This is a creative exploration of this week’s Torah portion read on Hanukah. I first present the text and some of the photographs from the Torah Tweets blogart project that I created five years ago with my wife Miriam to celebrate our 52nd year of marriage http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com.
It is followed by ideas from my books Photograph God:
Creating a Spiritual Blog of Your Life http://photographgod.com and The Future of Art in a Postdigital
Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness http://future-of-art.com.
The thesis that I develop in both books is that we are
witnessing a paradigm shift from Hellenistic to Hebraic consciousness in the
emerging postdigital age. I discuss two
buildings exemplifying Hebraic ways of experiencing space and time: the Guggenheim
Museums in New York City and Bilbao, Spain.
Miketz/Passed (Genesis 41:1-44:17) Hanukah
“Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, ‘See! I have placed you
in charge of all the land of Egypt.’ And
Pharaoh removed his ring from his hand and put it on Joseph's hand.” (Genesis
41:41, 42)
Joseph retained his Hebraic consciousness while reaching
the highest level of success in Egyptian culture, the major civilization of his
day.
Hanukah celebrates those Jews who fought to retain their
Hebraic consciousness rather than assimilate into Hellenistic culture, the major
culture of their day.
We celebrated Hanukah 5771 with our family lighting both
Hanukah and birthday candles in our home.
We celebrated two other events in our lives linked to the
Hanukah story.
Rejoicing that Mel completed his book The Future of
Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic Consciousness
(Intellect Books/University of Chicago Press).
Rejoicing that the Greeks saved Jews by sending
fire-fighting planes and firefighters to help douse the devastating Mt. Carmel
forest fire.
The photograph above shows our grandson Yahel lighting olive
oil wicks of a hanukiah in which light from outside is reflected inside.
Mel and our son Moshe lighting Hanukah candles in which
light from inside is reflected outside to make the miracle of Hanukah known.
Our grandchildren Tagel, Razel and Elianne dancing to the
singing of Hanukah songs.
Elianne looking in awe at the candles and sparklers in
two pink sufganiot [jelly donuts]
in celebration of her second birthday.
Hanukah story:
Jews so enamored by Hellenistic culture that they would assimilate into
it at war with those who chose to retain Jewish values.
Postdigital story:
A paradigm shift from Hellenistic static beauty in stone to Hebraic
dynamic beauty of flickering flames and global digital light of the Internet
SEEING HELLENISTIC AND HEBRAIC CONSCIOUSNESS THROUGH ART
AND ARCHITECTURE
The worldview of ancient Greece revived in Renaissance
Europe dominated Western art and architecture until the rise of modernism. The
transition to modernism and postmodernism in art and architecture represents a
paradigm shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic roots of Western culture
exemplified by the two Guggenheim art museums – Frank Lloyd Wright’s museum in
New York and Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao, Spain. An analysis of these two major works of
American architecture provides an introduction to the significance of Hebraic
consciousness in our rapidly changing contemporary culture.
In his seminal work, Hebrew Thought Compared with
Greek, Norwegian theologian Thorleif Boman analyzes Hellenistic and Hebraic
consciousness and compares them. He emphasizes the dynamic, vigorous,
passionate, and action-centered characteristics of Hebraic consciousness in
contrast to the static, peaceful, moderate, and passive Greek consciousness.
Boman notes that biblical passages concerned with the built environment always
describe plans for construction without any description of the appearance of
the finished structure. Noah’s ark is presented as a detailed building plan.
How the ark looked when it set sail is never described. The Bible has
exquisitely detailed construction instructions for the Mishkan, the
mobile Tabernacle built in the Sinai Desert, without any word picture of the
appearance of the completed structure.
The Mishkan was made of modular parts and woven
curtains, came apart like Lego, was set on a wagon, moved through the desert
from site to site, deconstructed and reconstructed each time. Its modest
tent-like design, human scale, and active life was quite different from the
immovable monumental marble temples on the Acropolis.
A biblical structure of consciousness in architecture
emphasizes temporal processes in which space is actively engaged by human
community rather than presenting a harmoniously stable form in space.
Architectural theorist, Bruno Zevi, compares the Hebraic and Greek attitudes
toward architecture in his essay, “Hebraism and the concept of space-time in
art.”
“For the Greeks a building means a house-object or a
temple-object. For the Jews it is the object-as-used, a living place or a
gathering place. As a result, architecture taking its inspiration from Hellenic
thought is based on colonnades, proportions, refined moulding, a composite
vision according to which nothing may be added or eliminated, a structure
defined once and for all. An architecture taking its inspiration from Hebrew
thought is the diametric opposite. It is an organic architecture, fully alive,
adapted to the needs of those who dwell within, capable of growth and
development, free of formalistic taboo, free of symmetry, alignments, fixed
relationships between filled and empty areas, free from the dogmas of
perspective, in short, an architecture whose only rule, whose only order is
change.”
BUILDING TIME OVER SPACE: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S
GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM
In Frank Lloyd Wright: A Study in Architectural
Content, art historian Norris Kelly Smith explained Wright’s originality
and genius in terms of Boman’s comparison between Hebrew and Greek patterns of
thought. Since Wright was well versed in the Bible as the son of a Unitarian
minister, he internalized the biblical message of freeing humanity from
enslavement in closed spaces and expressed this freedom in his architectural
design.
Smith emphasized that Wright imbued the field of architecture,
conditioned by two thousand years of GrecoRoman thought, with Hebrew thought.
Wright detested Greek architecture both in its content and in its forms. He was
critical of the neo-classical rhetoric employed by American architects who
studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
Wright sought to create a new architecture to echo the
biblical call inscribed on the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia: “Proclaim liberty
throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof” (Leviticus
25:10). He wanted American architecture to assert its cultural independence
from Europe. The connection between the exodus of the Israelites from Egyptian
slavery and the American experience as a rebellion against European tyranny was
clear to America’s founding fathers.
It is significant that the nation founded on the
principles of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” became the center
of the shift from the Hellenistic to the Hebraic worldview in the arts. Dynamic
forms of art and architecture symbolizing life and liberty blossomed on
American soil. Frank Lloyd Wright exemplified this blossoming.
His spiral Guggenheim Museum in New York invites a living
response. When I had asked my children what they remembered most from their
visits to the Guggenheim, they enthusiastically reminisced about running down
the ramp and being high up looking over the fence into the center atrium. It is
not a box for rectangular pictures set in static space, it is a lively place to
be engaged over time.
The exhibitions I saw there that worked best were shows
about movement: Alexander Calder’s mobiles were moving around the spiral to
create a circus of color. Yaacov Agam’s kinetic and dialogic art changed with
the movement of the viewers in his Beyond the Visible show, and Jenny
Holzer’s ruby light word messages on a running electronic signboard flashed
their way up the spiral ramp. The motorcycle show was right on the mark.
The spiral is one of the major life forms in nature: from
DNA, to a nautilus shell, to the growth pattern of palm fronds. It is also one
of the major symbols of the Hebraic mind. Jews are called am haSePheR,
usually translated “People of the Book.” But SePheR is a word written in
the Torah scroll itself long before the invention of codex type books. SePheR
means spiral scroll. It is spelled SPR, the root of the word “SPiRal” in
numerous languages, ancient and modern. Jews, then, are People of the Spiral.
In kabbalah, down-to-earth biblical mysticism, the SePhiRot are
emanations of divine light spiraling down into our everyday life. And the
English words “SPiRitual” and “inSPiRation” share the SRP root from the
Latin SPiRare, to breathe.
In Judaism, form gives shape to content. The medium is an
essential part of the message. Rather than the modernist viewpoint of art as
“the language of forms,” Judaism shares postmodernism’s emphasis on “the ideas
their forms might disclose.” Weekly
portions of the first five books of the Bible in the form of a Torah scroll are
read in synagogue. The symbolic significance of the spiral form is so strong
that if a Torah scroll is not available in synagogue, the Bible is not publicly
read at all. The exact same words printed in codex book form convey the wrong
message.
If the divine message encoded in the Torah is trapped
between two rectilinear covers, it loses its life-giving flow. The message of
the Torah must not be enslaved in the rectangle. It must have the infinite flow
of a Mobius strip where the final letter of the Torah, the lamed of yisraeL
(Israel) connects to the first letter, the bet of B’reshit (in
the beginning). Lamed bet spells the word for “heart.” The heart of the
Torah is where the end connects to the beginning in an endless flow. Form and
content join together to symbolize the essence of Jewish values. The Bible
encoded in a flowing scroll form provides a clue as to the nature of biblical
consciousness as an open-ended, living system.
Renowned expert on contemporary architecture, Bruno Zevi writes, "Wright’s helicoidal shaping of the Guggenheim Museum’s
cavity represents the victory of time over space, that is, the architectural
incarnation of Hebrew thought, even more significant because it was fully
realized by a non-Jew. Like Schonberg’s music, Wright’s architecture is based
on linguistic polarity, emancipated dissonance, contradiction; it is once
Expressionistic and rigorous; it applies Einstein’s concept of “field”; it is
multidimensional; it extols space by demolishing all fetishes and taboos
concerning it, by rendering it fluid, articulated so as to suit man’s ways,
weaving a continuum between building and landscape. In linguistic terms, this
means a total restructuring of form, denial of any philosophical a priori, any
repressive monumentality: action-architecture, aimed at conquering ever more
vast areas of freedom for human behavior."
SETTING A BUILDING IN MOTION: FRANK GEHRY’S GUGGENHEIM
MUSEUM
In creating his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Frank
Gehry moved beyond Wright to a more powerful realization of the Hebraic mindset
that Boman describes as dynamic, vigorous, passionate, and sometimes quite
explosive in kind.
It started in
Canada when young Frank Goldberg (his father changed the family name when they
moved to LA) would play with the live carp swimming in his grandmother’s
bathtub. Gehry often told the story that every Thursday his grandmother would
buy fish and keep them in the bathtub until Friday when she prepared gefilte
fish for the Sabbath meal. The vigorous body motions of swimming fish seen from
above gave Gehry his vocabulary for the dynamic shape of his museum. Fish are
one with their environment. They must stay in constant motion in it to stay
alive. Oxygen carrying water must be kept moving over their gills for them to
breathe. To stop motion is to die.
Gehry’s method of working is creative play with dynamic
forms. He starts with spontaneous scribble sketches that become forms that he
moves and reshapes in a dynamic interplay between computer-generated 3D CAD
graphic models and physical models in real space.
Over the years, Gehry has cultivated a highly personal
studio practice of working with models, because it permits impossibly
cantilevered parts and vertiginous piles of volumes in fluid transformation. As
he began to shape buildings from mobile parts, his sense of space transcended
Cartesian notions. This special sense defies verbal definition, but it might be
compared with the sensation of moving bodies in a medium akin to water. To the
extent that his buildings arrest volumes in continuous motion (and
transformation), time becomes their formative dimension.
As an integral part of education for an architecture of
time and motion, Gehry takes his students on ice in full hockey gear to
interact with each other and their environment in rapid movement. Like fish in
water, skaters standing still on ice are unstable. Swift motion creates balance.
The same concept of stability in motion is sensed in seeing the “fish-scale”
titanium skin on the Bilbao museum that makes it look like a futuristic
airplane. Airplanes must move through their air medium in order to fly.
Stopping motion in midair leads to crashing and death.
Gehry creates a dynamic flow between the building and its
waterfront site and between the visitor and continually unfolding spaces. While
jutting out over the water, the huge flowing fish-like building uses a
combination of water-filled pools and the river to create an energetic
interplay between building and site. Its full aerodynamic form can be seen from
the other side of the river. Crossing the bridge and approaching the building
transforms the experience of this monumental sculptural form into a more
intimate encounter. Shifting viewpoints confuse the building and its
environment as well as interior and exterior spaces. Movement through and
around Gehry’s museum always provides fresh encounters and new ways of seeing.
He sets the bodies of his buildings in motion as a
choreographer does with dancers. In the
book Frank O. Gehry: The Complete Works, Dal Co and Foster write, “One
need only observe Gehry’s manner of drawing to gain an immediate impression of
his way of thinking: the pen does not so much glide across the page as it
dances effortlessly though a continuum of space.” His studio practice appears
like a performance rehearsal. His knowledge of performance art, his
collaborations with artists, and his planning with artists led to spaces at the
Bilbao Guggenheim uniquely suited for the presentation of alternative forms of
art.
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