Thoroughly Modern Moishe
Langue d'Oy! and Langue d'OK Part II
Review
Modern-ish: Yonia Fain and the Art History of Yiddishland. A project with artist Yevgeniy Fiks. The James Gallery, The James Gallery at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street., Thursday, September 14, 2023 through Friday, December 8, 2023 First Floor (A collaboration of the Yiddishland Museum of Modern Art and the James Gallery. Curated by Katherine Carl. https://centerforthehumanities.org/james-gallery/exhibitions/modern-ish-yonia-fain-and-the-art-history-of-yiddishland. Tuesday-Friday 12-6pm.
Access: Free and relaxed.
And the sea's all around them and they swim unto themselves
singing weialala leia wallala leialala
We are travelers
The waters shift beneath us and the sun slips in our handsAnd they stand beneath the waters and they ask us what is water and we ask them what is land We've been borne here we have always held our home To be stepping over a broken sea.
Zrinka Stahuljak is the world's topmost fixerologist. She doesn't get much competition. Stahuljak teaches French at UCLA, but she was once a translator in Agfhanistan. Or a fixer, because she feels what she and others did went way beyond translating, in fact she thinks the fixer (or rather, le fixeur) is a social category all its own, a function rather than a profession. Not only does she theorize (boy, does she theorize) individual fixers but also fixer nations, sociopolitical entities that operate across and against national definitions, as well as fixer languages like Lingua Franca, a composite language widely spoken among fixers and merchants throughout the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages.
In true French fashion Stahuljak has little room for the historic roots of the phenomenon she explores, which go back to the Roman Empire.1 The only Jews that concern her are those she uses for theoretical backup, especially Walter Benjamin in his essay “The Task of the Translator,” along with parallel essays by Jacques Derrida and Antoine Berman, all three Jews. And you’d think the Jewishness of either three would be a factor of their fascination with translating — fixing, if you like:
„Dennoch könnte diejenige Übersetzung, welche vermitteln will, nichts vermitteln als die Mitteilung.“2
Which may be translated, “Therefore any particular translation that tries to mediate can mediate nothing but mediation itself.” There is a pun (untranslatable of course) between vermitteln, “to act as ago-between,” and mitteilung, to share. As with the fixer, the translating agent (be it a language or a culture or a cultural production) is irrefrangible: it can neither be dispensed with, nor can its component parts be absorbed into its functions like chemical agents that dissolve in the process of a reaction.
Dissolve or disperse? This conceptual conflict hovers over Modern-ish, not so much an exhibit devoted to an artist as a fraction of a wider project, The Yiddishland Pavilion, which debuted at the 2022 Venice Biennale. Co-curated by Maria Veits and Yevgeniy Fiks, Yiddishland consisted and consists and continues to consist of a series of performances, activities, workshops and exhibits centered on the concept of Yiddishland, or, as the curators put it, “Yiddish and Jewish discourse in contemporary artistic practice.” A number of events are planned along with the main event at the James Gallery, a retrospective of the paintings and writings of Yonya Fain.
Dispersive. Fain was born in Ukraine in 1914; fled with his father to Warsaw, then to Vilna, Hong Kong and Japan, then Mexico, to end up teaching at Hofstra on Long Island. He died in 2013. His wanderings provide the curators with a metaphor of the decentered nature of Yiddishland:
It’s a metaphor imposed on the whole project from the outset, and one wonders how cohesive. As one naïve critic observed of the The Yiddishland Pavilion in Venice,
Those looking to discover Yiddishland as a physical exhibition site in Venice will therefore be disappointed. Instead, Yiddishland at the Venice Biennale is a porous and generative project that threads itself through various pavilions, while subtly undermining the national logic of the biennale. Yiddishland can be found in alternative platforms consisting of both virtual projects and temporary performances and events, which operate as unauthorized artistic interventions among the Biennale’s traditional brick-and-mortar national pavilions.3
So, nu? The observation is just as true of the Venice Biennale as a whole, which is known for its decentered nature, a set of “expanding and interlocking circles of cultural production” which, beside the Central Pavilion and national pavilions, embraces “private exhibitions in permanent or temporary spaces […] and beyond that a considerable number of guerrilla actions by independent artists or collectives.”4 As the press release for Modern-ish informs us, “Modern-ish forges a ‘Yiddish art history’ that transcends and upends the borders of nation-states,” but these borders have long been upended in the field of Art as elsewhere, and the name of that upending is Modernity itself, a dispersion that has affected twentieth-century Jews in a new, tragic form.
In his brilliant analysis of Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman writes:
“The permanent and irremedial homelessness of the Jews was an integral part of their identity, virtually from the beginning of their history.”
However, writes Bauman, in the Middle Ages and Early Modern period Jews lived and thrived “in the void between the state and society”— in other terms, as potential fixers. Only with the advent of Modernity and the modern concept of the Nation, was their fate sealed:
“Hitler believed that having no territorial state, the Jews could not participate in the universal power-struggle in its ordinary form of a war aimed at land conquest, and thus had to reach instead for indecent, surreptitious and underhanded methods.”5
This is akin to saying, whatever agency the Jews had been granted within the confines of the Diaspora, with the coming of Modernism they found themselves with no agency as Jews. They could no longer move like fixers between nations and languages. Those in-between spaces, in the new order of Modernity, had been abolished. This is what Stephen Beller calls the “heads we win tails you lose bargain with modernity.” To become truly modern, Thoroughly Modern Moishe must give up his Jewish particularisms.6 But by the same token, by giving up his particularisms he ceases to be a Jew. As the German hyper-nationalist Heinrich Leo warned,
“The Jewish nation stands out conspicuously among all other nations of this world in that it possesses a truly corroding and decomposing mind. [...] The Jews, from the very beginning until this very day, have transmuted everything that fell into the orbit of their spiritual activity into an abstract generality.”7
The “abstract generality” of which Leo warned was the “corrosion” of modernity itself. It’s a fear that many Establishment Jews have taken up themselves: that Jews who adopt those universal values that are above nation or tribe will cease to be Jews.
Nevertheless—this is the importance of Stahuljak—they do not cease being fixers for all that. Hitler certainly thought so, for whom the Jews are morally depraved and parasitic because they are without a nation — the same argument Zionists were making even before Hitler came to power. Moreover, the Führer’s explanation for the Jew’s “depraved” state was, that being without a nation they were unable to exercise power except through cunning and guile. In other terms: as fixers.8
At first glance, Modernish seems to have sidestepped these questions. To quote the exhibition’s web page:
“The exhibition Modern-ish traces a new path for modern art history… Modern-ish acknowledges that the lives of often unclaimed and overlooked migrant artists who inhabited multiple nations and languages were indeed key drivers of modernism,” etc.
Except, a distinction needs to be drawn between a Jewish artist who paints in a universalist, therefore a modernist style — say, Chaïm Soutine or Mark Rothko — and a modernist style that reflects Jewish values and style. The former is banal from an art historian’s point of view. At best it’s biographical and tells us nothing of the work itself, at worst it sends us back to those good old times, oh, maybe twenty years ago, when the “canon” in Art History was whatever was provided in the college slide library, because nothing else was available: a lazy adjunct’s idea of what constitutes Art History, or an MFA dropout in a Bushwick bar, which amounts to the same thing.
The latter option —“a modernist style that reflects Jewish values and style”— sounds like an oxymoron, since Modernity, as Beller suggests, demands the total dissolution of all particularisms, whether Jewish, American, or Korean. Fain’s work would seem to confirm this. It looks no different from so much American Art of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies.
Some of it might seem outright derivative, a kiss of death if you intend to demonstrate that Yiddish modernism was a “driver” of trends and styles instead of being determined by them:
Pay close attention. It’s usual to assume that Benjamin, in his essay, refers to translation in the prosaic sense of translating from one language to another. Benjamin in fact begins by defining translation as that which addresses an artwork or an art form [Kunstwerk and Kunstform]. Clearly, he has in mind a process closer to the Early Modern paragone, the attempt to translate the sensual qualities inherent to one form into another. Benjamin will have none of this. The very act of translating, he suggests, is a unique discursive enterprise, independent of what is being translated. Benjamin suggests that the process of verbalizing in itself is at loggerheads with the belief in form as pure communication that is a foundation of Modernism in Art.
Likewise, the lynchpin of Fain’s work is not the art itself, it’s the process of translating that art into Yiddish poetry. That’s the process on view in Yiddishland, the true heart of the show:
As the Moroccan modernist Abdelfattah Kilito put it, « Je parle toutes les langues, mais en Arabe », which either means “I speak all languages, only in Arabic,” or “I speak all languages, but as an Arab,” both interpretations are valid in French though I can’t vouch for Arabic. At any rate Kilito’s statement is recontextualized from a statement by a Yiddish speaker as reported by Franz Kafka, a Jew from Prague who wrote in German. So, too, for Fain, translate: “I speak all languages, but as a Jew.” There is no essence, only function. A job for The Fixer.
WOID XXIII-29b
October 29, 2023
Part 2 of 3
Part 1: “Crazy Zionist Grampa”
Part 3: “The Year of Magical Thinking”
Zrinka Stahuljak, Les Fixeurs au Moyen Age : Histoire et littérature connectées (Paris: Seuil, 2020). ; « Conférencier invité. Les fixeurs au Moyen Âge, » Collège de France ; https://www.college-de-france.fr/agenda/conferencier-invite/les-fixeurs-au-moyen-age ; accessed October 20, 2023; see also Paul J. Achtemeier, I, Peter. A Commentary on First Peter (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1996), passim.
Walter Benjamin, „Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers“, Gesammelte Schriften Bd. IV/1 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), p. 9
Chelsea Haines, “At the Venice Biennale, a Border-Defying Yiddishland Pavilion,” Hyperallergic (July10, 2022; https://hyperallergic.com/746238/venice-biennale-yiddishland-pavilion/ ; accessed October 23, 2023.
Paul Werner, “Debt in Venice,” WOID XXI-37 (June 10, 2017); http://theorangepress.com/woid/woid21/woidxxi37.html; accessed October 23, 2023.
Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 35, 51, 35.
Steven Beller, Antisemitism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 33.
Bauman, op. cit., p. 55.
Bauman, p. 35.