About The G-d Project
As visual, conceptual, installation performance artist and eco-feminist Heléne Aylon completes her two decades long ”The G-d Project: Nine Houses Without Women,” what fell away was, she writes: the most limited and unevolved hierarchical G-d of the bible. In Art in America Robert Berlind notes Aylon’s committment “to ‘rescue’ God from those who would project their own time-bound views onto the Divine… comes from an empathic connection with the Divine, which is not understood as an essence but experienced as immanence.”
The Project began in 1990 with “The Liberation of G-d.” and the finale, the installation ”All Rise,” will be featured at The Jewish Museum’s Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life. Aylon writes:
The “House” is a Beit Midrash—a house of study where men congregate to learn together. For the finale of the G-d Project, I wish to make an actual tikkun, rather than a metaphoric inquiry. I am petitioning that women judges be allowed to judge on a Beit Din. We now have women rabbis and women cantors; it is time for women to be allowed to judge. All Rise is a Beit Din, A House of Law, a courtroom. The pink pillowcases of the All Rise Beit Din refer to the pillowcases I collected in the 1980s with women’s dreams and nightmares about the state of the world. The pink neon in the word G-d represents a feminine presence. The Tzitzit under the judicial seats refer to the fringes worn around the groins of religious men to protect them from the lure of women.
In 1990, I covered every page from the Five Books of Moses with transparent parchment, and, with a pink marker, I highlighted over words of misogyny and vengeance, cruelty and militarism, words attributed to G-d, and I highlighted between words where a female presence is omitted. Whenever I read that ubiquitous phrase, “And the Lord said unto Moses,” I looked long and hard because should we not be absolutely certain there is no misquote when someone (even Moses himself) quotes G-d? I called this action, “The Liberation of G-d.” I spelled the word God with a G, a dash, and a D as I was taught in my religious upbringing, but the dash is now pink… And I asked: When will G-d be rescued from ungodly projections in order to be G-d?
You see, I have come to believe The Five Books of Moses are indeed the Five Books of Moses, not the Five Books of G-d.
What drew me was my work in Anti- Militarism of the 80′s. Reluctantly, I acknowledged that the blueprint for militarism and misogyny was in the Old Testament. And with the process of deconstuction, I highlighted every problemmatic word over the transparent cover of each page. I wanted to see what was left without highlighting. This process was a meditation and release for me simultaneously. It did not occur to me to make this into an artwork until Norman Kleeblat, curator of the Jewish Museum, suggested that I package it into art. He asked Rabbi Burton Visotzky of the Theological Seminary to meet me and the Rabbi came to the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage, and sat with me in the Earth Ambulance and we spoke about G-d. The Rabbi wrote to the museum, advising them to show “The Liberation of G-d.” Norman Kleeblat appointed this Rabbi as a co-curator, something never done before —because [Kleeblat] felt he needed this backup, wrote that this work to his knowledge was the first merging of art and theology. At first, the highlights were called “Invisible Gold” (the color of the marker) which were subtle, somewhat like shadows. It was as pale and unnoticeable as a shadow. I was very tremulous in putting any mark on the sacred books—even though I covered every page so that the actual pages were not marked —just the overlay. That is why I began with this hint of a mark. I had been considering highlighting in pink but I was concerned that the pink would be too “knee-jerk” feminist . But then I decided to be bold because I liked the look of the pink and I wanted to be sure that the feminist lens was duly noticed.
For this self-portrait, I stood in front of “The Digital Liberation of G-d,” a version of “The Liberation of G-d” using computer shading instead of a pink marker. [View "The Digital LIberation of G-d."] I allowed the projected texts to cascade over my face – the same texts projected onto me in my Orthodox upbringing in Borough Park, in my schooling at the Shulamith School for Girls, in marriage to an Orthodox rabbi at age 18, in widowhood on my 30th birthday.
Aylon documents not so much a loss of faith as a wrestling with the books we take for faith. Of her changing sense of the human concept of G-d, Aylon writes: “The truth shall make you free” and I must not shrug off these discomforts. That is the gain. Of course, ignorance is bliss, and I can never attain that sense of joyous confidence that faith inspires. I can say thank you, but I find it difficult to say please thinking that my plea will be answered. How can anyone think that after the Holocaust.
To me Godliness is what I am seeking—not “G-d”—not the most limited and unevolved hierarchical G-d of the bible. I am studying Kabala, and I that too is part of our heritage. In Kabala, G-d is everywhere and everything, and there is no end —”Ein Sof.” ♦
Helène Aylon‘s latest installation will be featured in Reinventing Ritual: Contemporary Art and Design for Jewish Life at The Jewish Museum in New York City until February 7 and then at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco from April 22 to September 28, 2010. She is also participating in two group exhibitions: A Complex Weave: Identity and Women in Contemporary Art will be at Rutgers University until December 18 and then Towson University in Baltimore from February 11 to April 17, 2010 (Ms. Aylon will be speaking at Towson on April 9th); and Women in the Bible: Tricksters, Victors and (M)others at the Jewish Museum of Australia, in Melbourne.
This piece is compiled from an interview with Heléne Aylon, the article “Helene Aylon: Deconstructing the Torah” (Robert Berlind, Art in America, Oct, 1999) and Aylon’s artist statement at The Jewish Women’s Archive.
