Being female, I think I can confidently state that women have always had a complicated and stormy relationship with their clothing. There is the ongoing, eternal love affair with fashion, its trends and follies, and then there is the more complex, individual language of specific clothing: its implicit message, symbolism, and power.
As an artist, it is this language of connotation with which I am concerned. A specific garment has the power to convey layers of meaning that hint at history, oppression, trends, and ideas; often a piece of clothing can even provoke protest. A burka, a sari, a nun’s habit, a wedding dress, a garter belt, a ball gown, a mink stole, an apron – without any written narrative, each image will bring in its wake stories, personal sentiments, and prejudices. All this, without anyone uttering a single word. This powerful visual language is the fertile territory I find myself returning to again and again.
As Jewish women, we come from so many parts of the world, and have such different native costumes, that no single ethnic garment loudly and clearly says “Jewish woman.” Certain items of clothing do suggest certain kinds of Jewish women, but no single, universal garment unequivocally symbolizes us as Jewish women – certainly not the way in which a tallit or tzitzit says “Jewish man.”
Because of the absence of such a quintessential garment, I create generic ones, which are often very simple and graphic, shapeless even. In these cases the message is contained in the materials and the execution, rather than in the clothing itself. There are two garments I have created that could, at first glance, be perceived as simple, artistic paper garments but on closer examination become Jewish and very female.
Within Judaism there are two women with peculiar and particular plights: the agunah and the sotah. The ritual for determining the guilt of the sotah (a wife accused of adultery) was reportedly never enacted, but remains a very strange and thorny chapter of the written Torah. The rabbis and the Gemara offer all sorts of apologetic explanations that state that this ordeal was never really used, but it is still a part of our sacred text. And the plight of the agunah continues to haunt us today. For committed Jewish feminists, the idea of each of these women makes us uncomfortable and fills us with anger, shame, and questions.
My “Coat of the Agunot” is made up of hundreds and hundreds of hand-printed ketubot, in which I use colors of argaman (purple), colors of royalty, to convey the nobility of an agunah. (I personally think that any agunah’s ability to get out of bed every morning and face the world makes her quite regal.) I then took these ketubot and tore them up into tiny pieces, a symbolic act, with these pieces acting as a perfect reflection of the state of her marriage (which is in fact in tatters). I reassembled all these fragments of ketubot into a coat – a massive coat of paper. Then I sewed shut the sleeves, the hem, and the front seam, as a metaphor for her state: a woman trapped, hemmed in by her ketubah; a women who wears her anguish like a heavy coat, each and every day; who is bound by it, unable to extricate herself. I left the threads hanging because she herself is hanging, her whole life suspended, waiting for another piece of paper to release her from this state.
I felt that clothing was the best vehicle for transmitting this message. A coat that becomes a burden, which can never be removed, with threads in which she becomes entangled and trapped, made out of something as mundane as paper but deliberately referring to that desperately needed piece of paper (the “get” that is withheld from her) – this “coat” allowed me to manipulate into it all these myriad statements.
The second garment I created to portray another Jewish woman in an equally troubling state is called the “Garment of the Accused Wife.” In the fifth chapter of Parashat Naso, there is a brief but problematic discussion of the ordeal for determining the guilt of the sotah, the wife whose husband accuses her of committing adultery (note that there is no parallel ordeal for a husband suspected of infidelity). Without going into the rabbinic interpretations and justifications, a cursory reading of the verse in Naso reveals that the suspected wife is brought before the Kohanim, her hair is uncovered, curses about her including Hashem’s name are written, some of the dirt from the Mishkan floor is added to a vessel of holy water, and the curses are put into this “bitter” water, which she is then forced to drink. If the woman is “innocent,” her reward is the survival of her marriage and the conception of a male child. If, however, she is guilty, her womb distends, her flesh falls from her body, and she becomes a deformed and shunned outcast for all to see. (Some sources say she dies). All of this, of course, occurs while she is standing alone, in front of an audience of men, the Kohanim.
To capture this image, I used a very transparent Japanese paper to symbolize the sotah’s lack of privacy, her public ordeal. Her voice, her feelings in all this are invisible. In the paper I embedded hair, dirt and Hebrew letters taken from the biblical verse to portray, in graphic terms, the details of her ordeal. Her sexuality is of great concern to all involved. So sexually disturbing is the mere thought of a sotah that the rabbis interpreted the Torah’s juxtaposition of two topics (the sotah and the Nazirite) to imply that men who gazed upon a sotah during the ceremony would be compelled to take on the vows of the Nazir. I deliberately left hair sticking out from the hem of her skirt to represent genital hair, which is both repellent and titillating, as she must have seemed to the Kohanim. All the seams and edges are sewn with tiny stitches, a repetitive and tedious act, both as a tribute and an acknowledgment of her ordeal. Finally, I placed the garment in a glass vitrine, a display case, a glass closet because she is so very much on display. There is glass on all four sides because she becomes an “object” – displayed to all, with nowhere to hide.
Using clothing to give artistic expression to these two uniquely Jewish women, however troubling they may be, allowed me to transmit my ideas in a way that is familiar and accessible. We all relate to clothes: we love them, hate them, hide within them, use them to create statements. The entire fashion and advertising industry is based on the premise that “you are what you wear.” Unfortunately, the cruel ordeal of the agunah persists as a problem in contemporary Jewish society. Perhaps one day she will be as archaic as the sotah. It is my hope that for these two Jewish women, I have created symbolic clothing that is at once familiar, but imbued with meaning, protest, and sensitivity.