Spiritual Androgyny in the Art of Michael Sgan-Cohen and Carole Berman

"Art has no master and follows its own truth."¹ When a time for some idea is ripe, it seems as though that idea is dispersed like spores on a breeze.

Michael Sgan-Cohen and Carole Berman, artists in different places and from different backgrounds, with no prior knowledge of each other's work, have created images that share similarities of content and process. Both use gender-ambiguous sexual imagery to explore issues of Jewish spirituality. Both artists engaged in introspective journal work and intensive scrutiny of dreams as part of their creative process. And most importantly, for each, Jewish identity, transcribed biblical words, and a connection to the land of Israel are a central point of entry for much of their work.

Given the general disregard for traditional religious themes in the contemporary art world and the anti-religious sentiment of the Israeli art scene, Michael Sgan-Cohen (1944–1999) was remarkable in his unwillingness to suppress his passion for subject matter that could have been deemed "too Jewish"² and therefore professionally hazardous.

Expressed in a lively hybrid of assemblage and conceptual art, made of humble found materials—scuffed schoolroom furniture, ubiquitous army gear, and raw canvas—Sgan-Cohen's paintings and sculptures explore politics, linguistics, philosophy, and aesthetics. But throughout, they reveal his fascination with and deep reverence for Torah texts and Jewish mystical tradition. He channeled his obsessive inclinations into his work, copying out by hand endless lines of biblical text, sometimes on large sheets of paper, sometimes directly into blanked-out columns of newspapers, so that, for example, a charged biblical drama might appear as a hand-written news column in the daily paper Haaretz, next to ads for cigarettes and soap.

Sgan-Cohen's self-portraits as Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Don Quixote, and Moses, Jacob, and Jonah are a paradoxical mix of mythic events, offered up in a style of self-abnegating "bad" painting,³ in which the artist is the heroic central character.