The Complexities of Heritage: Rachel Libeskind in Conversation with Diego Giolitti

Rachel Libeskind is the youngest daughter of famed architect Daniel Libeskind, who designed the Master Plan for the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site in NY as well as designing the Imperial War Museum North in the UK and the Jewish Museum in Berlin to name a very few. Rachel is based in NY and has been making a name for herself in the contemporary art world.

She held a preview of her exhibition on the 3rd October, performing a piece called ‘Dirty Laundry’ as well as showing her new works - a series of tapestries depicting images of the Circumcision of Christ. She has a very strong connection with her Jewish heritage and this is reflected in the exhibition.

After Nyne presents a conversation that took place between Rachel and Diego Giolitti, Director at ContiniArtUK and chief curator of Rachel’s exhibition.

DG: First of all, I would like to ask how you came up with the concept for this exhibition, the “The Circumcision of Christ”?

RL: I discovered the topic “Circumcision of Christ” through the relic of Christ. I was reading these medieval texts that described nuns who were starving themselves to death; I discovered that they were having revelations of Christ’s foreskin appearing in their mouths. Of course, in a modern context, this is pretty racy. So I began to do some research in order to understand the context of the foreskin in the medieval ages; I started to realise that historically it was a very important material object, an object that everybody was after. This is actually a topic for a book that I will one day write; there is a huge conspiracy involving the Vatican stealing the foreskin and that it remains hidden in the Vatican archives to this day. Anyway, I discovered this relic; I love relics, I think they’re a fascinating part of the history of civilisation. That we actually believe in dead flesh containing power amazes me. So I began to form this idea, at the start I never really knew how I wanted this project to come to fruition as an artistic outpoint, rather than just an academic idea or an investigation.

Then I discovered that Wal-Mart, America’s largest retailer, makes these custom photo tapestries. You can send them any image you want and they make you these amazing, digitally fabricated, woven tapestries with a digital loom. So I began making them and I couldn’t stop. To me, the end products are such strange, revealing and revelatory objects. Not only this, but they are also very subtle in some ways; formally, they are these massive tapestries hanging on the wall, but they contain so much aura and connotation. It’s interesting because I’ve noticed how people’s brains tend to switch off when they see renaissance imagery. So you can have 15 images of the circumcision of Christ on a wall and it will take somebody about 25 minutes of sitting right in front of them to even realise what they are looking at; the penis of Christ being snipped. This is really fascinating to me. At the same time, they are also highly performative because they really force the audience into a strange position that they are not aware of what they’re getting themselves into, when they first look at the work.

DG: I also find it very interesting that, correct me if I am wrong, this was also the subject of your dissertation at Harvard. Did you only develop this as text or was visual art also involved?

RL: At the time I was making very experimental work, I did an entire presentation of my thesis in which I recreated a church. I actually based this on Kurt Schwitters, one of my favourite artists, Merzbau that he had in Hanover, which he actually called the ‘Cathedral of Unfulfilled Erotic Desire’. A lot of my work deals with collage and appropriation, and, in my thesis, I was very interested in Schwitters, which led me to recreate this cathedral which I actually named the ‘Unfulfilled Foreskin’. So my thesis was divided between academic research and a recreation of an altar and a church, which everything evolved from. One day I will definitely write a book about this - that’s next.

DG: With this project, I find that there are two aspects running side by side, that are extremely interesting. One, which we have already discussed, is that the circumcision of Christ is one of those events that, historically, the Catholic church has tried to suppress. Catholics substitute the initiation ritual with the Baptism, to the extent that you can face excommunication if you talk about the Holy prepuce. Although this doesn’t happen anymore we can still understand how sensitive the subject is. And the second highly significant idea that you touch on is that Judaism and Christianity comes from the same common roots, from this we can actually try to understand each other better and show that there is a common ground between everything, do you see this?

RL: Yes, definitely. I think that it is also an eternal story. It is not only a story of circumcision, it’s also a story of the Judaic and Christian tradition in general and the relationship between the individual and God. Of course, as a Jew it’s difficult for me because I love Catholicism and I love Christian iconography on a formal, aesthetic and conceptive level; I consider it to be some of the best art ever made. It’s difficult for me because I get into a sort of conundrum when I ask myself if I believe that the relic of Christ, Christ’s foreskin, had power? Do I believe that Christ was a powerful being? Obviously, my religion doesn’t tell me that Jesus Christ was the son of God, but I think that there is some shared ground there and, on a sort of Freudian level, it’s very interesting to talk about the marring of the body, the marring of the child’s body and being out of control of that societal violence opposed upon the body. Then, how that violence gets carried out onto all sorts of different types of narrative about sacrifice, about a covenant with God through spiritual baptism. To me, it definitely links the traditions together.

DG: Jesus Christ’s sexual identity is accentuated here. Not only that, I didn’t know about the Middle Ages – that the nuns were having actual revelations of Jesus Christ’s foreskin accumulating in their mouths. There seems to be a running theme of sexuality and identity that I find extremely interesting.

RL: I completely agree - forgive me for going off on a tangent here - but I’m personally very interested in early medieval times. In particular, the mass transition from Paganism to Christianity by the year 1000 over the entirety of Western Europe. By the time Christianity had reached Scandinavia and the tips of Scotland questions such as “Is Christ’s body just an illusion?”, “is Christ the spirit of God, but his body human?”, “is Christ’s flesh powerful enough because it contains a magic of God?” were so important to early Christianity and, like most divergent curiosity in religion, they were completely squashed by mainstream Christianity by the height of the medieval ages. So, it’s interesting to think about that period in the 14th century when nuns were talking about the foreskin of Christ appearing in their mouths, to consider the physicality of Christ. That they actually believed the foreskin was an apparition - a miraculous relic coming to them in moments of incredible starvation, is fascinating. It brings into play another, highly interesting, aspect - the equation of food - it’s radical to equate Christ’s foreskin to sustenance.

DG: This is also an idiosyncratic perspective, if the Catholic Church accepts the story of the circumcision as true, they also go against the belief that Jesus Christ, with every particle of his body, was resurrected and went to heaven. A contradiction is created between the foreskin and the resurrection, how can we believe both events happened, the foreskin certainly becomes problematic for the church.

RL: Exactly, it shouldn’t exist. The history behind it is fascinating, so many people have claimed to have the foreskin over the centuries. This is why I love relics and early Christianity, it’s so absurd, it’s so fun, it’s so crazy; throughout history, and often at the same time, all these different people claimed to have the foreskin. Different popes have claimed to have it, different kings have claimed to have it, people in the East have claimed to have it. Even as recently as the 1980’s, in a town called Calcata in Italy, there was a single church that claimed to have the foreskin, they even celebrated the Feast of the Circumcision. It was the only church in Western Catholicism that still celebrated the Feast of the Circumcision on the 1st of January. The Vatican said that it didn’t want the church celebrating this anymore because it was too divergent, too in line with Eastern Orthodoxy; in Greece and Russia and other parts of eastern Europe, if you’re there on January 1st, they still celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision, it is still very much practiced. And then mysteriously the foreskin in Calcata was stolen. Someone wrote a book about it a couple of years ago, about this story of the stolen foreskin, and the Vatican refuses to make any comment about it now.

DG: As you say, there have been many foreskins of Jesus Christ around the world and, interestingly enough, the relics were present in geographical areas of power of Christianity. I think it was in Poitiers in France, they had it in Rome.

RL: Yes, and it is fascinating if you think about it because what other part of the body of Christ would have more power than a piece of his penis? Really, it is the most powerful part; the very thing that can make more of him. A piece of that is the most potent object in connection to God. I find this very interesting, and to put this idea into context, one of my favourite words is phallogocentrism, which is the concept that history is written by the penis.

DG: I am also interested in the work from a technical perspective, you selected different paintings depicting the circumcision of Jesus Christ. Most of these images are from the 16th and 17th century and they are from different artists and different parts of the world. How did you come up with this particular selection?

RL: This is actually a very personal anecdote that I’ll tell you: four years ago I had a terrible accident skiing and I shattered my arm, it was a very traumatic experience and I had to be airlifted to hospital. The injury meant I couldn’t make work for about a year…. Shortly before the accident, however, I had this moment when I walked into a church and I saw this painting of the circumcision. I was struck by what an incredibly ubiquitous topic this actually is; as ubiquitous as the Pietà in sculpture, the image of Christ on the Cross, or the last supper – it’s as ubiquitous as any of them. So, in that moment, I had a sort of revelation; there are thousands of these paintings actually that I haven’t even looked up, but they exist in our subconscious. Then I had this terrible accident, and I was basically in a position where I had to sit around, unable to make any work for a year, so I continued my research on this project. I specifically started researching all of the paintings depicting the scene and these images are a selection of my favourites. It’s interesting because there are a lot of sculptures and reliquaries that are depicting the circumcision of Christ that I like more because they are actually from an earlier period - but they don’t look as good on tapestries.

DG: I feel that this exhibition is very relevant nowadays when it comes to themes such as anti-Semitism and Christian identity. The quantity of elements present is fascinating from an educational point of view. Especially when these are to a contemporary setting. Like you said, it’s about the power of observation, I saw some of these paintings in real life. The representation of the circumcised Christ did not pass my mind.

RL: And when you actually look at it and you realise that all the people in the paintings are looking at the penis of a baby in a painting, that someone actually painted 5 or 15 people all with their eyes on a penis of a 8 day old child and someone with a knife is about to cut it - it’s an extremely radical thing. The fact that it’s a ubiquitous topic of painting blows my mind.

DG: So is this the first time that you’re exhibiting your tapestries?

RL: Yes, I’ve only shown these tapestries as part of a performance about a month ago in New York, where I did a sort of ‘performance lecture’ with them around but they were only up for a few days.

DG: Well, we are very honoured to be the first to exhibit your tapestries as works in their own right. What was the reaction of the audience at the performance?

RL: It was very good, it’s interesting because, to be honest, I initially only made these works for performance. I was nervous about whether they can exist on their own without the context of me as the maker presenting them. So I made them for this particular ‘performance lecture’ and I set them up as though we were in the archive room of the ‘Museum of the Foreskin’. It’s a ridiculous, absurd performance in which I am a ‘historian of the foreskin’ and I talk to the audience and ask them probing questions like “who here is circumcised?” and “who here is not circumcised?”, “who here has seen a circumcised penis?”. It borders between something that is actually very serious and academic, and something that is sort of seen as pseudo sexual and kind of out there with the audience. The reception was really good, people really liked it, they were genuinely interested. There was an interesting breakdown in the audience between people that were Catholic, who had a familiarity with the imagery and the body of Christ, and people that weren’t Catholic - who were much more blown away and much more shocked. And that I thought was very interesting, I was pleased to see Catholics that were interested in it and felt as though it has always existed in their subconscious lives, but they have never truly looked at it. And the rest of the audience was fascinated, there reaction was “what is this new information, I’ve never heard of this before.” So in that respect - I really liked it. For me, there is nothing more exciting than making art that is actually transmitting real information and history that is important to civilizational context.

DG: This happened in New York in 2016, but what are your expectations of this exhibition happening in London in 2016? Between you and I, I have a feeling that we are going to get different results.

RL: Probably, I think it’s interesting work, I think what’s nice about the work is that it allows different people to access it through different channels of interest. Like you said, on a cultural level, on a sexual level, on a level of just talking about institutional observation, I think that’s the nice thing about the work, hopefully that will translate.

DG: And I also like this link between Judaism and Christianity, provoking the idea that the fundamental stories are common to everyone. Can you tell me more about the technical side of the tapestries and their physical construction?

RL: They are very archival in their constitution, in the way that they are built. I used a digital loom so they are very tight. As I mentioned, they were made by WalMart, which is something that I like, but I also struggle with. Personally, I don’t really care that they were made at Walmart but when some people find out, think its like a great joke on the American mass market. To me, the work is actually about that, but I also struggle with how much to actually use that idea. I left on those little American tags that they come with which say, “Made in the USA”. I was actually going to cut them off but then I realised that maybe they’re interesting

DG: They are, Rachel. You’re embracing something; again, it’s about linking the cultural entities together. The old world, Europe, the tradition, the religion and the new world, America, mass consumerism and so on. It’s highly intriguing.

RL: If we’re talking about artistic process I think it’s important to note that I’m not spending hours of my life on a loom making tapestries. I’m more involved in the intellectual process and the history itself and less with the physical process, which is nice for me. It’s amazing that there is a machine like that allows me to turn my ideas into reality, and I just get it sent back to me in the post. People who came to look at them at my studio in New York would say to me “if I bought this, could I make this into a rug?” “Could I use it as a blanket in my home?” “Does it have to be hung?”, “Could I put this behind glass?”. Which got me thinking about the fact that it’s nice that the work doesn’t have to exist as a tapestry.

DG: That was my next question. I wanted to ask you what you expect collectors to do with these tapestries. How would you want collectors to approach and display the artwork?

RL: I would tell people that however they envision having it, they should have it. This work is not necessarily wall bound - so if somebody wanted to have it draped on an object, they could have it like that. If somebody wanted to have it as a blanket or something like that, they could also have it that way, even though that’s somewhat absurd.

DG: Absolutely. Art is not about first impressions, but also the way one engages with it and intervenes it in their everyday life. Art should connect with the audience on a personal experience.

RL: Beautiful!

‘The Circumcision of Christ & Modern Oblivion’ (until 31st October)