by Susan Weinberg
We've sent off our traveling companions and are feeling a bit sad to no longer have their company. Some are off to visit family, many flew back in the early hours of the morning to the United States. It was a remarkable trip in terms of both the artists that we met and because of our wonderful group of fellow travelers.
For those who would like to explore a trip similar to ours, I wanted to share our itinerary and the resource people who helped us put this together.
The inspiration for many of our stops came from lab members and discussions we had in the lab over the past few years. The dinner in Jaffa in the dark, the graffiti tour and the work of David Moss were all discussed within the lab. We also had some wonderful unexpected surprises through prior contacts of the organizers. Rabbi Davis had previously hosted Rabbi Noah Greenberg in Minneapolis and his shtender project with David Moss proved to be an unanticipated delight. When something seems to work effortlessly you can be sure a lot of wise planning preceded it. That planning was handled by Meryll Page, Robyn Awend, Rabbi Alexander Davis and our wonderful Anat Szendro who was one of our early facilitators who returned to her home in Israel to welcome us there. Many of our artists participated in telling our story through this blog. I got a reprieve from my usual blog writing, but was responsible for coordinating the effort to capture everything here. We spoke often of seeing through someone else's eyes and the blog is a reflection of that effort.
Our tour was done through Shatour Israel Experience Ltd. with the able assistance of Nathan and Hanna Shapiro. Shatour is located at15 Even Shmuel; Jerusalem 9723484. You can reach them by phone at 02 586 5267 or email at shatour@netvision.net.il
Monday, March 21, 2016
Posting about Posters
March 22, 2016 by Suzanne FentonWhile part of our lab is traveling in Israel, the rest of the lab participants are keeping the wheels turning in Minneapolis.
We kicked off our session by viewing posters for Jewish and non-Jewish exhibitions to see the many ways they canprovide the necessary exhibit information to bring people in. The posters covered a wide range of ideas and themes and it was interesting to see the different stories they told.
A real crowd-pleaser was a poster promoting a Jewish film festival. The image of two black unrolled films danglingdown like corkscrew curls looked just like “paote” (orthodox man curls) and was brilliant in its simplicity. In contrast, the image of a menorah with train tracks cutting through it for “keeping the memory alive” was extremely disturbing and powerful.
There were some highly graphic ones with spectacular typography, different perspectives/depth, positive and negative space, multiple layers and foreign languages that for the most part conveyed the necessary information in order to attend an event; Title, who, where, and when. We viewed posters that gave too much information like the bus you need to take to get there and that the gallery is located just above McDonalds and then there were some that didn’t provide enough. Most tried to tell a story but a few were lost in translation so were not sure what the story was.
Two things we learned during our discussion: Blue is the color that really sells and white POPS.
The slide show presentation highlighted the myriad options we have to consider when making our own posters for the Voices Of Wisdom exhibit. We spent the remainder of the session sketching, painting, and collaborating on posters and will continue to work on them at home. Anita shared her “reflective” poster with the group for feedback and got a thumbs-up.
Posted with BlogsyTuesday, March 8, 2016
The Shadow of God
We have discussed many kinds of wisdom thus far, but perhaps the kind most relevant to us as artists is that exhibited by Bezalel, the creator of the Tabernacle. As this is the parsha for this week, Exodus 31, we took a closer look at the kind of wisdom possessed by Bezalel, known for his wide range of artistic talents. Rabbi Davis distributed the text (Bezalel text 1 and 2, print and place side by side) surrounded by the commentaries of Rashi, Nahmanides and Ibn Ezra. With the guidance of the Sages we began to examine the wisdom required by Bezalel in this daunting task for which he was drafted. Let's listen in.
Rashi speaking from 11th century France considers the source of wisdom and asserts that it is what one learns from others. We then bring understanding to it by considering what we've learned. Knowledge comes from God alone - divine inspiration.
Ibn Ezra chimes in from the 13th century and considers the fact that Bezalel understood a wide range of subjects, "mathematics, biology, physics and metaphysics far beyond anyone else of his generation". He introduces a little bit of the brain science of his time noting that Hokhmah, or calculation (per Arab philosophers) resides in the back part of the brain, Tevunah, introspection, in the middle and Da'at, imagination, in the front of the brain. He goes on to note that while someone may possess great wisdom that doesn't mean they can apply it in creation as did Bezalel.
Nahmanides (Rambam) also pipes up from the 13th century to add his kvelling about Bezalel noting that he was skilled in all crafts, but also possessed the "wisdom to understand the mystery of the Tabernacle and its furnishings and everything that they symbolized". He notes that the Sages attributed to Bezalel the knowledge of the combination of letters by which the heavens and earth were created. The Tabernacle was a microcosm of the universe and the knowledge to construct it represented an understanding of its mysteries. Nahmanides attributes Bezalel's skill to a gift from God, a miracle, as the Israelites were ground down by their work with bricks and mortar and knew nothing about working with gold, silver and precious stones.
Rabbi Davis raised an interesting question. What Egypt places a constraint on our work? How do we move from narrowness to breadth? Many of us noted the need to engage in process with less focus on an end point to free ourselves. Egypt pays the bills and many artists work at less creative jobs, still trying to find time and energy to create. The suggestion was made that we need to look at what our learnings are from creative work that we can carry over to our less inspiring, but remunerative tasks, and vice-versa. It was also suggested that we need to view our engagement with creating within a broader arc of time. Perhaps we need to fail now to succeed later.
After the Sages said their piece we were invited to contribute our thoughts on the qualities that would have been required by Bezalel to be successful in this endeavor. So here are our job requirements: Patience, skilled in all crafts, artistic vision, motivational skills, a good team leader with the ability to collaborate, flexibility when things go wrong, imagination and the ability to grapple with the requirements of the commission, a good listener who is detail oriented and not a quitter.
Rabbi Davis also directed our attention to an excerpt from the book The Particulars of Rapture by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. This handout (Zornberg) presents the commentary of Haamek Davar who posits that we are drawn to our God given talents although we may require years to master our gifts.
Zornberg explores the meaning of the name Bezalel which translates to One Who is in the Shadow of God, a fitting name as we are created in God's image. Each of us is a little bit of Bezalel and the question is how we take these qualities into the creation of our art and our world.
The second part of our session was split between artists Rochelle Woldorsky and Judy Snitzer. Rochelle introduced us to work that relies heavily on text. She composed an excellent slideshow that included work by Jenny Holzer, Lawrence Weiner, Fischel & Wiess, Ben Shahn, Banksy, Joseph Beuys, San Francisco street art and work from the Voices and Visions project. You can find the slideshow here. This work includes many truisms and statements that
are quite thought-provoking. In keeping with the theme of wisdom within truisms, Rochelle and Sylvia Horwitz offered us a treat of fortune cookies that they had created for our benefit. Mine noted this advice from the natural world "Imagine what we would achieve if we had the spider's determination".
This proved to be an appropriate introduction to Judy's exploration (titled Donkey) of another creature of the natural world, the donkey. She noted that donkeys are often a symbol of wisdom in Jewish text. Her exploration took us back to the first Jewish king, Saul, who begins his transformation into a king with a search for donkeys. There are also many stories of the arrival of the Messiah on a donkey. The word itself comes from a root of the word for material, suggesting perhaps that we need to work with the material we're given.Thus concludes yet another wide ranging session exploring the wisdom that our world offers.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
The Many Sides of Wisdom
2/23/2016 by Susan Weinberg Wisdom has often been personified by King Solomon, so much so that he was known as Solomon the Wise. For our session this evening we took a closer look at Solomon throughout his life to identify the qualities of wisdom that were associated with him. Meryll Page had prepared handouts that looked at different aspects of Solomon's wisdom and added a dose of imagination to give him voice. You can find the handouts (Solomon the Wise - many views) that contain the passages that we referenced and a brief summary follows. We also identified the part of the body that governs each kind of wisdom, not always what one might expect.
A Rabbinic View
Rabbinic teaching credits Solomon with writing Song of Songs in his youth, Proverbs in middle age and Ecclesiastes towards the end of his life. When given the choice by God to select what he wished, Solomon chose wisdom, knowing all else would then come. His choice is perhaps an evidence of wisdom even prior to his "God-given" gift. The mouth governs the rabbinic view.
Wisdom in Love
Song of Song and selections from Kings I present a wisdom that love is more than a physical act, it is poetry. Solomon recognizes the power of words to women. Of course he had a fair amount of practice with 700 wives and 300 concubines. The intestines and liver (kishkes) govern love.
Wisdom Through Architecture and Construction
The passage on the building of the first temple presented a different kind of wisdom. Solomon collaborated with others in the building of the temple and valued the wisdom of skilled workers in their creative work. The hands govern the arts and architecture.
The Wisest of Kings
Excerpts from Kings I and Proverbs informed the passage on governing. Solomon had requested of God a wise and discerning mind. He governed strategically and with foresight, relying on alliances and collaborations. He advocated for owning up to mistakes and noted that wisdom does not mean that one is perfect, more on this later. Ruling is not relegated to one aspect of the body, in fact it required all of his awareness, morality and perhaps most importantly his fear of God that he notes as the beginning of knowledge.
Reflections of the Philosopher King
Ecclesiastes is the passage attributed to Solomon in his later years. His body was weakening, his mind still strong. He was waxing philosophically realizing that the end was approaching, advocating for taking pleasure in the joys of living, eating bread and wine, finding happiness with the woman you love. The heart is not the seat of love, but rather the seat of wisdom and hence the home for the philosopher.
A Shunned Prophet's View
This passage examines Solomon's behavior against the standards set in Deuteronomy 17:16-20 and finds him wanting. A good time to remind you that Solomon noted that Wisdom is not perfection, perhaps with good cause. The kidneys are the seat of our conscience.
While Solomon is granted wisdom by God, it is a gift to which he needs to be attentive. By the end of his life he has squandered it by losing his fear of God (1 Kings 11:1-12). The Rabbinic view is that his wisdom grew as he aged, writing Ecclesiastes (the Koheleth) in his old age. We like our heroes without clay feet so this may have been a bit of reputation management. In his lifetime Solomon grew the kingdom and built the Temple, but he also lost the kingdom for his people ultimately by worshiping idols in his later years.
The second part of our session was devoted to some design concepts led by MCAD professor Jan Jancourt. One of our upcoming projects will be to work on posters around our exhibition. In preparation for that Jan presented basic design strategies and concepts. He shared a variety of posters with us dating back to the 1800s where we could observe the different movements and occasional throwbacks.
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| Art Nouveau 1899 |
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| 1849 |
Some design sensibilities were specific to a given industry and carried forward within that industry. The introduction of photography began to change graphic design. Often there was a technique known as outlining that removed the distracting background from an image to focus on the aspect to which the artist wished to direct your attention.
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| Saul Bass 1955 |
We talked at length about the Saul Bass poster on the Otto Preminger film, Anatomy of a Murder, where each body part is divided as well as the poster.
Jan noted that the term "concord" addresses what kinds of things look like other things, an echo of a concept in this poster and the opposite of contrast.
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| Polish - Tadeuz Trepkowski 1952 (Nie means wedge) |
We discussed the use of illustration used by European designers after the war and Swiss typography, also known as international style, which was reflected in a 1964 poster right. The concepts of less is more and form follows function are reflected in this simplified style.
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| Swiss -1964 |
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| San Francisco style |
We also examined more current examples from Nike and Target to look at where design is heading. Jan reminded us that Gertrude Stein once said that anything truly new will be ugly. Designers are creating for the future.
For the entire slide show click here.
While a whirlwind of information, the presentation captured the evolution over time of a number of different styles including Classicism, Modernism and Minimalism.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
Text as Texture
2/9/2016 by Susan WeinbergOur session today was led by Hillel Smith, an LA based artist, currently in a show with Toni Dachis at The Tychman Shapiro Gallery that employs text in unusual ways. Our lab theme also built on the use of text, exploring how it adds texture and meaning to artwork. Smith uses text in art as part of the art itself. He raised the question of whether it needs to be legible in art and argued the case that when it is hard to read it forces the viewer to engage with it, to work to understand. Even when we are unable to draw meaning from the words they create texture. When it is illegible or in another language we respond to the rhythm and strokes.
Hillel shared a number of his pieces as well as those by other artists who make use of text. (see presentation) Among some of the projects that he shared was a joint effort with Itamar Palogue that used calligraphic brushstrokes that evoked Hebrew, but were not actually Hebrew.
The work that illustrates each artists' body of work actually melds together text and image often with text morphing into image (Slides 23, 24). The practice of melding text and image has a long history. It often made use of Arabic as illustrated by the Wazir Khan Mosque (slide 25) and is employed in early printed bibles (slide 26). Microcalligraphy has developed out of this tradition. It uses tiny Hebrew letters to form a design that may be representational, geometric or abstract.
Some artists who make use of text in their artwork include Keturah Davis (slide 28) who creates images out of text and Marian Bantjes (slide 32) who hides words within image. Michael Beirut (slide 30) took the approach of deconstruction by taking the Saks Fifth Avenue logo and deconstructing the text into a graphic now used on their shopping bags. While text is the medium, there are many ways that artists have worked with it, distorting, overlapping, repeating and deconstructing represent just a few.
We moved into a brief exercise where we were asked to use text in this manner. You can see some of the efforts below.
For the second part of our session Rosyle Ultan and Sharon Stillman presented a talk on the complementary topic of Wisdom in Word and Image. Rosyle shared text and poetry from the Kabbalah and other sources that she felt evoked wisdom. (See handout, Wisdom in Word and Image) Some thought provoking questions were proposed that examined the role wisdom played in the creative process. The small group discussions were introduced by this wonderful quote from Picasso.
“What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who only has eyes, if he is a painter, or ears if he is a musician, or a lyre in every chamber of his heart if he is a poet, or even, if he is a boxer, just his muscles? Far from it: at the same time he is also a political being, constantly aware of the heartbreaking, passionate, or delightful things that happen in the world, shaping himself completely in their image. How could it be possible to feel no interest in other people, and with a cool indifference to detach yourself from the very life which they bring to you so abundantly? No, painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war.”
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
The Intersection of Humor, Wisdom and Jewishness
Jewish humor permeates American culture. From the Marx Brothers to Woody Allen to Jon Stewart, Jews have left their mark on what we consider funny. Tonight we gathered in the Tychman Shapiro Gallery in the LOL show, a show devoted to humor. The theme of humor permeates the JCC with the presence of the Jewish Humor Fest through the end of January.
This is of necessity a visual exploration so let me share a few excerpts from the show and the responses they generated. Kate McDonough captured what many of us thought of as Jewish humor in her grouping of four cartoons.We asked ourselves why we considered it humorous. Quite simply it made us laugh. We liked the contradictions in language in the one above and identified with the personality she depicted. The wisdom we found it in was self-awareness and a certain self-deprecating approach to that awareness.
We felt that the self-deprecating approach was very typical of Jewish humor. Humor is used as a defense against what we find challenging personally. And as Woody Allen frequently illustrates, worry and a touch of the neurotic are not alien to many of us. The drawing on the right captures that sense of otherness that many Jews carry within them.
Debra Fisher Goldstein's brightly colored photos of the Minnesota State Fair drew our attention with their interesting visual humor. They are real-time, feel-good, joyous images. While McDonough's artwork is personal and captures a sense of solitude, Goldstein's is social and focuses on an event we call the Great Minnesota Get-Together. How could we be any more social than that?Here humor was captured by the incongruity of nuns munching on an ear of corn or the echo of the cone in the shape of the young man's hair. The wisdom is that of daily life and the artwork makes use of visual puns.
We were especially intrigued with the work by Toni Dachis composed of layered chunks of newspaper to spell out a familiar joke. There is a sense that something may be buried within. By reinventing the familiar in an unexpected way, she allows us to see it through fresh eyes. In fact we proposed that humor lives in the familiar. Too esoteric won't do, we need to recognize the familiar before we can appreciate the twist.And what could be more Jewish than reading. We conjured up images of old grandfathers reading the newspaper.
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| Rochelle Woldorsky sketch |
For the second part of our session we turned to text, The Wise Men of Chelm (see handout-The Wise Men of Chelm). For this you will need to take a minute and read the stories. The Wise Men of Chelm share the humor of the schlemiel. Laurel and Hardy grew out of this tradition. It is the trickster story where insight may be found from a non-conventional approach. Again we find self-deprecating humor. Even when the characters appear foolish they are treated with kindness and gentleness.We concluded that the wisdom is that there is always hope. The stories arose during a time when life was difficult and laughter was the way out, laughter that was shared as they all saw through the same glasses, an image captured by one of our artists. (For more stories on the Wise Men of Chelm)
Tuesday, January 12, 2016
Fail Better
January 12, 2016 by Susan Weinberg
We began our session of the Artists' Lab with a discussion appropriate to this election season. Rabbi Davis posed the question "What do we look for in a leader?" Some of our responses reflected a reaction to what we see in today's public arena. A leader should embrace everyone, we replied. Being divisive is not leadership. Leading with one's ego is not leadership. Then we began to dig deeper and replied that a leader considers the big picture, bringing foresight and the ability to listen. They can break things down to decisions that are small but meaningful. They bring integrity. What we look for may vary a bit depending upon what they are to lead. A president or a spiritual leader may have somewhat different attributes, but many of the traits we noted are true of all effective leaders.
With that introduction we shifted to a handout (The Crown of...) with an excerpt from the Talmud that explores the idea of ranking. A very structured system of precedence was introduced. One of the more surprising aspects of it was a passage that noted a scholar or sage takes precedence over a king of Israel as he is less replaceable than a king. If a king of Israel dies, all of Israel is eligible for kingship, quite a radical concept. The Mishnah that follows this passage lays out some further ranking, but concludes with these words "If the mamzer (bastard) is a sage and the high priest is an ignoramus, the mamzer who is a sage supersedes the high priest who is an ignoramus."
R. Joseph Soloveitchik of Yeshiva University explains that our leader is not the king or warrior, but the Torah scholar, a teacher-king. It is a reminder that wisdom, not power guides the community.
We concluded this portion of our session with the idea that the crown of a good name is superior to the crown of Torah, priesthood or kingship. A good name is derived from our place within the larger community and underscores our responsibility to do good.
The second half of our session was led by your blog author Susan Weinberg and Rony Szliefer. Our focus was on failure and how it can lead to wisdom. We began with a little brainstorming. "What words do you associate with failure?" I asked.
"Mistake, anxiety, disappointing someone else," you replied. Several thought of failure in more factual terms - not meeting an objective in the allotted time, missing the mark. A few offered a more optimistic take with words such as opportunity and experimentation. "What do we call a person who fails?" I asked. "A loser" was the prompt reply offered in unison. You added that a loser is one who exhibits a lack of effort, is non-productive and self-doubting.
I then asked about the word success which interestingly elicited many more words associated with feelings - ambition, pride, surprise, elation, rewards and satisfaction. I began to wonder if it was harder to discuss the difficult feelings associated with failure than the pleasurable ones associated with success.
The word failure is derived from the Latin verb fallere and originally meant "deceive", but developed to mean to "deceive someone's hopes, disappoint someone".
The dictionary offers a rather depressing perspective on failure offering up such words as fiasco, debacle, catastrophe, disaster, flop, washout and snafu. No optimism there.
We shifted to a discussion of our experience with failure. I shared a personal story which you can find on my personal blog in the entry titled The Guise of Failure. There you will find my ruminations on this topic as I prepared for this session. Several attendees shared stories of failures including job failures, personal failures and artistic failures. All created feelings of dismay and uneasiness.The artistic failure involved cancelling a project when that inner muse failed to show up. Perhaps that is artistic integrity some suggested, not wanting to do less than your best. Is there such a thing as artistic failure? Not creating was suggested as an example. And yet artwork often has to emerge in its own time, the muse doesn't always show up on our schedule. Liba wisely suggested we need to think more about process than end result.
We then explored how religious texts address topics of failure and humility (handout). Hasidic wisdom says "Every descent is for the sake of a future ascent" and Solomon the Wise noted that "the Tzadik falls and stands seven times".
Within Proverbs there is quite a bit about not being "wise in one's own eyes", not being too full of oneself. Humility is closely associated with wisdom and the wise person learns from the "reproof of life" as expressed in Proverbs 15:31 "The ear that hearkeneth to the reproof of life abideth among the wise."
In more modern times Samuel Beckett echoed Solomon the Wise with "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better."
Some of our most innovative companies have a culture that embraces failure. This philosophy is at the core of many of 3M's successes from Post-it notes to Scotch tape. Often a failure for the initial objective proves to be a success for a problem yet to be identified. Now that's a culture of failing better.
Rony worked with us to explore our relationship to failure and how it can get in the way of wisdom. He noted that often a perceived failure is followed up with a resolution to never do that again, "that" being the source of our anxiety. We act out of fear of the discomfort associated with failure.
He asked a telling question, "How many welcome failure?" No one volunteered for the welcoming committee. Even those of us who speak of failure as an opportunity tend to shift to that mode when we are making the best of what we perceive as a bad deal, trying to find some meaning in a failure that arrived uninvited. Welcome it? I don't think so.
Rony asked about the experience of failure and now the feeling words emerged -sorrow, discontent, anxiety, embarrassment, shame, obsessiveness, emotional churning. Failure clearly affects us emotionally and discomforts us deeply.
He raised the question of when do we first experience those feelings and pointed out that young children do not have that fear of failure. Our fear of failure arises from the desire to not experience those feelings again.
In closing he pointed out that earlier in our sessions we talked about how wisdom is related to awe which is only possible in the presence of the unknown. Thus it is that our fear of failure often hampers our ability to explore the unknown and in fact limits our ability to embrace wisdom.
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