Jewish Folktales Retold: Artist as Maggid (review)

In creating an exhibition, curators must strike a careful balance as they bring together disparate works of art in order to tell a larger story without overly determining the shape of that story. The recent exhibition Jewish Folktales Retold: Artist as Maggidfeatures works in a wide range of forms, including sculpture, video, photography, and painting, and puts them in dialogue with the Jewish folktale (images available at folktales.thecjm.org/). In an essay that accompanied this exhibition, curator Pierre-François Galpin notes, "As curators, we usually leave the inspiration to the artists in a way that respects their creative independence freed of any restriction. But, for this exhibition, we did choose a given constraint—only one—that the artists we invited to submit proposals would be inspired by one or more Jewish folktale" (folktales.thecjm.org/galpin). According to cocurator Renny Pritkin, the exhibition aims to explore whether "fantastic stories conjured for another time and place" can be reinterpreted by contemporary visual artists through "entirely new manifestations and ways of knowing that relate to our time and place" (folktales.thecjm.org/rp-essay). The curators chose as their source text Harold Schwartz's anthology of Jewish folktales Leaves from the Garden of Eden(1983), which includes stories from North Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.

A central focus of this exhibition is the figure of the artist as a modern-day maggid, the itinerant Jewish storyteller/preacher of yore. Like the maggid, the artists whose works appear in this exhibition act as transmitters rather than producers of stories. As Gabriella Safran points out in her essay for the exhibit, the maggid plays a decisive role in determining which stories will live on and which will be censored "out of existence" (folktales.thecjm.org/safran-essay). The artists featured here have each selected a particular tale or set of tales, and their responses aim to breathe new life into them. But the artists in this exhibition were commissioned not simply to retell these stories, but to respond to and reinterpret them. As Pritkin points out, the artists in this exhibit tend to choose one of three strategies in their responses: for some, the art is an illustration that elucidates the story, others choose certain elements around which to create their art, whereas still others use the story as a springboard. Not surprisingly, works produced according to this latter strategy sometimes feel quite distant from the sources but also tend to offer the most profound and compelling interpretations.

Mike Rothfield's It Is Tomorrow We Bury Here Today(2017) was inspired by two different tales in which characters are magically transported through portals into alternate spaces. Rothfield's sculpture is a cave large enough for visitors to walk through. Something grotesque about this sculpture with its organic form and metallic hues seems to call out to visitors, in a shrill but empty voice, entrez vous!It's hard to resist the call of this big unsightly thing, and so, enter, we do, only to find ourselves, seconds later, emerging on the other side into the very same space we thought we had left behind. The work thus pushes back against the folktale's promise of a portal as escape through its suggestion that there is nowhere to go, nowhere but here.

Elisabeth Higgins O'Connor's set of sculptures blame/thirstand lullaby lamentconsists of two larger-than-life animal-like creatures and was inspired by the golem story, in which a supernatural creature is formed from clay and brought to life through kabbalistic magic to protect the Jewish community. Like Rothfield's work, O'Connor's does not aim to translate or illustrate the story. Using multiple media, including bedsheets, lace curtains, table linens, Styrofoam, and lumber, O'Connor concocts something utterly unique. Her sculptures epitomize the uncanny—from sheer size to their dynamic stance, which imbues them with a sense of aliveness. As Sigmund Freud tells us, the great uncanniness of the uncanny is in...