YINZ/YIDZ

A nice video from the Philip Mendlow exhibit at the American Jewish Museum.

Vanessa Hidary, a.k.a. the Hebrew Mamita, is coming to town on Thursday, from 7 to 9 p.m. — courtesy of Hillel JUC — at the Public Health Auditorium on the Pitt Campus. Hidary is a spoken word poet from New York who deals a lot with Jewish Identity. The clip above is her signature piece.

Local artist Ilene Winn-Lederer gets a nice write-up in the City Paper this week for her new book Between Heaven & Earth, which we wrote about a couple of weeks ago.

From the City Paper article:

With its vibrant depictions of brutal biblical passages, like Dinah kneeling in the blood of her vanquished rapists, Between Heaven & Earth is a fascinating introduction for Torah neophytes, and a welcome reminder for lapsed Jews.

"I wanted to do this book because when I went to shul, I was bored to death," Winn-Lederer says. "I didn't understand, couldn't fathom the language, I just didn't get it. And so I said, 'I want to come up with something that would help me learn.'"

Winn-Lederer had the fortune, (or maybe the misfortune, depending on how you look at it), to release her illustrated Torah commentary around the same time Robert Crumb released an illustrated version of Genesis.

Its interesting to see the similarities and differences between the two works. Crumb takes a very traditional approach to the text — his God is a white-bearded man holding creation in his hands. Winn-Lederer draws God as a divine presence: a golden mask — of no explicit gender or race — with nothing visible behind it. 

Both books, though, take the Rashi approach to Genesis 1, starting with "When God began to create the Heaven and Earth," and not "In the beginning, God created the Heaven and Earth."

 

Self-Portrait, 1993

David Brooks' column this morning is about two differing views of human character. The "philosopher's view" holds that each of us has a set personality that reveals itself in every situation we face. The "psychologist's view" holds that we behave differently in different contexts. Brooks uses this distinction to analyze "Where the Wild Things Are," the new film adaptation of the classic book by Maurice Sendak:

"At the beginning of the movie, young Max is torn by warring impulses he cannot control or understand. Part of him loves and depends upon his mother. But part of him rages against her.

"In the midst of turmoil, Max falls into a primitive, mythical realm with a community of Wild Things. The Wild Things contain and re-enact different pieces of his inner frenzy. One of them feels unimportant. One throws a tantrum because his love has been betrayed. They embody his different tendencies."

This idea of competing tendencies has been resonating with me this morning as I've been working on a story about the new retrospective of Philip Mendlow at the Jewish Community Center. Mendlow spent decades working and teaching in Pittsburgh, becoming very well-respected in the local arts community. As I've been asking people to describe Mendlow as a person, I've gotten an incredibly rich and contradictory list of adjective: sly, quiet, mischievous, challenging, intense, individual, reticent, prolific, incisive, introspective.

His work shows all these sides. Self-Portrait at Mirror (1960) is sly: what appears to be meaningless color and form up close is revealed to be a close-up on a pair of glasses when seen from afar. Stroke (1998) is intense: a bust carved from pine with a metal bolt under the left temple representing the medical malady of the title.

Brooks writes that the two views of personality offer differing paths to a good life. The philosopher's view requires directly attacking flaws and vices, while the psychologist's view demand a more indirect approach to match the "instincts and impulses" hidden deep within each of us. Art, Brooks writes, is one such approach:

"But it is possible to achieve momentary harmony through creative work. Max has all his Wild Things at peace when he is immersed in building a fort or when he is giving another his complete attention. This isn’t the good life through heroic self-analysis but through mundane, self-forgetting effort, and through everyday routines."

You see this in the Mendlow exhibit. Mendlow clearly used his art to understand himself. This really comes through in one section where a cluster of painted self-portraits from the 1960s sit next to a carved face of King David from 1995, which sits next to a pair of sculptures carved in the mid-1990s of the faces of Hasidic men.

Mendlow's search for meaning and understanding starts with himself, but eventually turns to more collective traditions: the communal archetype of King David, and his family heritage in the Hasidim of Eastern Europe.

Mendlow's nephew Eric Mendlow said those pieces show, "that psychological searching for the self: Who are we? What is our place in the world?"

The Squirrel Hill library is displaying a small collection of portraits by Jean Bergad. They have a charming quality to them. Unfortunately, the camera picked up a lot of glare from the glass frames.

• Mary Thomas at the P-G looks at a retrospective of Pittsburgh artist Henry Koerner showing at Chatham University. Our reporter Toby Tabachnick covered the exhibit this week. For Thomas, the exhibits shows how Koerner used his life and surroundings as a back-door to discussing his experiences during the Holocaust. 

In that context, the seemingly arbitrary -- at times menacing -- associations Koerner paints more realistically reflect true social structures. Idealized normalcy is the actual invention, the gloss over the turbulence that erupts in egregious purges of and by cultural groups.

• Manny Theiner writes in the Post-Gazette about the music and politics of the Klezmatics, who are coming to town this weekend. He asks whether they see themselves as being among other far-left Jewish bands:

Where do The Klezmatics fall in the mad Chomskyite rush toward the ultra-left? "The band does not and never will have a party line, which is against our nature," explains London. "Each has his or her own beliefs. [We are] about openness, inclusion, human rights, dignity and support for those who struggle. We don't give a damn who we [anger], Jewish or otherwise, as long as we stay true to our ideals.