Aliza Olmert’s Eggshells
March 17th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
Aliza Olmert’s (wife of the Israeli PM) photographs are on exhibit in “Tikkun” at the Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art through April 30.
[The Philadelphia Inquirer]
I covered the show for the Jewish Press just about two years ago when it was at HUC in New York, but since the review does not appear online, I am pasting it here:
Repairing Tikkun Olam
By Menachem Wecker
Aliza Olmert: Tikkun
February 14 - June 30, 2005
Hebrew Union College Museum
One West 4th Street, New York
HUC
The question is a very postmodern one—what happens when your tools no longer work, or reveal themselves to have never functioned at all. Take “Tikkun Olam,” or the notion of good deeds as cosmological mending apparatuses. What happens when the very conception of mending itself falls—like Humpty Dumpty—off the proverbial wall: can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put Tikkun Olam together again?
That Humpty Dumpty doubles as a postmodern linguist aside from his profession as liable wall sitter ought not to surprise readers familiar with Lewis Carroll’s sequel to “Alice in Wonderland” called “Through the Looking Glass.” Alice engages Humpty Dumpty in a philological debate, wherein Humpty meditates, “‘When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.’” Alice is not easily intimidated; after all, she has spoken with a rabbit late for an important date, dealt with shrinking and bloating pills that tempt “Eat Me” and encountered a whole slew of surreal marvels that would send Dali reeling. “‘The question is…whether you can make words mean so many different things,’” she charges, to which the large egg counters in grandiose deconstructionist fashion, “‘The question is…which is to be master—that’s all.’” Alice then calls upon Humpty to explain the enigmatic Jabberwocky poem, but we leave Alice to her own devices and instead borrow Humpty.
Aliza Olmert’s current exhibition, “Tikkun” mercilessly attacks the eggshell—if not Humpty, at very least a blood-relative—pricking him with safety pins, tying him up with wires and exposing his empty innards. Olmert conducts this exploration in the name of Tikkun Olam, which derives from a verse in a prayer that many attribute to Joshua, “Aleinu/V’al Kein.” The verse states, “to perfect (l’takkein) the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty,” and “l’takkein” stems from the root “Tikkun,” to fix. In the conception of Sixteenth Century Kabalist Isaac Luria, God retracted (tzimtzum) His divine sparks (nitzotzot) into containment shells (sefirot) so as to create the world, and the role of the righteous is to liberate the sparks by breaking the shells (shvirat ha’keilim). The entire Kabalistic device is thus one of restoration or Tikkun, and many mitnagdim later adopted and expanded the concept of Tikkun Olam to include all sorts of humanitarian service that seeks to perfect the world.
These proponents of Tikkun Olam persist despite Qoheleth’s (1:15) recording, “That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.” How can we justify repairing the world when the “wisest of men” echoes the claim that all the king’s horses and men can hardly put it together again?
Clearly, this discourse necessitates a reevaluation of Tikkun Olam, and luckily, Olmert has already weighed in. Olmert writes of her assemblages—all of which feature eggshells from a nearby Jerusalem food bakery, each shell manipulated in different ways with different props—as suggesting “options for a renewed ordering of realities,” and in her essay in the catalog, Hana Kofler writes of Olmert’s pieces as “attempting to develop a system of defense against further breakage.”
This model of preventing further breakage surfaces in “Ubu Enchained,” where Nineteenth Century Absurdist writer Alfred Jarry plants his Pa Ubu character saying, “We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.” Olmert effectively commits a similar deconstructionist act by taking apart the eggs and then “fixing” them. She fixes them in imperfect fashion though, which recalls Rabbi Tarfon’s statement in “Ethics of the Fathers” (2:16), “It is not your responsibility to complete the work, but neither are you free to dodge it either.”
Olmert’s first “Untitled, 2004” (all her pieces are untitled, 2004, so I have arbitrarily numbered them) shows an eggshell held together by a safety pin. The eggshell reads as a portrait—the two ends of the pin could be eyes and the gap below, a mouth—and Olmert places it off center towards the bottom of the page, which lends the egg a sinking feeling. A red stamp in Hebrew characters on the right side of the eggshell betrays the egg’s Israeli origin, and the black background recalls renaissance painters, Cranach’s and Botticelli’s use of black backgrounds to heighten the foreground objects, much like a spotlight. The image carries violence within it, with the sharp metal piercing through the eggshell, and yet the metal is almost a decorative adornment like an earring.
This duality of broken, but somewhat repaired, beautiful and delicate, yet pierced and sharp surfaces in Olmert’s second “Untitled, 2004,” which shows eleven (visible) eggshells on a plate, reinforced by sculpted wire. In all Olmert’s pieces, the egg is a very evocative symbol, referencing gender and maternal content in the secular realm. It also carries particularly Jewish ritual symbolism, as curator Laura Kruger points out in the catalog: eggs are eaten during the Passover Seder and with ashes on the Ninth of Av, and eggs are used as the measurement “about an egg size” (k’baytza) used to quantitatively appraise various legal objects. The assemblage has drained the eggshells on the plate of their symbolism—they are, after all, empty shells—and yet clearly Olmert has made an effort to reinforce them and prevent further damage, as Kofler observed.
Similarly, the third “Untitled, 2004”—which shows quite a number of smashed eggs tied with rubber wiring—is beautiful precisely because it is so destroyed. Like the beautiful yet prickly rose, the smashed eggshells draw the viewer in with their delicateness and nuance, and though they appear haphazardly placed, like Louise Nevelson’s “junk” sculptures that appear random but really hide a careful, brilliant underlying structure, the eggshell arrangement is deceptively simple and humble.
Olmert told me that her interest in eggshells derives from their “colour, texture, fragility… to them being trivial, worthless, empty containers.” This recalls the riddle Bilbo asks Gollum in “The Hobbit”: “A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.” The egg, of course has a box that is useless, but inside, the golden yoke resides. Olmert challenges this by removing the yoke, and it takes tremendous chutzpah to defy something as fundamental as Tikkun Olam. Yet, exposure of the innards shows Tikkun Olam to be hollow in a way. No matter how stable and shiny the eggshell seems, the innards are gone.
This work is not heretical though. It is the great irony of postmodernism that with the understanding that what we previously held as stable turns out rickety at best, we can actually now contextualize the object of our inquiry and rebuild its foundation on more honest and stable ground. Aliza Olmert told me that she is conscious of the tendency to affiliate her work with Jewish fate, but that “It’s not related to any Jewish content, neither religiously nor historically. Existential and ecological contents are often on my mind.” In my mind, though, the work is quite Jewish in its efforts to lend an aesthetic foundation to the critique and subsequent resurrection of Tikkun Olam. And even if Humpty Dumpty cannot be put together again, both Qoheleth and the proponents of Tikkun Olam can consider themselves satisfied, because tough the work can hardly be completed, the blockades against further collapse—the safety pins, wire, tubing and other assorted glues—approach a temporary and partial support system.