Giving Voice to Hagar

Note to Museum Visitors: If you watch this music video while at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), please use earphones so as to not disturb other visitors.

Just before launching into the world premiere of her gorgeous new song “The Arrow and the Bow,” commissioned by the CJM in connection with its exhibition Jacques Lipchitz: Hagar in the Desert, musician Alicia Jo Rabins invoked the young inter-disciplinary muse Miranda July: “Limitations are where art begins.”

In the case of Rabins’ song about Hagar, as well as the musical commentaries on biblical women from her band’s albums Girls in Trouble (2009) and Half You Half Me (2011), our limited access to the inner lives of these ancient women creates an artistic opportunity to radically re-imagine their psyches without departing from the confines of the texts.

There is a name for this bounded creativity within Jewish tradition, and it’s called midrash–a strategy employed by ancient rabbinic commentaries desperate to understand the ambiguities of characters and events in the Bible. Contemporary midrash, looser and broader than its rabbinical model, has been energized by women inspired to reclaim the agency and contributions of biblical heroines, some of whom are almost unknown today. Rabins pushes the practice even further by couching her interpretive poetry in the musical language of pop, rock, punk and country.

After the CJM concert on November 17, 2011, Rabins joked that when she played at underground rock clubs, creating hypnotic violin and vocal loops in echo-y basements, no one cared about the words. And when she played at Jewish institutions, where the biblically-inspired lyrics were the main event, few asked about the melodies. Hopefully CJM listeners will come to Rabins’ work appreciating her genius at both.

Listen to a podcast interview with Alicia Jo Rabins.

Picasso is My Rabbi

There are moments when art and religion come together perfectly. This happened to me recently, after returning from the wonderful Picasso show at the de Young Museum, all tanked up on the cubist view of the world. Picasso: Masterpieces from the Musée National Picasso, Paris foregrounds the autobiographical dimension of his work, which is appropriate since Picasso held onto this collection until he died, expressing as it did something essential about his vision of the world. Curator Timothy Bugard in the audio guide, describes Picasso’s understanding of art as a kind of magic, with the artist—through the hocus pocus of oil, pencil or metal—creating life out of inert objects.

Watching the Flowers of Friendship Fade

Gertrude Stein was creative not only in her writing but also in establishing and defining her relationships. Her social circle was forever fluctuating; associations changing often with the exception of her life-time partner, Alice B. Toklas. The women enjoyed the company of artists, literati and their wives at their Saturday night salons. Wanting to establish the couple at the heart of the art movement, Gertrude transforms their relationship into a mythical status when she writes as Alice, “[N]ow I will tell you how two Americans happened to be in the heart of an art movement of which the outside world knew nothing about” (Stein 26). While their presence and contributions cannot be questioned, one can question their sensitivity. Gertrude told Ernest Hemingway that he must quit journalism to become a proper writer. This sounds a little callous coming from a woman with a trust fund. However, not having to work allowed Gertrude the freedom to write, pose, and purchase art. In doing this, she created and established her legacy to literature and the art world.

An Artist Responds to Charlotte Salomon’s Life? or Theatre?

Musician Rykarda Parasol reflects on her father's past, art, and immortality.

Faced with the Nazi invasion of Poland, my grandparents made a heart-wrenching decision in 1943 to hand over my father to relative strangers in the hope that he might live. He was only six years old, suddenly parentless, and he faced physical danger day and night. His survival had been no sure bet. My grandparents must have understood that their end was coming and that my father’s life was the only slim hope of extension. Such risks, to me, were not only acts of protection, but also acts of defiance and survival—ways that Jews could passively continue on. I can imagine my grandparents thinking like Charlotte Salomon, “Keep this safe. It is my whole life.” Our births, our children, are a testament to our existence. We were there, in beauty and in struggle, and that is not something, no matter how many millions gone, can be denied.

Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein: Mona Lisa of the Twentieth Century

by Renate Stendhal, Ph.D., author of Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures.

Walking through Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, I noticed that the show is just like Gertrude Stein herself: sumptuous, good-humored, highly intelligent, brainy and eccentric, sophisticated and unpretentious all at the same time.