Fractured Epics: The Paintings of Joel Silverstein
An Interview with Richard McBee
I have known Joel Silverstein for more than 20 years. We share many ideas about the creation and nature of contemporary Jewish Art, as well as a commitment to the growing contemporary Jewish Art community, exemplified by the Jewish Art Salon. This exhibition of his recent work at the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life at Columbia/Barnard University has given me the crucial opportunity to examine the complex richness of his artwork. Silverstein continues to write, curate and create paintings that reflect a vibrant synthesis of his Brooklyn upbringing, Jewish texts (especially the Torah narratives and Midrashic commentaries) and postmodern visual sensibility; in short, a glimpse of the modern Jewish art experience. At first glance his work is obsessed with miracles: the miracle of the plagues, the miracle of the snakes, the miracle of the Golem coming alive, even the miracle of Superman who flies.
RM: What is it about the miraculous that appeals to you and draws you in?
JS: I can’t stand the limits that contemporary culture puts upon us: if the miraculous is not possible and everything is material, i.e. materialistic, then I don’t think I can live with that. So then I need to invent the miraculous, even if it doesn’t exist. I feel this is the kind of thing that you have to seek in order to find, and constructing the miraculous in art is both a good place to start and perhaps even necessary in fighting the impositions of our rationalistic culture.
It’s my belief that there is something greater than myself. There is a point where this and the imagination merge and I can’t say where that place is-- which is false and which is true? And that’s where I really groove to Jewish texts; the Hebrew Bible, traditional commentaries and more contemporary ones, Avivah Zornberg, (The Particulars of Rapture) Martin Jay, (Downcast Eyes), i.e. the point where postmodern discourse and writing, the idea of religion and God, and imagination all merge.
RM: What about the “magic of time” that seems to permeate many of your works?
JS: In the study of literary myth there is the simultaneity of time, so there is no before or after. But also in Torah study, time doesn’t exist. So they are more than similar.
RM: You have said that seeing Cecil B. de Mille’s “Ten Commandments, 1956” as a child was a theophany. A theophany?
JS: This movie colored my visual life a lot. Christianity pictures its heroes, but in Judaism there was no set iconography of Moses and as a child the visual aspect hit me hard. The de Mille Exodus narrative made a big impact on me. Charlton Heston looked like the Michelangelo sculpture. Visualizing the whole back story and the way de Mille went to Egypt to film fleshed out the biblical sensibility in a way that brought the narrative alive.
RM: The surface of almost all your artwork is distressed, rough, and broken up. Why?
JS: I have a personal love of surface. It’s just my personality…an existential dread making meaning out a chaotic surface. I love early Byzantine and early Italian altarpiece painting, now so troubled after 500 years. But it is also the modern expressionist tradition; anxiety as a form of modernity. Additionally it expresses the existential experience of living in the now, and trying to come to some kind of idea that is centered on navigating through the world, because at a certain point being in the world, like Merleau Ponty’s Phenomenology becomes a religious experience. It also makes the work feel modern in a traditional way, the way Picasso, Matisse or Soutine could actually tell a narrative in their paintings even though everyone denied they were doing so. A problem of the contemporary world and especially the contemporary Art world is the denial of particularist feeling, emotional deadness and inert irony. It comes out of the worst aspects of Warhol. It’s something that I want my work to fight against.
RM: Much of your work is concerned with the sublime.
JS: The tradition of the sublime relates to feelings of awe in confronting nature and creation. Think of a viewer before a thunderstorm or a vast mountain gorge in the landscape paintings of Cole, Bierstadt, Friedrich or even Hartley. But it’s more than that. It’s confronting man’s own limits of expression; the inability of art or language to capture, or fix anything down. In the 20th Century, we have seen these concepts applied to the Abstract Expressionists like Rothko. I am evoking a figurative sublime, but one very aware of its abstract precedents. The sublime has again becomes relevant for us, if only because it presents an aesthetic way to give us something else to talk about. I am proposing a hybridized impure sublime using cultural representations of all kinds, things both observed and imagined. I draw images from life or popular culture with no one representation seen as superior, more truthful or more relevant. A movie still of Charlton Heston can represent Moses, but so can a friend from my youth, a toy, an art historical reference, or my own self-portrait or family member. My goal is the depiction of a metaphysical reality; one where the boundaries of science, materialism and contemporary culture don’t hold sway.
RM: How does this relate to the Second Commandment and Jewish Art?
JS: I try to ditch my western Greco-Roman roots. The Second Commandment battles over images and image making raged in all the great monotheistic religions, including Judaism. This can be broken down into the people who like images (the Iconodules) the ones that destroy them (the Iconoclasts) and the ones that don’t use them at all (Aniconics). It’s not so simple to say who believed what and at what time in history they believed it. For my own artistic practice it’s important to understand the limits of symbols within a Jewish context, because I feel we live in a depleted visual world of clichés. It’s only by understanding the limits of figurative painting that we may restore its awe, the battle between making the image, breaking the image and getting rid of the image entirely.
Silverstein’s work needs to be understood as the raucous collision of the deeply personal and the frankly Biblical, a metaphor for our lives as felt and lived. The paintings and collages express a curious mystical confessional, grafting aesthetic elements with breathtaking abandon. He is determined to redefine how we look at the world, mixing historical, cultural and religious categories in truly inventive ways. He is a Jewish artist for our times.
Richard McBee is an Independent artist, critic and curator. He writes for the Jewish Press and lives in New York.