Interview: David Kaufmann
August 15th, 2007 by Menachem Wecker
David Kaufmann is associate professor of English at George Mason University in Va. See his website here. Kaufman discussed Jewish literature and how postmodern Jewish art might look.
MW: What, if anything, does the term Jewish art mean to you? Do you think there is a such thing as Jewish art above and beyond art made by a Jew or with Jewish content?
DK: This of course is a difficult one because it leads back to the struggle over the definition of Jew and, to a lesser extent, Judaism. I do not know how to limit my view of Jewish art, beyond thinking that it is art made by Jews. But within that, I have chosen—as if I had a choice—to cast as wide a net as possible. I am particularly interested in the various ways that Yiddishkeyt gets worked out and expressed. These ways are often subterranean, secular and to some extent physical—a gesture, a cadence, a turn of affect. Sometimes they are overt.
When readers of the FORWARD write me to berate me that I am too expansive and have diluted the very nature of Judaism, I console myself by remembering that Scholem had an equally expansive view and was of course fascinated—even delighted—by the sheer energy of heresy.
MW: To what extent do you think the artistic community/communities takes art that contains blatant religious content seriously? To what extent have you found religious people to seriously consider the value of art?
DK: Over the past few years, artists and critics have shown an increased interest in religion and art and in religion in art. James Elkin’s book and Jim Hyde’s recent group show, “Faith,” in Hartford are indications of this. But no, I don’t get the sense that the artistic community (if one can speak of it in the singular) is all that interested. Given the explorations of identity and meaning that have driven so much art in the recent past, this is both odd and interesting.
I cannot speak to all religious communities. I am not sure I can even talk about the Jewish communities to which I belong in one way or another. I know that Archie Rand’s murals were taken before a Bet Din, but they withstood the challenge and Archie was vindicated. The more liberal synagogues are full of art, of course, and important artists (Motherwell et al.) have been responsible for some of it.
But let me hazard a generalization. The religious of all denominations and faiths have a hard time with High Modernism and its aftermath because they are never sure if a work is in fact sincere. The folks who attacked Serrano’s “Piss Christ” didn’t get the work at all. In fact, they never got past the title and so failed to notice that the work is very pretty. In its own way, it is theologically rather conventional. It is about Jesus’s abjection, his kenosis. “Piss Christ” is hardly the sacreligious work that some people feared it was.
MW: What are some of the greatest difficulties Jewish artists encounter
in trying to remain simultaneously true to their faith and art?
DK: Jews have never really suffered from iconophobia (in spite of the example of Soutine’s famous beating) even though 19th century German art historians claimed they have. But I think modern and contemporary Jewish artists are confronted with two real problems: acceptance (Jewish art is too particularistic) and kitsch. The first is a question of p.r., the second is one of aesthetics. Most religious art in this century—especially Jewish art—has bordered on or indulged in the sentimentality of real kitsch. Chagall provides a fine example of this tendency. It’s no coincidence, of course, that the classic modernist essay, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” was written by Clement Greenberg.
MW: Is there any such thing as a Jewish book that violates the Second Commandment? Why do you think the Bible devotes 1/10 of the commandments solely to artists?
DK: I don’t know of such a book beyond those that have been accepted as canonical. (What do you make of Ezekiel?) The proscription on graven images goes well beyond artists, of course, and though it has had an impact on Jewish visual art, it has not really presented an obstacle to it. Jewish art hasn’t always looked like “art” of course, because our inherited definitions of “art” have not been Jewish, but either pagan or Christian.
MW: What are some of your favorite Jewish books?
DK: Where to begin? I am afraid that I tend to go with the tried and true. Scholem’s THE MESSIANIC IDEA has been important to me as well as Kafka’s shorter works. (I find THE TRIAL almost too painful to read.) I came to Scholem through my work on Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno.
What I understand of assimilation owes everything to PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT and Harold Bloom’s ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE.
I have learned a lot from the books of Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin. I love Moishe-Leyb Halpern and I am interested and daunted by Louis Zukofsky and Paul Celan. The historical references of BOOK OF DANIEL are usually beyond my students, but they are almost always stunned by the luster of Doctorow’s writing. Perhaps I owe my enthusiasm for that novel to the fact that I am, as Ginsberg says, “sentimental about the Wobblies.” I come by it honestly: my father’s family were Progressivists and Yekke socialists. There were good Bundists on my mother’s side. Of course, these identifications are, like all identifications, nothing more than shiny, if psychologically important, idealizations.
MW: How did you become interested in religion and art?
DK: It might have had something to do with my own writing, or with my reading of Scholem just after graduate school. I couldn’t say. It is as if I was always interested in it, though I know that that is not actually the case.
MW: I see that you’ve written on Archie Rand. Why do you think his work
is not more widely known? You mention that his post-modernism derives from the Talmud, not Derrida (whom I believe some argue was also influenced by the Talmud). What do you respond to those who say post-modernism is opposed to the Talmudic model, because the Talmud holds dear the very things post-modernism rejects: absolute truth, uniform texts, etc?
DK: I am in no position to speak at all confidently about Talmud and so would not want to argue with your conclusion, but—and don’t all Jewish demurrals contain a “but”?—it seems to me that there has been a fair amount of French postmodernist play with the Talmud and it is not limited to Derrida. But I am a prisoner of my own tastes in this regard and they run to the ponderously Germanic. I can hardly claim expertise or anything more than a hazy opinion here.
I can discuss Archie’s work with greater confidence. His paintings were the catalyst for Norman Kleeblatt’s “Too Jewish” show in the late 1990s, though they weren’t actually included in the exhibition. That should tell us something. I suppose that his work has run into problems because its remarkably wide iconographic reach (especially his use of comic book imagery) smashes up against the intensely Jewish, sometimes cryptic subject matter of the individual paintings. So, there is something there for everyone to distrust: the religious won’t buy the images and the artistic community won’t buy the content. Too Jewish for some, not Jewish enough for others. I do wish more people outside the Jewish museum circuit took his work more seriously, though I think it’s pretty clear why they won’t or can’t. This is a pity, because he’s doing things that are very interesting.