Glimpses of Jewish Culture worldwide

By Edward J. Sozanski

Art Critic

Philadelphia Inquirer

October 7, 2004

More than 25 years ago, French photographer Frederic Brenner set himself a monumental task: to document the length and breadth of the 2,000-year-old Jewish diaspora.

Since 1978 he has photographed Jewish communities all over the world, from China and Uzbekistan to Ethiopia and the United States. The project became a book, Diaspora: Homelands in Exile, published last year by HarperCollins, and an exhibition that has come to the galleries at the Gershman Y.

The show contains 41 black-and-white photos, most of them posed, of Jews working in factories, selling papal souvenirs in Rome, and cutting hair in Tajikistan. The photo of Jewish barbers with their Muslim clients is one of the more striking images in the show.

Brenner's photographs, mostly portraits, are unremarkable aesthetically and even journalistically. Absent extensive labels, the viewer would be hard-pressed to guess their subjects.

That's because Diaspora really needs to be a book. Without descriptive text, photos alone can't communicate the full social, economic and religious ramifications of Jewish emigration.

Particularly, one is hard-pressed to decide whether the photos show to what extent Jews have become assimilated in the various countries where they live in numbers, or how successfully they have preserved Jewish culture around the globe.

The most moving image in the show involves a bizarre situation - Polish Catholics in the town of Tykocin, where Jews were exterminated by the Germans in World War II, enacting a Purim skit in costume.

After one learns that the town is not far from the Treblinka death camp, the photo seems even stranger, more poignant, and more mysterious.

Clash of cultures. Yinka Shonibare, a British artist of Nigerian ancestry, has earned an international reputation by examining the fallout of colonialism as it affects colonizers as well as the colonized.
The African art exhibition that opened last weekend at the Philadelphia Museum of Art includes a prime example of the way he dramatizes the collision of European and African cultures: a sculptural tableau of four family figures dressed in Victorian-style garments made of colorful African cloth.

Shonibare's solo exhibition at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, where the aforementioned Nuclear Family was shown in 2001, contains two variations on this concept.

The most fantastical is Space Walk, two space-suited astronauts hanging from the ceiling whose richly colored suits are adorned with text and photographs from 1970s record albums.

While Nuclear Family is slyly but pointedly ironic, Space Walk carries the idea into the realm of non sequitur.

Pedagogy Boy/Boy is more accessible. Two headless male mannequins sit at a school desk wearing Victorian clothes make from Kente cloth, and high-topped shoes. The piece strikes its cross-cultural target squarely.

So does a sequence of a dozen black-and-white photos that re-create scenes from the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray, with Shonibare as the black protagonist.

Here the distinction between the two cultures, British exploiters and African exploited, becomes inverted as the artist assumes the persona of the oppressor. This helps the viewer to recognize one of the movie's themes, that moral rectitude should never be subordinated to superficial appearance.

Fabric Workshop and Museum, 1315 Cherry St. 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays. Through Nov. 6. 215-568-1111 or www.fabricworkshopandmuseum.org.

Off the turnip truck. Nick D'Angelo didn't just fall off the turnip truck. In his lexicon, that means he's not stupid. It also means he believes that trucks carrying turnips spread stupidity. If they do, why do his paintings make turnips seem so adorable?

There are five turnip-truck paintings in D'Angelo's exhibition at the Rodger LaPelle Galleries, along with other equally wry images that tweak American culture and its populist icons.

For instance, A Few Bricks Shy refers to the folk saying that describes dim-witted people. The painting is, like most of those in the show, a still-life - of a trowel and three bricks, one of which is a little short of fullness.

Initially, one doesn't notice D'Angelo's oils for their content but for their precise rendering and near-monochrome look. Each is nearly all white, with gray shadows. Each includes one brightly colored element that jumps out of the frame as if on springs.

One wonders, is this gypsum whiteness just a gimmick, or symbolic of some deeper meaning? Eventually I gave up looking for gnomic insights. The paintings are imaginative and amusing. If the monochrome is a gimmick, it succeeds.

Rodger LaPelle Galleries, 122 N. Third St. noon to 6 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Through Oct. 31. 215-592-0232 or www.artnet.com/lapelle.html.

Larger than life. The neoclassical Founder's Hall at Girard College is an imposing building by any measure, but particularly in scale.

Recognizing that, Philadelphia sculptor Tristin Lowe created an installation for the building in which the key elements are super-sized. His Fe Fi Fo Fum brings together childhood and adult achievement in dramatic fashion.

Two huge inflatable figures, a blue Cyclops and a pink elephant, symbolize the boarding school's young students.

A giant folding chair of wood and canvas stands for the world of civic virtue and achievement, which in turn alludes to philanthropist Stephen Girard, the rags-to-riches 19th-century banker and businessman whose bequest created the school.

The symbolic contrast runs even to structure. The figures are insubstantial balloons kept erect by fans, while the chair is a solid, imposing object that appears capable of lasting for generations.

The two halves of the piece suggest youthful exuberance resisting mature authority, but in a suitably lighthearted way.

Girard Avenue at Corinthian Street. Noon to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. Through Oct. 15. 215-787-2680.
Contact art critic Edward J. Sozanski at 215-854-5595 or esozanski@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/edwardsozanski