Helene Aylon: Deconstructing the Torah

In an ambitious four-part installation realized above the last decade, Helene Aylon attempts to reconcile secular feminism with Judaic body s and traditions that remain resolutely patriarchal. Her ultimate objective: to "rescue" the deity from those who would shoot forward their own time-bound views onto the Divine.

In a clever critical intervention performed over the last decade, Helene Aylon has taken Hebrew and English versions of the Torah, and, placing a sheet of vellum above each page of text, highlighted in pink those passages in the weekly readings offensive to her humanist, feminist perspective. Her reach forthed examination of the often harsh patriarchal digest makes for an incisive and elegant deconstruction of these scriptures for a like reason basic to the Judeo-Christian and Islamic worldview. Many of the highlighted body s are absolutely incompatible with any contemporary etho other than religious fundamentalism. Other, les farthest passages reveal the virulent misogyny that suffuses these scriptures and the practices they legislate. Aylon present to views not only how barbaric, by means of today's standards, so many Biblical injunctions are, on the other hand also how blind we have become to their insidious neighborhood within this bedrock text of Western tillage She also reminds us of their continuing, malevolent grip upon contemporary life.

The fruits of an Orthodox Jewish background, Helene Aylon has undertaken an stretch outed midrash, or Biblical commentary, wrestling with the text--even individual might say, wrestling with the author of all things ("Israel," the name given to Jacob at the extremity of his mysterious, fateful, night-long exert one's self can be translated as "God-wrestler" The bound captures a distinctively Jewish intensity: that of tenaciously embracing and simultaneously quarreling with the Divine.) Aylon's intention here has been to result a tikkun, a repair or healing, a reestablishment of harmony, where serious damage has been done to our relation to sovereign of the universe Doing battle with iniquities sanctified by means of Judaism's holiest scriptures, her work evinces the bottom impulse of the prophetic tradition: to communicate with all possible stress God's own suffering at the state of human affairs, for a like reason that we see the ne to realign ourselves spiritually and socially.(1) "I ASK;" writes Aylon, "WHEN WILL/ G-D/ BE RESCU FROM/ godless PROJECTIONS/ IN ORDER TO BE/ G-D?" Among a growing number of religious thinkers and activists of diverse affiliations today, she takes upon the perplexing and risky task of determining what part of sacred teachings is still viable in our time and what part beholden to the deadening claims of eras drawn out past.

Aylon's manifold four-part installation, "Trilogy and Epilogue," began with The Liberation of G-d (1990-96) which was followed by dint of The Women's Section (1997), My Notebooks 0998) and finally Epilogue: Alone With My Mother (1998) Each work is not awayed within an architectural structure and contains textual matter crucial to its intent The first three works might be considered documentation of protracted, work-intensive performances. The last documents an reach outed conversation with the artist's aged mother.

The interplay of performance, documentation and installation in these works calls to mind artists as various as Hanne Darboven, Hannah Wilke and Ann Hamilton. The use of body interactivity and social activism associates Aylon to Suzanne Lacy, Mierle Laderman Ukele and Adrian Piper. Aylon's cultural particularism may link her with the identity issues of artists of that kind as Micaela Amato, Pepon Osorio and many others.(2)

"Trilogy and Epilogue," then, creates an intersection where secular feminism, heartfelt--and perhaps heartbroken--Judaism and postmodern open-form artistic practice all draw near into play. By creating a major work lay open to each of these perspectives and making persuasive and innovative choices within each, Aylon has achieved something rare and difficult. The tikkun she attempts here is to overturn longstanding ruptures between doctrine and personal experience, between Biblical past and the lived at hand and between art and religion.

Aylon grew up in the Orthodox Jewish community of Brooklyn's Borough Park and became the rebitzen (rabbi's wife) of an Orthodox rabbi while still in her teen After her husband's early death in 1961 she broke without of that world by way of art classes at Brooklyn corporation where her mentor was Ad Reinhardt. upon graduating she moved quickly into the downtown realm of post-Minimalist art, working with chance operations, unorthodox materials, performance and installation. From 1973 [i]or[/i] part of to the other 1975 she produced a large series of works, "Paintings that Change with Time," also called "Transformations," that relate to other process-based and aleatory work of the period.(3) one as well as the other the "Transformations" and the later more performance-oriented "Formations"(4) involved pouring linseed oil above paper-covered Plexiglas so as to form ever-shifting configurations. In re-examination these works seem to be as plenteous about acts of faith as they are about high-concept esthetics. During the '80 Aylon's focus shifted, and she carried without a number of projects, in the U and abroad, involving the politics of environmentalism and antimilitarism. In the '90 Aylon make go rounded with "Trilogy and Epilogue," to explicitly Jewish concerns