The First Light, The Shadow And Jewish Mysticism In Painting

A Conversation With Edmond Brooks-Beckman, 28th September 2023

Inscriptions beneath the skin, oil on canvas (170x190 cm), 2023

Edmond Brooks-Beckman

I feel that as a Jew, there’s a tendency to want to go into the difficult conversations. We recognise and feel this through all the festivals we grow up with. Passover is about looking at the difficult journey that Jews have taken, and remembering and recapitulating the bitter times with the bitter herbs. Facing that by returning to a ritual that continually gets us to look at the dark, and then look at the light. And there’s the idea of Tikkun Olam-

Bruno Grad

Repairing the world.

EBB

Yeah, one of the main things about Jewish ethics is this concept of mitzvot. At the heart of our tradition is the question of how we ethically live in the world and, well, the answer is to look after the world socially and ethically by performing mitzvot. I think that’s another way of understanding this drive behind wanting to do challenging things—like facing up to the Israel-Palestine conflict, confronting the shadow in ourselves.

BG

It interests me how you’re bringing together the issue of Israel-Palestine with the Jungian concept of the shadow in this conversation. You’re starting with something on the macro, historical level—the history of the Temple Mount, that big sweep of history—and then at the same time you’re collapsing that into something really personal and domestic.

EBB

Collapsing is a good word.

BG

My instinct is that Judaism is doing that all the time. There’s this bringing together like you were saying earlier about bringing back together the scattered sparks of the divine—a bringing together of the grand biblical narratives, the deep theology, with the everyday, our lived lives, as they actually are. I don’t want to comment on other traditions, but I see it that in Judaism there isn’t this aspirational movement away from the domestic and bodily towards the sublime and rarified. We’re always rooted in the messiness of our lives. And because of this, there’s a familiarity and proximity with the muddiness, the pain, the emotional, the erotic, the close to home. There isn’t necessarily a hierarchy between those things, between the material and the transcendent. They’re inseparable.

EBB

I love that. It takes us back to the collapsing together, and no hierarchy. Maybe that’s because we’ve suffered under power structures that have excluded us from their hierarchies, or punished us within them. It makes sense then that we would be inclined to collapse or unfreeze them. I can appreciate that psychologically and emotionally, as a group that has been judged or deemed outside of the acceptable.

BG

Do you think there’s something about the way our tradition encourages us to be more honest about our insufficiencies that makes us threatening or suspicious to others, and feeds into that deep vein of antisemitism? For instance, it was Yom Kippur recently; in a way it’s like we’re being commanded to face our shadow. We’re asking ourselves to interrogate what we’ve done wrong and to accommodate into our broader sense of ourselves the idea that we’re not only capable of doing wrong, but that this capacity is in some way intrinsic to who we are. Next Yom Kippur we will ask the same questions. Never mind if I think, ‘well, bad things have been happening to me, I haven’t done anything wrong. Other people have been screwing me over,’ you’re still compelled to ask, ‘what is it in myself that’s unacceptable, and that I could confront with honesty?’ I was thinking how powerful that is. When someone’s in denial and doesn’t want to countenance the ‘bad’, the shadow in himself, it can, as you say, make

him too full of this shadow to accommodate the other. If you can’t accommodate the other, you’re more likely to treat them as an object and not be present as a human being with them. And this is destructive.

EBB

Yeah, and it puts you out on an island. I have no connection with my uncle, and I was really sad about that as a kid. I really loved and looked up to him.

BG

To bring it back to painting, do you think there’s something here about the impossibility of pure abstraction? Or perhaps this is another collapsing together of abstraction and the representational? That it’s a kind of self-deception to believe that you don’t need to be situated in the context of your life. But it’s not entirely representational either.

EBB

I don’t want to say it’s self-deception. I just personally find that because I’m sitting for so long making this work, there have to be conversations that are happening. And the conversations have to be broad and deep enough to keep me interested in them. So as well as these being bodies and thinking about shadow and about my family, and about how full or how empty they are (and so how much it’s possible for me to relate to them) I’m also thinking about the ten vessels with the sparks because I relate elementally to this stuff. These are fire. These are sparks of light. What makes me gravitate towards that fire? In the Kabbalah and the stories of the Jewish mystics, there’s so much about fire and the elemental. I find it interesting that I’m zoning in on the fire.

BG

What would you say it is about this body of work that’s concerned with the fire element in particular?

EBB

I gravitated towards this light because it affords such a visceral experience. You see it and feel it, it’s immediately impactful. Also it speaks to my process. I don’t so much like putting light over dark and the dark coming through. I always find that I like the light to come through. Maybe there’s something optimistic about that. There’s beauty in this idea that light is underneath everything.

BG

Yes, that’s how you started this conversation. Talking about the first creative act.

EBB

Let there be light. I think there’s an emotional—psychological and possibly much more intangible or metaphysical—way of just gravitating towards this kind of energy. Light is the first thing. In fact it’s the first thing that gets put on. The yellow is the first thing that gets put on. And it’s a bright colour. Loads of it gets piled on. And then the dark is the last bit. So the dark, the shadow, comes after all of that. Maybe it’s like the story of Adam and Eve. It was all light until they f ***** up and it became dark. Maybe I’m mirroring the stories that have been passed down to us. Maybe the characteristics of this painting reflect the characteristics of the biblical narratives around light and dark.

BG

Again, it’s like dissolving that hierarchy because you’re not saying that the first light is any more real than the darkness. As you said, the shadow is also essential. If you think, oh if only there wasn’t shadow then everything could be light -

EBB

Yeah, there’s not a pointing towards an ideal. There’s not a telling. That’s another important thing: we don’t tell. We’re not preachers, we’re not missionaries. We don’t try to tell people that they should be Jews or that we know the light and we know the way. We know it for ourselves, or some of us say we do. I mean, I’m not a religious person.

BG

So you wouldn’t see this in any way as religious art?

In the wake of Amalek’s shadow, oil on canvas ( 170 x 190 cm), 2023

EBB

I would say that it’s responding to mystical and Jewish mythological sources. But I’m probably more agnostic about that whole thing. I don’t have a strong sway that there’s

some kind of essence that I’m tapping into that could be described as spiritual.

BG

Would you call yourself a Jewish artist or mention your Jewishness in a bio for example?

EBB

Often it comes up, yeah.

BG

Why do you think that is?

EBB

I gravitate lots to that. I just do. When you’ve got that much time to sit and think… you just keep coming back to that.

BG

Whatever Jewishness might mean, how does that enter into your practice?

EBB

Well, from the things that we’re talking about. The collapsing of things, the non-hierarchical. A behaviour towards this life, what I’m looking at, that you could describe as Jewish. The non-preachy thing I think is another thing. The fact I’m not preaching: ‘I have something to say, and I’m going to tell you through my work. And this message will help and heal the world’. I’m not a saviour. Christian art and Christianity is all about Jesus. Jesus was the saviour. And you see so many white American and English men on the internet playing the role of saviour. We don’t have this characteristic of ‘we will be the saviour’.

When people ask, ‘what is your art saying’, I’m not using it to tell other people something. I’m not sending out a message. I’m having a communion with this [points to the work].

BG

This conversation started in quite a beautiful way. You brought up the opening of Bereshit (Book of Genesis). The Kabbalists would say that this text is encoded with meanings that aren’t directly transferred. Let there be light doesn’t for instance infer a guy turning on a magical torch. When you were just speaking it made me think how in an ordinary language act —like reading a menu, or in a literal reading of Bereshit—you’re like, ‘this is what I want to say, here are the words’, and the reader’s like, ‘ok, here’s the meaning’. But you’re saying your work’s not doing that.

From a mystical point of view, there’s never a simple transmission of meaning. This is especially the case when using the Hebrew script, where each individual character generates meaning. When you speak about your work I can’t help but detect a mystical approach not only in your thinking but also in the act itself.

1916) 48 ( 700000 ) 3.300000, oil on canvas (170x190 cm), 2023

EBB

It makes me think of the oil paintings upstairs. I love mark making, but very often I’m confronted with the question of how I resolve the endings of marks. Because the mark obviously has a beginning and an end. The ending points of these marks—how they finish—has started to take the shape of Hebrew letters. They are beautiful shapes. And I know that what I’m doing with the oil paintings is that I’m resolving the endings of my shapes with the shapes of Hebrew. I find that fascinating. How to resolve endings. Like I said, a mark has a beginning and an end. But I’m also interested in the after. I don’t just want to put a mark down and leave it. I don’t really like gestural abstraction. Just mark, mark, mark. I don’t like that. I like marks that have been put on and manipulated and changed. As if the first, immediate event of a visit to the canvas is not enough. And, actually, it does need to be revised, in the same way that in the Rabbinic tradition, and in the Jewish tradition more generally, our scripture is constantly going through a process of interrogation and revising. It’s just not enough to leave it as is. It needs to be alive, it needs to be treated, to be manipulated. Maybe there’s a nervous energy in that, an energy of doubt. I think that’s a massive thing in the work, this sense of doubt. Which again I think psychologically, behaviourally, speaks about the history of a persecuted people, left with doubt. Doubt, whether it comes to ‘are we safe?’ I think that anxiety comes out in my need to constantly manipulate first events, first visits. I don’t think first visits are enough for me. I’m getting at a method of abstraction that isn’t just mark making, mark making, mark making. I do marks and then I manipulate them after. I cut into them. I cut through them.

BG

Are you interrogating them?

EBB

Yeah.

BG

You’re looking for something?

EBB

Yeah, for something that goes beyond what I see. You can’t see a lot of my work from beginning to end. Perhaps you can on the edges, but in the middle I cut into it and I cut away from it. I cut mine up. Lines get cut into. Marks get cut into. There’s never a complete linearity. It gets chopped into, even though you can still see maybe the trace of it. It makes me think of my lineage. I feel cut off from my lineage. I don’t feel like I’m connected at all. I think that’s what my work is so much about. Not feeling connected to Judaism. Desperately trying to feel connected to it. Not feeling connected to it, realising i’m not feeling connected to it, and therefore the work is a manifestation of that tension of not being that connected.

BG

When you talk about being able to see the beginning and the end, do you mean the beginning and the end of the painting?

EBB

I mean the beginning and ending of individual marks. Let me show you [we go to his studio space upstairs and he gets out an oil painting]. This is made up of lots of different marks that are cut into and cut around. So this would have gone all the way through, there would have been other marks. I’ve carved around this and I’ve carved into. But the way I’m ending them… they become Hebrew. That mark there is a back-to-front ה (Hei). The way that mark finishes with a tail, it’s a dalet (ד ).

BG

Do you see that as a movement towards diction? Your marks move towards the articulacy of letters. Is that something you think about? Or are they just an available shape system, so to speak?

EBB

I think they’re an available thing. But I also think that as an artist you’re there to listen to what the work is trying to do. And the work is always an amalgamation of what your identity is, and my identity has been made up of these different parts. Going to cheder when I was a kid, knowing that I liked these shapes. So this is the evidence of a life lived in this particular aesthetic and zone. I’m not going to say anything. They are just evidence of a life lived with these particular types of experiences. Hebrew has this really beautiful quality to it, which definitely comes out in the work.

BG

To me as a religious Jew, I think living with the question of what it means to be Jewish—living with the fragments, with the material of a Jewish life, the visual landscape and atmosphere of Judaism—is also a way of being within the Jewish religion. You’re breathing the tradition. Religious art is a very loaded term, especially since the canon of Western religious painting is essentially a Christian tradition. But as I see it, trying to come to terms with what it means for you to be Jewish through your painting, which is something you intuit as being meaningful and important for you as a person as well as being relevant to your practice, makes it a kind of religious art.

EBB

I totally get that. For you it is. And for me it is and it isn’t. Perhaps it’s in that zone, but calling it religious painting and putting it into such a particular category limits what it is.

BG

I don’t see much discussion about Jewish painting, but pretty much everyone can talk about the Jewish novel or film. When you were talking about doubt you were right to say that this isn’t an exclusively Jewish sensibility. But when I think of the Jewish novel I think of people like Philip Roth, Gertrude Stein, Paul Auster or Franz Kafka. In film I think about Woody Allen, Chantal Akerman, the Safdies. In TV, obviously there’s Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm… They all share an earthiness, doubt and neurosis, but at the same time they’re emphatic and confident in their formal innovation and experimentalism. I think that’s a really interesting combination—that seems very Jewish. There is this doubt, and there is an honesty about the eroticism—the carnal, the bodily, the recognisably human—but there’s also this real ambition, verve and confidence in interrogating the medium and the material. Do you think this also speaks to the shattering of the vessels¹, the scattering of those divine sparks and the attempt to gather them together? The bringing together of high and low. Even in a Woody Allen film, you see this collapsing together of a swaggering cinematic inventiveness with stories about a jittery little man. Do you think it’s important to have connection with other Jewish artists?

EBB

Yeah I do. Me and Liorah Tchiprout have built something. I went to hers for Rosh Hashanah. There’s a sense of ‘get to know your family’.

1. Shevirah - Shattering the Vessels

“At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. When God decided to bring this world into being, to make room for creation, He first drew in His breath, contracting Himself. From that contraction darkness was created. And when God said, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3), the light that came into being filled the darkness, and ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light.

In this way God sent forth those ten vessels, like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light. Had they all arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. But the vessels were too fragile to contain such a powerful, divine light. They broke open, split asunder, and all the holy sparks were scattered like sand, like seeds, like stars. Those sparks fell everywhere, but more fell on the Holy Land than anywhere else.

That is why we were created — to gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden. God created the world so that the descendants of Jacob could raise up the holy sparks. That is why there have been so many exiles — to release the holy sparks from the servitude of captivity. In this way the Jewish people will sift all the holy sparks from the four corners of the earth.

And when enough holy sparks have been gathered, the broken vessels will be restored, and tikkun olam, the repair of the world, awaited so long, will finally be complete. Therefore it should be the aim of everyone to raise these sparks from wherever they are imprisoned and to elevate them to holiness by the power of their soul.”

Howard Schwartz, Tree of Souls, p. 122