STUDIA ROSENTHALIANA 45 (2014), 75-89 doi: 10.2143/SR.45.0.3021382

Return to the Future: The Role of Visual Art in the Contemporary Jewish Museum

MICHAELA SIDENBERG

COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, IN 2006, the Jewish Museum in A was commemorating its 100th anniversary by organizing a series of events called Year of Jewish Culture. It was a unique opportunity to map and contextualize the existence of an institution housing one of the rich- est collections of Judaica in the Diaspora. Besides being an occasion to commemorate and celebrate, it was also an opportune moment to debate the Museum’s present and, above all, to map out its future. One of the key questions was what role does visual art play in the contemporary Jew- ish Museum and how might it be employed in a museological narrative. Even though works of visual art have been present in collections and displays of every major Jewish museum since the end of the 19th Century, their role within the context of many of these institutions has remained ambivalent. Collections of visual art are often reduced to ‘collections of Jewish icons’, an iconographic addenda illustrating heroic tales of the Bible, Jewish history, or the social and cultural practices of in a certain period and place. Although exhibiting visual art has become commonplace in many of today’s Jewish museums and other cultural institutions, and despite the fact that many seminal essays and books have been written on various aspects of the use and interpretation of image within traditional and modern Jewish society, there tends to be some uncertainty when it comes to searching for a satisfactory definition of what Jewish (diasporic) visual art actually is and whom it is for – in other words: who are its creators, promoters and recipients, what are its motives and strategies, and, ultimately, whom or what does it represent? Is it art by Jewish artists or is it conceptually defined as artistic commen- tary on Jewish themes, drawing from the rich texture of Jewish tradition 76 MICHAELA SIDENBERG regardless of the artist’s ethnicity or religious affiliation? Is it targeting primarily a Jewish clientele? Is it ritual, ethnic, representative, abstract, blasphemous, contradictory, nostalgic, provocative, self-referential, or, indeed, redundant? What is the diasporic Gesammtkunstwerk (a total, all-inclusive work of art), and is it actually appropriate to speak about it at all when for many dispersion is still seen as the direct opposite of integrity? For one it may be a beautifully illustrated manuscript, for another it is a , a museum, a single page of the Talmud, or perhaps a complex system of new technologies in which direct depiction is replaced by digitally encoded content. Yet can it actually be a single work of art, project or event? And if so, can one artist at all aspire to speak on behalf of an entire people whose collective memory is so deep and vast that any subjective view of it cannot be but a fragmented, stro- boscopic reflection of the whole, which for the most part remains unre- vealed? Looking at the work of some artists, one cannot help but think that contemporary Jewish and other ‘minority art’ is being utilized as a strategy for playing the exotic ‘Other’ whereby ethnicity becomes a plat- form for one’s claim to fame. There is certainly a whole range of grant-giving institutions willing to support anything that pretends to treat ‘minority issues’ without ever acknowledging that such work already became mainstream many years ago. As a response to this confusion between a sincere artistic exploration of one’s own experience and the mass production of identity-based art, some artists and theoreticians have come up with the pertinent idea that art should be a tool for attaining social justice. They place it within the frame of tikkun olam (fixing the world).1 Some of them even speak about a major paradigm shift that is moving all contemporary art from the Hellenistic concept, represented by a three-dimensional carved image, to what can be viewed as essentially Jewish or Hebraic, the exclusive his- torical experience and cultural tradition of the Diaspora, collaborative, pluralistic, discursive, and embracing all kinds of new artistic practices and strategies such as video, performance, public space interventions, social activism, or system- and bio-art.2

1. On the idea of tikkun olam as an artistic concept and art critical term see i.a.: O.Z. Soltes, Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century (Hanover and London 2002). 2. For the literature on the subject see mainly: M. Alexenberg, The Future of Art in a Digital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness (Bristol 2006). R ETURN TO THE FUTURE: THE ROLE OF VISUAL ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM 77

The questions are numerous and so perhaps are the answers. Some of the issues are well known and researched and some, not quite yet at the centre of academic debate, haunt primarily artists, curators and crit- ics. Responding to all of them goes far beyond the purpose and extent of this presentation. Instead of a systematic enumeration and analysis of these problems, I would like to touch upon certain aspects of this ongo- ing discussion by presenting one of the most recent contemporary visual art projects hosted by the . It is a project I consider a genuine breakthrough in the Museum’s exhibition and com- munication strategy. With full awareness that in today’s post-modern world there is no single notion of Jewish culture or identity, and with the deepest respect and appreciation for historically and geographically determined differ- ences among the institutions whose mission it is to document and repre- sent those phenomena, it is my hope that ‘the Prague case’ – which can be seen as part of a more general discourse on the role of museums in the digital age – may eventually serve as an inspiration, if not a tool to navi- gate one of the many paths through this vast field. The project I have decided to present as an exemplum pars pro toto of the alternative ways in which the Jewish Museum in Prague seeks to enhance its narrative in its content and form is ARK, a large-scale out- door video-sculpture by Canadian artist Melissa Shiff, whom I chose to be the keynote artist for the Museum’s centennial. Before I present her work, however, I would like to outline the context in which it came into being. As an art curator working in a Jewish museum that is not primarily designed as a visual art collecting institution (although most of the items in its collection indisputably possess a great aesthetic value and are irre- placeable for the history of Jewish art), I am constantly confronted and challenged by the renown the Museum has gained over a century full of dramatic shifts and tragedies. Labelled as a treasury safeguarding ‘the precious legacy’ of Czech and Moravian Jews and a memorial to the catastrophe that befell the Czech Jewish community during the Shoah, in the eyes of many the Museum is a sealed time capsule. In this context, all objects and works of art on display are viewed either as documents or as presenting the beauty of the past, and the manner of their exhibiting seems to confirm this idea in almost every single respect. 78 MICHAELA SIDENBERG

Displays of the permanent collection are scattered across the area of the former Jewish ghetto and housed in its historical buildings: four and the chevrah kaddishah ceremonial hall. Items, enclosed in glass cases, are used to illustrate a detailed and rich narrative of reli- gious, social, and cultural history that itself is presented in the form of text panels and labels. Paintings, which often exceed the showcases’ size, are seldom used. More common are other, less dominant and more document- or illustration-like visual materials such as prints and photo- graphs. In addition to these traditional displays with their historic narratives fragmented and sealed in glass cases, the Museum offers other installa- tions and sites that are of a more conceptual nature, suggesting an alter- native rather than simply a linear reading of history. One such example is the Museum’s treasury, a magnificent display of silver installed in the winter prayer room of the Spanish Synagogue (Fig. 1). The silver objects are exhibited in spacious vitrines as if they were floating, deprived of their coordinates in space and time. Their backing is a wallpaper composed of a digitally manipulated pattern of war-time index cards. Looking at the de-contextualized objects on a backdrop of their blown-up catalogue entries one cannot help but see this pattern as a certain undercurrent permeating and overwhelming the main narrative, as if it were paraphrasing the ornate interior of the Span- ish Synagogue, which itself expresses the struggle for a new definition of Jewish cultural identity during the late 19th Century. The juxtaposition is breathtaking: the sumptuous red, gold and green ornament covering the walls and the dome of the building – an embodiment of longing for Zion – suddenly blurs into an austere aesthetic of filled-up forms referring to cultural death. Ultimately, it makes us think of yet another pattern-like texture, this time composed of the names of the nearly 80,000 Czech and Moravian Jews covering the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue (Fig. 2). Turned into a memorial to the victims of the Shoah, its quiet strength commemorates and symbolically buries those who would otherwise remain forgotten and nameless. Unlike the oriental fantasies of the Span- ish Synagogue (Fig. 3 and 4), the Pinkas Synagogue is an embodiment of immense grief and sorrow. It was conceived at the very beginning of the 1950s by the first post-war director of the Jewish Museum, Dr Hana Volavkova, and it is truly the first conceptual environment ever created. R ETURN TO THE FUTURE: THE ROLE OF VISUAL ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM 79

It was in a similar spirit to these integrating environments that Melissa Shiff created her ARK, a translucent structure in the form of a ship’s prow nearly five meters high. Opposing the very idea of an enclosed museum vitrine, ARK was designed as an outdoor installation. It functioned as a giant three-dimensional screen for a rear stereo-projec- tion of a 30 minute video narrative running in a loop and turning the sand-blasted Plexiglass cladding into a glowing display filled with a vibrant and fluid parable of the past, present, and the future of the Prague Jewish community and its Museum (Fig. 5-10). Originally conceived as a site-specific work commissioned by the Museum, ARK was installed on one of the last authentic sites of the former Jewish ghetto – Small Pinkas Street, a blind alley running along the western facade of the Pinkas Synagogue to the Old Jewish Cemetery. The street was greatly changed in character during the urban renewal of in 1906/07, that is, right at the time when the Association for Founding and Maintaining the Jewish Museum in Prague was in its first year of existence. Sunken under the now much higher level of the neigh- bouring streets and cut to approximately one third of its original length, it became a dead-end, a memento of long-forgotten history, a symbolic boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Placing ARK on this site was by itself a highly symbolic and appropriate gesture that endowed the work with a significance that surpassed the scope of one institution, connoting a much larger perspective of the entire Jewish people and its contribution to the history of mankind. Starting with cosmogony, images of the world’s creation through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and echoing the Biblical flood and the Ark as an archetype sailing across cultures, Shiff arrived at the highly compelling ethical and aesthetic concept of the Ark as an architecture of our memory and as a sense for community. Building on a quotation chosen from Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Archive Fever’: ‘Arkhé: The com- mencement and the commandment. Where authority and social order is exercised, this place from which order is given’, Shiff erected her own architecture of the future in which the idea of a museum as an ark and archive preserving cultural memory of a people is central. She concludes her story with another passage from Derrida: ‘The obligation and imper- ative of the archive is to remember the future.’ There is no doubt that Shiff’s ARK does precisely that. It is a contemplation of mementos of the 80 MICHAELA SIDENBERG past that points out to the yet immaterialized future by using the power of virtually expanded presence. For her artistic excellence – particularly that of her style of employing graphic elements (letters, numbers, sym- bols) and the moving-image medium – Shiff has been called by some reviewers of her work a descendant of Russian avant-garde filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov. Her work has been compared to that of Christian Boltanski, Bill Viola, Beryl Korot, or Chantal Aker- man. Yet, her ARK is not a mere ‘visual repository’3 in the sense of a large-scale cinematic showcase. Besides belonging to the kind of ‘time- machines that transport us into historic sites, sacred spaces, and arenas that challenge the limits of sacrifice and faith,’4 it is to be appreciated as a work of art possessing a truly integrating power and the large potential to speak even to those who would never visit a museum. As such an intellectually stimulating and socially integrating concept ARK is at the forefront of contemporary Jewish art, navigating its way toward the future.

3. B. Jenkins, ‘Melissa Shiff’s Ark/Archa’, Curator. The Museum Journal, vol. 50, no. 3 (July 2007), p. 355-357. 4. Ibid. R ETURN TO THE FUTURE: THE ROLE OF VISUAL ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM 81

Figure 1. Interior of the Late Gothic/Early Renaissance Pinkas Synagogue, turned into a memorial to the victims of the Shoah in the 1950s Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague. 82 MICHAELA SIDENBERG

Figure 2. Detailed view of the names of nearly 80,000 Bohemian and Moravian Jews covering the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue The inscriptions are arranged in alphabetical order and sorted by communities and families. The memorial was conceived by art historian and first post-war director of the Jewish Museum in Prague, Hana Volavkova (1904-1985), who commissioned two Czech artists, Jiri John (1923-1972) and Vaclav Bostik (1913-2005), to undertake the work. It is rightly considered to be one of the first conceptual environments ever created in the history of art. The original inscriptions from the period of 1954-1958 were destroyed by poor maintenance during the communist regime. The present condition is the result of a reconstruction undertaken by the Jewish Museum in Prague in the 1990s. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague. R ETURN TO THE FUTURE: THE ROLE OF VISUAL ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM 83

Figure 3. Interior of the Spanish Synagogue built by architect Ignatz Ullmann in 1868 Reflecting the fictitious Occident/Orient fantasies of the period of the Jewish national revival, the decoration of the walls dates back to the last two decades of the 19th century. The pattern unifies the environment in which the history of Jewish emancipation is featured in images and texts. Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague. 84 MICHAELA SIDENBERG

Figure 4. Interior of the Spanish Synagogue – a detailed view of the arabesque variations on the vaulting Courtesy of the Jewish Museum in Prague. R ETURN TO THE FUTURE: THE ROLE OF VISUAL ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM 85

Figure 5. In the Beginning: Aleph A still of Melissa Shiff’s ARK capturing one of the first sequences of the 30-minute video where letters of the Hebrew alphabet appear and allude to the Kabbalistic concept of the creation of the world. Courtesy of Melissa Shiff. 86 MICHAELA SIDENBERG

Figure 6. Swimming through Time A still of Melissa Shiff’s ARK showing the sequence with animated silver fish-shaped ritual spice boxes from the collection of the Jewish Museum in Prague. Courtesy of Melissa Shiff. R ETURN TO THE FUTURE: THE ROLE OF VISUAL ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM 87

Figure 7. Raining Menorahs A still of Melissa Shiff’s ARK with various shapes of menorahs and other silver and brass ritual objects that fill up the space of the large-scale cinematic vitrine. Courtesy of Melissa Shiff. 88 MICHAELA SIDENBERG

Figure 8. Star I A still of Melissa Shiff’s ARK with the yellow Star of David which all Jews in the Protec- torate and had to wear as of 19 September, 1941. Illuminated western facade of the Pinkas Synagogue in the background. Courtesy of Melissa Shiff. R ETURN TO THE FUTURE: THE ROLE OF VISUAL ART IN THE CONTEMPORARY JEWISH MUSEUM 89

Figure 9. Star II A still of Melissa Shiff’s ARK with the symbol of communist oppression marking the 1968/5762 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. The star is an important recurrent motif in ARK’s video narrative. This picture captures a paradoxical moment in which the five- pointed red star with the hammer and sickle is juxtaposed with the six-pointed Star of David over the western gate of the Pinkas Synagogue. Courtesy of Melissa Shiff.

Figure 10. Salvaged Shofars A still of Melissa Shiff’s ARK against the backdrop of the illuminated Pinkas Synagogue. ARK is filled with a black and white photograph of shofars from the abolished Jewish congregations in the Protectorate. Courtesy of Melissa Shiff.