Q: I was first introduced to your work with your pieces like Hartford Wash: Washing / Tracks / Maintenance when you washed the steps of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, and Sidewalk Washing outside A.I.R. Gallery in SoHo, These pieces both stemmed from your Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!, and brought values of caring from inside domestic life and projected them onto the public arena. In conceiving those pieces, were you also thinking about bringing Jewish domestic life into the public arena?
A: The Jewish sources of my thinking were really of a piece with the rest of my thinking. Jewish ideas are always part of my ideas in creating maintenance art. I intended to maintain the cleanliness of an area on the sidewalk in front of the A.I.R. Gallery on Wooster Street from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. on June 13, 1974, and said it would be “normalized” at 5:01 p.m. I made many photocopies of a quotation from Rav Kook, titled “On Holiness.” Taping these together, I set up a boundary on one side of the sidewalk and down the other end, and I also covered the doors of the gallery with this text. These papers repeating Rav Kook’s quotation became the surroundings and zone which I entered to take responsibility to make this place clean as an act of maintenance art. One part of the quote says:
“The contradictions between the holy and the profane exists only in the subjectivity of man who has not yet attained to spiritual unity and is unable, with his limited powers of understanding, to mediate between the two, In reality the main purpose in life is to raise everything that is profane to the level of the holy….. We are all coming near to Nature and Nature is coming near to us”
Q: Have you been influenced by other Jewish concepts regarding ‘work’?
A: Another source of this notion of maintenance as unity and not separation from holiness is the image of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They are not commanded to sit passively in the Garden, but to take care of it. This gave them responsibility and power. Work was not drudgery, punishment or pain. From this vantage point, we see humans created in the image of God and God as the continual maintainer of the universe. Human activity likens us to the continuing creator. The essence of the idea of maintenance art is to “reveal the hum of living from breath to breath.” The second Jewish idea connected to maintenance is the absolute opposite of the previous one. That is the idea of the strict separation between the holy and the profane. Maintenance is profane in the simplest sense, and Shabbat is seen as the escape from maintenance. Maintenance work is what must be done – this is Adam and Eve after the expulsion, maintenance becomes the punishment where one must work for survival. Work is seen as tedious and monotonous. Sabbath becomes a relief, and a glimpse of heaven that can make you free from the drudgery of work. The third Jewish concept about maintenance is the Zionist idea of working the land of Israel and keeping the land as holy or idealized labor, whether you see Zionism through a religious lens or as a secular Zionist.
All these ideas about maintenance fuelled me and gave me a kind of energy.
Q: Is your goal to bring all three ideas into your work?
A: Yes, that is the greatest challenge. But, I always need to say this; there is a tremendous amount of ambivalence in my work. A lot about work and repetitive work is limiting and drags a person down. A lot of necessary work shrinks one’s creativity. I have found that in my own work, and in any repetitive work where you have to do something, even if it came from a great starting point. With Israel, I feel there is a holiness of the land. I feel that way about the environment as well. It is our job to take care of the planet: as hard as that work is and even if at times it can pull you down, it really can elevate you as well. As you know, I have been Artist in Residence (official and unsalaried) for the NYC Department of Sanitation for 28 years.
Q: Much of your work can be termed performance art. This has been defined many ways. How would you define it?
A: As opposed to a theatrical performance, performance art is real. It is art that contests the meaning of reality. My own performances are highly structured and thought-out, but they unfold in real time where the outcome is unknown and can be changed by the viewer or spectator. I also make sculpture, video and installation art. Virtually all my works are public art as this is the area where truly everyone can be inside the picture.
Q: Can you tell me about your mikvah projects? Were they directed at a Jewish audience?
A: I have done four mikvah projects. The first, “Mikva Dreams”, had two manifestations. One was commissioned by Franklin Furnace which invited me to do a performance work. It was a love poem to the mikvah, because I found going to the mikvah a magical experience. I honored the notion of not talking about it and I wouldn’t discuss it with anyone except my husband, yet I also had a desire to share it. “Mikva Dreams” was a performance with a text in which I spoke about the mikvah and then I chanted a word poem at the end where I repeated the words ‘Immerse Again’ 210 times, because that was my calculation of how many eggs I might have in my fertile life. It was a kind of prayer that I would be able to have that life of fertility. I covered myself with a sheet to preserve an aura of sacred mystery and privacy, and I spoke the poem, hidden from the audience and not seeing it. This was for a diverse art audience and was very well received.
The second piece used the same text along with a photograph of a woman (who happened to be me) draped in a sheet facing the flowing Hudson River, seen from the back. This piece was published in the feminist art journal, “Heresies,” and I was part of a collective made up of many different kinds of feminists. I was apprehensive about the piece being accepted by the collective, because there was a lot of anger against patriarchy in Judaism and in religion generally. But it was also very well received.
In my next pieces, I spoke directly to a Jewish audience. First I made a mikvah installation in a project called “Mikva: Place of Kissing Waters” for a show called “Jewish Themes-Contemporary Artists” at the Jewish Museum in 1986.
Q: Was that a performance piece or a sculptural work?
A: A sculpture. I did a huge amount of research. I crawled around a mikvah with the region’s best mikvah maker. I wanted to know all about the material, the proportions and the rules. With a sculpture, one has to become very physical. I came across a world of original Jewish ideas embodying great halakhic creativity.
First, the mikvah is a place of rebirth. Maimonides says, and Rabbi Soloveitchik elaborates on this, that in the mikvah you stand directly before the Divine. You cannot do it by proxy. The person who emerges is reborn a new person. The mikvah is the place where you can start over again. This is really the theme of all my work- our unlimited powers of transformation that I see as the essence of Judaism. All my work from trying to change the degraded identities of service workers—the housewives of the City—to the restoration of ravaged landscapes relates to this. This is why I have worked on the transformation of three closed landfills, including Fresh Kills in New York City.
The second idea is the idea of the bor, the collecting pool. The bor has to be grounded, becoming part of the place, and cannot be a removable object. As a person interested in earthworks, this is an essential earthwork. To me, it represents taking a risk; Jews who build a mikvah are saying that they intend to stay in that place and to belong to the place.
The third idea is about the pipes that bring God’s water, in the form of rain or snow, from the roof. The joints of the pipes must be open. We can direct the water, but not possess it, which is a classic environmental idea. We may benefit from the water, but it is God’s water. I grew up in Colorado where my father was an Orthodox Rabbi. I remember that they used snow from the Rocky Mountains for the mikvah, and my father, a tall dignified man, would stand on the roof of the mikvah shoveling it down the pipes.
The fourth idea is one of the great original ideas in Judaism. The rabbis did not say, “Stop. Wait for the rain!” until they had enough water for the mikvah. They did not put life on hold. As long as there was a certain portion of water from God — rain or snow — you can mix it, and the halakhic words are you ‘seed’ the water or ‘kiss’ the water with plumbing water, water from human systems. This water becomes as holy as God’s waters. The rabbis figured out how to make life continue, and this is such a loving concept. Judaism extols the human creativity involved in designing water systems. One thinks of Leonardo da Vinci’s designs for water systems as great art.
As an artist, I was also amazed that some materials were considered kosher and others not. With the pipes, some materials do not contaminate the water, so the water can flow through these materials and stay pure. Other materials like copper make water impure. Incidentally, there is much ambivalence about copper in Judaism. Copper was the material of the mirrors that the women donated for building the mishkan (sanctuary) in the desert; even though impurities adhere to copper, the copper became the basin, which the priests used to purify themselves. The magical back and forth about the material is fascinating to me as an artist.
Q: Can you describe your Jewish Museum mikvah installation?
A: My mikvah is a two story installation made from contemporary French tiles, with stairs of clear plexiglass—each step turning in another direction because going to the mikvah is about turning from one state to another, and one must make a choice at each step. The mikvah is entered through double doors of transformation. The right door is the one that the individual enters out of free choice, when he or she is ready to be reborn. The left door is the one that the community representative opens when the community is ready to receive the individual. I called the work “Kissing Waters” to underline the idea that life does not stop.
Q: What was the fourth mikvah?
A: In 1986, I created a performance piece for the Jewish Museum called “Immerse Again Immerse Again.” This related to the mikvah as the site where a person converts to Judaism. It was the time of the first wave of immigration of Ethiopian Jews, who had been loyal Jews for centuries. They walked hundreds of miles and finally made it to Israel. When the rabbis told them that they had to convert, they responded that either they would commit suicide or would walk back to Ethiopia. To see the classic Jewish image of walking through the African continent into the land of Israel reversed was unbearable. This was the most uncreative response by the rabbis to this miracle.
I realized this is the first time in history that all Jewish communities are in touch simultaneously with one another. Until now, Jewish communities developed separately in different places. There was some communication through she’aylot and t’shuvot (questions addressed to rabbis and their responses), but generally communities developed on their own. Now that all communities are in simultaneous contact, all our differences become more glaring. My response to this situation was that we should all go to the mikvah, and start again. I created this performance artwork—“The Universal Jewish Immersion Project.” In this way, we all start as Jews from the same beginning.
In my performance artwork, I had forty people holding rectangles of clear blue plexiglass that symbolized the mikvah water. The people had to work together to join the plastic to create a “river”. There was also a path of beautiful, golden light. They then raised the “river” over their heads as if they were immersing in the waters all at the same time. I had many people as “witnesses” speaking about Jewish unity. I specifically invited people of different ages and from different parts of the Jewish community to participate. Some believed in Jewish unity and others did not, but it was up to them to share their thoughts.
Q: What was the response to these two projects that were directed at Jewish audiences?
A: Almost all my art is public art, which means I hardly ever sell anything. When I received a Guggenheim and NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, I took all the money that was meant to support me as an artist and used it to make a piece with direct Jewish content, addressed directly to a Jewish audience – “to bring it home.” And what happened was nothing. There was absolute silence.
Q: Do you think it is because mikvah gets designated as a woman’s sphere that mikva’ot in general have not been given enough attention and are not made with any aesthetic concerns?
A: I thought I was trying to deal with all of those things. All the materials were kosher, as were the proportions. I adhered to the halakhic requirements of a regular mikvah and I thought there would be an appreciation of that. I tried to make it as beautiful as I could, and as personal and accessible as possible. Indeed, I would really like to build a real mikvah in the future as a spiritual haven. At first, I thought the silence meant a negative response so I was waiting to hear the negative criticism. But, it was silence and it was the silence I found so shocking.
With the “Immerse Again Immerse Again” performance work, I had a video projection behind “the river of light” of my husband immersing about 75 times, because I wanted to underline that mikvah is not, and never was, only for women. I wanted to open up the subject. It was so disturbing to me that there was no dialogue about the piece in the Jewish community.
Q: Do you think that the prohibition of graven images has limited the number of artists in the Orthodox world?
A: The art world is filled with Jewsartists, gallery owners, critics, theoreticians, writers, curators, collectors, and so many are indeed women. So why so few Orthodox artists among them? It is as if we have a dead culture. A culture without art cannot survive. We are not engendering any living culture. Why? That is the question I continue to ask myself. We should have a rich, thick, phenomenal culture: positive, negative, sweet, intimate, big, furious. Whatever the artist wants to make as a free being! We need to welcome that freedom.