"Kicking aound the Claypan" - a work by Lin Onus. Copyright the Lin Onus Estate.

By Siobhan O’Neill

An exhibition featuring the collaboration of the work the late Lin Onus, the famous Aboriginal artist, and Israeli artist Shaike Snir, opened this evening at Alt Neu I am Art gallery in Glenhuntly Road, Elsternwick.

The exhibition features incredible works that reflect the combined feelings of Lin Onus and Shaike ‘I am Art’ Snir, from issues relating to injustice, death and atrocities to magnificent pieces of great beauty and perfect simplicity.

Tragically, Lin Onus died in 1996 of a heart attack at the age of just 47.

“I was so shocked at his death. I really couldn’t believe it when I was told what had happened. Lin was such a wonderful human being, open and professional. We worked together since 1988 and produced so many incredible pieces. Some I would like to see in the National Gallery of Victoria,” said Shaike Snir.

“Lin would have loved to be involved in this exhibition. It’s funny, because we loved these works and enjoyed creating them so much, but it took some years to see the depth of some of these pieces,” Shaike said.

A well-known and respected master printer, Shaike says 25 percent of all proceeds will go to the Heart Foundation. The Caulfield resident says he feels strongly about making a difference to try to help reduce the rate of cardiovascular disease, Australia’s biggest killer.

He says the incredible generosity of his friend and colleague Lin Onus also drives him.

“Lin was such a generous human being. As an artist it was about a rise to perfection. He always wanted to help people, especially indigenous students. He loved life, was so knowledgeable and wanted to give back.  I’m quite sad every time I think about him and the pieces, and his untimely death,” Shaike said.

Shaike and his wife Irit, who own the Alt Neu I am Art gallery, were also pleased to have the chance to support the work of the Heart Foundation by opening the exhibition during national Heart Week.

The exhibition will run until Thursday 26 May 2011 at Alt Neu I am Art, 297a Glenhuntly Road, Elsternwick.  For details telephone 0417 383 994

Aborigines, Chained to a tree (1946) - Yosl Bergner

By Michael Krape

Shaike Snir is not a household name but his causes are.  Together with his wife Irit he is creating a way for artists and their art to deliver outcomes for people in need.

The Israeli-born artist, printmaker and art dealer will open a gallery ‘Alt-Neu I am Art’* in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick on April 5^th with a clear mandate: a percentage of every work of art sold at an event will be donated to a charity or a recognised cause.

One that is close to Shaike and Irit’s hearts is the Indigenous community.  Not only were they friends of Lin Onus, arguably Australia’s most important contemporary Aboriginal artist, but Shaike is a close confidant of 90 year-old Yosl Bergner who became a champion of dispossessed Aborigines back in the 1930s.

Bergner was a member of the ‘Angry Penguins’ and counted Sir Sidney Nolan, Albert Tucker and Arthur Boyd among his friends.  As history has revealed, he was one of the first European artists to document the plight of Aboriginal Australians.

He has given Shaike the right to produce a limited edition of 99 digital prints of a 2004 work created as a companion piece to a remarkable painting from the mid 1940s titled ‘Aborigines chained to a tree’. Bergner refused to sell this work and in 1979 donated it to the National Gallery of Victoria.

Bergner created the original work after reading a newspaper report about a group of four Aborigines chained to a

And the Chains Remained (2004) - Yosl Bergner

tree by the manager of a sheep station in Outback South Australia.  He told Shaike he was moved to tears by the headline:  ‘Chattels, not living beings’, and the parallels with the Jewish experience in Europe.

“Yosl isn’t just a great artist, but an inspirational humanitarian,” Shaike says.  “He may not have lived in Australia for more than half a century, but he is still passionate about addressing the wrongs that were done to Indigenous people.

“Like Yosl I believe we can live without art, but not as well.  If we can use it to make lives better, to influence outcomes and to change how people think, then we have a duty to do that.”

He says that artists are happy to participate with his and Irit’s vision including many who are household names.  And he is encouraging other artists to contact him.

Shaike says more often than not, artists come to their profession with a strong social conscience and use their art to explore themes and ideas.  It also helps them to achieve greater clarity with their emotional and intellectual response to issues of concern.

‘Tikkun Olam’ is a Hebrew term that means to ‘fix or repair the world’.  He argues that artists have it within their power to effect change in those who view their works or understand the motivation behind them.  He says that purpose of the gallery is to support the artists’ in their journey.

Opening exhibition of ALT NEU I AM ART is called ‘Tikkun Olam’. This is the name of the committee from the “Shira Hadasha” synagogue community. Money raised from this first exhibition will help to fund two prizes in memory of William Cooper.  They will help young Aboriginal students continue their studies in the area of Indigenous Health and Education.

The ‘Tikkun Olam’ committee and the gallery are also keen to support Galiamble Men’s Recovery Centre in St Kilda, a cause that is close to some of the artists who live and work in the area.

The exhibition will include the Bergner print titled: “And The Chains Remained” ($700 + GST unframed) and works by a range of other highly regarded artists. 25% of the sale price will be donated to these causes.

It will be officially opened by Associate Professor Mark Baker, who heads the Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Monash University and is Director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilization.

The ‘Alt-Neu I am Art’ Gallery is located at 1^st Floor, 297a Glenhuntly Road, Elsternwick.  Queries should be directed to Shaike Snir on 0417 383 994 or iamartoo AT hotmail.com

* The name comes from the oldest synagogue in Prague, believed to date from 1270 using stones from the Temple in Jerusalem.

Kiss of Judas (fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel) by Giotto di Bondone*

By Almoni

For the past ten years I’ve had an increasing interest with Renaissance Art: Duccio, Giotto, the Lippis, Martini, della Francesca and many others. For all of them – and for earlier wonderful painters like Cimabue – Christian iconography is central to their extraordinary art.

But for most of my life, I could not bear to look at icons, frescoes, crucifixes, diptychs, triptychs or Byzantine mosaics. It was as if, by looking at the traditionally forbidden and hated graven images, the worship of the golden calves and idols of Art, I would be instantly Christianized and become some sort of fervid, rosary-waving, anti-Semitic Catholic: everything our tradition has taught us not to be. In reality, as the frescoes in the Synagogue at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates tell us, old time Jews loved a good narrative painting (the equivalent of a blockbuster movie) as much as anyone else and aberrant tendencies also appear in Jewish Palestinian mosaics.

I knew something was special about Renaissance Christian art when I first saw Giotto in Florence 36 years ago – I still have the postcards next to my bed.  But I couldn’t handle the ‘really’ Christian stuff that featured not just kind St Francis, but Jesus, Mary and angels.  That is at least, not until more recently.  I’ve grown fond of looking at Maestàs (an enthroned Madonna and Child) and spend hours appreciating subtle differences between artistic masters in Florence or Siena, without a shred of fear.  I can spend hours on trains going to museums in Italy to see another masterwork, to come home with aching legs and a mind overwhelmed.

So what is it about my obsession with Renaissance masterworks?  I think that they represent our Western ideal of beauty: everyone now knows Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and his angels—but Botticelli is a secular copout compared with the real religious stuff.  This magical art did not come out of the blue.  It is rooted in an ancient tradition that was hidden for about 1000 years during the period of a more formalized Byzantine Art (which has its own splendours: just go to Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Ravenna, or the island of Burano near Venice).

What makes Renaissance work so wonderful is its astounding and audacious development and technique. Renaissance artists knew how to capture a moment in time and milk the ‘psychological moment’ for all its worth. That moment can be one of serenity, of contemplation, suffering, love, the moment of death, adoration, resurrection, budding youth. You name it, they could paint it or sculpt it, with a few deft strokes on wet plaster, or in infinite detail, with minute brush strokes or moulding of clay, as fresh as day they were created, half a millennia or more ago.  There is something eternal in their art, and that was certainly their intention, as many of these works were painted for public display to a largely illiterate audience that ‘learned’ its religion from pictures, rather than print.

It is not as if each of these works was meant to be a stand alone item either: there are thousands of examples of Madonnas and Child, manufactured for anyone with money to spare for a church or private devotion by artists and their schools and guilds – an early example of mass-reproduction of art, albeit of a very high quality.  Their secular art, of Doges and Duchesses, or beautiful young men and women is equally astounding.  Della Robbia’s terracottas are the most beautiful sculptures of young women as you will ever see.

Consequently, because Renaissance artists hit the magic spot with their art, it is inherently enjoyable.  There are no intellectual games here. Their art is as crisp as the latest large-screen TV, only better because it is real.   This is despite the fact  that the ghetto is usually just down the street and even though the Jews are gone, you can still see where the mezuzot were.

And there are signs of the connection with Judaism.  On the wall of the Palazzo Bocchi in Bologna is a long, beautifully engraved Hebrew inscription. In the Bologna Medieval museum there are Jewish gravestones with inscriptions that have to be from the same stonecutter.  I’ve seen chapels with Hebrew inscriptions coming out of the mouths of saints, bits of Hebrew on other works of art, and the Ten Commandments in Hebrew on the side of a prelates’ huge gold throne in Venice.

So even if you are still a bit scared of the art, you can treat it as a detective story and look for connections.

* Image source: The Art Wolf

Dear Tante Bayla,

A couple of weeks ago, my beloved and I decided to visit the Dali exhibition at the NGV for the Art After Dark session. When we arrived we were dismayed to find that the queue to buy tickets was at least an hour long, taking up the entire atrium. If we actually got in, we’d have hardly any time to see the exhibition before it closed for the day. As we were debating whether or not to stay, I spied my old high school art teacher — let’s call her Mrs Chagall — out of the corner of my eye. She waved us over to her spot at the front of the queue, and told us that her sciatica was playing up and she was going to go home, but we were welcome to take her spot in the line.

Before I could even begin to formulate a response my beloved jumped the rope and voila, we were at the front of the queue. We had our tickets within ten minutes and ample time to peruse the exhibition. But I feel guilty that we pushed ahead of all the other people patiently waiting. Was it right of us to accept Mrs Chagall’s offer? Shouldn’t we have bided our time in the queue like everyone else? (Beloved said no! carpe di queue, etc.)

What should we have done?

Guilty Art Lover, Bentleigh, VIC

Dear GAL,

This is a tough one. On the one hand, had you waited in the queue with everyone else, you could have missed out on seeing the exhibition entirely. And technically, you didn’t make the queue any longer for the people behind you – you were simply replacing Mrs Chagall. On the other hand, what you did was morally dubious. You jumped the queue. You took what wasn’t yours! In the school tuckshop line, this sort of exchange is called a “Chinese swap” (nu, primary school kids aren’t known for their political correctness) and is seriously frowned upon as the ultimate manifestation corruption and dishonesty. In thirty-six degree heat, you just gotta wait your turn for your Sunnyboy like everyone else.

But primary school morality is perhaps not the best arbiter of right and wrong. So let us turn to the Good Book, where there’s plenty of queue-jumping and dubious decision-making to reflect upon!

Case in point:

Jacob convinces Esau to hand over his birthright as firstborn in exchange for THE BEST CHULENT OF ALL TIME. Aided by his mother, Rebecca, Jacob then dons a hairy disguise and steals some blessings from Isaac intended for Esau, thus starting the biggest rivalry EVA and altering the course of Jewish history for all eternity. Jacob is also considered to be the granddaddy of the Jewish nation. (Sucks to be Esau.) So it would appear that you can indulge in your queue-jumping sans guilt, safe in the knowledge that you are emulating our righteous (cough, cough) forefathers.

BUT. Jacob gets his comeuppance. He’s conned by Leah and Laban, the BEST QUEUE JUMPERS OF ALL TIME. They make you and your Beloved and look positively saintly. Leah marries Jacob ahead of Rachel, and Jacob is forced to toil another seven years for Laban until he finally gets to marry his true love. (Happy sigh.) But ultimately Rachel and Leah have a very dysfunctional, unhappy relationship, with Leah constantly flaunting her fertility and never able to reconcile herself to the fact that Rachel is Jacob’s true love. (Echoes of The Bold and the Beautiful here.) Then poor Rachel dies giving birth to Benjamin. And then there’s the whole saga with Joseph and Benjamin and the other brothers kidnapping Joseph and then pretending he’s been killed, etc. (Echoes of Dr Phil, anyone?)

So, in conclusion – queue jumping is bad. It has led, respectively, to:

1. The Arab-Israeli conflict;
2. Slavery of Jews in Egypt; (and by extension, the invention of matzah… *shudder*)
3. All subsequent Jewish suffering and persecution;
4. Bad soap opera plots (see B&B reference above);
5. Bad self-help reality TV (refer to Dr Phil).

So unless you want to initiate a world war, accidentally marry your Beloved’s sister, or end up on daytime television, I would advise that queue jumping of any sort is best left well alone.

As penance, say eighteen Hail Marys and tune in to Galus’ liveblog coverage of John Safran’s new TV show tomorrow night. (There will be no queues.)

Love,

Tante Bayla

By Simon Holloway

Almost everybody who has been to Italy has seen it and those who haven’t, should. Sitting within a small church on one of Rome’s seven hills, the tomb of Pope Julius II sports a larger-than-life statue by the renowned sculptor, Michelangelo. The august proto-prophet sits nobly, a cloak draped over one knee and the two tablets of the law in his right hand. His head is turned thoughtfully to one side and, thanks to Michelangelo’s uncanny ability to coax fluidity from stone, Moses’ beard flows elegantly from his chin. Oh yes: and he has horns.

Many people have commented in the past upon this cornual indiscretion, and two suggestions have been raised. The first, and I am pleased to say the least popular, is that it constitutes an antisemitic slur. There is an old expression: “Speak of the devil and he will appear“. Wikipedia lists a variety of variations on this expression, from a total of 30 languages (including English). In Italian alone, the expression becomes “Speak of the devil and his horns will appear”. Is it a reference to Jews? Was Michelangelo equating Moses with Satan? I doubt it, but those who would prefer to believe that could certainly have some fun with the evidence in its favour.

In reality, the more compelling of the two explanations is simply that it’s a sloppy translation. Not Michelangelo’s sloppiness of course, but the sloppiness of St. Jerome, who translated the Pentateuch into Latin in the 5th century. When Jerome came across Exodus 34:29 (and, though slightly differently, verses 30 and 35), he rendered it as “cornuta esset facies sua“. That is to say, “his face became hornéd“. Everybody knows, of course, that that’s not what the Hebrew says. Or is it?

Exodus 34:29, according to the JPS Tanakh, reads as follows: “as Moses came down from the mountain bearing the two tablets of the Pact, Moses was not aware that the skin of his face was radiant“. This is more or less what the King James version has as well, when they translate “the skin of his face shone“. It would seem that Jerome was way off! Where did he derive this nonsense about horns?

Truth be told, both the King James version and the JPS are relying very heavily upon the earliest translation of this passage that was ever made: the translation into Greek. The Greek Septuagint (which was, of course, a Jewish translation) makes it very clear that Moses’ face was shining, and it is this translation that became standard in later Jewish interpretation. In fact, the Midrash goes even further by suggesting that Moses was radiant even at birth; and images of holy people with light emanating from their skin, so popular in the artworks of Renaissance painters, have their source in similar declarations. The Hebrew itself is not quite so easy to understand.

The problem is that of the three Hebrew words employed in the collocation, one of them doesn’t make much sense. The words are קָ֛רַן‭ ‬ע֥וֹר‭ ‬פָּנָ֖יו, and I include them with the vocalisation and accentuation that the masoretes gave them. For the benefit of those who don’t read Hebrew, the words read as qaran ohr panav and the first word (קרן, qaran) is vocalised as a verb. This is the first problem with the passage, because there are only four instances in the whole Tanakh when this word is a verb and of those four instances, three of them concern Moses’ face. The fourth instance is found in Psalms 69:32 and means… “to have horns”.

Okay, but surelyקרן‭ ‬ can also mean shine, right? I mean, this is the way the word is used in Israel today! Let’s have a look. As a noun, rather than a verb, the word turns up 90 times in the Bible, in 79 different verses. In every one of those instances, bar one, it either means “horn”, or it refers to something that is the shape of a horn, like the protuberances on the side of the altar. The one exception is Habbakuk 3:4, in which it appears to mean “ray of light”, although the context is non-literal. As if to complicate matters, the following verse (Hab 3:5) makes reference to two Near Eastern gods known as “plague” and “pestilence” (דבר and רשף) both being subservient to the god of Israel. It is therefore possible that the reference to “concealment” in verse 4 (חביון) might be also be an allusion to the hornéd demon known as Hebyon, and that the word קרן might therefore being implying “horns”, rather than “rays of light”.

Whether or not that is the case, the word does most certainly come to mean “ray of light” in post-Biblical Hebrew, but the corresponding verbal form (“to shine”) isn’t actually attested at all until the liturgical poetry of the mediaeval period! What is more, the usages of the verb with that meaning might have been back-formations, based upon the classical understanding of the verses that describe Moses.

The problems, unfortunately, don’t end there. If the passage simply seemed to be saying that Moses grew horns, then there would be a thousand better ways of saying so than “the flesh of Moses’ face horned.” What some scholars have suggested is that the passage was originally intended to have the meaning, “his face became a horn of flesh” – like the nightmarish vision that Daniel has in Daniel 7:8.

Feeling that this was possibly disrespectful, the Alexandrian Jewish community favoured an alternative reading tradition that they then reflected in their Greek translation. Following this tradition, the Tiberian masoretes vocalised the word as a verb, and punctuated it with their accent marks in such a fashion that, even though it’s an awkward reading, it favours the Greek translation over any other possible interpretation. Jerome, who sought a fresh translation from the Hebrew with little assistance from the Greek, hit upon an alternative, although equally viable reading of the text.

Of course, this is all theoretical. All that we have at our disposal is a complex Hebrew clause that seems to be saying something about horns, something about flesh, and something about Moses’ face. It’s easy to understand how there could be such radical disagreements regarding precisely what it was that all of that was supposed to mean.