What would Harry Houdini (March 24, 1874 – October 31, 1926) have done to celebrate his birthday? It’s safe to say that cupcakes and candles may not have been on the top of his list. But we do know from Houdini’s biographer, Kenneth Silverman, that the great magician and escape artist often visited the gravesite of his beloved mother, Cecilia Weiss, at the Jewish Machpelah Cemetery, in Queens, New York on his birthday and hers. 
Houdini adored his mother. He stipulated that he be buried at Machpelah, too, with a pillow of letters from his mother under his head. The novelist E. L. Doctorow has called Houdini “one of the last great mother lovers.” Houdini’s devotional relationship to his mother is one fascinating facet of his famous persona. While Mrs. Weiss is buried in the Houdini family plot, Bess Rahner Houdini (1875-1943), his wife who was Catholic, was not permitted burial there.
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Happy 136th Birthday, Ehrich Weiss (better known as Harry Houdini).
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010Planning Man Ray
Friday, November 20th, 2009
Since the spring of 2007, I’ve been working with curator Mason Klein on the much anticipated exhibition Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention. At last, over two years later, the show is now on view at The Jewish Museum.
Our exhibition surveys Man Ray’s diverse career, stretching over 60 years, and includes examples of his painting, photography, drawing, collage, film, sculpture, and writing. Most people know Man Ray for his associations with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, or for his many collaborations with Marcel Duchamp. The challenge in organizing Alias Man Ray was to get at the artist’s own hidden identity, and highlight the way his conflicted desire to both conceal and distinguish himself informed a lifetime of artistic output.
When dealing with such a canonical artist, the unexpected can be hard to come by, but Alias Man Ray is full of surprises. It is largely unknown, for example, that Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitzky, the son of Jewish Russian immigrants. A photograph of little Manny Radnitzky, posing in his bar mitzvah attire with an impertinent hand-on-hip, is on view in the exhibition. It is one of the few surviving pictures from the artist’s youth in Philadelphia and Brooklyn. Man Ray himself is seen and heard in a video interview on view in the galleries, his Brooklyn accent a revelation for many who assume the long-time Paris resident was French.
Scattered among his breath taking iconic images, such as Le violon d’Ingres, Noire et blanche and dozens of luminous portraits, are more surprises. One of my favorites, Hier, Demain, Aujourd’ hui (Yesterday, Tomorrow, Today), is a triptych of photographed nudes whose faces and pubic areas are collaged over by bright circles in a strange Baldessari-like gesture. The collage hung in the artist’s darkroom for many years, and according to his wife Juliet Man Ray, was an unfailing source of inspiration.
For me, after years of looking at reproductions of Man Ray’s work in books, the best surprise was to open the crates and finally see the work for myself. The colors of his paintings are richer, and the jewel-like qualities of the photographs are more luminescent than I expected. You can look at all the reproductions you want, but nothing beats the face to face encounter. So come and check out the show for yourself!
- Lauren Schell Dickens
Neubauer Family Foundation Curatorial Assistant
Join Lauren on a behind-the-scenes tour of the exhibition Monday, November 23rd at 12:15 pm. For a full list of staff gallery talks and special offers, click here to find out more about Man Ray Mondays.
Sheltering Sky
Tuesday, October 6th, 2009We’re midway through Sukkot, the harvest holiday that also marks the wanderings of the Jews through the desert after the Exodus. A main ritual of this holiday is the construction of a temporary outdoor shelter open to the sky. Jews eat in this hut for seven days reminding them of the fragility of life and the beauty of nature. Recently, at least in the U.S., Sukkot has been reinvented as the great DIY holiday, when families and communities dust off their power drills and ladders and use whatever materials are handy to work together to build their sukkah.
Sukkot is on track to become what Passover has been the last few decades: the Jewish holiday that embodies the values of the community today. As the floating world of the Internet continues to expand into every facet of our lives, the life of brick-and-mortar, real world places will have the duration more of a blog post than a cathedral. In the architecture world in general there is great interest in temporary structures, from tents to pop-up stores to art exhibits in shipping containers.
Judaism, as an inherently nomadic and diasporic religion the last two thousand years, is well equipped for the 21st century preference for the ephemeral. The sukkah is this structure par excellence, a temporary shelter for the bringing together of community and ritual, in a joyous and beautiful way. Two works in Reinventing Ritual explore the evanescence of the sukkah.
Francisca Benitez’s video Sukkah analyzes the fascinating lives of sukkahs in the congested urban neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, built on fire escapes, roofs, balconies, and alleyways. The video contains four sections: construction, proliferation, use, and deconstruction. A staccato editing quality, and electronic soundtrack by Memoy Demay, defamiliarizes an already unusual practice in America, reinforcing the artist’s interest in how the sukkah is physically temporary and ancient at the same time. A good comparison is the famous Shinto shrine at Ise, Japan, where the temple is rebuilt entirely every 20 years.
The other work is the full-scale Gardening Sukkah by Allan Wexler. This piece won the Leir Prize and has been discussed in a previous post. If Benitez takes a purely architectural exterior view of the sukkah, Wexler is more interested in its usage as a temporary site for eating. He focuses on the interior of the work, meticulously mounting all the utensils and tools needed for ritual meals and gardening. By tying the meal as the essence of the sukkah to the annual cycle of nature—planting, reaping, lying fallow—Wexler helps us recall that architecture is at service of human activity.
The web (and the Museum’s online collection) is full of interesting news articles about creative sukkahs this year, from a drive-thru in Pinecrest, Florida to a student design/build project at Wesleyan University. The range of expression and interest is only growing each year. The Museum is interested in continuing to explore the sukkah in the future.
DIY
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009Prayer is an essential part of the High Holidays. The artists LoVid through their diverse practice use language, song, music, video, and electronics to connect people. Their video garment Retzuot (ShinShinAgam), which is currently on view in Reinventing Ritual, brings these concepts of prayer and connection together into one beautiful and thought-provoking work. The artists have just posted video documentation of how to wrap and wear Retzuot, helping us to better understand how this piece functions as reinvented tefillin.
The following is LoVid’s statement about the work, as published in the exhibition catalogue:
Retzuot (ShinShinAgam) is inspired by the head
and arm pieces of tefillin. The straps of tefillin
reminded us of electronic conductive wires,
which we use in our media-based, audiovisual
work. In a similar way, tefillin straps conduct
and preserve information that is in the scrolls
and that has passed down through history.
In Retzuot (ShinShinAgam), the scrolls are represented
by circuit boards, which generate
continuous live video. The video image is a
minimal representation of the letter shin,
which in traditional tefillin appears on the
headpiece box.
This fall, LoVid will be leading two hands-on workshops about making Judaica with simple electronics. The first is for all ages during A Day of Reinventing Ritual at the Jewish Theological Seminary on November 15, and the second is a family workshop about creating electric menorahs at The Jewish Museum on December 13.
Reinventing Ritual is now open!
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
We had an absolutely incredible turnout on Monday night, with a long line outside, which I hear has never before happened at a JM opening. People compared it to a Biennial, which is so gratifying because that was one of the unspoken ambitions for this show. The energy and enthusiasm was amazing and inspires us to continue to support and exhibit this vital area of contemporary art, design, and Jewish ritual. Props to the opening co-host Heeb magazine and publisher Josh Neuman. For pictures, visit our Facebook and Flickr pages.
The highlight of the event was the awarding of the first ever Henry J. Leir Prize to Allan Wexler, one of the true pioneers in the area of “reinventing ritual.” The $5,000 prize recognizes a work that embodies the finest of contemporary art and design, and best expresses the dynamic practice of religion today. Wexler’s Gardening Sukkah impressed the prize jury with its craftsmanship, “green” awareness, and ability to make us rethink what a sukkah can be.
The distinguished panel of judges included: Rabbi Darcie Crystal, Coordinator of Leadership Initiatives at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York; Holly Hotchner, Director of the Museum of Arts and Design; and Daniel Libeskind, architect and designer. Thanks to them for their time and energy.
The jury also recognized two honorable mentions: Hadassa Goldvicht’s video Writing Lesson #1, and Ami Drach and Dov Ganchrow’s design +/- Hotplate.
We’ll continue to blog about ongoing events and activities around the exhibition. And if you have not yet seen the show, please come and check it out!
Installing Tamara Kostianovsky’s “Unearthed”
Thursday, August 27th, 2009Yesterday we installed Tamara Kostianovsky’s amazingly realistic sculpture of a side of beef made from clothes: “Unearthed” (2007). Pictured are art handlers Annie Varnot and John Ros, registrar Julie Maguire, and curator Daniel Belasco. Thanks to JiaJia Fei for taking these and all the following photos as we document the placement of the larger and more complicated installations over the next few days, in advance of placing the cases and tables.
Click thumbnails to enlarge and redirect to our Flickr page
Flat-pack
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
Another major element of the exhibition design is the system of tables, bases, and panels that Incorporated designed to display the range of media: jewelry, ceramic plates, videos, silver implements, textiles, and so on.
The initial inspiration came from an exhibition I viewed at Foxy Productions in Chelsea, where a variety of small sculptures and objets d’art were displayed on a sawhorse table. Each item was under plexi cube, and the display itself came off as an installation for the objects in the show. To me, the presentation seemed uninflected and honest, modest and sophisticated. Departing from this one image, Incorporated developed a simple and elegant solution to the display of the diverse group of works in Reinventing Ritual within the hundred-year-old container of the museum’s galleries.
Raw plywood is cut and slotted so the pieces smoothly join. For tables and bases, the horizontal deck nests right into a sturdy base formed by the supportive sheets crisscrossing on the vertical axis. For panels that support wall-oriented works and 
flat-screen monitors, sheets of plywood are suspended by a variation on the same support system. I’m probably not describing these very well, so take a close look at the preview of some of the tables and panels in the gallery to better understand how they work. There is no hidden armature, no decoration or ornament. No illusionism or superglue. The cases are purely functional and communicate their structure inside and out. I think Mies would be pleased that American architects continue to heed his ideas.
Taking commercial materials, cutting them into geometric units, and crafting them into functional objects is the same approach used by the textile artist Galya 
Rosenfeld. Her prototypes for ark curtains, commissioned by the Minneapolis Institute of Art for a Judaica show in 2007, are made from small modules of fabric cut from gray polyester IKEA curtains. They are woven together in an innovative structure that subtly creates Stars of David in a repeating pattern, and can be seen in Reinventing Ritual.
Put another way, the casework for Reinventing Ritual is one part IKEA and one part Tobias Putrih, a simple flat-pack system both industrial and artsy. Another important aspect of the cases and panels is that they can be easily dismantled. The plywood boards are held together by gravity and torque; there are no glue or nails 
to affix them. After the exhibition closes in New York, all the cases and panels can be popped apart, stacked, and shipped to San Francisco, where they will be reused in the representation at the Contemporary Jewish Museum.
Call it retro-functionalism: the old modernist ideals of the rational building stripped of ornament, combined with the postmodernist values of environmentalism and sustainability. An eco-Bauhaus if you will, calling for smart industrial production. I like to think that this retro-functionalist approach to building and design is expressed in every aspect of the exhibition contents and design, especially the casework.
All Rise
Thursday, July 16th, 2009The following text was composed by Helène Aylon, whose latest installation will be featured in Reinventing Ritual. She is also participating in two group exhibitions this fall: A Complex Weave: Feminism and Identity at Rutgers University and Women in the Bible: Tricksters, Victors and (M)others at the Jewish Museum of Australia, in Melbourne.
Feminism reinvents all of reality by the participation of women bringing the issues into male dominated spheres. I have used a feminist lens to investigate the main issues of the decade from the time I began my career: in the 1970s, addressing the notion of change itself and the Body; in the 1980s, the Earth; and in the 1990s and 2000s, G-d. (G-d required two decades!)
The G-d Project: Nine Houses Without Women began in 1990 with The Liberation of G-d. [Exhibited in “Too Jewish?” at The Jewish Museum in 1996, and now in the museum’s permanent collection.—Ed.] The “House” is a Beit Midrash—a house of study where men congregate to learn together.
For the finale of the G-d Project, I wish to make an actual tikkun, rather than a metaphoric inquiry. I am petitioning that women judges be allowed to judge on a Beit Din. We now have women rabbis and women cantors; it is time for women to be allowed to judge. All Rise is a Beit Din, A House of Law, a courtroom.
The pink pillowcase flags of the All Rise Beit Din refer to the pillowcases I collected in the 1980s with women’s dreams and nightmares about the state of the world. The pink neon in the word G-d represents a feminine presence. The Tzitzit under the judicial seats refer to the fringes worn around the groins of religious men to protect them from the lure of women.
This courtroom can be utilized as a focal point for discussion. It is significant that The Jewish Museum originated The G-d Project with The Liberation of G-d, and now will be showing the finale, All Rise.
Helène Aylon