Kostianovsky courtesy of Black and White Gallery / Ukeles and
11
andel commissioned by the Jewish Museum.
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up-to-the-minute interpretations of con-
ventional Judaica, such as Karim Rashid’s
Menorahmorph,
an undulating landscape
of tutti-frutti colored silicone, and Leila
Vignelli’s ruffled silver Sabbath candle-
sticks, though they hardly seem a reinven-
tion. Talila Abraham’s
Dantela,
of stainless
steel etched to mimic lace, is intriguing in
its inversion of the ritual of covering the
matzo with a cloth at the Passover Seder.
Two works stand out as art capable of
radiating spirituality in concrete forms. One
is Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Steven N.
Handel’s
Scent Garden,
meant to enact the
havdalah ritual, marking the end of the Sab-
bath and the return to the quotidian. This
grouping of laboratory vessels filled with
spices, herbs, fragrant oils, seeds, flowers
and grasses invites participants to use all the
senses, especially the olfactory, to partake
of the natural world. The other is
Saphyr,
an omer counter by Tobi Kahn, an artist of
deep Jewish learning whose oeuvre has fo-
cused on the delineation of sacred space.
This painted wood wall sculpture, a grid set
with stonelike removable forms that is con-
tinually changing, relates to the counting of
the 49 days between Passover and Slvavuoth.
To respond to these and other works in
“Reinventing Ritual,” familiarity with Juda-
ism doesn’t hurt, though in the words of
a much-quoted ad for rye bread, “you don’t
have to be Jewish” to be moved by them.
+
The exhibition travels to the Contemporary
Jewish Museum, San Francisco, Apr. 22-
Sept. 28. The catalog is S39.95 from the
museum and yalepress.yale.edu.
Above left:
Tamara Kostianovsky
U nearthed,
2007, cloth-
ing, embroider)' thread,
metal hooks.
Above right:
Studio Armadillo:
Iiadas Kruk
and
Anat Stein
H evru ta -M ituta ,
2007,
plastic chessboard,
32 knitted skullcaps.
Below:
Mierle Laderman
Ukeles
and
Steven N.
Handel
“I'm T a lk in g to ‘Y ou ”:
A S cen t C a rden,
2009,
scientific vessels,
natural materials.
The exhibition reflects how deeply the practice o f
Judaism has been affected by recent social issues as
w ell as by a persistent Jewish concern with injustice.
fcb/mario american craft 035
www.journal-plaza.net & www.freedowns.net
