Anti-Semitism and Brokenness and then, mending to survive
Looking at Brokenness
Breaking
The act of breaking serves several purposes.
Breaking to extract the essence of what is useful or important
Breaking to control destiny
Breaking to demonstrate power
Breaking as an action to reconstruct time and memory
Breaking as loss of control
Breaking to gain control
Breaking as sacrifice
Broken
Shards and ostraca
The destruction of perfectionism
The evidence of damage
Shattered memory
Relic of trauma, age, and history
Victim of circumstance
Deconstruction of purpose, useless
Breaker
Why make chaos and damage?
To make self evident
Fatalistic/determinism vs free will
To usurp nature- age and decay
Control damage from others
Reordering pre-existing damages
Destroying old order
Chaos
Disarray and in transition
mess/ relic of traumatic event
Between useful and uselessness
Between beauty and ugliness
Time stands still
Repair
Envisioning possibility and renewal
Empowerment of recreation
Rebirth
Scars as power, evidence of damage
Survival
Re-emergence from sacrifice
Victory as regeneration
Becoming Unbroken
Collaboration as Practice
I am interested in visual conversations with artists and friends who may not be artists. For years, I have played with the surrealist’s “Exquisite Corpse” methodology of collaborative assemblage. This is an approach I have used in the studio and in the classroom to break down self-conciousness and rigidity in art practice. In my own work I will create partial ideas- sketches and fragments that I return to for another go. This process initiates possibilities in imagery and concepts.
My Australian friend and collaborator, Pamela Irving came to Chicago at the beginning of October to run some art workshops at The Chicago Mosaic School. It was her first visit since November of 2019, when we had our second collaborative exhibition at SOFA Chicago, called Savage Liaisons. She and I work incredibly well together - we are the same age, same professional trajectories and studio practices and both of us respect and adore each other. When we are together, all we want to do is draw and bounce theories, books drawings and ideas off of one another.
We discussed how collage is adjacent to some practices within contemporary mosaic which led us to do abput 18 collaborative artworks. These are collage ( newspaper magazines notebooks etc), drawing, painting, etc. Our intention is to continue to construct/react/deconstruct/react with some of these pieces- moving them from 2-D collage to sculptural dimensional mosaic works.
A third collaboration took place with one of these works. My son Judah, a Brooklyn musician who has been practicing his passion for paper collage created a show poster from one of the Pamela/Karen pieces. I love how these pieces, when there is an agreement between the collaborators, continue to transform and change.
RANT.
The newest world disorder is personal.
Yes, Israel has been governmentally, politically problematic and extreme and I have my thoughts and ideas and frustration about it. But here’s a loaded word: JEW.
Can Jew be separated from Israel? From Zionism? Palestinians are separate from Hamas, yes?
Why does my DNA identify me as a JEW if it is only a religion?
When there is a targeted slaughter of JEWS, why is there justification for it from the world?
I feel, in my bones and blood, my ancestors shaking their heads as history repeats itself.
The spread of misinformation, fake news, social media has bring the ugliness and hatred into my home, my work and my family. I see the words, the memes, the vitriol of fellow friends and artists I considered compassionate, now wishing destruction of Israel, for all jews to die and suffer, for all israelis to move to the US where they belong- because the suffering of jews is different than the suffering of other human beings- it is somehow deserved.
This horrible situation in Israel/Gaza is complicated and requires perspective and knowledge not knee jerk memes. Jews are a people broken over and over again, survivors that recompose themselves through strength and resiliency. The idea of Israel was a mosaic- a collection of jews and muslims to live and share and thrive space in a historically sacred space. Sharing space. What kind of fucking hippie bullshit idealism do I subscribe to?
In the past 2 years, I have been organizing an exhibition in Tel Aviv with Israeli and Palestinian artists that consider their practice to be mosaic. The show is/was called- InterConnected. I curated the works with assistance from organizers in Israel and Chicago; work from Chicago, Europe, Japan, and Australia was sent over last month. I was scheduled to present the exhibition with a gallery discussion as well as a critique of the works with the artists. I was going to teach two workshops on creative process, practice and mosaic called “Embracing the Broken”. It is broken.
Although my family and friends told me there was no way I was going to go in 5 weeks, that it would be impossible things would be resolved, I did not want to be the facilitator of the cancellation. Through the texts of my Israeli collaborators, they still expressing hope and needed something normal, something positive in the future to cling to. After 10 days, my flights to Tel Aviv were cancelled by the airlines. I waited to correspond, hoping there would be a Plan B.
The organizers understood the plans of this show, the workshops and all the beauty and compassion it was built around, could not happen in December of this year. Yet, instead of cancellation, they have POSTPONED the plans- shifting and adjusting to remain hopeful, to survive.