Deflationary tactics with the archive of life: contemporary Jewish art and popular culture

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses art works by Suzanne Treister, Deborah Kass and Doug Fishbone. It considers the importance of their work for contemporary Jewish identity within the terms of wider conceptual questions that preoccupy contemporary art. These concerns are challenging the perceived structures of power, the “performance” of subjectivity and the questioning of authenticity. A deflationary aesthetic is central to the critique of these structures of thinking fuelled by an interest in the relationship between Jewish subjectivity and popular culture that underpins all of these art works. I argue that popular culture plays a key role as a constituting factor in the production of contemporary Anglophone subjectivity. I use the case studies to develop the argument in the three artists’ specificities and the way they all question the idea of authenticity as a stable source of self-understanding. Suzanne Treister questions history and our relationship with historical events, specifically the Holocaust. She also explores questions of the relationship between structures of power and narratives of history. Debora Kass considers the representation of Jewish women, power and iconicity. Doug Fishbone, a younger artist, takes on self-hate as a transformative tool and as a motif that destabilizes Jewishness as a category, especially in an age of the accelerated post-internet-derived subjectivity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Rachel Garfield is Associate Professor of Fine Art at the University of Reading. She is an artist who also writes on contemporary and modern art, as well as popular culture. She exhibits regularly most recently Unsensed, group show at the Hatton gallery, Newcastle (2015) and 100 for 100: Ben Uri – Past, Present and Future, Christies, London (2016). Recent publications include, Screen Journal, Dossier: Stephen Dwoskin, Vol. 57, Issue 1, Spring 2016 (co-editor with Alison Butler); “Playing with History: Negotiating Subjectivity in Contemporary Lens Based Art.” Routledge, Handbook for Contemporary Jewish Cultures, eds., Nadia Valman, Laurence Roth, Routledge, 2014, and she is under contract to IB Tauris for the single authored book, AV Punk: Women, Experimental Film and a Punk Aesthetic (2017).

Notes

1. A few key texts are Greenberg (1939), Drucker (2006) and Adorno (2001).

2. Curtis and Padjakowska (1995).

3. Jack Rosenthal's plays are popular in that they were commissioned and broadcast to a wide audience through the populist medium of television. This does not preclude serious intent. See Garfield (2016) for an analysis of the work of Rosenthal in relation to British Jewish Masculinity. See also Sue Vice (2009) for the definitive work on Rosenthal.

4. See, for example, Garfield (2016).

5. After Jacques Lacan.

6. I’m thinking here of artists such as Andy Warhol or Larry Rivers in the U.S. context or Damien Hurst or Tracey Emin in the U.K. context, who instead of hiding their provenance as working class and infiltrating the Oxbridge set and changing their accents (or the U.S. equivalent), held on to their working-class identities. The prevalence of “mockney” also attests to the importance of popular culture and its perceived working-class roots.

7. Bryan Cheyette wrote about the bifurcated position of Jews in British culture (1997, 106–126).

8. He states, for example, that a camera is an archive producing machine (Enwezor 2008, 12).

9. Passing is when a member of a minority group can and does hide their minority status, merging into the majority community, historically this is a term that applied mostly to the black communities. More recently the term has expanded to be used as referring to Jews, gays and other groups.

10. Bloom (2006) writes about Eleanor Antin and the elision of Jewish Identity. I discussed this in relation to Ali G in Garfield (2001).

11. Passing is when a member of a minority group can and does hide their minority status, merging into the majority community. Historically this is a term that applied mostly to the black communities, exemplified by the novel Passing by Nella Larsen (2002). More recently the term has expanded to be used as referring to Jews, gays and other groups.

12. Although of course this is more problematic than that. See Boyarin and Boyarin (1994), Azoulay (1997) and Garfield (2001).

13. Her work does not only consist of “Rosalind Brodsky.”

14. This work is a book, photographs and video that make an archive of all the street names in Germany that pertain to Jews – Judenstrasse, Judengasse, etc.

15. Wissenshaft des Judentums was a nineteenth-century movement to Westernize Jewish culture and belief through rationalist analysis of its tenets and literature.

16. This assumption that Jews are from Europe is itself an example of racist thinking, or at least of “Western” hegemony. Only the Ashkenazi communities are from within Europe. The very large Sephardi community are neither white nor from Europe. Boyarin (1994) also argues this, as does Azoulay (1997).

17. http://ensemble.va.com.au/tableau/suzy/diary/diary.html

18. In a similar way to The Wizard of Oz being made at the outset of the Second World War.

19. If one brackets the gender-bending aspect, as it would be too complex for this text to explore and merits its own text. These paintings are close in thesis to Daniel Boyarin's book on Jewish masculinity, Unheroic Conduct as being distinct from Christian-derived masculinity.

20. This becomes even more explicit in her series, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women (1994–1995).

21. Interview with Deborah Kass and Mary Anne Staniszweski, June 1998; quoted in Staniszweski (1998, 25).

22. Foster (2001, 132). In his analysis of Warhol's use of repetition Foster states “the Warhol repetitions not only reproduce traumatic effects; they also produce them” (340). Foster was talking particularly about the silk screens such as White Burning Car, While, he argues, the poststructuralists read Warhol as disinvesting meaning from the symbols through reiteration (and Thomas Crow argues that Warhol is outraged by the “complacent consumption” of America). Foster, through a Lacanian reading, states that the object is both de-invested and reinvested with meaning.

23. Interview with Deborah Kass by the author (2001).

24. Guy Debord of the Situationist International was a writer and film maker who developed ideas around the politics of the sign and has been very influential in much art that claims to be political in aim.

25. Panel 1: A gorilla walks into a deli in New York/Panel 2: and orders a pastrami on rye with a pickle on the side to go/Panel 3: The guy behind the counter puts the sandwich together and when its [sic] ready he says “that’ll be twelve dollars.”/Panel 4: He realizes that he's been staring and apologizes … /Panel 5: “Uh, I’m sorry sir, but to be honest with you I’ve never seen a gorilla in here before.”/Panel 6: “You keep charging twelve bucks for a sandwich,” says the gorilla, “and you never will again.”

26. For key texts on Accelerationist Subjectivity see Shaviro (2010), Noys (2014) or Mackay and Avanessian (2014).