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Building a Model of Percival Goodman’s Millburn, NJ Synagogue

Monday, March 1st, 2010

In preparation for Modern Art, Sacred Space: Motherwell, Ferber and Gottlieb we hired Pre_Post to develop a scale model of Percival Goodman’s Millburn, NJ synagogue to be included in the exhibition.

“We are creating 1/8″ scale model made from a combination of laser cut and hand finished bass wood. Working with scans of the original drawing set by Percival Goodman, we redrew the building on the computer, using the digital drawings for laser cutting and as the guide for the hand finished work,” explain the principals of Pre_Post.

“Throughout this process, we cross checked the drawings with archival photos and renderings in an effort to get a complete picture of the synagogue and its site. The scale model artworks were produced based on archival photos and the original pieces.”

Pre_Post is also producing to-scale artworks for the model based on archival photos and the original pieces.

Related Links:
Exhibition: Modern Art, Sacred Space: Motherwell, Ferber and Gottlieb (Mar 14 – Aug 1, 2010)
Blog: Conserving Adolph Gottlieb’s Torah Ark Curtain (1/7/2010)
Restoring & Installing Motherwell’s The Wall of the Temple (2/17/2010)
Online Collection works by: Herbert Ferber / Adolph Gottlieb / Robert Motherwell
Flickr: More photos of the model, conservation and exhibition install

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Happy Hanukkah

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Joe Grand’s Galvanized Steel Candelabra is the hot menorah of the season, getting picked by The New York Times and National Public Radio in the last week. I love its cool combination of thrift and style, funk and elegance. Assembled from iron pipe fittings from Home Depot, the DIY attitude exudes the 21st century Hanukkah spirit of improvisation and renewal.

Listen to an excellent report on Reinventing Ritual by Margot Adler that just aired on NPR’s Morning Edition. And read about Jonathan Adler’s visit to The Jewish Museum shops in pursuit of Hanukkah chic.

And finally, a shout out to our friends at Hazon’s food blog The Jew and the Carrot, which always has great holiday recipes and stories. I find particularly informative this guide to latke frying oil. Best wishes for a fun filled celebration.

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Planning 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.

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Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

It is with great sadness that I read of the death of the great French anthropologist. A founder of structuralism, his writings and thought remain vital to this day. As we are reemphasizing the patterns that connect us over the differences that divide us, Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of social, linguistic, and material forms across cultures and times provides a useful set of tools and metaphors. His landmark study “The Savage Mind” (1962) was influential in my early thinking about how ritual and art work together to create meaning in the everyday. I never formulated these thoughts for the catalogue, so record them here as a small tribute to a great mind.

“The Science of the Concrete,” the brilliant first chapter of Lévi-Strauss’s aforementioned book, introduces the concepts of two different types of scientific knowledge. First, the bricoleur who creates new ideas of objects from the materials at hand, thereby renewing or enriching the stock of available constructions. (This is the science of the concrete, which Lévi-Strauss observes in “primitive” societies and other cultures based on myth and ritual.) Second, the engineer who questions the universe and strives to think beyond the given constraints, thereby opening up new possibilities through technology. In other words, the former is reinvention, the latter is invention.

The main purpose of “The Savage Mind” is to elevate the status of the bricoleur to the cultural equivalent of the engineer. Certainly, the term has been seized on as a valid process by contemporary artists with a DIY attitude in the last decade, notably Tom Sachs.

For Lévi-Strauss, the artist operates between the bricoleur and the engineer: “art lies half-way between scientific knowledge and mythical or magical thought.” He focuses on a detail from François Clouet’s naturalistic portrait of Queen Elizabeth of Austria (1571) to investigate the “very profound aesthetic emotion” produced by a highly-detailed representation of a lace collar. The fascination of the lace collar, in its morphological verisimilitude seen through the artist’s unique perspective, fuses reinvention and invention.

Only on rereading these passages did I realize that coincidentally three artists in Reinventing Ritual looked at lace and represented its texture into new means: molded silicone, etched steel, and hand-worked silver. The latter, new Judaica by Lella Vignelli, was inspired precisely by Baroque costume similar to that described by Lévi-Strauss. There is a poignant aspect to the excess of labor and beauty in a lace collar, and the desire on the part of the artist—be it Clouet or Vignelli—to borrow its power to enchant a new work of art. The candlesticks by Vignelli are an unexpected tribute to the anthropologist who developed a highly complex but practical theory of the process of artistic reinvention.

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Sheltering Sky

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

We’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.

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DIY

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Prayer 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.

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Sweetness

Monday, September 21st, 2009

Shana tova (happy new year) to readers of the blog. During this time of thinking about renewal as we celebrate the Jewish new year Rosh Hashanah and contemplate the coming Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, a number of works currently on view at The Jewish Museum stand out.

The image shown here is a still from a gorgeous video by artist Dafna Shalom, “Yamim Noraim (Fearful Days) #2″ (2007). Shalom documents the movement of bees in and around a honeycomb. Visually, it condenses our appreciation of honey, which is a staple of the Jewish New Year in a hope for sweetness, into something else: a metaphor for the fragility of community and the architecture of relationships. The video was inspired by the colony collapse disorder of several years ago, which reduced bee stocks in North America with frightening alacrity from unknown causes. The video’s soundtrack of melodic Moroccan Jewish singing sacralizes the present moment’s concern for well-being. The title refers to the ten day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We are in that time now, when the sweetness of honey mitigates our positions in the scheme of life.

“Yamim Noraim” is currently on view in The Jewish Museum’s exhibition Rite Now: Sacred and Secular in Video, organized by Andy Ingall. The show introduces new takes on rituals not explored in Reinventing Ritual, such as mourning and the amidah, or standing prayer.

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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!

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Installing Helène Aylon’s “All Rise”

Monday, August 31st, 2009

We’re a few days behind in posting images. Last Thursday, Helène Aylon came in to install her major work “All Rise.” The color and the scale of the piece perfectly fits that of its gallery, amazing since the artist had not inking of this presentation when she designed and produced it in 2007.

Click thumbnails to enlarge and redirect to our Flickr page

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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.

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