When I go abroad, I like to see art. Usually, something with presence and gravitas, as you might find at Washington’s National Gallery – a museum in which I once spent a precious 3.7 minutes with children before being asked by a guard, firmly but not unkindly, to leave. He was right. We were disrupting the quiet, spiritual serenity of taking in Great Art. A museum like that is a temple. The emotions swell, and sometimes, tears threaten.
Subtle, well thought-out modern art has a different set of effects. Even for an uneducated amateur like me, it can hit you deep in the gut and keep your thoughts back in the gallery long after your eyes have readjusted to the glare outside. Last week I found myself in the contemporary section of Hamburg’s Kunsthalle to see an exquisite exhibit entitled “Lost Places”. It was, really, a psychological thriller.
A lot of contemporary art uses what might be described as explicit, closed expressions of intertextuality to get the mind’s wheels turning. One type includes works that are sub-divided into different components and then given to develop certain, suggestive connections between the various parts. A work that has stayed with me from “Lost Places” is a video installation by Israeli artist, Omer Fast. Like some of his other pieces, Nostalgia I-III (2009) performs this sort of intertextuality remarkably well. The three sections of the installation had videos going simultaneously with surprising and unexpected connections. Here is the way the museum’s curator describes the piece, followed by a clip (until 3:00) that because of the limitations of the medium cannot do much justice:
Omer Fast (*1972, Jerusalem / Israel) explores the shifting meanings of places and the resultant unravelling of apparent certainties. A key stylistic device in his films and video works is the interview, which – as a seemingly realistic format – holds the promise of authenticity, but is invariably staged with actors. The three-parts of Fast’s video installation Nostalgia I-III (2009) are linked by the motif of a trap: in Nostalgia I (first room) we see a gamekeeper attempting to construct a trap using bent branches. Nostalgia II (second room, 2 monitors) shows a conversation between two actors in an office of the immigration authorities, whereby the issue of building a trap also becomes the pivotal point of the narrative. Nostalgia III (cinematic projection) is a 30-minute feature film in which the current geopolitical constellation has been inverted: in this scenario, Africa is the only safe place left in the world. Europeans try to enter an unnamed African country through a system of tunnels and repeatedly find themselves in situations where they are trapped and subject to the arbitrary practices of the police and other authorities. The multiple narrative levels of Fast’s Nostalgia deconstruct the apparent objectivity of history, nationality, justice and injustice.
For many, ‘explicit intertextuality’ is really no intertextuality at all, since intertextuality is a framework for understanding the complex and non-explicit relationship between widely disparate ‘texts’ realized synchronically. As Daniel Boyarin noted in Intertextuality and the Reading of Midrash, ‘sources and traditions’ approaches cannot really be understood as employing a method of intertextuality. There are also problems with thinking about intertextuality when its realization is confined to a limited canon, like rabbinic literature, or especially to a single work of art. Instead, in works like Fast’s installation, the effect of the interconnections must be to remind viewers that the carefully curated intertextuality of the piece simply reflects the intertextuality of the everyday – or if you are religious, God’s intertextuality.
Regardless of what we’ll call them, theoretical methods that seriously probe the intersections between various parts of rabbinic literature on an intertextual axis can be nicely related to some of these expressions of contemporary art. Last year, I mused about how the redaction of the Bavli and its relationship to the culture that produced it can be illuminated by YouTube’s Life in a Day. Now, it occurs to me that Life in a Day‘s canvass is far too wide and overpopulated. Maybe its worth thinking about the redaction of the Bavli and its suggestive juxtapositions along the lines of a contemporary video installation like Fast’s, which take place within a single space. Within the confines of a tractate or pereq, the Talmud has multiple screens going, which you view when you walk into different ‘rooms’ or see things from different angles. The videos on the screens frequently intersect despite apparently broadcasting separate films. If you’ve joined daf yomi and have followed the tides of some of the early aggadot in the first chapter of Berakhot, you can see this with certain reocurrences, like the tangible presence of night and its various articulations. Reoccurrence however, is not merely restatement, and when one text is read in light of the other, sparks fly. The flip-side, of course, is that maybe like in Fast’s Nostalgia, the illuminations are little more than a trap. But that too is an illumination.
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The Clock is a much better example than a day in life as it reflects through an order (time) a century of expression of the nature of life not through a reality but through a specific group (filmakers) vision of the way things are/should be.
http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/exhibitions/current/details/christian-marclay-the-clock-3408
An honor to have you comment on the Talmud Blog’s (unfortunate) forays into film. As I admitted in my Life in a Day post, I am a Talmudist who has seen a few good films. No more – though I always want to learn more. I will definitely have to go see ‘The Clock’ . If I understood you correctly, ‘The Clock’ does not attempt the fiction that a ‘Life in a Day’ does – to somehow ‘capture’ reality as it is.
Yes but filtered through the vision of a special class of observers the film makers. And at each moment you may see silent era communicating with Hollywood musical communicating with American Noir and Post War Italian around a specific time of day.
Shai, fascinating observations. My question would be how conscious a process are we talking about in the Talmudic case, how consciously are they trying to achieve the effects towards which the filmmaker is working? The next question would be first, how can we know one way or another, and, second, what would the answer say about what intentionality is, or isn’t.
This really gets to the heart of the matter. The more fancifully-souled (like me), tend to see connections among redacted material that dyed-in-the-wool philologists simply cannot accept. I do not claim that I have hit upon 100% redactional intent, but I wonder if the talmudic text was constructed in such a way to specifically allow its audience to produce some of the connections. That is, can we speak of ‘writerly’ intent in the Talmud?
‘Writerlyness’ seems to be a big part of what contemporary art revels in. Fast wants the audience to draw the links and connections – and surely not only the ones that he, as the producer of the artifact, intended. Now the question becomes whether historically speaking, a work like the c. 600 CE Talmud could have possibly intended to produce such a (post?)modern cultural artifact? If we think of it not as a digest put together by a committee of intent-minded redactors (a la Justinian); rather as a cultural reality that more organically emerged from Babylonian Jewry took on textual form, just maybe. But these are, currently, the fuzziest of thoughts relegated to the comments section of a blog.
Please forgive me if the observations that follow are common knowledge among full time students of Talmud, but may I press the intertextual connections in these early pages of Berakhot a bit farther? Back in 5b we learn how difficult it is even for the pious sages to live up to their belief that there can be punishments of love–a wonderful example of the Talmud’s moral realism. What stands in the way of accepting their punishments as such? Surely one element is the very human “love of one’s own” that makes us stand high in our own regard, as hinted at in the exchange between Rabbi Yohanan and Rabbi Elazar. Rabbi Yohanan offers his student rather cold comfort until he is reminded of his own mortality. This appeal to his love of his own moves him to tears, and it is only then that he offers Rabbi Elazar his hand. Here, love of one’s own arouses compassion. But at 17a-b we see a different possibility. The warning against sectarianism is prefaced by a garden variety disagreement about the meaning of a passage from Psalms, one strand of which acknowledges the suffering of Torah leaders. And yet here and in the passage that follows, we multiply opinions with a meta-disagreement about who is disagreeing. The persistence of such “stubborn-hearted” disagreements (not so unfamiliar to the academy today) is surely another consequence of the love of one’s own. Little wonder then that here we find the suggestion (itself disputed, of course) that the world is sustained only by God’s charity. . .or perhaps by Hanina ben Dosa and his almost inhuman ability to overcome the love of his own.
A terrific post, Shai to which I’d append a couple of thoughts. The first is that a lot of contemporary thought and theory is now non-narrative. It probably goes back to Deleuze. Another thought is that the Deleuzian notion of an “assemblage” might be very helpful here in thinking through redaction questions. An assemblage is an assembling of heterogenous parts, the organizaiton of which is motored not be necessery linkages between parts as much as by pure process. I’ve posted about Deleuze at “jewishphilosophyplace,” and also about the artist Sarah Sze whose works work like Deleuze.
Yes, Deleuze does seem like the key. Thanks for the cross post and the kind words. Ill be reading you even more carefully.
Reblogged this on jewish philosophy place and commented:
An excellent post from Talmud Blog relating to contemporary art and Talmud redaction. The Omer Fast video clip is very good. Talmud Blog should keep going to look at contemporary art!
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