Over the twenty-four years that I have chosen to commit my artmaking process to paper, I have rarely been involved in the self-reflexive activity of art for art's sake. The material, paper, and my preferred structure, the artist book, have both offered me endless opportunities to consider and reflect on a wide range of ideas. Because I am a feminist and an internationalist, humanism has been my ideal. As such, I have chosen to focus on a range of political and humanist concerns.  When I was in my twenties I belonged to an international peace group, called Servas, that believed in personal connections at the small-is-beautiful level. These connections strove to overcome, bit by bit, the damning trajectories of power-based history. Projects based on exchange have, since then, been essential to my life: whether working under the auspices of Dobbin Books, my artist book studio that focuses on international collaborations; running with a new organization, Alma on Dobbin, on cultural exchange projects between Hungary and the United States; or assisting on poverty-alleviation projects, like Phumani Paper in Johannesburg, South Africa. I view several themes in my work as “political paper.” Since 1994, I have collaborated with Hungarian sculptor András Böröcz on a series of artist books, performances, and installations dealing with the social and political symbolism of bread. Bread Head Fables is an absurdist homage to the Polish priest of the Solidarity movement, Reverend Jerzy Popieluszko. It reflects on how political events of global magnitude are reenacted on a local scale. The paper here was made to resemble concrete and stone, and it highlights the questionable materiality of the bread heads and of bread itself. In another artist book, Missing Labels (1997), the focus is entirely on the tiny paper labels seen traditionally on kosher and Central European breads. The labels, which originally had the name of the bakery, city, and date of production to confirm freshness, are redesigned to communicate more obscure messages. These transformed labels along with photo images of András and me posing with bread, add an almost Dadaist humor to the work. Breads for our Breads on Heads installation (1997) are real but seem paper cast. Bread Portraits (2003) is a photographic essay that repeatedly uses bread as shoes and as body decoration—paper is solely substrate here in an elegiac exorcism of material. The notion of identity has figured repeatedly in my work, particularly when I address concerns about post-Apartheid South Africa or post-Soviet Hungary. Since 1995 I have had several opportunities to work in South Africa with other artists. Emandulo Re-Creation (1997) is the result of a twenty-two artist collaboration that I designed and orchestrated in Johannesburg. In this book (edition of thirty), each artist’s particular creation myth was cut up to mix and match with the others’, an implicit contrast to the still very stratified South African society. Another collaboration, Tracks (1998), done with Kim Berman, considers man-made references as symbols of memory and loss. This artist book (edition of five) consists of slats of flax and abaca paper used to create a ladder or track-like structure. The skin-like paper is tattooed with burn drawings, dry-point printed landscapes, and embedded materials. For Dihangara (2001), I brought fifteen artists together to consider the appearance of change in identity. We made an artist book designed to be a closet of hangers, with text and images on the paper wrappers, which move far beyond the commercial cleaners’ versions. This artist book was the catalyst for an international exhibition I organized of art on hangers called We Love Our Customers (2001/2003). Looking closer to my home in New York City, the papers of 9/11 became a personal minefield for my questions and political concerns. In one book object, Snowstorm of Documents (2002), a dustpan is covered with text-filled papers, ruminations catalyzed by the flurry of papers and detritus that blanketed large portions of New York on 9/11. The brush portion has been built directly into the base of the dustpan and is made of human hairs. On the dustpan is a piece of detritus with a text that reflects on what can be quantified, along with a small book about the changing numbers of victims. Other political themes in my artist books and paper works include the meaning of destruction of books (Duster, 1999, and Duster 2, 2001), the role of women in patriarchal Jewish culture, (Morning Prayer, 1997, and 64 Stones,1997), and post-modern reflections on the meaning of torture (Mourning Prayer, 2000, Morning Prayer 2, 2000, Spine, 2000, and Clew, 2003).
Simulacrum is an installation made for an exhibition called Weaving Women’s Words in Spring 2004. This exhibition focuses on the oral histories of a group of Baltimore women from the Jewish Women's Archive. This Archive was started in 1995 to document the generation of women born in the early decades of the twentieth century. Some do not consider white women a marginalized group, but most of these women were immigrants who arrived in this country when women did not have a public voice. More importantly, these women, like most, have been and continue to be left out of documented history. The need to give them a context and place offers those of us who follow a better understanding of who we are and who we can be.
A simulacrum is that which is made in the likeness of a being or thing. I used this title to refer to the testaments recorded for the Archive, as they represent the lives of these women.
Nine glass and paper lambdoid forms stand in a cluster. The papers within are thick with these women's many words, pulp-painted with a graphite-pigmented pulp on both sides of translucent abaca paper. Because of the paper's extreme translucency, the words on both sides appear to entangle and become one: a complex mesh of lines. The paper is cut out in many places between the cursive lines, which visually cease to be language, the actual space between the words having been taken away. The representation of a life through written or oral documentation is clearly the goal of any archive such as this one, but questions immediately arise as to the limits of language: What are words? Can they really contain a life? Borges’ Librarian in his “Library of Babel” comes to mind, with his rhetorical question: “You who read me, are you sure you understand my language?” (Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges, Grove Press, 1962, p. 87) The Kabbalists believed in two Torahs: the Black and White Torah. The Black contained all the written words—all that we deem important. The White Torah, on the other hand, is the space in between—between the words and between the letters. Only here, they believed, could true wisdom be found. (Interestingly, this obsession with the relationship of information and substrate, subject and ground, has been an essential aspect of Modernism and Abstraction.) I am not a Kabbalist, but when it comes to words, I concur: it is literally in between the spaces of all that has been committed to writing where all that cannot be said remains. This simulacrum chooses to honor all that goes on in a life—the blood, the guts, the sinews, the tears, and the silences—these interstices that are so often left out or reduced to a passing laugh. It is the wisdom that we all search for. The particular technique of pulp painting, where the text is made of pigmented paper fibers on handmade paper, adds yet another layer of meaning. In Simulacrum the words and the spaces between them are actually one and the same, at least in terms of material. There is a merging of subject and content into the paper itself. In my installation, the glass and paper forms stand like inverted open books in a cluster, as ciphers and as semblances. Like small lean-tos or rooftops, they literally protect their internal light (here, nine small but startlingly bright fluorescent bulbs). Like a house of cards, they stand precariously in balance, but unlike cards these facets are made of sheets of glass: fragile yet resilient; dangerous yet transparent. As ciphers they acknowledge the many words spoken; as semblances they honor all that cannot be said. "Nothing is before it has been uttered in a clear voice." (author unknown, possibly Egyptian) In reviewing these artworks, I reaffirm my commitment to activate all aspects of the art process, including my primary material, paper, with the result that the subject becomes the object itself. Weaving Women’s Words was curated by Jill Vexler for the Jewish Museum of Maryland (March 28 - July 18, 2004)