The Tale of the Goldsmith's Floor

The Tale ofthe Goldsmith's Floor illustrated video script excerpts Copyrlghl 2005 by Brown t nivtrsitj and d i r T i- r e n c c .t ; A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14:5 MIRA SCHOR OTHERNESS BEGINS AT HOME M Ly sister Naomi Schor used as the frontispiece of her 1987 book Reading iti Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine a black and white reproduction ofthe outer and inner surfaces of a silver, gold, and diamond bracelet made by our father, Uya Schor, in 1958 and donated in that year to the Decorative Arts section of the Department of Modern Art ofthe Metropolitan Museum. In her introduction she wrote: I tVA SCHOR BRACELET From mul back. Stiver, gold, iind diuninnds Approx. 6" y. t.J' Courtesy ofthe MeUopolilnn Museum nf Art, New York. Photo: J.J. Breit My own love ofthe detail—and like all loves this love is shot through with ambivalence—is inextricably bound up with my Oedipus: my father, a goldsmith, was a master ofthe ornamental detail, a Renaissance artist in the age of high modernism and minimalism. Now, as Nietzsche writes in afragtnent of The Gay Science entitled "On the origin of scholars": "Once one has trained otie's eyes to recognize in a scholarly treatise the scholar's intellectual idiosyncrasy—every scholar has one—and lo catch it in the act, one will almost always behold behind this the scholar's 'pre-history,' his family, and especially their occupations and crt^fts." In asserting the detail's claim to aesthetic dignity and epistemological prestige, my motivation is then double: to endow with legitimacy my own brand of feminist hermeneutics, while giving value to my father's craft. (7) STUDIO, 7 9 T M STREET 1976 Photo: Mi(a Schor d i f f e r e n c e * 139 In this film I will continue the spirit of this brief statement by my sister and present the work of both our parents, Ilya Schor and Resia Schor, suggesting how, in those origins, issues of the gendering of tlie detailbut also issues of craft, of feminism, of Judaism and assimilation, tradition and modernism, history and loss—all were vivid parts of our family narrative and discourse and of its material visual practice. My father and then my mother have worked in this room for forty-eight years. If the size and messiness of an artist's studio are commonly ) thought to reflect importance on the work produced in it, it is perhaps most accurate to call this room a workshop rather than a studio. U had been the "maid's room" of our upper-West Side New York apartment. In this narrow little room are two worktables, and jeweler's, engraver's, and painting tools are arranged on the shelves and walls in an orderly manner. It is a spaee thus doubly marked as feminine, because of its domestic associations and the secondary status of craft. But many elaborate and unusual works have been created here. The tale of the goldsmith's floor was one of the foundational metaphors of our family: in the workshop of a goldsmith, gold dust is husbanded carefully, but it is impossible to recuperate all of it, as it sifts into | cracks in the floorboards. When the goldsmith moves, the floor is burned to recover the accumulated gold mass. My father would often say that in our family, we have gold on the floor, but we don't know how to pick it up. On the one hand, that can seem like a metaphor for the disappointments and bitterness of the artist's life—something that I certainly learned as the daughter of artists and as an artist myself— but on the other hand, we lived in a house filled with treasures. 14O The Tale of the Goldsmith's Floor I LVA SCHOR SHIELD LATK 1 9 4 0 s OR EARI.y 1 9 5 0 s Oil on anti((ue melal nbjecl .4pprn.r. 14' x 18' On the studio door hangs a shield from the Spanish Inquisition. My father painted the tools of the goldsmith's trade over a crucifixion. Resia Schor [reading/: "Ilya Schor, Goldsmith'" My father Ilya Schor was born in Zlotzow, Galicia in 1904 in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was a small town, and my grandparents had two houses, one on the town street and one at the outskirts, near a stream across from fields. They lived near the synagogue. In notes that my mother prepared in the 1960s for a talk she was to give on my father's work, she wrote, "His first rencontre with paint was in the studio of his father, a sign painter, a real folk artist." N A F T A LI SCHORR, C RAN DFATH E R EARLY TWKNIiETII CENTLIRY Pumily photograph 1 LYA S C H O R P O R T R A I T OF F A T H E R M,T». Silver Approx. 3" K 22" I LVA J E W S C H O R W I T H T A L L I S EAHLV I95O.S Detail, gouache on hoard 142 The Tale of the Goldsmith's Floor ILVA f C H O R ((^EF e NCR A V E R ' S APPR ENTICE c. Rs: Naftall, he was a painter. MS: A sign painter— RS: A sign painter. Naftali Schorr was born around 1847 and died around 1955. Thus, my sister and I had only to reach back across one generation to find ourselves connected to a man of the nineteenth-century Hasidic community of Eastern Europe. Of my grandfather's work, no tangible or visible traces remain. Yet his soul and the qualities of his world dwelt close to us as they permeated the origin of my father's work. My father's work taught us lessons about this world of his father; messages from a lost paradigm were both evident in the images yet also absorbed at a deeper unknown level hecause they were so deeply embedded into the work and so foreign from the world we lived in. A world view in which the deity was present in what was most humble, most minute, was transmitted to us through visual pleasure without our knowing that il was a lesson. 143 d i f f e r e n c e I lYA SCHOR AND ( f AR K I C MT ) FRIENDS WARSAW KAHLY 1950s ILVA M SCHOR EZUZAH 1950s Silver wilh gold When he was a teenager, before he went to art school, my father was put into a Iraditional apprenticeship with an engraver so that he would learn a trade. His long apprenticeship and study with different craftsmen gave him a sound knowledge of every aspect of metal work. In 1930 my father began his studies in painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. In 1937 he received a grant from the Polish Government to continue his studies in Paris. Here we can see the beginnings of his methods and style: an object is built up of or adorned with many details of religious and village life, each element is engraved, cut out of silver and gold or other metals, and soldered onto a surface that may also be engraved with Hebrew letters, floral patterns, or ornamental designs. • Every piece has an unseen side that is often just as ornamented as the front so that no matter how beautiful and joyous the image, there is a sense ofloss inherent to the construction ofthe work: some part ofthe representation is always just outside our field of vision—always lacking, despite the exhilaration of its existence. 144 IIVA SCHOR LOCKET 1959 Front atiii hiirk view. Silver, gold, and (liamontis C(Hn'lcs\ iirtlie Melropoliliiri Museum of Art. New York Photo: Ken Pelka iind ni'.il 7piipe.-c I LYA SCHOR BRACELET '958 Silvrr. gold, ami diamonds Coitrlesy til the Mctriipolilan Museum of Arl, New York Photo: Ken Pelka The bracelet at the Metropolitan is really a masterpiece within my father's oeuvre, a work that goes back beyond the folk life of Ihe Hasidim to even older European traditions of medieval love, Arcadian joys, and conrtly dances: where the complexity of outer and inner snrface is especially developed. On the fronl, dancers in gold are surrounded by trellises of silver ornament and diamonds, but the side that would be hidden from Ihe viewer if the bracelet were worn on a woman's wrist is perhaps even more exquisitely drawn, wrought, and engraved, depicting the musicians whose music makes the golden figures twirl. That the unseen is even more beautiful than the seen, yet in the more modest material of silver, is again a reflection of the Hasidic penchant for the mystical appeal of humility. The charm is in the individual detail, the musician or the dancer or the bird; the power is in the detailed nature ofthe execution and the transformation of a metal into lace. V(^<>r. m \ ^ ' l HI • 1 >S^ y m * ^^ \ \i V. ILVA d i f f e r e n c e * 153 RESIA ILYA AND SCHOR WARSAW c. 1952 My father died in 1961. In the history of our family's work, there are two chapters on the origins ofthe scholar. For if in Reading in Detail my sister suggests the femininity of the detail, in our family my mother's work in metal, which followed in the path of uiy lather's work in metal, suggests a counterdiscourse within an understanding ofthe detail as feminine. Our parents' work embodies a strangely erossed-gender art message. Inasmuch as art movements are gender coded, my father's work— folkloric, figurative, narrative, Jewish, delicate, light in weight —carries a feminine code. My mother's work—abstract, muscularly sculptural, and heavy in weight, although still relatively small—carries a code that would seem to he masculine, as those terms are used. My mother was born Resia Ainstein in Lublin, Poland, in 1910. Though from a traditionally observant background with ties to the Hasidim, her family was more urban, more Polish. Her mother fought for her daughter's right to pursue advanced studies in art even though she was a girl. Her aesthetic training took place at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, but in order to pass the entrance exam, she took a preparatory course in life drawing. The Tale of the Goldsmith's Floor 154 RESIA O R A W I N C SCHOR CLASS (RIGHT FRIENDS c.1950 RS: Before I went to the Academy, I went to a kind of, a school for preparation. I never drew a nude, so I was therefor a few months until I went to the exam. MS: Quite a sexy bunch of ladies. My parents arrived in New York on December 3, 1941. As a painter in New York in the 1950s, my mother produced and exhibited Uishly painterly abstract works, but after my father died, she began to work in metal, picking up and transforming his practice and her own. The continuity between my parents' work is more important and enriching than the difference. My lather shifted toward cubism and abstraction in some of his Judaica pieces and in the abstract brass sculptures he made in the late fifties. Although, in a radical and iconoclastic gesture, my mother took the mezuzah and turned it inside out, revealing and cutting into small fragments the small talismanic text that had always been hidden and nol to be touched by a woman, both chose the mezuzah as their object. And despite my mother's more secure placement within modernism, they both suffered from the prejudice against small scale and craft prevalent in American art. d i f f e r e n c e s RESIA SCHOR FRAGMENTED MEZUZAH 1976 Brass, giiiiHchc on paper, iinil 1S5 156 The Tale ofthe Goldsmith's Floor RESIA SCHOR THE MOON i9f'7 Silver, giild, moonslo ami silver solder AppnuT. ) ' K 2.i" c l i f f e r e n f e * 157 If my father's works are short stories from a lost culture, tny mother's works are monumental modernist sculptures, only wrought at an intimate scale. This is The Moon, a large, heavy, full, and fluid mass of silver, gold, and moonstones. The dark side ofthe moon is intuited in a tangle of silver wire created just hefore that unknown suhject was first photographed. Both my parents' works have a particularly intimate feeling. They are infinitely interesting company to wear, and they carry tender secrets. I LYA RINC SCHOR WITH ENCRAVINC INSIDE A N D INSCRIPTION 1944 Silver and gold wilh lurqiioises The Tale of the Goldsmith's Floor BESrA AT THE SCHOR WORK TALE OF THE C O L D S M I T H ' S F L O O R 2005 Video stills Before Reading in Detail, my sister and I had the privilege of watching our parents working in detail. My mother has lived into the era of the camcorder. I filmed her working in the summer of 2002 in her studio in Provincetown. MS: Mommy, can you tell us ivhat you're doing? RS: I Just now soldered, something broke, atid I have to lake it otice more in the fire. MS Oh, show me what you— HS liete, this little Ihitig. MS Where? Can you point it out again? Yes, oh my! RS I was thinking if I can have it without this. MS Yes, you can, you could file down that. RS But it is rough, 1 think with this, it is nicer, so I have to have this. MS Oh, it's a shame. RS Yes, but I think that it is necessary, this little piece. But I have lo /lake/ this yellow powder. d i r f e r e n c e * 159 MS: What's the yellow powder for? RS: TO protect the other things, that they don't melt. MS: Do you know what it is made out? The yellotv powder? RS: It's a kind of, like, how you say, earth like this, which, you know, it builds around that. . . MS: . . . a protection . . . RS: That the fire doesn't touch... You see, when you do it, you really, when you take the machine, you start to clean it, you know that. . . MS: . . . what's what. 1 RS: Because (fit's loose it comes off, and this [is] soldered on a place which is thin like a hair. MS: So there, so the base is maybe too thin, it's a design problem. RS: ' NO. MS: I mean, it's a structural problem. RS: That's the structure, you know. ' i6o The Tale ofthe Goldsmith's Ffoor Each pendant ormeztizah is a small sculplure achieved through physical lahor, in which she wrestles visual complexity out ofthe differing melting points of silver and gold and triumphs over matter via fire and acid. RS: J'rn Just cleaning, cleaning, polishing and cleaning. The places where I cannot reach, only with the brush, a metal brush. MS: That's a difficult part ofthe work. Rs: Yes, the chain, you know, these little things. Any jeweler, any sculptor, doesn't do it, they usually have somebody who does it for them. This is the most boring part, but it has to be done. Each round, it's dark... MS: And you have to clean it out. RS: You have to clean it out. MS: So it requires a lot of patience. RS: Yes, and it's work too, you know. As much as I protect my fingers, il burns it, it's very hot. Ms: Okay, thank you. RS: You're welcome. TREASURES MIBA SCHOR is a painter and writer living in New York. She is the author of PVet: On Paint- ing, Feminism, and Art Culture (1997) and the coedilor of M/EM/N/l/N/G: .-In Anthology of Artists' nritings, Theory, and Criticism (2000), iioth from Duke IJniversily Press. She teaches in the MFA Painting and Sculpture Program in the Fine Arts Department of Parsons Schoot of Design. Crcdils: Video eciitinp and addilional foolHfie li,v Krik Moskowitz A Resia liya N»unii Mira frodutlion. ®niirasrhnriOl)3 (1 i f e r e n c e s E N D F R A M E THE TALE OF COLDSMITH'S I IVA RING OF THE FLOO R SCMO R, tNTERIOR 1950s Gold 161