The Role of Visual Art in the Contemporary Jewish Museum

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 Prague 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 Jews 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 synagogue, 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 historical 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, 2 social activism, or system- and bio-art. 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 Jewish Museum in Prague. 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 represent 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 synagogues and the chevrah kaddishah ceremonial hall. Items, enclosed in glass cases, are used to illustrate a detailed and rich narrative of religious, 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 alternative 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.

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