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The Vagina and de Facto Feminism in the Artwork of Naʿama Snitkoff-Lotan

2017; Indiana University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15525864-3728756

1558-9579

David Sperber,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

In 2011 Zipi Mizrachi established “Studio of Her Own—a space for young Modern Orthodox female artists in Jerusalem,” to fulfill a requirement in the Gender Studies Program at Bar Ilan University in Israel. In this alliance, young women create and exhibit their art in public spaces (fig. 1). The exhibits often address the body and sexuality (Sperber 2015), similar to the radical feminist art produced in the United States in the 1970s. This article investigates the artwork of Studio of Her Own participant Naʿama Snitkoff-Lotan (b. 1984), a graduate of the Ceramics and Glass Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, the most prestigious art studies institute in Israel. I consider the concern with vaginal art in Snitkoff-Lotan’s body of work to be representative of the focus on sexuality and the body in the art of Modern Orthodox Jewish women in Israel. The artist positions her Modern Orthodox religiosity and art as separate and noncontradictory. She argues that her vaginal art focuses on women’s reproductive and childbirth experiences and fears. I argue that despite the artist’s resistance to identifying her artwork as feminist “cunt art” that challenges Modern Orthodox Judaism, this art can still be interpreted through a “de facto” feminist lens.This article is based on analysis of the artist’s oeuvre and a partially structured interview in Hebrew I conducted with Snitkoff-Lotan in her house in the Israeli settlement of Maʿale Shomron, in the Occupied Palestinian Territories on June 29, 2014. Snitkoff-Lotan is married but does not wear a headscarf, as is customary among married women in the mainstream Jewish Orthodox world. During the interview she was pregnant. At this writing she is a mother of two children and teaches ceramics in a day center for the elderly. She is currently studying for a master’s degree in art therapy.I analyzed the interview thematically (Strauss and Corbin 1990), reading and listening on several levels to identify narrative characters and themes and consider absences (Brown and Gilligan 1992, 197–208). I was alert to my positionality as a man studying a woman’s experiences, especially on sexual subject matter. Rosalind Edwards (1993) emphasizes being aware of “double subjectivity” in qualitative feminist research. The reflexive approach recognizes that the researcher is always part of an interview, influencing the account on multiple levels. As a male researcher, I recognize myself as an “other” in a way that enables me to identify and clarify themes from the stance of otherness. From this positionality, I stress the gaps between my questions and the perspectives and musings of the artist. This awareness of multiple subjectivities (Krumer-Nevo and Sidi 2014, 234) nevertheless posits the artist front and center, attending to her context, layers of meaning, and specific experiences.Scholars have studied representations of the body and sexuality by US feminist artists (Semmel and Kingsley 1980; Schapiro and Wilding 1989; Schneider 1997, 43–87; Jones 1998; 2012, 170–217). In the 1970s artists such as Judy Chicago (b. 1939), Magdalena Abakanowicz (b. 1930), and Keren LeCocq (b. 1949) created vaginal representations that Chicago and her students called “Cunt Positivism Art.” These works aimed to celebrate women’s bodies and to free women’s body images from male domination (Dekel 2013, 30–37). While Snitkoff-Lotan speaks about her work in the context of childbirth rather than sexuality, the works themselves seem to reference vaginal art and resemble feminist artistic precedents focused on women’s sexuality. My analysis of Snitkoff-Lotan’s vaginal art relies to some extent on Amelia Jones’ method of antiessentialist rereading of 1970s “cunt art” by “seeing differently” (2012). Jones uses a strategy of looking and interpreting that deliberately reads and misreads the works to open them up to new interpretations.In 2012 Dvora Liss and I curated an international exhibit in Israel, Matronita: Jewish Feminist Art, of works by religious and traditional women artists that focused on gender criticism of the Jewish world and its ceremonies, values, and institutions (Sperber 2012, 144–64).1 Very little has been written about the work of artists creating from within the Jewish religious world. In the United States a few have written about the contemporary art of religious Jewish women (Baigell 2012; Orenstein 2007, 101–15). However, hardly any research exists about Jewish feminist art that criticizes Jewish tradition and commentary or investigates Modern Orthodox artwork in Israel focused on the body and sexuality.Modesty concerns in Jewish Orthodox society deny women’s bodily experiences. Rabbinic law holds that women’s sexuality is first and foremost for the purpose of reproduction (Sagi and Englander 2013, 88). Deviation from this model, such as masturbation or lesbianism, is viewed negatively. This contrasts with Jewish feminist writing that challenges the obsession with women’s modesty in male produced ritual laws. Ritual laws assume that men cannot control their passions. Male rabbis tirelessly discuss women’s anatomy, arguing in detail about which body part is especially sexually arousing for men and should be hidden or silenced. This is the basis for Hartman’s (2007, 45–61) claim that the current Orthodox discourse on modesty is out of proportion and practically pornographic.Snitkoff-Lotan’s artwork consists mainly of drawings and sculptures and often includes representations of vaginas. Costa de-hayyuta, Aramaic for “giving life” and denoting seed decomposition in the foundational Kabbalistic text (the Zohar), comprises two thematically related sculptures. The first is a hollow tube with a scabby texture and an open inner space (fig. 2). Openings at the bottom touch the ground, connecting the inner space to the external space. The sculpture, made of yellowish-orange silk paper, extends like a chimney from the ground to the ceiling. The second sculpture resembles a large black, brown, and red pillow (fig. 3). This soft piece was made by sewing several small pillows together. The crude hand stitching delineates a fragile, accessible vagina-like shape that is scarred. The first word in the title of the dual works sounds like the Arabic slang word “cunt” (kus), which is used in Hebrew slang as well. Juxtaposing the slang word with the Kabbalistic expression signifying vitality evokes the archetype of the great mother or Goddess as the source of life.Great mother imagery is a common theme in feminist art of the 1970s (Klein 2009), for example in works by Mary Beth Edelson (Goddess Head, 1975) and Ana Mendieta (Alma Silueta en Fuego, 1975). The Snitkoff-Lotan piece made of pillows echoes the work of Annette Messager (b. 1943) and a wide range of vaginal cloth sculptures that appeared in earlier feminist art by Magdalena Abakanowicz (Red Abakan, 1969) and Keren LeCocq (Feather Cunt, 1971). Such explicit reference to the vagina as a sexual organ harks back to L’origine du monde (1866), the well-known painting by Gustave Courbet. In the foreground is a woman laying down with legs spread open, her vagina visible, her upper body half covered with a white sheet and her head excluded from the frame. Dana Gillerman offers a critical feminist approach to this painting in her animated piece, The Origin of the World (after Gustave Courbet), which adds menstrual blood to the scene.Snitkoff-Lotan is no doubt representing vaginas. Indeed, That Place, after the name for the vagina in rabbinic literature, is a vagina-shaped soft sculpture made with pleated silk paper (fig. 4). The piece is a clear challenge to Jewish ritual law that forbids looking at the vagina. Snitkoff-Lotan’s video Openings (fig. 5) represents fingers fumbling with a piece of paper that looks like a vagina and tears.2 The touching becomes fondling and turns into masturbation. Snitkoff-Lotan represents autonomous female sexuality without undermining the model of heterosexual relationships. For example, in Openings one of the fingers wears a wedding ring. Feminist theory suggests that women are often constructed as either sex symbols or asexual beings. This focus on self-generated sexual enjoyment resembles many works by US feminist artists in the 1970s (Dekel 2013, 35–37). Joan Semmel (b. 1932) chose to depict the image of a hand and fingers enacting the autoerotic act in many of her works, including Touch (1977). Marisol Escobar (b. 1930) represented fingers and hands to hint at the act of masturbation. Luce Irigaray (1985, 210) observed that female desire speaks a different language than male desire—but this difference is covered up by a prevailing logic that privileges gaze over touch. In this reading, inserting women into the governing male scopic economy or field of vision makes them passive objects and offers women no means to express themselves. Feminist artists such as Lynda Benglis (b. 1941) and Carolee Schneemann (b. 1939) create alternatives to the phallocentric perception of woman as an empty receptacle waiting to be filled by a man (MacKinnon 1982, 655). Snitkoff-Lotan follows such long-standing tradition.Sexuality is barely discussed, and certainly not in public, in Jewish Modern Orthodox communities (Hartman and Samet 2007, 74). Michal Prins (2013, 40–48) argues that pathologies are produced for religious women when they transition from a life of modesty that includes no contact with unrelated men and little information about sexuality, to a life where they are expected to expose their bodies and engage in sexual intercourse with husbands. Zehavit Gross (2003) researched attitudes about “gender identity” among women who graduated from the religious education system in Israel and found that since this is not a concern of curriculum, the girls do not discuss it. They are socialized to ignore the physical body and its needs, thus erasing the body in the girls’ religious world.Pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood emerged as central themes during the interview with Snitkoff-Lotan. She reported that in her childhood religious environment, sexual intercourse was not discussed. Rather discussions focused on the physiology of the body and childbirth. When I asked Snitkoff-Lotan about what appeared to be the sexual focus of her artistic work, she responded:It changes with time, like also, there are subjects that I always go back to, especially [pause] childbirth, pregnancy [pause] and also sexuality, but I think that usually it’s connected, like [pause] most times when I deal with sexuality it’s usually connected, actually not always, but many times it’s connected to that experience of childbirth and motherhood and also before it, fears of it, and things like that [pause] and often I, my things, I get to subjects—maybe dark things, places of fears, monsters. . . .Her discussion of childbirth as something to be feared, a scary experience, and even a monster contrasts with dominant Western feminist depictions of childbirth as empowering. Viewers usually interpret her video Openings to be focused on masturbation. Snitkoff-Lotan, in contrast, uses this work to illustrate how she connects pregnancy and childbirth to fear. When I asked, “childbirth, pregnancy, and fear? Are they connected to each other?” She firmly responded, “Yes.” She stressed that when she made Openings, “I had no intention of doing something sexual, to the contrary, it was more to destroy, a sort of destructive streak, self-destruction. And then it became something else.” While her work does not directly represent childbirth, her engagements with masturbation and self-destruction in her mind are connected to childbirth and fear of “dark things.” The artist disavows the intentional production of vaginal art, pointing to unconscious dynamics: When she showed me the plaster cast she used to construct a vaginal work, she explained: “I didn’t think of it, do you understand? This work wasn’t really planned.” Rather, “It is just shapes. It’s not that I say, all right, today I’m going to make ‘cunt art.’” As a male interviewer, I clearly distinguished between sexuality and childbirth and fear and childbirth, since childbirth is an impossible experience for me. The artist does not acknowledge such distinctions. I used the term sexuality in this research because of the explicit vaginal and sexual images, and I was surprised that the artist connects her work to the theme of childbirth first and foremost.While my questions assumed modesty as central to the religious world, Snitkoff-Lotan presented the world she lived in as heterogeneous and multiple. The artist describes a grafting of spaces (De Lauretis 1987, 25–26; Pile 1994, 255–77) whereby notions of modesty vary. In Orthodox religious spaces, modesty is central and significant, while it is a minor concern in the environment in which she was raised. She is the daughter of a conservative rabbi who moved from the United States to Israel in 1992, when she was seven years old. As a child she lived on a Modern Orthodox kibbutz after immigrating to Israel. Later her family belonged to the liberal feminist Modern Orthodoxy of the Yedidya congregation in Jerusalem. Between 2007 and 2011 she lived in the religious Zionist West Bank settlement of Mitzpe Yericho while studying at Bezalel in Jerusalem. According to her account:My feeling is that I grew up in all kinds of worlds. That there wasn’t one world, that maybe it’s as if I don’t owe answers to anyone. In the States, there were certain social norms that suddenly weren’t applicable on the kibbutz. . . . We moved to Jerusalem and those norms were suddenly inapplicable. And then I went to Shuva [a girls’ college for Jewish studies in the Ofra settlement in the West Bank] and there were other norms that I had never known before in my life. So maybe, somehow, I don’t have a specific place. I don’t have a place that I owe explanations to, like inside me; I don’t know. It’s as if I realized at an early age that social norms are just social norms. It’s not—there’s no realistic truth, not everyone has to [pause] although people are the same everywhere; each place has a different same, but a basic sameness.For the artist, social norms do not pose barriers to her artistic pursuit. She reported that modesty concerns created conflict around her work in the rigid space of the settlement Mitzpe Yericho. She described having difficulty abiding by the norms of this orthodox religious environment as a university student:For example, we had a lesson about ritual bathing in Mitzpe Yericho, and then I started saying things, and suddenly I saw that people couldn’t contain it. As if—it’s not like if I look like them [or] I can speak in their language, because I can’t. I am not like that. I didn’t grow up there. That is not my world. It’s not like that. It hurts me that there are people who live in that kind of world, but I won’t go and stage an exhibition in a place of religious people to shock or influence. I’m not like that. Maybe that’s actually the heroic and correct thing to do, but I chose to leave.But her parents’ home is not structured around modesty concerns and accepts her art. She contrasts the religious liberal environment of her home, that is, the Modern Orthodox world of the Yedidya community, with the requirement of religious modesty in the Mitzpe Yericho settlement. Nevertheless, it is difficult to ignore the artist’s dismissal of sexuality as a subject in her works. Her evasion on these matters during the interview may be linked to her religious upbringing and current life situation. Despite her awareness and critique of sexual repression, she seems to surrender to some taboos. Childbirth was the most prominent subject in the interview, while other contexts of femininity emerge as “a flattened voice,” soft and minor (Spector-Mersel 2010, 86–87).The German sociologist Ulrich Beck begins his book A God of One’s Own (2010) by turning to Virginia Woolf, who writes of women needing their own rooms to discover and cultivate creativity. Beck (2010, 14) claims that religious orthodoxy is increasingly widely embraced because each individual can create “a god of one’s own” that aligns with the centering of the individual in religious and secular life. Snitkoff-Lotan’s art does not necessarily merge with her spiritual world, nor does it conflict with it in her account. To my questions about whether religious modesty concerns were contradicted by her art, she repeatedly stated that she experiences no contradiction between her religious world and her pursuit of art, although she recognizes that in some of her communities her artwork is considered unacceptable. She separates such norms and injunctions from her inner religious world. She sees these as two different spaces or networks of significance. Whenever these collide, her inner religious world prevails:It’s important to be myself, so if it clashes, I can’t—So for my part there’s no conflict. Perhaps other people would say other things, but what if I love the Sabbath [Saturday]? If I want to pray, can I not, therefore, do my own thing? It seems to me like [pause] so what did I get this talent for? It seems to me a bit like those rabbis who say if you’re gay you have to go to therapy and change it [pause]. But that’s who you are! So what, you won’t be yourself? I cannot understand the need people have to reduce people into fitting in with something. . . . The fact that I show things that are apparently immodest? I don’t know and don’t really care. Maybe I want things that don’t really go together—for me they do go together but not necessarily for others. They do go together, of course they do, but I haven’t found that kind of community yet.She emphasized the importance of following ritual law but insisted at the same time, “It’s important to be who I am.” The artist creates a mental and creative place in which her different identities and commitments do not “clash.” The artist’s ability “to close the door behind her” and disconnect from the religious world through her art work enables her to break with its conventions and challenged my initial assumption of a built-in conflict around modesty.Snitkoff-Lotan describes her artistic work as neither coinciding nor conflicting with her religiosity, irrespective of her use of religious intertextual references. Snitkoff-Lotan emphasized twice during the interview that hers “is not the artwork of a religious woman,” challenging my conceptualization of her project and the label, “religious woman artist”: “It’s not the art of somebody religious, that’s not the point at all. Like what difference does it make what I believe, what I am, how I choose to live my life? Maybe it does matter, I know that it does matter because anthropologically maybe it’s interesting but it’s like maybe I expect people to be more—I expect something that maybe can’t be.” She was vexed about what interested her teachers in the Bezalel Academy: “That I’m religious and I do things like this. Like they were interested in the difference between how I look and what I do. And for me it’s the easiest thing in the world. For me, like, there’s no gap between what I am and what I do, so, whatever, what does it matter what I wear? I create from the place I am inside.”When I asked her, “Did they tag you as ‘the religious woman’?,” she answered: “I was allocated that place until—Dammit! If I could do a woman giving birth in high school, what now? I’m in Bezalel, I can do whatever I feel like. And somehow it’s simple.” The artist situates her work in the realm of art alone. Such protest by artists over reductive analysis of creative work is common in the art world (Krifa 2013, 12).Snitkoff-Lotan does not feel a need to unite the traditional religious milieu and the artistic realm: “But I don’t want to talk to people like that, that is not my audience. You understand? No rabbi from Mitzpe Yericho is going to see art exhibitions. The only rabbi that’s going to see art is my father. You’ll not see lots of typical religious people in the Israel museum. Typical religious people.” Such delineations between worlds enable her to disavow potential contradictions between her artwork and religiosity. She can be religious and pursue her sexually explicit forms of art. For the artist, this is a hybrid world in which representations of the immodest body and sexuality do not collide with religious belief.In this research I was concerned with how Snitkoff-Lotan understood the body and sexuality in her art. My hypothesis was that the images appearing to be vaginal forms are connected with the body and sexuality because they were similar to the Cunt Art of US feminist artists, which were unequivocal in their focus on gender and sexuality. Pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood were not the focus of feminist artists of the 1970s (Dekel 2013, 6), and not part of the Cunt Art movement (Scheflan-Katzav 1997, 21). Thus I was surprised to learn that the artist regards her work as connected to pregnancy, motherhood, and fear rather than sexuality. Nor did the artist share my distinction between sexuality and childbirth.The artist’s focus on pregnancy and childbirth aligns with dominant concerns in the religious world. It appears that art offers Snitkoff-Lotan a space that enables her to express matters that may be difficult or undesirable to express with words. The gap between the artist’s account that her works and focus on the vagina represent childbirth and their frequent interpretation as sexually focused may be understood partly as related to religious taboos against discussion of sexuality and partly as related to my own distinction between sexuality and childbirth. The visual representations, however, including of masturbation, indicate her use of art as a liminal space that subverts religious community norms. Even if Snitkoff-Lotan does not regard her work as feminist activism or resistance to Jewish Orthodox modesty norms, her artistic engagement with women’s embodiment contrasts with rabbinical law and could be called “de facto feminism” (Misciagno 1997). Art that deals with the body and sexuality in religious communities indirectly serves as a subversive site in relation to Jewish ritual laws on gender and modesty. This case study demonstrates the importance of the art world as a space for enabling religious women artists to tackle taboo subjects often ignored in conservative milieus (Fall 2007).I wish to thank my parents as well as Naʿama Snitkoff-Lotan, Tanya Zion-Waldoks, Michal Rom, Yakir Eiglander, Ken Goldman, and Elisheva Sperber-Ozsvath.