Habitus

by Habitus · 11/21/11

This conversation between memoirist, novelist, critic, and scholar André Aciman and Habitus editor Joshua Ellison was recorded last summer at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in lower Manhattan, at an event entitled, “Is New York the Diaspora?”

Diaspora is not a word you use a lot in your writing, but exile is a concept you return to again and again. So, I ask, as a beginning: are Diaspora and exile the same thing?

An exile is someone who has been forcibly evicted or dispossessed. Force is inherent to the displacement of an exile; otherwise he is just an immigrant. Therefore, as an exile, you are a wanderer until you find a home—if ever you do. Diaspora is a condition of dispersion that applies to more than one individual; you cannot have one person being diasporic. You cannot be a Diaspora unto yourself. This is an important distinction because the experience of solitude defines exile but does not necessarily have any kind of repercussions in a Diaspora. For example, you could dismantle an entire ghetto in Vilnius and transport it to Brooklyn. Those people are in the condition of Diaspora but they are together. They bring with them their own history, a set of cultural values, and artifacts that keep bound them together.

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by Daniel Bloch · 09/21/11

An abandoned mattress reflects the shadow of a boy suspended in midair. Dozens of faces poke out of windows, trying to catch a glimpse of a body on the street below. Two elderly women embrace, one gazing straight ahead while the other, numbers etched on her forearm, looks lost in her memories.

These three images capture ordinary New Yorkers at extraordinary, if usually grim, moments: The young boy briefly achieves flight amidst a landscape of urban decay in the “Burning Bronx” of the 1970s. The witnesses are craning their necks to get a better look at a gunned-down gangster in 1930s Little Italy. The two women are sisters and survivors, moored in New York half a century after the horror of the camps.

Their stark eloquence is only half the story; who took these photos? In his fascinating new book, After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers (2011, Syracuse University Press), Daniel Morris considers the creators of these images–Mel Rosenthal, Weegee, and Bruce Davidson, respectively–along with the likes of Diane Arbus and Annie Leibovitz, as he investigates the complex legacy of Jewish photography in America. The photographers profiled cover the spectrum of subjects and techniques, not to mention personal links to Jewish life and culture. Yet according to Morris, professor of English at Purdue University and editor of Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, they are united in their grappling with “questions of ethnicity and national identity. They question their status as white mainstream Americans, and negotiate between understanding photography as a medium serving social justice, and as a public display of personal expression, aesthetic value, and commercial reward.” He spoke with Habitus to help us further navigate the terrain.

Your book considers the legacy of Weegee, born Usher Fellig, in Austrian Galicia in 1899, and the son of an aspiring rabbi who peddled Passover dishes on the Lower East Side. Can you tell us more about Weegee, and why his legacy as a Jewish photographer is so influential?

Courtesy wikipedia.org

Weegee influences contemporary culture—not only Jewish photography. One could argue, for example, that there would have been no Andy Warhol had there not first been Weegee, who, after all, printed his pictures with a stamp that read “Weegee the Famous.” Think of Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series that featured mangled car wrecks. Think of Warhol’s obsession with celebrity in his work on Elvis and Marilyn. Warhol’s insight into our media fascination with extreme violence as well as his understanding that there exists a close relationship between the cultures of consumerism, fine art, popular media, and a cult of the artist are indebted to Weegee. In Warhol’s diaries he expresses his appreciation for Weegee’s genius, and he is not alone. The eclectic Jewish jazz musician, John Zorn, featured Weegee images on the cover of one of his albums. In terms of Jewish photographers, I would point to Weegee’s innovative creation of photo books, such as Naked City, that combined images and texts as having a major impact on contemporary figures, such as Jim Goldberg and Mel Rosenthal. Diane Arbus’s obsession with “freak” culture stems from Weegee, as does Annie Leibovitz’s interest in performance and celebrity. Read more »

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by Habitus · 09/12/11

At the age of thirty-four, the Israeli-born architect Michael Arad won the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition with his submission, “Reflecting Absence.” He spoke with Habitus editor Joshua Ellison as the site was readied for its unveiling on September 11th, 2011.

You are an immigrant to New York but you have now made an imprint on the city that few people could equal. How has this process changed your relationship to the city?

I think what really changed my relationship to the city came before this project—the 9/11 attacks and the response of New Yorkers on that day. I’d been living in New York for close to three years. I’d lived here before at a much earlier age, in sixth grade. I had come and gone from New York throughout college and graduate school, but I felt very much like an outsider here. It was a city that always intrigued me; I knew I wanted to come work here and live here. But even after being here for a number of years, I still felt like an outsider—I think New York is a city that’s full of outsiders.

Arad, the architect/designer of the World Trade Center Memorial

Having an Israeli background, New York was far removed from the difficulties of living in Israel. Back home, I knew that prevalent sense of vulnerability—violence could be waiting on the next bus ride or around on the next corner. When the 9/11 attacks happened, that misplaced sense of security evaporated in an instant.

But I also gained something: All of a sudden, by going through the crucible of this experience, I felt a tremendous sense of kinship to my fellow New Yorkers. All my neighbors, the people I saw on the subway, the people I saw on the street, and the people I saw gathering in public spaces like Union Square and Washington Square: we were one. That was very powerful and moving. In particular, I recall going to Washington Square a couple of days after the attacks—I was living in the East Village at the time—and our neighborhood, like everything south of Fourteenth Street, was shut off from the rest of the city. There were no cars, hardly any people outside. I went for a bike ride in the middle of the night—two, three in the morning—in an ever-widening circle, starting in my neighborhood, making my way over to Chinatown and TriBeCa and the West Village. I eventually ended up in Washington Square Park and I walked up to the fountain. There were candles surrounding the fountain and there were people standing there. I think people came there the same way that I did, alone or maybe with one other friend, but people stood there together. And when I walked up to that fountain, that circular fountain, I joined that circle of people and I didn’t feel alone anymore. I don’t think I understood the significance of that moment, but in many ways it was a very transformative moment for me: I felt that I became a New Yorker, realizing that this is my home.

One of the interesting tensions around this memorial project has been the question: Is this a national memorial or a New York City memorial?

It’s a national memorial. I think that’s how everybody involved in it right now sees it. At some points over the last few years, there were questions about whether or not we should include the names of people who died in Pennsylvania, or in Washington, or Virginia. For me, it was never a question.

I also think it goes beyond being a national memorial; I think it’s part of our shared human heritage, wherever we are coming from. There are people from over sixty countries among the victims. And New York is an incredibly cosmopolitan city that brings people in from everywhere and gives everybody a shot—I’m not going to say an equal and fair shot, but it gives everybody opportunities which they might not have elsewhere.

You have written that you started thinking about memorial ideas very shortly after the event.

We were living next door to a pastry shop called De Robertis on First Avenue, between 10^th and 11^th, and shortly after the attack, they put up a cake in the window that had an image of the Twin Towers. It said, “We will never forget,” in frosting. When I first saw it, I thought it was in terrible taste. But as I walked by it, day after day, I grew to really appreciate the gesture. These people used their best means of self-expression. They wanted to find a way to express themselves and they used the tools that were available. It was easy to be very dismissive of that when you first saw it. But I came to realize it was not that dissimilar to what I did when I started to sketch ideas on a piece of yellow tracing paper. I was trying to find a way to make sense, to acknowledge what we had seen, what we had suffered. I spent close to a year on what was a very personal and very cathartic exercise of exploring these ideas. There was no memorial competition, there was no client driving the design project. This was a very personal effort, something I spent days obsessing over and building and sketching and designing.

You originally envisioned a memorial on the Hudson River.

It was the image of the river being torn open, and I imagined walking up to the edge of the river and looking beyond, and feeling this sense that the fabric of space had somehow been torn open and water was falling into these voids—and that these voids would never be filled. It was a completely enigmatic and inexplicable image, and I spent a lot of time trying to realize it. I wasn’t sure if it could be realized.

I built a little fountain in a miniature scale—twelve inches by twelve inches. A year later, there was a competition for the design of the memorial.  I wanted to see if I could take those ideas that I had for the voids on the Hudson and in some way reinterpret them. I also wanted to bring that sense of creating a specific place—a place of assembly within the city, like Union Square, like Washington Square—that helped me confront that day, not alone but as part of a project.

In both the Hudson design and the competition version, you started with the idea of submerged forms or negative spaces.

It was about creating a space that would remain inaccessible and empty, an emptiness that I think is filled with meaning. I was making the absence visible—something that is not erased with the passage of time.

The void doesn’t really open up under you until you’re right there, right at its edge. It’s a very visceral reaction: you really feel it in your chest, in your gut, as you walk up to them.

This idea of “reflecting absence” seems to repeat a question that has been central to memorial design since the Second World War, which is: How do you capture in physical space the enormity of a tragedy that is beyond measure? Did you look to other memorial projects for guidance?

As an architect, I’ve seen many memorials and many buildings and many monuments, so all of those feed into the design unconscious. You don’t know where everything that you draw upon and think of comes from. It comes from a mixture that is deep within.

On the question of memorializing, one of the difficulties here was that the number of deaths—close to 3,000—could easily become an abstraction, a number that’s impossible to grapple with and understand and break down. We arranged the names of the victims around two pools according to meaningful adjacencies. The idea was that there would be a reason why one name is close to another name, that these adjacencies and the placements of the names would reflect the relationships that existed between the victims. A lot of the victims knew each other very well: they’d worked together, some of them were families that died together, some of them commuted together every morning, or went to school together. Some of them only got to know each other that day. In their effort to help each other, some of them died together. I wanted to reach out to family members and ask them if there were names of other victims that they would like to see next to the name of the person they lost. This was a big “ask,” so to speak, for the memorial foundation. This was something I’m still surprised we were given the opportunity to do, because it was a tremendous risk, and institutions and the people who run institutions are usually risk averse.

Mayor Bloomberg deserves tremendous credit for giving us the opportunity to pursue this. It wasn’t until 2006, when he became chairman of the foundation, that we were given a green light to go ahead and try this. And then it wasn’t until 2009 that letters finally went out to family members asking for this input. We got over 1,200 requests from family members, and we spent a year arranging the names very carefully to meet each and every request. It was a very emotionally challenging task—it was the kind of task where you had to hold onto that depth of feeling without letting it overwhelm you, and without becoming callous to it either. There are incredibly sad stories that are now embedded in the very fabric of this memorial design. These relationships, to the naked eye, are invisible: it looks like a random array of names, but in fact there are constellations of adjacencies.

There’s one particular story of a meaningful adjacency that I’ve shared a number of times. Abigail Ross Goodman lost her father that day. He was on Flight 11. She lost her best friend, Stacey Leigh Sanders, too, who was working in the North Tower. Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower, and so she lost her father and her best friend in an instant. We got a request to put those two names side by side, and initially we didn’t know why. You find out one story after another. I don’t know all the stories that are part of these arrangements—I don’t think anybody will ever know all the stories.

However you come to know them, I think there are ways to transmit these incredibly sad and moving stories and to build up a sense of understanding, one person at a time, adjacency by adjacency. This way, we might better understand what happened that day, rather than become confounded by the close to 3,000 deaths. I think these individual stories will always have resonance. There will be new ways to share these stories that I can’t imagine yet, but someone else will become involved in doing this. The meaningful adjacencies are a way for us to address that question that you are asking about: how do you memorialize, especially when it seems like such an overwhelming task, something that is beyond comprehension?

It also strikes me, as an architectural matter, that the use of the names is an interesting response to one of the major challenges of the site, which is the enormity of the scale of the space. It is a way of allowing for a more intimate, quiet register within this really vast expanse.

In some ways, these design decisions were very straightforward.  We knew we wanted to place these pools where the towers once were. We knew we wanted their scale to be commensurate with the size of the towers’ footprint and we knew that we wanted every name listed. After that, it was about letting the history of the site come forward through these design elements. When you have very clear objectives, it becomes easier to make decisions that are going to be consistent.

You are also very conscious, programmatically, of how a viewer moves through the space. Can you talk a little bit how you envision that?

Well, I think the experience of the memorial actually begins when you consider the scale of this neighborhood. If you think of Lower Manhattan, of these tall and narrow urban canyons where you can barely see a sliver of sky in some instances, and you walk out of these canyons onto this vast, open plain—this eight-acre memorial site—where a clear dome of the sky is so present all of a sudden: You are at once within the city and also looking at it as if you were outside it. You have this distance that separates you from Lower Manhattan even though you are firmly within it.

For me, it was always about rooting the site back into the life of the neighborhood, and also giving you the opportunity to separate yourself from everyday New York life. It’s a very dynamic relationship, I think, between the site and the surrounding city. The site is very much defined by the buildings that will rise around it. I think it’s powerful, once you cross the street and step onto the memorial plaza. You discover this unexpected forest of nearly 400 trees. You walk under their canopy and the view of the city becomes even more mediated through that permeable ceiling of branches and leaves. Then you walk deeper into the site, to the edge of one of two enormous voids.

We designed these voids with an eight-foot wide and two-foot tall water table that surrounds them and serves as the spring point for the waterfall. Above that, there are the bronze panels where the names are inscribed. What happens is that you can start to see the scale of the void—you start to see the waterfall from 200 feet away—but the void doesn’t really open up under you until you’re right there, right at its edge. It’s a very visceral reaction: you really feel it in your chest, in your gut, as you walk up to them. It’s the kind of thing that you can’t really capture in a photograph because a photograph isolates the sentiment into something that is just a visual image. But when you’re there, your sense of balance is upended by what is around you. And then, as you stand there at the edge of void, and as you take in this enormous space, you see this multitude of names that surrounds each pool—close to 1,500 names over each void.

You start walking slowly and gradually around these pools, taking in one name after another. Each name has a geographic component to it that I think is very important, and it’s reinforced by these meaningful adjacencies, though you might not know about them. When you walk up to the void, what you see is one name and then another and another and, together, they coalesce to form a river of names that surrounds each pool. But each name is an island unto itself. What is on this memorial is the name of the person—that most essential marker of the unique identity of the individual—and, at the same time, there’s also this assembly of names, all together. I think it was important to me to draw on the individual loss, but also this collective loss that we suffered—that sense of the individual and the universal.

There have been commemorations of 9/11 at every scale, from the very personal to the civic and political. You talked about your neighbor’s bakery. So why is it important to have an official response, a single space that focuses all this memory and mourning?

I don’t think it’s a single response, I think it’s one of many responses. This is the “national” 9/11 memorial and it has a standing that is separate from those others, as an institution of the state. I think that’s appropriate, but I also think that it does not thereby give it more meaning or a better meaning than other memorials that reflect the diversity of responses that we had to that day. There should be multiple ways of understanding that event, and I think there will be multiple ways of understanding this memorial. I think many people will walk away from it with very different understandings and resolve to respond to what they have seen in very different ways.

You mentioned before that Israel was your family home. I wonder if you feel like you have internalized anything about that country’s approach to memory or memorialization in the way that you approached this design.

I don’t necessarily think so. I was born in London, I grew up in London and New York and Washington and Jerusalem and Mexico City, and that was all by the time I graduated high school. So I think that all of these influences are part of it, so maybe no is the wrong answer—the answer is yes and…

Was I influenced by the military cemetery in Jerusalem? Yes, but I was also influenced by seeing Chichen Itza and the pyramids in Mexico. One of the benefits of having a childhood that was spread across so many continents is that you start to see the universal in this world and understand that there is much more that unifies us than divides us. When it comes to something as difficult as dealing with death, you will find that to be more the case than anything else.

Memorials necessarily have to address themselves to posterity. I wonder if you have given much thought to what someone in the future will learn about what happened on 9/11 from visiting your memorial—is it meant to be educational in that sense?

That moment that I described to you earlier of walking up to the edge of the void and seeing the scale of this space, which echoes the scale of the towers’ footprints, and seeing the multitude of names that surrounds each void—that is an incredibly powerful moment. It is the moment of walking up to a threshold, to this line that separates the living from the dead. I think this will always be a powerful moment. Fifty years from now, a hundred years from now, even when people might not know every detail of that day, they will still comprehend in an instant that this happened.

I think that’s important. But I also think this story is going to be told in many other venues. When you built a memorial a thousand years ago, it was in the absence of the printing press, the Internet and movies and every other medium that we now have at our disposal to share information, to disseminate information, and to connect to people. So this idea that the memorial is somehow singlehandedly going to convey the story of 9/11 to future generations—that’s not going to be the case. I am not trying to get myself off the hook. It does need to do something very profound. But it’s part of a much larger combination of forces, and if you looked in the paper on almost any day in the last ten years, there would have been some reference to some aspect of 9/11. Whether it was a story about security at airports or immigration or the wars or anything else, it is all part of that story. I think we’ll be discussing 9/11 for a long time to come.

That must be liberating as a designer, in some sense.

It allowed me to focus on what I thought was most essential. I don’t think I could ever have become of the sole arbiter of the meaning of 9/11. Anybody who thinks they can has a very narrow agenda.

Visit the National 9/11 Memorial Website here. This interview will be featured in forthcoming the New York issue of Habitus. Subscribe now to pre-order your copy.

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by Habitus · 01/13/11

During the contentious debate over what form Berlin’s planned Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe would take, Horst Hoheisel became infamous as the man who proposed blowing up the Brandenburg Gate. He first came to prominence as a designer of monuments with the construction of his “negative fountain” in his hometown of Kassel. The project was conceived as a mirror image of a fountain that was destroyed during World War II; a phantom monument, surrounding the empty space left behind with a reflecting pool. “For Hoheisel,” James E. Young explains, “even the fragment was a decorative lie, suggesting itself as a remnant of a destruction no one knew much about.”

In Germany and throughout the world, Hoheisel has proposed memory works designed to provoke anger and stimulate debate by upending the conventions of the memorial form. The artist writes, “I don’t need the memorial as an object itself, the idea of thinking creatively is a monument and memorial on its own because particular monuments tell much more about our time, about ourselves and less about those victims.”

Habitus: Your personal history overlaps so closely with the history of Germany after the war. When you were young, what did you know about the war?

Hoheisel: I was born in December 1944, in the last month of the war. My parents were from Latvia, from Riga. Now I live in Kassel, Germany.

When I was working on the Aschrottbrunnen memorial fountain in Kassel, I found out from my research that the Jewish people of Kassel had been deported to Riga. So the story suddenly became very personal, very near to my own family biography.

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by David Gutherz · 09/04/10

“The problem in Hungary is not that anti-semites are allowed to speak freely,” says Agnes Heller, in a recently translated interview for Salon” but that nobody tells these people to shut up.”  For those interested in exploring of the complex inter-connections between government, media, and culture in Hungarian anti-semitism (and, mutatis mutandis, the recent outburst of American Islamophobia) Heller’s ever-insightful analysis is not to be missed. And after that, be sure to re-read our interview with her in issue 1.

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by Habitus · 08/26/10

In the late 1990s, a group of young artists transformed the Mexico City art scene and drew international attention to a city that had previously been considered an obscure outpost of contemporary visual culture. Yoshua Okón, one of the defining personalities of that moment, embodied its spirit with video and installations that were impolite, funny, and inflammatory. His seminal works aimed squarely at his society’s hypocrisies, excesses, and human spectacles. Now an internationally known artist who creates and exhibits work all over the world, Okón lives in Los Angeles and Mexico City. He spoke to Habitus from his home in the Condesa neighborhood, where he has spent most of his life.

Habitus: Growing up in Mexico City can mean so many different things and represent so many different worlds that don’t often intersect. Can you tell me a bit about the version of Mexico City that you knew growing up?

Okón: It’s a good way to describe the city and Mexico, as a whole. I’m very grateful to have grown up here; it’s a very complex place that doesn’t allow you to ignore the multiple realities and experiences. It’s a very in-your-face place that doesn’t allow you to live under many illusions.

I grew up in Colonia Condesa, where I still live today. It’s a neighborhood that was historically full of immigrants, so the cosmopolitan dimension of Mexico City is very strong here. It’s also a neighborhood with a very active street life. The old urban planning has survived here; it has a very human scale with lots of parks and green space and small businesses. You interact a lot with other people. This kind of neighborhood puts you in touch with the city’s many realities. As a child I would hang out in the parks and I got to meet an amazing variety of people: recent immigrants, working class, middle class, various races.

My work is very much socially oriented and that definitely comes from my experience growing up in the city and, specifically, in Condesa.

Was there a particular time in your life that you became aware of the city’s violence and corruption and social divisions—all the things that would become central to your art?

That was something I saw almost from the beginning. I don’t think it is particular to Mexico. I lived the in the U.S. for eight years and I would dare say that, in many ways, it’s a much more corrupt society. The difference is that there you have very sophisticated mechanisms that make people feel they are living in a fair society. To me it is, in many ways, much more ruthless. Here, the corruption is far more naked.

You might be best known for a piece in which you paid local policemen to act out in front of your camera. They dance, sing, gesture obscenely, shout. Can you say a little about how the material was gathered?

My experience with the police in Mexico City is very much love-hate. They are so cynical and corrupt but they are also amazing actors. At the end, you know they just want your money and they know it, too. But there is a theatricality to it that I have always hated and always loved. I thought: these guys are so creative and such skillful performers, why not use them as actors? These guys will make you laugh but you will feel highly uncomfortable at the same time.

There is something obviously cynical in the act but, at the same time, there is something that’s also very tender about they way they perform for you.

Exactly. There is something very human and down-to-earth about the way they behave but of course it is also cynical.

I’m interested in the relationship between orchestration and improvisation in this kind of work. How do you find the right level of intervention for a given situation?

Well, I guess that is part of my art. For me making artwork has a lot to do with my curiosity about the world. It is a great way to rethink the way I understand the world and to challenge the viewer. I think we often live mostly by stereotypes. This work is a way of bringing a little distance from everyday life.

It would be very boring for me to come up with a script, or answers, before I create the piece. That’s where performance comes in. I basically set up very simple parameters—the rules of the game that speak for themselves. Reality is always surprising me; most things that happen could have never come from a script.

You encourage people to see themselves and their place in society with humor. There is something kind of democratic in the use of humor in your work, which creates a kind of relationship of equality between the subjects and the audience, who may not be on equal footing in society at large.

I think humor is an incredible useful tool for gaining distance from ourselves. When we laugh, we are more able to see ourselves from the outside. My works are as much about the viewer as the subjects being portrayed. Humor allows viewers to become implicated in the work. Once you are laughing, you are already implicated. A mixture of humor and discomfort can be very powerful.

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by David Gutherz · 07/27/10

True or false: “there has ever been a source of great tension between Judaism and democracy.” See what Habitus advisor Ian Buruma has to say about it, in this fascinating interview with Farid Boussaid and Jonothan Gharraie. Author of more than a dozen books on  a dizzying array of topics, Buruma’s most recent English-language work is The Taming of the  Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents. In it, Buruma focuses on the complex relations between religion, liberalism, secularism, and democracy in America, Asia, and Europe.

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by David Gutherz · 07/06/10

Alex Epstein, sometimes called “Israel’s Borges,” is one of the most promising writers to come out of Tel Aviv in a decade. Having emigrated from St. Petersburg at a young age, much of Epstein’s work circles incessantly around the ideas of home and homelessness–of homelessness within the home.   Check out this enlightening interview conducted by Bud Parr of Words Without Borders about Epstein’s new book Blue Has No South and his quest to “capture the world in as few words as possible.”

A Conversation with Alex Epstein from Words without Borders on Vimeo.

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by Michael Berk · 07/06/10

For almost two decades, composer, vocalist, and installation artist Jewlia Eisenberg has been making music rooted in the sounds of the Jewish and African diasporas. Eisenberg’s recordings with the ensemble Charming Hostess, based on her wide-ranging reading, have explored Walter Benjamin’s Berlin, Asja Lacis’s Moscow, and Semezdin Mehmedinovic’s Sarajevo, while her research has taken her across Africa, Central Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Her latest work, the Bowls Project, takes her to Babylon; the forthcoming Gramophone and Dynamo explores the rebetika music of Salonika, while a project still in the planning stages will visit the texts of Natalia Ginzburg.

The Bowls Project, which premieres at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on July 6, explores the tradition of the “demon bowls” that were buried, upside down, beneath the thresholds of homes in Bablyon during the 2nd through 6th centuries to protect families, children, and possessions against evil. The texts inscribed on these bowls—expressions of what the composer calls the “apocalyptic intimate”—invoke the powers of angels and demons in the service of everyday domestic struggles. The bowls—many of which have been unearthed by ordnance during the Iraq war—remain the only written record we have of women’s voices during the time of the Talmud.

The Bowls Project, including Eisenberg’s settings of the bowls’ texts to new music influenced by American folk and Babylonian traditions, is an immersive multimedia installation presented in a domed space designed by Michael H. Ramage, engineer of last year’s World Architecture Festival Building of the Year, and built by a group of volunteers using the nearly lost art of timbrel vaulting, taking advantage the strength of tile to build elegant arches without the need for extensive support. Within the domes, visitors are invited to record their own “secrets of the home,” which will then be played back as part of an evolving sound collage. In addition, Charming Hostess will perform weekly; rituals from a variety of traditions will take place on Friday evenings, and other participatory programs, including workshops on the bowls texts and amulet making, will be held on weekends.

Habitus caught up with Eisenberg by phone from her home in San Francisco, where she’s readying the project for its opening today. You can see images or video of the construction of the domes, or participate by sharing your own secrets. To learn more about the bowls themselves, download Dan Levene’s pamphlet on their history.

Tell me about what you’re calling the “apocalyptic intimate.”

There’s this idea in the texts of the bowls that the most great forces—angels and demons, the messengers of the divine—are things that people encounter every day. It’s not really your choice whether you deal with them, they’re just around. The bowls often refer to these wild, giant forces, these apocalyptic visions, in intense combination with domestic issues: “I bar thee now, from gossiping, with the twelve names of twelves sons.”

These are very different registers from our perspective…

But on the other hand, they aren’t. There’s all of this American music that we love that’s in conversation with these same kinds of ideas. “Get back devil, leave me alone,” all of the stuff about angels and demons that’s very present in American folk music, both black and white. I think these are deep tropes for people in any case, and there’s a relationship here between these kinds of texts, although they’re very remote, obviously.

And that’s the connection that informs the music you’ve written for the project?

The music for the project draws pretty heavily on the Bablyonian Jewish music tradition—some religious songs, but also some pop music from the 1940s, and then this American folk music that comes out of an apocalyptic tradition. I think it sounds pretty straightforwardly like my writing voice; I guess there’s a bit more single-voice singing than in the past.

Does that have to do with the notion of intimacy?

Well, what would happen is that you’d get a woman client, she’d go to the scribe and he (I’m assuming most of them were he) would inscribe the bowl, she’d take it home and bury it under the doorway of her house. It was probably never ever said out loud. You really feel it as the voice of a single person—it’s not about a city, not about a movement. It’s also very universal and you identify with these people—an Iraqi woman from 1,500 years ago is worried about the same things as me—and that is so obvious when you experience these texts, even though they’re so weird.

What about Jewishness? Are these a Jewish form?

You can read this through a Jewish lens, but the bowls are cosmopolitan—everyone has them at this time, in Babylon around 1,500 years ago, from the 2nd to the 6th century. Mandaeans, Jews, Syriac Christians, Zoroastrians, animists. Everyone is using the same amulet system. Not only is it a cosmopolitan form—everyone shares it—but it’s a porous form. A Zoroastrian might go to a Jewish scribe, and that would be totally normal. You get a lot of flow between gods, goddesses, angels, demons. For example, you’ll see on a Jewish bowl, “And I come to him for the satisfaction of love, with the angel Dalibat”—but Dalibat is not a Jewish angel. She’s a Mesopotamian goddess, related to Ishtar. But here she appears as part of the Jewish spirit world. And that’s something of interest to me—that porosity, that cosmopolitanism.

“Four blast demons came forth into the fortress of the earth, and the devil horns sounded and the rebel drums pounded, and the queen Lilith moaned and Leviathan the sea monster shrieked. I abjure you, great bird of rivers. Listen to my plea and accept my incantation.” The great bird of rivers? That’s a Jewish god? “Bodies of motion, bodies of chaos and tummult. The voice. The sound of bodies of noise, chaos and noise.” And you see what I mean by apocalyptic? They sound like Black Sabbath.

Also with the bowls, mysticism and spirituality and sexuality are very deeply intertwined. You get a surprising number of women’s voices in the bowls. I was talking to Daniel Boyarin about the bowls, and I had asked him to read some of the Aramaic for me, so I could sing it correctly and he stumbled over a word…and I wondered, what word could he possibly stumble over? It was the “we” form for “women.” It never appears once in the Talmud, but constantly in the bowls, where you have tons and tons of women’s words: I want to fuck the guy next door, I want to protect my kids or my possessions, or to stop these people gossiping about me. A really common trope in the bowls is that a demon has come into the house and married somebody nonconsensually, and you have to get a formal divorce or it’ll keep hanging around.

And the texts of the bowls are the only represented women’s voices from that period?

It was not weird for women to express themselves, even though the canonical text we have from that time has none of it. Women don’t have a voice. You do have some women in the Talmud, Beruriah for instance, but their words are written down by men. The bowls are still mediated—we assume the scribes who wrote these words down were men—but you really do get a sense of these individual women.

Was there an official, legal aspect to the bowls? Were the scribes who wrote the texts representatives of the state?

No, these guys were not rabbis, though we don’t actually know a huge amount about them. One thing that’s interesting—there are more Jewish bowls than there were Jews at this time; you see a lot of bowls written in Jewish Aramaic, but the names are not Jewish. They think that at the time Jews were considered to have more mojo, to be more magical than other people, so you might go seek out a Jewish scribe to get your bowl done. But this is a time when Jews are just one of a number of people living around there. You can see how everyone’s sharing the same magic system.

People who are into early Kabbalah are interested in the bowls, because this is the first time you get the language that becomes part of the slightly later, seminal mystical texts.But what’s interesting is that this is all happening at the same time as the Talmud. The Talmud ends up being the mainstream, and the language of the bowls is now totally marginal and weird sounding. But at the time, the Talmud was just some guys sitting in a room, and these people were mainstream. Everybody had this.

Given that you make a connection with American folk traditions, is apocalyptic intimacy necessarily a diaspora concept?

You might think of it as a female concept. For me diaspora means that you’re looking at something without a land base. It’s anti-nationalist. In what way is the bowls project a diaspora project? It’s super anti-nationalist; it has to do with this cosmopolitan, porous form. And it’s also a critique of the war in and occupation of Iraq. Because that’s why I started it and that’s what I got interested in. It’s either a place of war, or a place of myth. Sumer and cuneiform, or Fallujah. That’s what we know. And this is something different and it’s something that I felt that people could connect to. I really wanted to kick aside the myths.

If you conflate diaspora stuff with Jewish stuff, or with African stuff, you get into a lot of conversations about text as home, language as home, multiplicity as home, and I identify with all of those ideas, but I really didn’t want to get into the Sumerian civilization. This is about some women in this place, not about civilization, not about giant movements but intimate relations.

Instead of thinking of it as a physical displacement, which is the way we’d normally think about diaspora, there’s a sense of questioning your spiritual space. And that might involve how you encounter angels and demons. If you think about Freud and the idea of something being unheimlich, unhomelike, uncanny, it’s something that is not of ours, and that’s what the supernatural is —- something that’s beyond the home.

But the bowls are pretty radically of the home…

Yeah, exactly. This is the opposite of that Western, that German idea. You’re saying that something that’s very deep in my home, and central to my domestic preoccupations, is also radically far from my home. And I can encounter those entities, and I have to, and there’s something that will help me mediate that relationship, these encounters with these things that are radically unhomelike. And you see that in the bowls texts and in American folk music.

The words themselves are performative. The words themselves have power, they do something. You both coerce and cajole these entities into doing what you want them to do, with words. We don’t have that many performative words that we take very seriously. For example, one that’s pretty big in the state of California right now is “I now pronounce you man and wife” or “I now pronounce you partners for life.” That word is law, it changes the status of living people, just those words.

One of the American songs that I chose for the record, “Hangman Devil Man”—and this is one of the only ones—is about the idea that the Devil Man is kind of an agent of the state, the hangman who’s going to take you down, but most of them have to do with intimate relations, with angels and demons being very personal, being in your life.

Getting deep into these texts one of the things you have to deal with is the Lilith story and how women encounter female power—physical power, spiritual power, their own power, the power of other women. So all these questions about how political it is—maybe it’s the Muriel Rukeyser thing about how if one woman told the truth about her life the whole world would burst?

Is there a place for the apocalyptic intimate in contemporary life? How do you see it working?

Let me give you an example. I had a residency at the University of Denver last year, and my partner’s sister is a fundamentalist, in one of the big megachurches there. And she loves music. So I was telling her about the project, and she says to me that it sounds amazing, and she’d love to come hear it, but she can’t, because I’m using the words of demons, and I could invoke a demon and she can’t be there while that’s happening.

The apocalyptic intimate is part of her daily life. When I say I want to pray on something, I’m not even sure if I encounter it in the same way she does. Do I think that an angel is with me all the time, or that if something is wrong with my house it’s because there’s a demon here? That’s not how I would articulate my own life, but that is part of her life.

I’m a believer; I pray, we keep Shabbat, for this installation I can’t work on Friday night. Is that encountering the apocalyptic intimate? I don’t know. It’s a different articulation.

The people of the bowls, who knows what they believed? But in any case they were comfortable talking to the divine. Expressing themselves toward the holy, toward the source of all being? No problem! They don’t feel uncomfortable about that, or awkward, or dorky. It’s not weird for them.

Or is it even separate at all from their everyday lives?

For me, one thing I really like about them is that there’s no self-consciousness about getting right with God. And I feel like that too. I talk to God every day.

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by Habitus · 09/16/08

For musician and historian Ned Sublette, New Orleans is a city of global significance that is also “an alternative American history in itself.” His book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square, is a painstaking and imaginative recreation of the city’s first hundred years. By carefully decoding the influences that shaped it, he has created a vivid portrait of the city we know today.

Sublette approaches the history of New Orleans largely though its music, and he hears in the city an expansive dialogue that reaches back to Europe and Africa and across the Americas. “The whole history of New Orleans is Diasporas,” he tells us—a place where myriad cultural inputs were preserved, integrated, and exported to the world.

Some people call New Orleans the least American city. Your book illustrates that the city is deeply singular, but also profoundly connected to the history and culture of the nation, the region, and the world.

I think it’s the most American city. It’s as fundamental to the history of the nation as Philadelphia or Boston or New York. New Orleans is the logical outcome of competing international forces, meeting in a peculiar geography.

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