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Central in the dialogue in Reinventing Ritual is the relationship between the decorative and the functional. A much reviled expression in modernism, the decorative or ornamental was derided by critics like Clement Greenberg and Adolf Loos as inessential, if not a crime, against the purist ideals of formalism and functionality. Feminist and other reactions to modernist hegemony in the 1970s brought the decorative back into critical favor, where it became one of the pillars of postmodernist art and design. The core idea was to invest the decorative and its objects, once dismissed as useless and meaningless, with value and purpose.

What’s interesting about the current trend is that a number of contemporary Israeli designers take the decorative a step further and invert the roles of the functional and non functional, the object and the ornament. Recent works have been inspired by the tablecloths and lace doilies that were part of the interior decoration of Israeli households once aspiring to import Old World sensibility into postwar concrete apartments. In Israel today, perhaps aware of the achievement of commercial abundance, industrial designers are reimagining the material culture of past as ritual objects for the present.

To wit, Studio Armadillo crafted Linen (2001), a sculpture of an actual-sized Sabbath table—wine bottle and ritual objects and all—out of white linen. The piece addresses how the Sabbath is sanctified by not only the traditional lighting of candles and eating of hallah, but the laying of the tablecloth, which sets the context and mood for the transition from the stress of the work week to the holy day of rest. The sculpture, when properly installed, seems to float in the air, giving off a magical, ethereal aura. It is a work of art, and would be used in Sabbath observance. This type of “conceptual Judaica” has entered The Jewish Museum collection as an affective conversation piece about Jewish ritual.

Two other works, each related to Passover, take this attention to the table covering one step further, so that a soft, delicate material can become a rigid and structurally sound form capable of performing the rituals.

Sahar Batsry’s Volcano (2007) turns the idea of a tablecloth into a soft seder plate. A white molded silicone disk serves as a “plate” supporting six etched glass dishes. The elastic properties hold in place the embedded dishes, which when used contain the symbolic foods discussed in the Haggadah. Small perforations around the plate’s perimeter recall the source inspiration in lace. The piece is flexible, so it requires a flat surface to be fully functional as a plate. Thus the piece metaphorically transforms the entire table into a plate by blurring the distinctions between object and furniture. Volcano rethinks the tripartite relationship among furniture, cover, and object: no longer a three-element combination, but all fused into one elegant object.

Talilia Abraham, also an industrial designer in Israel, created a material she calls … basically finely worked pierced metal that mimics lace. This type of unexpected hybrid of the hard and the soft can be found in a lot of jewelry and tabletop objects these days. But Abraham’s workshop hand etches the pieces to get an added delicacy, while most other examples in international design rely on laser cutting. For our interests, Abraham, as part of her large line of baskets and containers, created a few pieces specifically designed for Jewish ritual functions: one to hold the hallah, another to hold matzoh during the Passover seder.

The Passover piece, called Dantela after the type of heirloom lace that inspired it, directly endows the decorative look of lace with a new purpose. Thus the “lower” valued decorative item is “elevated” to status of ritual object to frame unleavened bread, eaten during Passover to recall liberation from slavery in Egypt. The feminist politics resolve clearly in this piece. Abraham reinvests an anonymous craft practiced by women for centuries. While these handicrafts are now largely industrialized, Abraham revives their patterns as tribute to the women of the past, and as a strong statement of her own presence and autonomy. Dantela is a feminist ritual object par excellence, literally bringing the history of women’s creativity to the Passover table.

Concluding here with a feminist piece I acknowledge that gender politics have not yet been a central part of the conversation on the blog. The next several posts should start thinking though the feminist approach that motivated many of the most important works in Reinventing Ritual.