Archie Rand's The Eighteen and Postmodern (Mis)Recognition

David Kaufmann
George Mason University

[Figures]

Abstract: Archie Rand's series of paintings, The Eighteen, presents an interesting test for the supposed inclusiveness of "postmodern" theory. A frankly redemptive investigation of Jewish prayer, it rejoices in the freedoms of postmodern figuration, but because it offers neither critique nor an account of identity formation, it is not—or rather cannot be—recognized as a "valid" postmodern work. In the end, this judgment says less about the quality of the work than it does about the limits of postmodernism as it has been construed.

A great deal of the critical energy of both postmodern painting and theory has been spent on the complicated dialectics of (mis)recognition: who gets recognized and as what; what gets recognized and by whom. One of the points of this often feverish and sometimes hyperbolic activity has been to open up new ranges of conceptual and artistic possibility, and to grant serious attention to new groups, practices, and themes.

In this article, I want to look at what appear to me to be the limits of our hard-won inclusiveness by investigating an unlikely case, that of Archie Rand's series, The Eighteen. Technically, these paintings seem to partake of all the freedoms of pastiche and appropriation that postmodernism offers. Nevertheless, they have not been recognized as belonging to the critical sphere of postmodern interests. Unlike Rand's early underground hits, the Letter Paintings of the early 1970s, which served as beautiful and witty hommages to Afro-American music, and which are now shown world-wide, The Eighteen has been relegated to the Jewish museum circuit. In the first section of my piece, I will try to reconstruct the project of these paintings in order to argue that they are unrecognizable to postmodernism because they are inscribed within a historical horizon of redemptive hope, which has apparently been lost. In the second section, I will go on to maintain that in the larger field of contemporary painting, especially in the field of works that are devoted to the dense peculiarities of ethnic experience, The Eighteen is too dense and too peculiar to be recognized. My guess is that this relative invisibility is a sign not of the weakness of Rand's paintings, but of a new kind of critical foreclosure, an unwillingness to entertain certain themes. [End Page 120]

I.

Archie Rand's series of paintings, The Eighteen, takes as its subject Hebrew bene dictions that date back to the Talmud. How do you paint a prayer? I do not mean those prayers—you find the practice amongst Native Americans and Indians—which actually are paintings, where the painting itself is part of the ritual. I am referring instead to the standard prescribed prayers of the three major monotheistic religions. How do you catch both the text and the phenomenology of prayer, that is, its interiority, concentration, and direction?

It could be argued that Rothko's later paintings evince that intense inwardness. Rothko's uncanny, hovering dark rectangles are both monumental and ill defined. As such they provide seductive and vaguely threatening intimations of both a complete otherness and an equally complete lack of differentiation. And it is precisely this mixture of alterity and swampy familiarity that allows Rothko's works to elude concep tual summary so successfully. In this way, Rothko's canvasses can be assimilated to that odd seriousness that Americans call "spirituality"—a sense of an infinite interiority without specific content. "Spirituality" is equal-opportunity faith, a mood as much as a belief. It is popular because it is eclectic, owes allegiance to no particular religious practice, and can thus easily be universalized.

The same cannot be said of Rand's series, The Eighteen, which consists of paintings that take as their subject the fundamental liturgy of Judaism, the blessings that are recited three times a day by observant Jews. Unlike Rothko's paintings, they brim over with specific content and thus suffer the danger of becoming alienating precisely because they lack Rothko's murky universalism. Indeed, Rand's Eighteen wears its content blatantly. Each canvas clearly displays the Hebrew of the benediction that serves as its subject.

Such a shorthand description makes the benedictions seem to be the background of the paintings. This is, in the literal sense, not so. The words are set off, for the most part, in an illusion that they are in fact the foreground. The first in the series (see Figure 1) contains a large circle whose outline is maintained by two small rows of glass mosaic squares. Inside that circle is another one, described by a wavy circle of yellow. The area inside these circles is divided into diamond-shaped rectangles of various reds, oranges, and greens. Towards the top, rows of black diamonds show under drips that seem to descend from the yellow wavy line. Blue swathes and arabesques twist over the diamonds in the lower half of the main circle. This circle, which has small blocks of blue, green, and yellow attached to its circumference-like satellites, floats on a pale green sky. Two black gestural curves hover in this sky, one by each of the top two quadrants of the circle. The benediction can be clearly made out over the diamonds and under the drips in the uppermost half of the biggest circle. [End Page 121]

Is the supposed background—the most painterly part—an illustration of the benediction? The prayer in question is called "Avot" because it recalls the Biblical patriarchs:

Blessed are You, o Lord, our G-d and G-d of our fathers, G-d of Abraham, G-d of Isaac, and G-d of Jacob; the great, mighty and awesome G-d, the supreme G-d, who bestows beneficial kindness and creates everything, who recalls the kindness of the patriarchs and brings a Redeemer to their children's children, for His Name's sake, with love. O King, Helper, Savior and Shield. Blessed are You, o Lord, Shield of Abraham.

The prayer is clearly not about the patriarchs, but about the Almighty and His attributes. It stresses not only G-d's goodness but also covers the history of creation by referring both to the beginning of the world and to the promise of ultimate redemption. This is [End Page 122]

hard stuff to paint. The second commandment's proscription against graven images makes it impossible for a Jewish artist to actually portray G-d in any way other than by describing His attributes, which are, by definition, abstract.

We can ask, then, if the circles of Rand's first painting are a representation of the only "concrete" image in the prayer, that is, a picture of the magen Avraham—the shield of Abraham? Perhaps, but there is no reason why that shield would be round. Indeed, it is worth noting that one of the recurrent motifs of these pictures is the magen David—the star of David. In the odd world of Jewish figuration, a shield can just as easily be a star, and a star, a shield. By the same token, Rand's circle might represent the world: on one of the drawings for the series, he made the notation "Mercator projection."

Or maybe the circle is a depiction of G-d after all. Dante, faced with the same problem of representing the divine, describes his vision of the Trinity towards the end of the Paradiso as three circles in one. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that here, as in all the last cantos of that poem, Dante has to resort to paradox in order to show the distance between the transcendence of the divine and of the limiting immanence of human reason and language. Something similar is going on in Rand's series. The painting, which is the illusionistic background of the writing, actually needs the writing as its temporal or logical background. It refers to the writing, but allusively, indirectly. The juxtaposition of the writing and the painting opens the painting to a number of interpretations (it is G-d, the shield, the world) without reducing it to any single one. The very insistence of the Hebrew letters underlines and deepens the ambiguous nature of these not-quite-illustrations by pointing to their linguistic nature. This first benediction is an interesting speech act in that it is an assertion that is less a statement of fact than the performance of the act of blessing. Its indirections and its interest lie in its peculiarly linguistic nature, in questions of mood and voice. Unlike other benedictions in the shemone esrei (the Hebrew name of the prayer, which translated means simply, "the eighteen"), the first one does not couch imperatives amongst its supplications. It does not tell G-d what to do, or at least not directly. It reminds Him of the merits of the patriarchs, which are presumed to be greater than ours. In so doing, it seeks to hold G-d to what He has promised and contains the demand that He fulfill these promises soon. It is also supremely vocative. It is an address to the Lord and establishes the relationship it denotes. It is both a commitment to faith and an urgent request without ever once claiming to be either.

It therefore makes excellent sense to parade the words across the picture plane, for the best way to convey the prayer—whose specificity is linguistic—is to write it. Perhaps we should see the paintings as ornaments for the letters. After all, the Talmud tells us that G-d Himself put crowns on the letters of the Torah. But in an American [End Page 123] context, the letters have to serve an ornamental function, because there are relatively few people in this country who could sound the words, let alone translate them. Never theless, these mute ciphers are not without meaning, even when they cannot be read. Most Americans—at least amongst the classes that go and see art—would recognize them, especially in context, as Hebrew. These letters thus refer to a whole world of signification, which may well be just out of the viewer's ken, but which is nevertheless real and active. The letters, like the paintings in which they take part, are thus both ornamental and meaningful at the same time. They are not reducible to either pole, to the material or non-cognitive on the one hand, and the conceptual on the other.

The Eighteen is therefore an extension of the experiments of Rand's earlier paintings, specifically the Letter Paintings that he produced in the late 1960's while still in his teens. The pictures are monumental inscriptions of the names of Black jazz and rhythm-and-blues artists (as well as some white painters and musicians) in Roz Chast- like hand-lettering on or in colored fields. While they serve to celebrate the often forgotten achievements of the true heroes of American musical experience, these paintings do more than that, for to reduce them to their content and address is to ignore their sheer cock-eyed beauty. They are poised on the edges between post-post-painterly abstraction (Rand was Larry Poons's assistant), pop, and conceptualism, while critiquing all these movements. From pop, Rand borrows his content but does not adopt the cool figurations of celebrity, urban banality, or suburban irony. From abstraction, he derives his beautifully painted surfaces, without making those surfaces the sole end of his art. His debt to conceptualism is to be seen in his interest in language, but he does not equate the artwork with its concept. In the Letter Paintings, the name stands in for the concept and the word stands in for the representational figure, while the painting itself insists on its quality as object. He thus refuses to make art that is purely material or purely cognitive. His paintings—both the earlier and the later—arise from the tensions between the two.

Of course, by moving from English to Hebrew, from popular culture to the religious, Rand has raised the stakes. No longer just meditating on the separate demands of the material and cognitive sides of art, he is now painting from the rift between the sacred and the profane. Christian art has traditionally split the difference between the transcendent and the immanent by way of the symbol, which asserts a unity (however sublimated) between the earthly sign and the divine spirit that it bodies forth. The model for this gorgeous paradox is the figure of Jesus himself, who is the Word made flesh. Judaism (called "the religion of the sublime" by Hegel precisely because it maintains an absolute gulf between the Lord and His creation) cannot use symbols in this way. The closest it will come—and this is the basis of the Kabbalah—is a mysticism of language, because language works as the medium of revelation, the sole mediation [End Page 124] between G-d and the world. But the interesting mystico-materialist view of language one finds in Jewish esotericism is of little direct help to the visual artist. Funnily enough, allegory—rarely thought of as a Jewish mode of art—comes nearer to the mark, because it does not lay claim to any identity between sign and spirit. Rather, it asserts a conventional, that is to say contingent, relation between the two.

My brief comments on allegory and symbol here derive from Walter Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama, a work that has had great influence on the postmodern re-evaluation of allegory. Frequently missed in contemporary discussions is the frankly theological and apocalyptic context of Benjamin's account. Of course, Benjamin himself hides the specifically Jewish content behind a thick veil of neo-Platonism—a strategy he outlines in letters to his friend, Gershom Scholem. The religious pathos of this work on allegory (which is, as we shall see, unassimilable to American versions of postmodernism) comes out clearly in Benjamin's often cited but just as frequently misunderstood last work, "Theses on the Philosophy of History."

Following Benjamin (and to a lesser extent, Maimonides), we can say that allegory —seen as a conscious marriage of convenience between sign and referent—serves as a hedge against idolatry. It works in much the same way that the slashed nose of a statue (a commonplace in Jewish aesthetics) does. It acts as a reminder that the artifact is nothing more than that, an artifact, a creation of human hands. This lends the Jewish tendency towards allegory a certain abstractness as well as ironic self-consciousness, for it turns concretions into signs of what never can be rendered concrete. It cuts the ground away from almost every commitment to artistic realism.

If I am more or less accurate in my discussion here, Rand's The Eighteen derives its apparently postmodern playfulness not from Derrida, but from the Talmud. And the paintings are indeed playful in their eclecticism and their impurity. There are pop-art, op-art, abstract expressionist, and collage elements in all these canvases. What is more, they seem to delight in the banality—the sheer kitschiness—of their found materials. Amongst its painterly complications, the second in the series also contains confetti, plastic flowers, and a dime-store bird hovering above a swirl that is like both a globe and a feeder. The third sports little confetti stars in its lowering, impasto sky. And so on. Littered throughout this series, are little embossed cut-outs (or punch-outs) of grapes and of Corinthian columns, tchtochke shells and butterflies; little metal magen Davids suspended like Christmas (!) ornaments; painted doilies and even more dime-store birds. Perhaps what is most shocking is the inclusion, not only of what we assume to be Christian iconography, but of Christian paintings that are fully appropriated, if not quite fully digested. [End Page 125]

The third benediction (see Figure 2) blesses G-d's holiness and refers to the hosts of angels who sing of that holiness. Rand's third painting actually depicts those angels by containing a small copy, on paper, of an eighteenth-century apotheosis by Sebastiano Ricci. What is that copy doing there? The painting appears to be a landscape, or, to put it more properly, a skyscape in thick green and bronze paint with tiny metallic paper stars and confetti. In the top third of the canvas, we see what appears to be a rather Blakean white disk emitting rays—most likely the sun—and a stylized cotton-ball cloud, as well as some blue and wisps of white. The Hebrew letters scroll across the middle section in white. Beneath them is more white, clearly meant (by way of a cartoonish wavy outline) to signal itself as cloud and an odd black shape that looks, as one of Rand's curators claims, like a "batwing gate" of cast-iron. One could also say that it looks like angel's wings. And the angelic vision of Sebastiano Ricci surrounded by Haringesque red squiggle rays is superimposed over the center of that wing-like [End Page 126] outline. If we try to read the painting as a single skyscape, the angels are not ascending into the heavens at the top of the canvas—that is, not into the highest heaven that the picture describes. Rather, they are caught in the middle distance, in the third or fourth, but not the seventh heaven. What is more, if we do interpret the "wings" as a gate, then Ricci's angels are flittering up on this, the viewer's side, of the gate. They are no better off than we are, have no better access than we have. I think that to look at the painting in this way is to fall into precisely the interpretive trap that Rand is working to avoid. He is disrupting our attempt to plot the geography of Heaven, to try to find its exact place on the horizon, hence the angelic apotheosis that gets locked in mid-sky. His transposition of Ricci's work from a wall in a church (where it seems to participate in the very ascension it depicts) to a piece of paper in the middle of a painting undermines its pretensions to symbolic unity and brings it back to its status, less of sign, than of sign-post to the transcendent.

Rand can adopt Christian angels because in his painting they become abstractions, self-conscious ciphers of the divine that they cannot claim to depict. It is precisely this kind of allegorization, of conventionalization of signs and styles, that allows Rand to import figuration into the paintings, for wherever he allows himself a representational figure, he throws in a little piece of kitschy jetsam to undercut any claim to realism. This is especially clear in the fifteenth canvas in the series where a technicolor arch is centered on a little applique of a Corinthian column. But this play with style and with material should not be interpreted as a form of that jouissance that got played out in the 1980's after everyone "discovered" that representation was "merely" conventional. The point of the simulacrum is that nothing "real" hides behind the curtain, only more simu lacra. Baudrillardian exultation is born of the sense of infinite (if somewhat cynical) freedom. Rand's exuberance and his freedom are born of a sense that the transcendent towards which representation might strive will always be exceeded by the sheer fullness of that transcendent. His irony is not aimed condescendingly at representation's failure, but rather rejoices in that failure, because that failure is not a sign of the universe's lack of meaning. It promises divine plenitude, beyond human imaging and imagining.

A faith in such plenitude would go a long way—although a paradoxical one— towards explaining Rand's commitment to "impurity," to his mixture of styles and media. Biblical and Talmudic Judaism base themselves on the separation of the pure and the impure, the kosher and the treyf. They are also deeply concerned with the separation of the pure and the pure, that is, with the differentiation of kinds. (Thus there is a strict injunction against mixing wool and linen in one garment.) In the light of such a traditional fascination with taxonomy, Rand's delighted and delightful eclecticism might seem misguided, if not heretical. In fact, Gershom Scholem, the great historian of Jewish mysticism and heresy, has shown that there is an antinomian current that runs [End Page 127] through the history of Judaism, one that claims the stern divisions enforced by the Law will be rescinded in the time of our collective redemption. (Such a view, of course, stands as the bedrock of Pauline Christianity.) It could well be, then, that Rand's pictures are indices of the redemption of the world, a kind of sundial of the messianic era. They mix and mingle as if all things had been redeemed, recast in a light where nothing is lost. Their energy, their charge, would be an indication of joy—an emotion that is not common to contemporary art. By the same token, their energy would also be a sign of anxiety or yearning. It would register the sense that we are still quite far from the great promises recounted in the first and the last benedictions of the Shimone esrei. The heterogeneity of styles, media, material in Rand's paintings—the artistic reflection of the post-lapsarian distortions of creation—has not yet been resolved. Thus the paintings stand on the verge of the redemption they signal.

Now, what place can redemption hold in the discourse of the arts these days? Although redemption in its specifically Jewish sense (and this has become one of the mainstays of non-orthodox Judaism since the late nineteenth century) has very specific political meanings (the institution of global justice and freedom), the universalistic tendency of such redemption probably looks more than a tad suspect in a time when universalistic claims have come under increasing (and, sadly, often misguided) attack from progressives. At the same time, the Jewish provenance of such notions of redemp tion will seem equally suspect to those who feel that salvation in this case will somehow be too Jewish, too particularistic. And, let us be frank here, these paintings do not look political. They derive from a very specific, modern Jewish understanding of redemption as both ontological and political, but they do not explain that understanding, they merely body it forth.

If the kind of redemption Rand portrays seems too limited and universalistic at the same time, there is still another problem. Redemption in these paintings, even with its promise of emancipation, retains the odor of the theological, and so the postmodern has taken the theological and the metaphysical as two of its greatest adversaries. Further more, at a time when, as not only Lyotard has claimed, the grand stories of progress and utopia have been debunked, redemptive hopes will seem pitifully out of date. In a period which is marked, as Jameson has claimed, by a truncated experience of time, where temporal flow has been dissolved into a kind of disjointed, amnesiac present, Rand's tub-thumping vision of the future will seem just too religious or naïve.

I have thus argued that Rand's The Eighteen may in fact derive its figures and its play from its understanding of its position at "the end of art," but it veers into a kind of unrecognizability because it does not see itself, either cynically or happily, at the "end of (meta)history." [End Page 128]

II.

In the previous section of this article, I suggested that the materials and the organization of Rand's The Eighteen coincide with postmodern practice but cannot be recognized by postmodern criticism. In this section, I want to argue that the very project of The Eighteen—the representation of Jewish prayer—is equally unrecognizable. It seems that the times demand a different subject for Jewish painting. My question for the final part of this essay, then, is what are the possibilities (and limitations) of Jewish painting given the present field of American postmodernism? And what are the limitations of American postmodernism as a field for Jewish painting?

Of course, the mere notion of Jewish painting is itself an interesting historical anomaly. Judaism is famously suspicious of icons and fetishes, although it would be perhaps be unfair to call it aniconic. Historically it has defined itself, especially since Talmudic times, against the seductions of idolatry. So we find in the tractate Shabbat that images are not to be looked at even on weekdays, on the principle that we are not to "turn unto that conceived in [our] own minds (149a). For this and other reasons, Judaism has been a religion whose ritual (since the destruction of the Second Temple) might involve objects, but not visual representations. Hence the relative dearth, until modernity, of Jewish painting.

It should not be presumed, however, that the Talmud (about which I want to claim no authority) is uniform in its prohibition of painted images. In fact, most of the Rabbis' proscription of images takes the form of a prohibition on statues, not paintings. (The Talmudic Rabbis—unlike Maimonides—had no qualms about verbal images.) So we find Abaye doggedly defending R. Gamaliel's use of a picture of the phases of the moon by arguing that images can be used in order "to understand and to teach" (Rosh HaShana 24b). Pictures can thus be used for edification, not for worship. Hence, for all the illuminated manuscripts that Judaism has produced, there is just no long-standing tradition of Western Jewish painting or of painterly iconography.

Given this traditional suspicion of sculpture, painting, and drawing, the appearance of a properly Jewish "high art" in general and of painting in particular had to wait for Jewish emancipation and its concomitant though vexed assimilation of Jewry into the citizenry of Western Europe. It had to wait for both the secularization of the Jews into citizens and the relative autonomization of "art."

There are a number of different accounts of the development of the secular institution of "art." I will begin mine with a relatively unlikely, because unsociological, source: Arthur Danto, and I will rely on his own summary of his aesthetic reflections in After the End of Art:Contemporary Art and the Pale of History. I will then try magically to transform Danto into Weber to explain what I think is going on in postmodern representational painting. Like Jameson, Danto relies on Hegel's claim that [End Page 129] philosophy has come to supersede art, though Danto sees this supersession as art's self- consciousness, not on the apotheosis of theory. For Danto, "art" denotes the progressive narrative self-definition of the visual arts that begins around 1400 and reigns until the mid-1960s. This meta-narrative is marked by two periods. During the longer of these— the Vasarian—"art" looks to painting and claims to move ever more closely towards a complete and convincing mimesis. Art in this sense aspires to replicate the precisions and complexities of perception. The second period—the Modern—spans the eighty years from Manet to Warhol and is also guided by painting, and its narrative is devoted not to mimesis but to the progressive purification of its means. Finally, in the late 1960s, the story of purification is played out and "art" loses its governing narrative, and thus "art," as it had been defined, comes to an end. For the first time in centuries, painting is no longer the dominant medium. Thus freed, works of art become decidedly impure.

For Danto, works of art after Warhol move to that next level of consciousness that Hegel had always promised, that of philosophy, or self-reflection. No longer dependent on meta-narratives of progress and perfection, art in the new dispensation is defined, not by how it looks, but by the fact that 1) it is "about" something and that 2) it embodies its meaning. The work of art is perceptually no different from the artifacts of everyday life. Its differences are complex and conceptual.

Danto's account has the advantage of its resolute good cheer, and it derives its persuasiveness from having drawn on a number of different sources. (You can hear their echoes—however dimly—even in my summary.) Danto's story serves as a fairly accurate map of thought about art in New York over the past decade and a half. (Its provenance in New York is visible in a number of places, not the least of which is Danto's reliance on Clement Greenberg as his chief polemicist for High Modernism.) To give Danto a sharper descriptive edge, I would like to recast his narrative in a post- Weberian way and claim that Danto in fact has redescribed the important and not unfamiliar process of art's desacralization. In his history of the stages of art's self- description since the Renaissance, he has outlined art's varied attempts to legitimize its practices—first in terms of a formalist mimesis, and then in terms of its purity—as it moved further away from religious ritual and national glorification. At this, our latest stage of postmodernism, art has taken its legitimation as its basic theme. It has turned its critique back on itself and its institutions.

Now, when Jews entered the arena of "art" and painting in the nineteenth century, they were thus entering a field that was already increasingly secularized and thus more or less prepared to receive them provided they too would agree to its canons of mimesis and its increasingly formalist legitimating strategies. So you could have a painter like Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, whose often sentimentalized depictions of German-Jewish life as it confronted modernity clearly fit (in both style and substance) into the established [End Page 130] and emphatically mimetic genre of German regionalism. Or you could have painters who happened to be Jewish, like Pissaro and Soutine or, more recently, Rothko and Barnett Newman, much as you could have other citizens of the modern nation-state who just happened to be of the Jewish persuasion. I would even suggest that even Chagall's demonstrably Jewish paintings (especially those of the teens and twenties) were legible not only because of their formal inventiveness, but also because their inspi ration was less religious than folkloric. They represented a kind of Jewish primitivism. Gauguin presented an important influence on more than Chagall's palette.

At best, then, the painting that has taken Judaism as its theme since the nineteenth century does not have a particular iconography it can draw on beyond the subject matter of its own ethnic peculiarities. And the particularities of recent Jewish history are such that such painting often becomes either a testimony to horror or to a kind of com fortably homey Yiddishkeit. As neither description applies to Rand's The Eighteen, perhaps we should look at them in terms of the project of postmodern, rather than specifically Jewish, art. But this does not seem a particularly promising line of inquiry. If postmodern, post-historical painting takes as its theme its legitimation—or the difficulty of its self-justification—it is hard to see precisely what is going on in Rand's Eighteen. Does the legitimation of painting in an artistic field that increasingly emphasizes its loss of its sacred and nationalist functions conflict with expressly religious art? This second question should be easy to answer. As painting for Judaism has traditionally been kept far from the cult and from ritual, Rand's "Eighteen" and paintings like it should have no trouble getting accepted. But Rand is trying to do something peculiar: he is trying single-handedly to redress the lack of Jewish painterly iconography—its paucity of visual symbols—by creating just such an iconography while raiding the archives of every tradition he can find. To make my point and Rand's dilemma clear, let me state the problem starkly and thus a little inaccurately: just at the time that postmodernism met Judaism in its iconoclasm—really its iconophobia—Rand has gone into the business of Jewish figuration.

Now there are, of course, at least two ways that figuration appears in postmodern painting. (There is, of course, much postmodern art that is non-figurative and much that is not devoted to painting. I must bracket these for this discussion.) The first tendency is to immerse painting in the critique of representation as mimesis. One can see this in all sorts of artists, from Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, and David Salle to Vic Muniz and Julie Heffernan. The second tendency is frequently allied to the first, and that is the use of the critique of representation as a means for interrogating invidious social constructions of identity. In the last fifteen or twenty years, such an interrogation of identity has been a crucial generative impetus for work by and exhibitions devoted to [End Page 131] disenfranchised groups. Recently, even Jews have gotten into the act. Here is the self- description of a show called Too Jewish which went on the circuit a few years ago:

Much recent art has embraced complex issues of ethnic identity, following a trend of inclusivity which began in American universities. . . . Museums and galleries have been reversing a long history of discrimination against art about or by African-Americans, Latinos, Native-Americans, Asian-Americans, women, lesbians, and gay men. In this context, some Jewish artists are asking where they can fit in. Although Jews have experienced far less blatant exclusion from the art world and mainstream society since the Holocaust and World War II, their assimilation has often been accomplished by the shedding of ethnic specificity. This pattern of ethnic erasure is precisely what the artists in this exhibition are challenging.

The me-too tone of this statement betrays a certain defensiveness, which is born of an odd transformation since the late 1950s in American culture: Jews are no longer considered a racial minority and religion has ceased to be a category recognized by the American Left. Jews have gone mainstream, even while fighting the charge of exclu siveness. The cost of such mainstreaming, of course, is what Too Jewish was all about. And the sheer wit of the paintings in the show (and here I am thinking of works by Ken Aptekar, Deborah Kass, and Carrie Liebowitz) went a long way towards defining the double consciousness inherent in the apparent success of Jewish assimilation.

It should be clear that Rand's The Eighteen does not really participate in either the critique of representation or the interrogation of identity construction. Interestingly enough, even though the show Too Jewish originated in the curator's embarrassed response to Archie Rand's paintings, "The Eighteen"—for all its use of pastiche and appropriation—is still "too Jewish" a series to be recognizably postmodern in the relatively limited field that postmodern Jewish painting now describes. It does not thematize the limits of mimesis, because it has already assimilated the iconoclastic tendencies of Jewish allegorization. Thus it comes from the critique of representation, but is not about it. Furthermore, it is not about ethnic identity in the way, say, Larry Rivers's History of Matzah/History of the Jews is. His paintings of prayers are about religion and specifically, about Judaism. They are, in the end, about the as-yet- unexplored possibilities of Jewish painting.

In the end, the argument that I have presented—that The Eighteen is not recognizable within the interests and commitments of postmodernism because it insists on redemption and on painting from, but not about Jewish ethnic and religious identity—is susceptible to the counter-claim that Rand's paintings are not recognizable as postmodern, because they are not, in fact, postmodern. Such criticism could go on to say that I have mistaken my subject. But the very notion of a proper postmodernism should serve as a warning. It makes postmodernism a "movement," given to the very same exclusive assertions of purity that marked the self-limitations of modernism, [End Page 132] assertions against which postmodernism has defined itself so strongly. So, given the provocation of Rand's paintings, I want to end by asking a question. What are the limits of American postmodern practice—both in painting and criticism—if that practice relegates The Eighteen to the merely tribal interests of Jews?

 

David Kaufmann is Chair of the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department and an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University. Author of The Business of Common Life: Novels and Classical Economics Between Revolution and Reform (Johns Hopkins, 1995) and an increasing number of articles on the Frankfurt School, he is presently completing a monograph on Philip Guston's later work.

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