The Tale of the Goldsmith's Floor

ILYA SCHOR BRACELET 1958. Front and back. Silver, gold, and diamonds Approx. 6" x 1.5" Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo: J.J. Breit

Otherness Begins At Home

My sister Naomi Schor used as the frontispiece of her 1987 book Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine a black and white reproduction of the outer and inner surfaces of a silver, gold, and diamond bracelet made by our father, Ilya Schor, in 1958 and donated in that year to the Decorative Arts section of the Department of Modern Art of the Metropolitan Museum. In her introduction she wrote:

My own love of the detail—and like all loves this love is shot through with ambivalence—is inextricably bound up with my Oedipus: my father, a goldsmith, was a master of the ornamental detail, a Renaissance artist in the age of high modernism and minimalism. Now, as Nietzsche writes in a fragment of The Gay Science entitled "On the origin of scholars": "Once one has trained one's eyes to recognize in a scholarly treatise the scholar's intellectual idiosyncrasy—every scholar has one—and to catch it in the act, one will almost always behold behind this the scholar's 'pre-history,' his family, and especially their occupations and crafts." In asserting the detail's claim to aesthetic dignity and epistemological prestige, my motivation is then double: to endow with legitimacy my own brand of feminist hermeneutics, while giving value to my father's craft. (7)

Studio 79th Street 1976 Photo: Mira Schor

In this film I will continue the spirit of this brief statement by my sister and present the work of both our parents, Ilya Schor and Resia Schor, suggesting how, in those origins, issues of the gendering of the detail—but also issues of craft, of feminism, of Judaism and assimilation, tradition and modernism, history and loss—all were vivid parts of our family narrative and discourse and of its material visual practice.

My father and then my mother have worked in this room for forty-eight years. If the size and messiness of an artist's studio are commonly thought to reflect importance on the work produced in it, it is perhaps most accurate to call this room a workshop rather than a studio. It had been the "maid's room" of our upper-West Side New York apartment. In this narrow little room are two worktables, and jeweler's, engraver's, and painting tools are arranged on the shelves and walls in an orderly manner. It is a space thus doubly marked as feminine, because of its domestic associations and the secondary status of craft. But many elaborate and unusual works have been created here.

The tale of the goldsmith's floor was one of the foundational metaphors of our family: in the workshop of a goldsmith, gold dust is husbanded carefully, but it is impossible to recuperate all of it, as it sifts into cracks in the floorboards. When the goldsmith moves, the floor is burned to recover the accumulated gold mass. My father would often say that in our family, we have gold on the floor, but we don't know how to pick it up. On the one hand, that can seem like a metaphor for the disappointments and bitterness of the artist's life—something that I certainly learned as the daughter of artists and as an artist myself—but on the other hand, we lived in a house filled with treasures.

Ilya Schor Shield Late 1940's or early 1950's Oil on antique metal object Approx. 14" x 18"

On the studio door hangs a shield from the Spanish Inquisition. My father painted the tools of the goldsmith's trade over a crucifixion.

Resia Schor[reading]: "Ilya Schor, Goldsmith"

My father Ilya Schor was born...