffers, we share the pain; when many of us advance communal ideals together, we - and the world - benefit.

I am a Zionist because I know my history - and after being exiled from their homeland more than 1900 years ago, the defenseless, wandering Jews endured repeated persecutions from both Christians and Muslims - centuries before this anti-Semitism culminated in the Holocaust.

I am a Zionist because Jews never forgot their ties to their homeland, their love for Jerusalem. Even when they established autonomous self-governing structures in Babylonia, in Europe, in North Africa, these governments in exile yearned to return home.

I am a Zionist because those ideological ties nourished and were nurtured by the plucky minority of Jews who remained in the land of Israel, sustaining continued Jewish settlement throughout the exile.

I am a Zionist because in modern times the promise of Emancipation and Enlightenment was a double-edged sword, often only offering acceptance for Jews in Europe after they assimilated, yet never fully respecting them if they did assimilate.

I am a Zionist because in establishing the sovereign state of Israel in 1948, the Jews reconstituted in modern Western terms a relationship with a land they had been attached to for millennia, since Biblical times - just as Japan or India established modern states from ancient civilizations.

I am a Zionist because in building that state, the Jews returned to history and embraced normalcy, a condition which gave them power, with all its benefits, responsibilities, and dilemmas.

I am a Zionist because I celebrate Israel's existence. Like any thoughtful patriot, though I might criticize particular government policies I dislike - I do not delegitimize the state itself. I am a Zionist because I live in the real world of nation-states. I see that Zionism is no more or less "racist" than any other nationalism, be it American, Armenian, Canadian, or Czech. All express the eternal human need for some internal cohesion, some tribalism, some solidarity among some historic grouping of individuals, and not others.

I am a Zionist because we have learned from North American multiculturalism that pride in one's heritage as a Jew, an Italian, a Greek, can provide essential, time-tested anchors in our me-me-me, my-my-my, more-more-more, now-now-now world.

I am a Zionist because in Israel we have learned that a country without a vision is like a person without a soul; a big-tent Zionism can inculcate values, fight corruption, reaffirm national unity, and restore a sense of mission.

I am a Zionist because in our world of post-modern multi-dimensional identities, we don't have to be "either-ors", we can be "ands and buts" - a Zionist AND an American patriot; a secular Jew BUT also a Zionist. Just as some people living in Israel reject Zionism, meaning Jewish nationalism, Jews in the Diaspora can embrace it. To those who ask "How can you be a Zionist if you don't make aliya," I reply, "How will anyone make aliya without first being a Zionist?"

I am a Zionist because I am a democrat. The marriage of democracy and nationalism has produced great liberal democracies, including Israel, despite its democracy being tested under severe conditions.

I am a Zionist because I am an idealist. Just as a century ago, the notion of a viable, independent, sovereign Jewish state was an impossible dream - yet worth fighting for - so, too, today, the notion of a thriving, independent, sovereign Jewish state living in true peace with its neighbors appears to be an impossible dream - yet worth seeking.

I am a Zionist because I am a romantic. The story of the Jews rebuilding their homeland, reclaiming the desert, renewing themselves, was one of the 20th century's greatest epics, just as the narrative of the Jews maintaining their homeland, reconciling with the Arab world, renewing themselves, and serving as a light to others, a model nation state, could be one of this century's marvels. Yes, it sometimes sounds far-fetched. But, as Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, said in an idle boast that has become a cliche: "If you will it, it is no dream."

World Zionist Congress, Jerusalem, 2010/5770
Posted here is an update to Gil Troy's 2008 Zionist manefesto from his 16 June 2010 Jerusalem Post op-ed "The World Zionist Congress is not even relevant enough to be targeted. The congress which once shaped Jewish history is a ghost of its former self."

"Zionism always had more ambitious, more humanistic, aims to elevate the Jewish soul not just protect Jewish bodies, and by redeeming the Jewish people, redeem the world.... We need a World Zionist Congress worthy of its tradition. We need a modern Theodore Herzl to move us from hysteria to hope, from defending to dreaming, from reacting to crises to creating opportunities. We need a modern Ahad Ha'am to tap into the Jewish homeland's secular and religious spiritual powers, reminding us of its centrality in our lives and nationalism's constructue power. We need a modern Max Nordau, whose literary fame in the non-Jewish world elevated the Zioinst movement, and who proclaimed; 'We Zionists wear our Judaism as a badge of honor.'"

Why, Despite My Obviously-Hebrew-Sounding Name, I Resist Calling Myself a Zionist Artist

2010-06-01T08:03:00.000-07:00

by Menahem Wecker

When I introduce myself in social or professional contexts, my name generally draws either blank stares or requests that I repeat my name or spell it. Often my new acquaintance tries several times in vain to pronounce my name, and I usually reassure her or him that the final attempt was close enough.

On very rare occasions, the person smiles and reminds me that I share a given name with former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. I usually respond in jest that Mr. Begin adopted my name, hoping my tone masks my discomfort with the entire enterprise and my identification with Mr. Begin. I have nothing against the late politician, per se — I do not consider myself sufficiently versed in Israeli political history to have any sort of educated position on the man or his political career — but I am uncertain where I stand on the issue of Zionism, both past and contemporary.

However much it makes me feel like a freshman timidly introducing a class presentation with a lame disclaimer and preemptive apology for the disgraceful quality of the work I am about to present, I must admit that I am very conflicted as I sit to write this essay.

On the one hand, the title of one of the paintings which I most enjoyed creating, and which, years later, I continue to take pleasure in, is “Jerusalem.” It represents a vision of the Old City viewed from the German colony, where I loved spending hours on end at a restaurant and bar called Alexander’s listening to the Israeli and Palestinian musicians playing with the late Jazz legend Arnie Lawrence. For a small cover fee, I could spend hours mesmerized by the music, and by the idea of the collaboration. When my grandparents came to visit, I took them both to the bar, and my grandmother and I drew the musicians, particularly the pianist whose hands danced across the keyboard. When we got up to leave, my grandfather proudly presented the musician with both of our sketches.

I modeled my palette for the painting on the phrase, Yerushalayim shel zahav, Jerusalem of gold, and I juxtaposed deep purples with bright yellows and ochres. I hoped the colors and forms of the Tower of David would appear to reach out to the heavens, all the while resembling branches – perhaps of the Tree of Life, said to sustain all of those who had the faith to reach out and grasp a hold of it, or the sly trap of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, all the more mesmerizing because it was the only one-way ticket out of paradise.

In the painting, I tried to capture the disorientation of not knowing where the heavens ended and the earth began. In my studies at the yeshiva I attended about mid-way between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, I had been stumbling my way through a variety of Chassidic and Kabbalistic texts, many of which discussed Rabbah bar bar-Chana, a Jewish version of Odysseus, who took fantastical journeys into the bowels of the earth and into the heavens above, and who encountered monsters that could have come out of one of the paintings of the early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch.

One such story (Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Baba Bathra, folio 74a) that particularly impressed me found Rabbah bar bar-Chana traveling to the place where the heavens meet the earth, with an Arab merchant as his guide. When the two arrived, they found it to be full of windows (Hebrew, arubot ha-shamayim). Rabbah bar bar-Chana placed the basket he was carrying on one of the window sills while the two scouted out the area. When they returned, the basket was gone, so Rabbah bar bar-Chana wondered aloud, “Is it possible that there are burglars even in heaven?!”

It seems Rabbah bar bar-Chana was confused himself about the distinction between heavenly and earthly realms. He must have been thinking that Judaism really was unique if God allowed thieves into paradise. But the merchant assured his guest that robbers were not to blame. Instead, the heavens rotated regularly, and if Rabbah bar bar-Chana would only return at the same time the next day he would find his basket. And so he did.

Perhaps, rather than trying to present a bird’s or worm’s eye view of Jerusalem in my painting, I was pursuing a Rabbah bar bar-Chana’s eye view — where Leviathans were as likely to surface as frogs and snakes so large that they could swallow entire villages. My Jerusalem was not only made of gold but also of myths and dreams and visions.

When one of my art teachers told me I would love Israel, because the light was so different there, I did not quite understand how that was possible. A light is a light is a light, I was convinced. Sure I would need to buy new converters, because the outlets that I needed to plug my lights into would be different, but surely the light is a universal phenomenon that manifests itself in pretty much the same way without political, ethnic or religious distinction or discrimination.

I figured it out almost immediately on arrival at Ben Gurion Airport, though. Where my peers often confounded me with their declarations about their love for the “spirituality” of the land – try as I did, I must confess I never felt any such thing that I would be comfortable characterizing as “spiritual” – I certainly was conscious of a different aesthetic, a fresh color scheme. I could not find any outstanding levels of religious or moral purity in the Holy Land, but I did find the way the sunlight played off the surfaces of the Jerusalem stone in the Old City to be in a rare form of purity.

Luckily, I had brought two duffel bags with me for the year – one with clothes, and the other stuffed with a roll of canvas, a staple gun, staples, pliers, brushes, charcoal, paints, sketch pads and an easel. When I should have been attending classes, I was alternating hitchhiking to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv each day, either visiting museums and galleries or drawing and painting.

Today, I can hardly call myself a painter in anything but aspiration. My connection with art often seems parasitic. I am an art critic for several publications, mostly religious ones, but I rarely am able to find the time to create my own work.

I am also quite uncomfortable with the notion of calling myself a Zionist.

I grew up in Modern Orthodox and regular old Orthodox communities and often went to Hassidic synagogues — all communities where it was assumed that everyone was a Zionist. When I proudly updated the alumni community director of my high school with the information that I was one of the lead publicists for an event that brought former President Jimmy Carter to speak in Washington at The George Washington University, I was not surprised that the news did not make its way into the alumni newsletter.

I have come to resist the label, in part, because I am not wholly confident that I even properly grasp the meaning of the word ‘Zionist.’

I certainly wish peace for Israelis and Palestinians (and for the rest of the world too, while I am at it), but if I am brutally honest with myself, I feel I am an American primarily, and it is not unusual for days to pass without my once thinking about Israel.

“If I forget thee, O’ Jerusalem,” the psalmist famously declared, “let me forget my right hand.” I have surely forgotten Jerusalem, and if my right hand is symbolic of my painting arm, I have neglected that as well.

When I studied in Israel for those 10 or 11 months, I came to realize that one of the main things I had been taught in my day school education was a myth. In Israel, a Jew can always feel free and safe to openly be a Jew, the rabbis and teachers at my Modern Orthodox day school had taught me and my colleagues, and even if everyone else threw us out (why did it so often degenerate to an us versus them situation?), Israel would accept us with open arms. Somehow I was not convinced that we could expect a replication of the miracle where the Temple courtyard opened up to accommodate far more worshippers than the fire codes would have permitted. Could Israel really accommodate every Jew if push came to shove?

I am partly convinced that Israel could be a safe haven for some of the world’s Jewry if a minor disaster did transpire. But in Israel, I was made to feel not like a Jew, but like an American primarily, and a Jew coincidentally. The rabbis at the yeshiva, many of whom were Americans who had moved to Israel (made aliyah), often shared writings with the me and my peers of rabbis like Rabbi Abraham Isaac Ha-Cohen Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Israel, who stated that there was no such thing as a Jew outside of Israel.

Just minutes after the planes had crashed into the Twin Towers in New York, some of the Israeli children at the Sha’alavim boys’ school responded happily, “Now the Americans will know how we feel.” I am not blaming the young boys for their perspective – they did not know any better, and must have felt frustrated that the rest of the world did not and could not grasp the devastation that accompanies terrorism – but I cite the story to illustrate how different their perspective was. It was almost like we were two very different types of Jews, and I certainly did not feel like I was the imposter and they were the prototype I should be aspiring to join.

And yet, there is something that I have noticed in the drawings of the Ukrainian artist Ephraim Moses “E. M.” Lilien, co-founder of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, which has affected me in a way that no other work has. I believe it has affected me precisely for its religious and Zionist content.

I have a poor visual memory generally, and I can’t ever seem to remember my dreams – surely a prerequisite for a Zionist! But Lilien’s art nouveau Theodor Herzl-as-Moses (1908), infused (at least for me) with the eroticism and the absinthe scented drawings of Aubrey Beardsley, is something I have not been able to get out of my mind since my friend Amy Stempler, an expert in Jewish library science and assistant professor at the College of Staten Island, showed it to me at the I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection in Washington, D.C.

I am pretty sure Lilien was not only pining back to the bible, to the time of Moses and to the drawings Beardsley had composed just over a decade earlier of Salome dancing with the severed head of John the Baptist on a platter. There is something timeless yet derivative about placing modern heads on historical figures or characters from religious texts. I am thinking of all the medieval artists who appended their patrons’ features to the bodies of saints and prophets and of the late painter, caricaturist, social critic and political satirist David Levine, who told me he loved drawing caricatures of the Roman busts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There is something unique in Lilien’s Moses-as-Herzl, which I will take as a microcosm of the larger field of art and Zionism. I sense something similar in the tortured (yet dignified) faces of Anna Ticho’s subjects (her husband’s patients) and Hermann Struck’s portraits of rabbis. Just as James Joyce’s nostalgia for Dublin was so personal and deeply felt, and yet clearly in retrospect so universal, so too is the nostalgia, sorrow, love, memory and tradition of Jerusalem unique to Jews and Jewish artists.

In Lilien’s Assyrian, or Babylonian looking Herzl-Moses, one cannot help but be struck by the collision – or even simultaneous cohabitation – of the ancient past with modernity.

I am not sure I am an artist or a Zionist. I would certainly resist the title of Zionist artist. But I would be lying if I pretended that I am not sometimes affected by works that I would be comfortable identifying as Zionist art.

Take Rembrandt’s 1640 painting Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, which is in the collection of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

There is more than enough emotion in the face of the broken old man who has seen his horrifying prophecies realized. Jeremiah sits beneath a column (generally symbolic of fortitude, but here perhaps an ironic prop meant to signify anything but stability and safety) hunched over with his head resting on his left hand. Although well dressed, he is barefoot and sits in a depressingly dark and amorphous space, perhaps a cave. Jeremiah’s elbow rests on a book, inscribed ‘Bibel,’ no doubt a later addition to the work.

In the top left register of the painting, the destruction of Jerusalem can be seen, and one can just barely make out fires and the Jewish king Zedekiah, clutching his eyes which Nebuchadnezzar had ordered be put out. What appears to be a domed building above Zedekiah might represent Solomon’s Temple.

Jeremiah had of course prophesied the temple’s destruction, and Rembrandt captures the prophet as he is overcome with the pain of watching events unfold in real time that he had foreseen. It was too late for repentance; this was no situation like Jonah’s preemptive warnings to the denizens of Nineveh. It was more like Noah holing himself up in his ark.

The prophet’s posture reminds me a little of Daumier’s work, O’ Moon, Inspire Me, which depicts a woman gazing longingly up at the moon. She curses her husband, while Jeremiah mourns the temple, but there is something in the gaze of both figures that is not easy to forget.

Daumier’s work is humorous in a biting way, because it is so familiar. Rembrandt’s Jeremiah is more majestic and distant, but I find it very hard to avoid bringing everything I know about Jerusalem and the bible into the work.

In the course of covering the intersection of Judaism and art for several years, I have often written about Israeli art. Often that art was about victimhood – whether depicting Holocaust memory or suicide bombing – but there is another sort of art that is affirmative in its delineation of the Israeli experience.

One of the Israeli artists whose work has most interested me is Mel Alexenberg, whose book, The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness, I reviewed in 2007.

I thought Alexenberg’s memorial to the would-be victims of an Iranian attack on Israel was witty and gutsy, and his analysis of the paradigm shift from what he called Hellenistic to Hebraic consciousness was both scholarly and accessible.

I appreciated Alexenberg’s art and aesthetic analysis not because his subject matter – Jewish sacred texts, Israel, etc. – were so familiar to me and because they made my nostalgic. Alexenberg and his work are important because he is an artist first, and a creator of Zionist art second. I do not mean to raise the question of hyphenated identities (American Jew, or Jewish American?), and I am certain that Alexenberg would say his faith and his life views cannot be separated from his art.

But it is very important to note that Alexenberg (and many of his colleagues who create Jewish and Israeli art) is not an outsider artist. He has classical training and extensive experience. His art is often about Zionism – and it could be argued by some to even be Zionist – but it is art first, and about Zionism second. Anything else would approach kitsch.

In researching my review, I asked Alexenberg about the would-be memorial, and wondered if it was inviting the evil eye.

“What I’m doing is using my abilities as a new media artist to issue a wakeup call to an indifferent world and to Jews with their heads in the sand and warn of a horrific danger facing Israel and all the free world,” he told me. “To hell with an evil eye. It is evil to sit back and do nothing.”

Although most trends in modern and contemporary art have been toward a deconstructionist (or post-structuralist, or frankly, post-anything-ist) where absolutes like ‘evil’ do not exist (or simultaneously exist and do not exist), Alexenberg confidently states that his art has amulet-like properties. It reminds me of a conversation I had with painter Archie Rand, presidential professor of art at Brooklyn College, where he stated that his works are Jewish precisely because he states that they are Jewish.

Tom Barron, a Boston-based painter, has often told me that a painting is Jewish if its mother is Jewish. Rand, who recently exhibited a 613 canvas series (one per commandment according to the Maimonidean tally), is a Jewish parent so he insists his work is too.

Religious painters, I have found, often create their art in a void for a non-existent public. Religious institutions and clergy often adopt cautious approaches to engaging art, and often censor it. Secular museums and galleries, meanwhile, often consider sacred art to be the worst kind of kitsch. Rand’s The 613 and many other works with significant religious content are caught in the no-man’s land between two hostile territories. He and his colleagues, he once told me, create work that holds up a flag to test enemy firepower.

If Jewish art is the red-headed stepchild of the art world, Israeli or Zionist art is not even invited to the family outings. If I had a shekel for every Israeli artist who diluted the impact of her or his work by stressing how “internationalist” the style was, I would be purchasing real estate in Tel Aviv. Often, it takes many more Google searches than it should to find the nationality and place of birth of artists with obviously Hebrew names. They simply do not state it on their websites, either (I assume) because they are afraid of the conclusions others will draw, or because they themselves are unsure about or uncomfortable with their identities.

The only parallel experience I have had has been with artists affiliated (or formerly affiliated) with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Some share images of Jesus on their websites, but they bury the word ‘Mormon,’ if it even appears on their websites to begin with.

Even if I do not identify as a Zionist artist, I applaud artists who firmly share their political and religious convictions in their work. One of the things I enjoy most about studying sacred art is the element of self-portraiture. In every biblical scene, the artist infuses the work with her or his personal interpretations of the scene (is Moses dressed in so-called “biblical” garb, or contemporary attire? How was the sacrifice of Isaac choreographed?).

The same can be said of Zionist art. It stands to reason that a country whose cab drivers so readily discuss politics and history (reminding me of the taxi drivers in Washington, D.C., where I live) should also produce artists whose works wear their politics and theology on their sleeves. Rav Kook noted this in his writings, in addition to warning the students of the Jerusalem-based Bezalel Academy of Fine Arts about some of the dangers of art-making. Alexenberg picks up, in some ways, where Rav Kook left off, by not only using art cautiously, but even using his work to thwart evil.

Perhaps the most promising (and brilliant) aspect of Alexenberg’s analysis of the Hebraic consciousness, and of many of his installations and performances, is its forward thinking. Long ago, I lost count of the astonishing and ever-increasing number of blogs Alexenberg has created and authored, and he has embraced Facebook and Twitter like someone a quarter of his age. He sees these new and social media platforms as not only means to publicize his art projects, but also as media that are in their own right Zionist and Jewish networks.

It is too early to tell if Alexenberg is right about the impact of new and social media. It will be a long time before we know if the projects stand the test of time. But it is very exciting to see how they, and the Zionist and Jewish artists who are embracing them, are changing the way we think about art and art history.

Despite my name — which happens to be Alexenberg’s first name too, it is worth noting — I am not comfortable identifying myself as part of the phenomena I describe above. Nor do I want to stake out a position that is in opposition to the communities of Zionist artists. As an interested bystander and observer, I am fascinated and humbled by what I have observed over the past few years. And thanks to artists like Alexenberg and Rand, and many others like them, I eagerly anticipate what the future will bring.

Towards a Zionist Art Movement

2010-06-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

by Alan Kaufman

Preface
In 2007, while under contract to the prestigious Himmelberger Gallery of San Francisco, I underwent an experience that transformed me from a painter of Zionist themes to a self-declared Zionist painter.

The gallery, which had offered to produce a catalogue of my works withdrew the offer well into the production phase when they saw that I intended to title the catalogue: Visionary Expressionism: A Zionist Art. They also rejected out of hand the Jewish authors who had contributed essays on my paintings, including the Biblical scholar David Rosenberg, the New York Sun columnist David Twersky, Israeli author Etgar Keret, the author and legal scholar Thane Rosenbaum and Polly Zavadivker, a doctoral student in Jewish Studies who had written what I felt was a brilliant and comprehensive overview of my paintings.

The gallery's decision made headlines and articles appeared on the front page of the New York Sun as well as in the pages of The Forward, Jewish Week, The Jewish Bulletin of Northern California and PresenTense. Reactions spread throughout the internet in countless blogs and websites. The Himmelberger controversy served to underscore a development that has continued to grow not only in the cultural sphere at large but in academia and even in the Jewish community as well: the proactive, as well as unspoken, consignment of Zionism to the status of a pariah ideology, a political embarrassment, a social and cultural byword for extremism and injustice.

In only six decades since the revelation of the death camps and subsequent establishment of the State of Israel, Zionism, which maintains that the Jewish People must at all costs keep and defend a sovereign Jewish state in the land of Israel, has become to large portions of the world, and even in certain quarters within Israel, an Outlaw point of view.

Astonished, I granted interviews and made public appearances throughout Northern California in various Jewish Community venues to offer my perspectives on the root causes of anti-Zionism in the cultural sphere and in which I called for the formation of a Zionist Arts Movement. To date, few have answered the call. The efforts to delegitimize Zionism have intensified and increased.

In this increasingly one-sided struggle, only a brave few have stepped forward to champion the exploration of Zionism as a creative source. Among these, Mel Alexenberg and Ariel Beery figure most prominently for their constancy of effort and fidelity to the cause. With the exception of Alexenberg, whom I first had the pleasure to encounter many years ago, none but I have deemed themselves a "Zionist Artist". Even the admirers of my paintings have urged me to soften my approach. But I refuse. I remain a Zionist artist to the last.

The following are the sum of my thoughts on the origins of anti-Zionism in the cultural world, with particular emphasis on the visual arts, as well as my understanding of the importance of Zionism and finally how it figures into my painting. They may prove of especial interest for having been formulated in the heat of the events that I have described, involving the gallery and the subsequent media and public reaction. They are, as such, dispatched from the front lines of the effort to affirm a Zionist art.

I
The young Israeli art historian Avraham Levitt brilliantly shows in his essay ‘Israeli Art On Its Way To Somewhere Else’ (Azure, Winter 5758 / 1998, no. 3), that at some point in the past, around the 1920’s, the still fledgling Zionist arts movement that had been earlier founded by the artist Boris Shatz with the explicit blessing of Theordore Herzl, himself a playwright, and which was housed in Jerusalem at the Bezalel Arts Academy, diverged from its intended mission of inventing, investigating and expressing the brand new Zionist project. Instead, Levitt maintains, Israeli art surrendered to formal and ideological imperatives which not only ignored the central fact of the rebirth of Jewish national existence but at some point proceeded to tear it asunder, and with it, the very premise of Israel, which is Zionism.

Let me here briefly sketch out the devolution of Israeli art as Levitt outlines it for it is my intention in launching a Zionist Arts Movement to counter this phenomenon which Levitt identifies. After a mere two decades of Jewish nationalist art, most especially exemplified by the works of Moshe Lilien and Zev Raban, the idealism of Zionist rebirth depicted in their paintings and drawings succumbed in other artists, and at first in a potentially positive way, to an infatuation with local Orientalism and soon, in the canvasses of Israeli painters like Nachum Gutman and Israel Paldi, Arabs began to replace Jews as models for biblical themes and subsequently Jewish content was then rejected altogether in favor of local non-Jewish subjects.

By the 1930’s, the large numbers of prominent German Jewish artists and intellectuals in flight from Nazism brought with them to pre-State Israel a deep ambivalence towards Zionism, even a kind of disdain. They favored instead the cosmopolitanism and universalism that were the hallmarks of the modernist explosion in Weimar before Hitler, for in the expression and advocacy of modernism many of these Jews had played distinguished roles.

How ironic that luminaries of such urbane outlook should have found themselves rescued from the gas chambers by both Zionism, which they regarded as a parochial ideology, and by a land like Israel, then occupied by the British, and which they deplored as a backwater. The irony was lost upon them. Suffice it to say that they soon occupied positions of prominence in Israeli visual culture and made their negative feelings known in both pedagogy and art. Bezalel which had been closed now reopened in 1935 under the directorship of Joseph Budko, a German Jew and the main language of discourse at the school was not Hebrew but German. This carried forward into the 1940s and in the paintings of Meron Sima, Mordecai Ardon and Leopold Krakauer, one finds reflected a sense of bleakness and to roughly paraphrase Levitt, landscapes devoid of Jewish meaning.

Hitler, by the way, was no stranger to modernism. Though he infamously outlawed the great modernist masters in his 1937 exhibit of so-called degenerate art and was himself a failed artist, some think that he may very well have gotten his ideas for concentration camps from the visual images of mass enslaved workers with bowed shaved heads marching in lockstep to work in Fritz Lang’s great 1927 cinematic masterpiece Metropolis. And in general modernism was in the air and was no stranger to facism and at times even served as its footservant.

During World War Two, for instance, Ezra Pound, the much admired American modernist poet, theoretician and advocate of the new painting broadcast anti-Semitic speeches for Mussolini. The poet whom he made it his mission to promote, T.S. Eliot, also an American, is regarded by many as the consummate modernist poet. In his poems Eliot evokes images of Jews so vile that they could have been composed by Josef Goebels, who, by the way, was himself a failed novelist. Eliot is buried in the Poets Corner at Westminster Abbey and his anti-Semitic poems are today widely celebrated and given a principle berth in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, a staple of college classroom study. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian poet whose Futurist manifesto launched the Futurist movement, aligned himself and his colleagues with the Fascists. The Futurist love of speed, technology and violence was modernist and became central motifs of Moussolini’s regime, which Hitler, in turn, greatly admired and sought to emulate. In the Futurist architecture of Antonio Saint Elia one sees prefigured the National Socialist esthetic of Albert Speer.

Look: I could go on and on about the intersection of Modernism with Fascism. My point is to wonder how those German Jews who fled to pre-State Israel could not have seen the deadly contradictions implicit within the esthetic and philosophical paradigm which they so fervently opposed against Zionism. Did not Walter Benjamin himself, the supreme German Jewish champion of modernism, commit suicide at the border between France and Spain, abandoned and alone in a sordid little room, because he could not escape from the Nazis and no one extended any help?

Could these new arrivals to Israel really not see the difference between a homicidal ideology like National Socialism, which had made their own murder its principle goal, and a redemptive program like Zionism which had rescued them from the talons of Hitler? Apparently not, for to them, as to many Jews and Israelis engaged in culture even today, all forms of nationalism are evil. And yet, should we be surprised? For is not a sense of estrangement from oneself and disconnection from all beliefs somehow implicit within Modernism and post-Modernism, which are not only geographically but also spiritually nomadic?

And do we not in fact see in this very day, right here in our own back yard, in the novels, art, films and plays of our own homegrown rootless cosmopolitan American Jewish writers and artists and filmmakers, our greatest critics of Israel and Zionism. Think of Michael Chabon, Art Spiegelman, Tony Kushner, Tony Judt, just to name a few, whose disdain for Jewish nationalism is a matter of public record.

They oppose against Zionism the alienated modernist and post-modernist urbanity of Manhattan and the Hollywood shtetl and publicly excoriate and vilify the besieged Jewish homeland and all that she represents. Do we not see in their anti-Zionism the very same contemptuous agenda of those displaced German Jewish modernists who not only came to British Mandate-controlled Israel but also to NY, Hollywood and San Francisco too, and today, in the cultural establishments of both Israel and the United States, who but they, the anti-Zionists, hold the reins of Jewish cultural public opinion most firmly in their hands?

But just to carry forward for another moment young Avraham Levitt’s brilliant timeline of the devolution into anti-Zionism of Israeli art. By the 1950s Israeli art had developed a preoccupation with the condition of the Arab rather than of the Jew and with this came an agonized regret over the very idea of Jewish power, even when exercised in self-defense. The greatest examples of this were the German Jewish painter Jakob Steinhardt whose biblically themed works were paeans to imagined Jewish nationalist anguish over the so-called horrors committed by Israel in the name of Zionism.

But it was Yitzhak Danziger and his Canaanite movement that sealed the fate of Israeli art for decades to come and sadly this was not at all their intended purpose. In their romance with the land the artists of the Canaanite movement bypassed ancient Israel for earlier civilizations and though the movement emphasized the geographical, geophysical and climactic characteristics of the Israeli landscape in ways intended as a kind of materialist examination of the actual terrain of Israel, Danziger, Rudi Lehman and others succeeded only in negating Jewish nationhood as a legitimate subject for art. They celebrated the land but ignored and later rejected outright the very ideology that justified Jewish habitation: Zionism.

Consequently, in short order, a new and explicitly anti-Zionist movement of Tel Aviv artists known as the Horizon Group, lead by the Paris-trained painter Yitzhak Stematsky, had sprung up, and as the Canaanite group was preoccupied with the landscape so the Horizon Group was obsessed with the effects of Israeli light. Thus, in the nineteen forties and fifties, landscape and light, nature itself, a historical materialism rather then Jewish spiritual and political nationhood, became the motifs of Israeli canvasses. Both groups stridently renounced nationalism, and thus Zionism, altogether. So that by the 1960’s such artists as Yigal Tumarkin, a student of Rudi Lehmann’s, could comfortably equate in metaphoric sculptural terms the modern Jewish State with the Crusader conquests.

Paralleling this was the rise in Israeli literature of a group of young authors lead by A. B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz, who became known as “The Generation of the State". In one of Yehoshua’s earliest and best known stories, “Facing the Forests," the author issues a direct challenge to the legitimacy of Israel and no doubt in emulation of Tumarkin likens it, metaphorically, to the Crusader invasion.

Thus art leads the way for literature to join the anti-Zionist crusade. And as with the earlier German Jewish painters and their successors in the visual arts, anti-nationalist guilt and shame and a preoccupation with the condition of Arabs rather than with that of Jews, become central concerns of Israeli literature. All this is ushered in under the banner of modernism. And ever since, from Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, Hanoch Levin and now David Grossman, and so many others, the undermining of Zionism as a central premise of Israeli society and culture has gone on, unabated and even at times supported by successive Israeli governments and by the Diaspora communities, who don’t want to be seen as censorious Philistines and frankly don’t know what in the world to do about it.

Jewish and Israeli cultural anti-Zionism troubles me even more then that which emanates from non-Jewish quarters. In its exasperated naiveté it reminds me of a press conference I once participated in with the late Allen Ginsberg during the Berlin Jewish Cultural Festival, when he claimed that if only Shirley Temple and Cary Cooper had spoken up, Hitler could have been dissuaded from enacting The Final Solution. In other words, that Betty Grable could easily have stood between one million Jewish children and the ovens at Treblinka and Birkenau. Even the German reporters shook their heads in disbelief at such shocking childishness. It struck us all then as little less then painful, just as I find painful the anti-Zionism of my distinguished colleagues.

Let me tell you: it is no easy thing to be a writer and an artist and to stand before you and to openly proclaim my Zionism. To do so is to stand alone and unrewarded. For Zionism, the most important Jewish development in the modern era has not only fallen into disrepute, even and perhaps especially among us Jews, but has been declared bankrupt, over, dead by large portions of our intelligencia, even as it is violently denounced by our foes. Our historians and thinkers, writers and artists, declare that Zionism is defunct, old hat, corrupt, irrelevant. We are, they say, not even in a post-Zionist period anymore. According to them, even that moment has passed. Where are we then? We are now in a post-identity period, they answer. They would have us become such Jews as Moses Hess, the great pioneering Zionist philosopher despaired of us becoming. In his book European Triarchy, published in 1840, he wrote: “They have renounced their idea of the future.” They wander “like a ghost across the living world…” and can “neither die nor rise again”, for “the rejuvenating principle of Judaism, the Messianic belief, has ceased to exist.”

I have a terrible admission to make. Whenever I read in the media a pronouncement that Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran or al-Qaida will strike at Zionists around the globe, wherever they are, I think to myself: “Really? Where will you find them? I’d like to know! Are there any here in San Francisco? Or in Israel?” These days, publicly identifying a Zionist is tougher than locating a cheap flat in New York.

However, I have a powerful feeling, in fact an urgent sense of certainty, that all this is about to change.

II
Zionism is a vision for the Jewish weary of an Otherness so enthralling that today's young Jewish writers and artists must surely take it up, as it is meant to be taken up, as once they took up the Emancipation, the Enlightenment, Chasidism, or Modernism or Postmodernism, and as once upon a time in the shtetls of Eastern Europe, rubbing the dust of oppression from their eyes, they took it up and set forth to build a new Eden, a new World in the Land of Israel.

Zionism as a vehicle for artistic expression has never really been fully explored. Until now, it has been, by and large, a political force. That is how it is known in the world today, to Jews and non-Jews.

For writers and artists to embrace Zionism will take enormous courage. For in today's cultural sphere – not only in the United States and Europe but even, to some extent, within Israel herself – anti-Zionism, a vociferous and unremitting critique of Israel and her very right to exist, have become globally de rigueur – a fashionable cultural and political stance that one must adopt and adhere to if one expects to gain credibility and acceptance towards the advancement of ones artistic career, whether one is Jewish or non-Jewish, Israeli or French, British or German.

I myself have experienced this as a writer and artist both, a pressure to conform my opinion and expression to a subtle or overt critique of Israel. The pressure is insistently asserted from every corner of the cultural world, that an Israeli or Jewish-diasporic creative, writing about Israel or things Jewish must, for instance, wear at all times the so-called Israel-Palestinian conflict like a hair shirt. The implied subtext is that Israeli and Jewish Diasporic authors or artists are de facto aparthidists and therefore must demonstrate (to more "enlightened people") that in fact we are capable of decency and conscience. We may prove this by an inescapable referencing of the Palestinians, and with drab but eloquent little chest beatings about our
shame and anger over their situation.

In this way, propaganda in the guise of a specious moralism has infiltrated, contaminated and crippled the Israeli and Jewish imagination. Sources from without are not solely responsible for this state of affairs, as I have shown. Little wonder that these days novels by Israelis enjoy great popularity in France, currently one of the premier anti-Semitic countries in Europe. A significant proviso of any French publisher contemplating the translation and publication of an Israeli author into French is that the book avoid positive or patriotic reference to the Israel Defense Forces. This, sadly, has not proven to be an obstacle.

There are of course notable exceptions, like Agnon and Bialik but they are dead. And neither serve as models for today's young writers and artists, who would not think to consult such influences to guide their own efforts. Most writers and artists today regard Israel as a negative to be deplored or, when possible, avoided. Ask a younger Israeli writer like Savyon Liberecht about her influences and she is more likely to cite F. Scott Fitzgerald than Moshe Shamir. But this alone is insufficient cause to undertake the launching of a Zionist Arts Movement, which I here propose to do. After all, Israel is an established fact, the strongest nation in the Middle East. A song of Anti-Zionist victimization will not hold interest, mine or anyone else's, for very long, rooted though it be in harsh and actual prejudices. Whether or not the current cultural orbit accepts Israel does not matter, ultimately, to her survival. No, what is of greater interest is that, historically-speaking, a true Zionist Arts Movement never really emerged. In some sense, Israeli literature and art, like Jewish American literature and art have yet to produce a truly singular and visionary range of Zionist works.

It is a remarkable state of affairs, considering that the Birth of the State of Israel is without question the most important development in two thousand years of Jewish history. Yet all that we have to show for it in America is a middle-brow paperback, Leon Uris's Exodus. And from out of Israel there has emerged over the years a procession of vaguely interesting works but with the exception of Amichai and Agnon, nothing much that offers very compelling proof of Israeli literary and artistic genius.

I liken this puzzling situation to the condition of American literature in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when its novels and poems were produced under the oppressive influence of Europe. From this issued a trickle of rather uninteresting literary productions (the best among them, James Fennimore Cooper's Last of The Mohicans, frankly makes for a far better film than it did a book).

It was only by a relative casting off of European influence, most notably in the works of Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Emerson, Dickenson, Thoreau and others that a truly American literature emerged, in the form of the Transcendentalist movement. I maintain that Zionism is our version of this, a Jewish transcendentalism, woven from the stuff and fiber of Israel and Jewish history, and that this rich vein has gone until now largely unmined.

At this time there is an emergent Zionist Arts Movement that I can identify but it has, as yet, no real awareness of itself as such. Rather, it is comprised of disparate individuals who, for the most part, may not yet see themselves as belonging to a larger milieu or to any particular movement.

But in time, they may. For the Zionist Arts Movement is a seed that does not yet know of the immense forest which it contains: an artistic flourishing couched in a rejection of cultural production predicated upon modern rootlessness; a movement that would create works of art with Zionism as their crucible.

This is a movement that some day will ask: what does a Zionist literature look like, Zionist painting, Zionist dance, Zionist theater? The Zionist Arts Movement is the vision of a new cultural ecology predicated upon the existential centrality to Jewish individual and national existence of Eretz Yisrael.

There are proponents of various features of this vision who are arriving by their own paths to the very same place to which I have come in my work as an author and a painter. Among these are Assaf Inbari, David Rosenberg, Avraham Levitt, Ariel Beery, and the young fledgling scholar Polly Zavadivker. These individuals are groping forward, like sleepwalkers, to one of the most pivotal moments in Jewish History, one that I believe may very well decide our direction as a people, in both Israel and the Diaspora, for the next century and beyond.

I believe that a clouded relationship to Israel and to Zionism among some of our most prominent cultural figures in both Israel and the Diaspora is responsible for our failure, to date, to attain the cultural heights of which we are capable as a people. For though Zionism is our Jewish modernism, our Jewish psychoanalysis, our Jewish Existentialism, we have yet to fully explore its deepest implications in a cultural sense, as I propose that a Zionist Arts Movement will do.

In so doing, we will yield cultural masterpieces that will astonish and inspire our people. Love of nation informed the great works of Sophocles, Homer, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Blake, Goya, Turner, Tolstoy, Faulkner and Hugo. Most of all it inspired the greatest writers of all time: the authors of the Bible.

Zionism, taken at its fullest - a prodigious sea change in the understanding of a Jew's relation to the nations, the very idea of society, even Judaism itself, is a radical departure from what we have commonly known, a portal to the future that opens from a doorway in the past and those artists who pass through it will, I believe, create works of universal greatness that will be cherished by the entire world.

But in order to undertake such a mission, Jewish artists and writers must rest secure in the moral righteousness of Zionism.

What then is Zionism?

III
Zionism is the Civil Rights Movement of the Jewish People. It is the answered prayer to two thousand years of ceaseless persecution at the hands of unpredictable host nations and of religions that at times abandoned their own highest moral precepts in the pursuit of dubious political objectives at the expense of Jewish life and limb. For an individual or institution to claim to respect and tolerate Jews and yet deny a Jew, any Jew, the right to proclaim Zionism as a personal spiritual, cultural and political raison d'etre, is like telling a Black person that you regard him as your equal and friend but please, do not mention the March on Birmingham; please, don’t talk about Martin Luther King; please, don’t bring up Rosa Parks to me.

Zionism is the March on Birmingham, the Martin Luther King, the Rosa Parks of our people, the Jewish People. It is our march on the death camp at Auschwitz; it is our fight for an equal place on the bus of human history.

And the State of Israel is our Promised Land of freedom and equality on earth. How the term Zionism, and all that it so powerfully represents to our people after the Holocaust; how this term Zionism, this vision of redemption, this philosophy of empowerment, this bright candle held up to the night and which lead back home the displaced and tortured remnants, the dreamers and idealists, the Jews who came from all corners of the earth with a vision of self-determination and cultural, spiritual and political renewal; how this miracle of an idea was brought to fruition through the sacrifice and struggle of the brave Israeli people, is one of the great miracles of human history. And how this same Zionism, distorted and vilified by one of the most sordid
disinformation campaigns in history, became the bete noire of the present day, a refugee of a word, a pariah of an idea, is one of the most sordid instances in the long, cruel campaign to marginalize and, ultimately, to destroy the Jewish People.

Let us, then, be perfectly frank about one thing. To vilify, marginalize, suppress or outlaw Zionism politically, socially or culturally, for any reason whatever, is to wish no less then murderous extinction upon every Jewish man, woman and child in the world today. It is to refute our history entire, to deny us the memory of our long march out of bondage into equality and dignity. It is to assert ghettoization and ostracization, exile and massacre as theonly fate befitting a Jew.

If ignorance of the law does not exempt one from the law, then ignorance of the unthinkable consequences to Jews of a world without Israel, and of ones own action to libel, marginalize or censor Zionism in any way, regardless of how subtle or seemingly innocuous, does not exempt anyone, then, from the charge of participation in fostering genocide against the Jewish People. For no less than genocide awaits our people should the present campaign against Zionism succeed.

I hereby affirm our right -- moral, spiritual, cultural and political -- to proclaim our Zionism in any manner that we choose, without hinderence or proscription, and further, I condemn, forcefully and completely the stance of anti-Zionism for what so blatently it is: a human rights violation and euphemistic mask behind which lurks the age-old nightmare of anti-Semitism.

IV
Israel is to me as Ireland was to James Joyce or Spain to Picasso. Both men created their best work in cosmopolitan centers beyond the borders of the countries they most loved, in order to foster the artistic freedom and independent perspective that would enable them to look back at Ireland and Spain with fresh new eyes and to present those nations and peoples, their symbols and even language, in completely new ways, through experimental visual art and literature. James Joyce wrote in 'Portrait of the Artist': “I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, and as wholly as I can, using . . . silence, exile, and cunning.”

As a dual national, Israeli and American, born in New York City but also a citizen of Israel and a proud veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, I am in exile from two places at once, Israel and America, for as George Orwell said, in respect to someone who has called two countries home: when walking down the street of one, often you are thinking of the other.

San Francisco, where I reside, is not really like the rest of the United States -- an undefinable center of radical artistic and social innovation. From here successive waves of radical cultural change have emerged, from the Beats to Abstract Expressionism, the 60's Be-Ins and San Francisco Sound, to Low-Brow Art, The Beautiful Losers movement and Shepard Faery. In a certain regard, San Francisco is my Paris.

It is also an epicenter of ant-Zionism, a community proactively opposed to Zionism, which I do not even consider an ideology so much as the expression of an obvious historical truth: that a Jewish People without a homeland and an army exclusively our own are doomed to perish. As such, San Francisco is a kind of constant and palpable countervailing force opposed to that which I most believe, the whetting stone upon which I sharpen my pen and hone my Zionist brush.

If I am in self-imposed artistic exile from the two places that most serve as the inspiration for my work, Israel and America, also I am both a painter and an author. In addition to appearing in galleries in one man and group shows, I have published well-received books with major American and British publishers about Israel and The Holocaust. My paintings are not a departure from my writings but rather an extension of them into another medium, for my paintings begin at the edge of where my literature stops.

My paintings express what I cannot find language for. They exist in the realm of pure vision, beyond words. They are what I find lies hidden at my essence as a Jew: the colors of the desert and of clay, of fire and of blood.

Thus, my paintings burn with the colors of heat: red, pink, magenta, crimson, and sand-inspired gradations of brown, burnt sienna, beige. They are the colors of Sinai in which Moses wandered and saw visions, of sunset over Masada (which I first visited during time spent on kibbutz); of the red desert heat of the Negev where I served as an IDF soldier and of Sderot, which experiences daily rocket attacks and whose suffering I think of as I walk the streets of San Francisco. They are the colors of Ashdod where my Israeli daughter Isadora was raised and of Jerusalem where I lived for many years, the color that the city turns at dusk as the sun sets. They are the color of the blood spilled by my soldier brothers fallen in defense of the Jewish State, who served with me in the IDF and gave their lives for their people. They are the color of the fires of the Holocaust during which my mother hid and fled from the Nazis for five terrible years, in France and later in Italy. They are the red fiery hues of Mosaic vision and imagination, for it is well known that red is associated with creativity but in its darker hues, it is the primary color, as I see it, of History.

My paintings tend to fall into several categories.

A) Prophetic landscapes of the unconscious realms of Israeli and Jewish experience, such as the birth of the Jewish State, the Holocaust, the dreams, hopes and fears that lie beneath our historical experience.

B) Portraiture of imaginary Israelis conjured out of my unconscious and who, simultaneously, inhabit two realms: both modern and ancient Israel.

C)Depictions of internal states, such as the moment between waking and sleeping. There are also strong intimations of the supernatural, of ghosts that inhabit my canvasses, struggling for release. Who are these ghosts? The anonymous millions of Jews in mass graves? The ghosts of past Jews slaughtered in foreign lands? Ghosts of IDF soldiers lost in battle? My compulsion to paint them, evoke them, haunts and drives me with whispering but irresistable force. Perhaps it is expression of a state of constant grief for my lost Jewish brothers and sisters on the shoulders of whose sacrifices I have come to exist.

D) Explorations of Jewish identity, especially vis a vis the struggles encountered with antisemitism and stereotyping.

My painting technique is one that I have developed after long experimentation and that has as much parallel in the frottage methods of Max Ernst as to the exploratory brushworks of DeKooning and the conceptual illuminated strivings of Mark Rothko. My most deeply felt painting influences are Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, Jackson Pollack, Max Beckman, Chaim Soutine, David Newman, Milton Resnik, Hans Hoffman, Barnet Newman. My painting method is my own invention, entailing the use of fluorescent acrylics, charcoals, machine oil, lead pencil, and various mediums such as Galkyd and Meglip. In combination, they create a slow-drying surface upon which I reflect for long periods of time until able to perceive the slowly emerging shape of visions that result from the slowly catalyzing surface. It is the materials encountering my inner eye that produces my work, a meeting of the unconscious with the accidental canvas--a method that is metaphor for the process of history, or even of creation itself.

Many shades of warm pinks, corrals, reds, oranges, magentas such as suffuse Israel's landscape inform my paintings and as I've discovered, they are the colors which I find when I look deeply within myself, the colors of my love for Israel, my fellow Israelis and Diaspora Jews, the colors of my passion for art and literature: the color of the heart.

About the Artist
Alan Kaufman is an Israeli-American painter and author. He has hung in both one man and group shows at Himmelberger Gallery, a prestigious Union Square Gallery in San Francisco and Art@324 Gallery in The Chelsea Fine Arts Building in New York City's Chelsea District, hub of the New York Art World. He is a former instructor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He has also hung in numerous group shows and is in numerous private collections in the United States and Israel. His novels include the critically acclaimed memoir Jew Boy (Fromm/FSG) and Matches (Little, Brown/Time-Warner Books), The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry (Basic Books/Perseus) and The Outlaw Bible of American Literature (Basic Books/Perseus). Kaufman also writes on literature and art for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, Huffington Post, Evergreen Review, Hi-Fructose and many other prominent national publications.

JerUSAlem-USA

2009-11-03T00:25:00.000-08:00

The photograph above was taken in Jerusalem, Michigan.
The text below was added to 'On Being a Zionist Artists in a Networked World'

Art creating dialog between Israel and the Diaspora
Although living in Israel by a Jewish calendar, speaking Hebrew, walking on the soil of our ancestors is the Zionist ideal, the networked world provides unprecedented opportunities for Jewish artists in the homeland and those in the Diaspora to creatively interact with each other. Internet 2.0 generates alternative frameworks for global communities to form and flourish. Zionist artists can form virtual communities spreading rhizome-like across the surface of the globe. Israel becoming the central node in these worldwide communities is the realization of the dream of the cultural Zionists led by Ahad Ha’am at the First Zionist Congress in 1897. In addition, artists share their creative works through their websites, blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Rhizome, Second Life, etc. Particularly vital to the Zionist future is creative dialog and collaboration between the two largest Jewish communities. Through inspired partnerships between artists in Israel, the world center of Jewish culture, and artists in the USA, the world center of artistic innovation, a new Zionist energy will emerge and flourish.

In addition to energizing the creative dialog between Jews in Israel and United States, it is important to the Zionist enterprise in a networked world to establish a creative dialog between Israelis and Americans of diverse backgrounds. To realize this extended dialog, I created a work of participatory blogart ‘JerUSAlem-USA’ linking the twenty places in the United States called ‘Jerusalem’ with the original in Israel: http://jerusalem-usa.blogspot.com. In this collaborative artwork, Americans send photographs of Jerusalems in USA to which Israelis respond with matched images of Jerusalem in Israel. This digital dialog creates an interactive network of people with shared values that deepens friendships between them. The Lubavicher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, teaches:

“The divine purpose of the present information revolution, which gives an individual unprecedented power and opportunity, is to allow us to share knowledge – spiritual knowledge – with each other, empowering and unifying individuals everywhere. We need to use today’s interactive technology not just for business or leisure but to interlink as people – to create a welcome environment for the interaction of our souls, our hearts, our visions.”

Rotate Light before Darkness

2008-12-13T22:44:00.000-08:00

Rotating Light before Darkness, Mel Alexenberg's memorial artwork honoring Gabriel and Rivah Holtzberg, will first be exhibited in the "Art in Darkness" exhibition at Emuna College in Jerusalem during Hanuaka. The Jewish response to the horrific murders in Mumbai is to bring light from Jerusalem to Jewish communities worldwide in times of darkness, an appropriate message for the Festival of Lights.

In Rotating Light before Darkness (a phrase from the Jewish prayerbook), we see Jews around the world welcoming the dawn in morning prayers from Jerusalem to Jerusalem cycling though 24 time zones. The digital cycling program shows morning prayers beginning in Jerusalem, passing through Aizwal (Mizoram State, India), Katmandu (Nepal), Seoul (Korea), Melbourne, Hobart (Tasmania, Australia), Honololu, Seattle, Los Angeles, Denver, Richmond (Virginia), New Jersey, New York City, Brooklyn, London, Amsterdam, Milano, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Eisiskes (Lithuania), Johannesburg (South Africa), Vysoki (Russia), Tbilisi (Georgia), and returning to Jerusalem.

See: http://artiststory.blogspot.com/2008/12/illuminating-darkness.html

Art as a Sign of Awakening from a 2000-year Coma

2008-08-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, a down-to-earth mystic who served as Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel, wrote a letter of congratulations on the founding of the Betzalel Art School in Jerusalem in 1906. By way of allegory, he refers to the revival of Jewish art and aesthetics after two thousand years of exile as a child in a coma who awakes calling for her doll.

"The pleasant and beloved child, the delightful daughter, after a long and forlorn illness, with a face as pallid as plaster, bluish lips, fever burning like a fiery furnace, and convulsive shaking and trembling, behold! She has opened her eyes and her tightly sealed lips, her little hands move with renewed life, her thin pure fingers wander hither and thither, seeking their purpose; her lips move and almost revert to their normal color, and as if through a medium a voice is heard: “Mother, Mother, the doll, give me the doll, the dear doll, which I have not seen for so long.” A voice of mirth and a voice of gladness, all are joyous, the father, the mother, the brothers and sisters, even the elderly man and woman who, because of their many years, have forgotten their children’s games."

Rabbi Kook saw artists at work as a clear sign of the rebirth of the Jewish people in its homeland. Their playful spirit nurturing sensitivity for beauty “will uplift depressed souls, giving them a clear and illuminating view of the beauty of life, nature, and work.”

Excerpt from the book by Mel Alexenberg, The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press).

אומנים ציוניים

2008-08-11T06:25:00.000-07:00

אומנים ציוניים משתמשים באנרגיות היצירתיות שלהם לתרום חלק יצירתי בתקומה הלאומית של העם היהודי. הנס המקראי של יציאת אומה של אלפים מעבדות בארץ מצריים, אחרי 210 שנים של גלות מחוויר לאומת הנס הציוני בן זמננו של שחרור מיליוני יהודים מרדיפות, פוגרומים ושואה בעשרות ארצות, לאחר 2000 שנה של גלות ושיבתם הביתה לישראל. להיות שותף אינטגראלי לנס ציוני זה הינה הזדמנות שובת לב לאומן, הזדמנות חסרת תקדים בהיסטוריה העולמית

Zionist Thoughts on the Arts, Creativity, and Cultural Renewal

2008-08-02T13:45:00.000-07:00

Posted in Petach Tikvah (Opening to Hope) in the State of Israel on motzei shabbat rosh chodesh Av, the month during which we mourn our loss of national soverignty centuries ago.
'Bless the State of Israel as the beginning of the flowering of our redemption and spread a canopy of peace over her.'
Below is my photograph at the opening season of the Israel Baseball League where Mel Alexenberg's son Ari was pitcher and coach for the Petach Tikvah Pioneers. Ari is currently Director of the Israel Action Center in Boston.

Creating Works of Imagination in the Land of IsraelThe Land of Israel is not something external, not an external national asset, a means to the end of collective solidarity and the strengthening of the nation’s existence, physical or even spiritual. The Land of Israel is an essential unit bound by the bond-of-life to the People, united by inner characteristics to its existence.

Whoever is endowed with the soul of a creator must create works of imagination and thought, for the flame of the soul rises by itself and one cannot impede it on its course…. The creative individual brings vital, new light from the higher source where originality emanates to the place where its has not previously been manifest, from the place that “no bird of prey knows, nor has the falcon’s eye seen.” (Job 28:7), “that no man has passed, nor has any person dwelt” (Jeremiah 2:6).

Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), First Chief Rabbi of the Land of Israel, Founder of Yeshivat Mercaz Ha’Rav in Jerusalem. Quotations from: Orot (Lights) and Orot Hakodesh (Lights of Holiness)Longing to Create is Embodied in all of Judaism's Goals
Halakhic man is a man who longs to create, to bring into being something new, something original. The dream of creation is the central idea in halakhic consciousness – the idea of the importance of man as a partner of the Almighty in the act of creation, man as creator of worlds. This longing for creation and the renewal of the cosmos is embodied in all of Judaism’s goals.

If a man wishes to attain the rank of holiness, he must become a creator of worlds. If a man never creates, never brings into being anything new, anything original, then he cannot be holy unto his God. That passive type who is derelict in fulfilling his task of creation cannot become holy. Creation is the lowering of transcendence into the midst of our turbid, coarse, material world…. “For the Lord thy God walketh in the midst of thy camp” (Deuteronomy 23:15).

Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), Head of the Rabbinical Seminary of Yeshiva University, President of Mizrachi Zionists of America. Quotations from: Ish Ha’halakhah (Halakhic Man)
A National Culture of its OwnA complete national life involves two things: first, full play for the creative faculties of the nation in a specific national culture of its own, and, second, a system of education whereby the individual members of the nation will be thoroughly imbued with that culture, and so molded by it that its imprint will be recognizable in all their way of life and thought, individual and social.

Ahad Ha’Am (Asher Zvi Ginsberg) (1856-1927), Hebrew essayist and father of ‘Cultural Zionism.’
Revolution and TraditionA renewing and creative regeneration does not throw the cultural heritage of ages in the dustbin. It examines and scrutinizes, accepts and rejects. At times it may keep and add to an accepted tradition. At times it descends into ruined grottoes to excavate and remove the dust from that which had lain in forgetfulness, in order to resuscitate old traditions which have the power to stimulate the spirit of the generation of renewal.

Berl Katzenelson (1887-1944), Leader of ‘Socialist Zionism,’ Founder the Labor Zionist newspaper Davar, and editor of Am Oved, publishing house of the Histadrut.
Increasing Beauty and Wisdom in Tel Aviv
Even my dreams are eternal, for others will dream them when I am no more. Beauty and wisdom do not die because their creators die. Just as the conservation of energy is self-evident, so must we infer that there is conservation of beauty and wisdom…. Have the sayings of our ancient sages perished? No, their flame burns brightly, even if in happy times it is less clearly visible than in dark days, like all flames. And what should we learn from this? That we should strive to increase beauty and wisdom on this earth as long as we live.

Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), Founder of the World Zionist Organization and its first president. Quotation from: Altneuland (Old-New Land). The Hebrew translation of Herzl's visionary novel by Nachum Sokolov was titled Tel Aviv (the ancient tel and the renewal of spring). When the first Hebrew city was founded, it took its name from the title of Herzl's book.

Artists worldwide are invited to contribute additional quotations of Zionist thinkers on the arts, creativity, and cultural renewal.
Send your contributions to: melalexenberg@yahoo.com