A Peek Behind Archie Rand’s Holiday Banners

[View this email in your browser]( October 13, 2022 • Sukkot • Elul 19, 5783 # Dear Reader: Part of our recent redesign, carried out by the peerless team at Pentagram led by Luke Hayman, was a complete overhaul of our popular and oft-consulted [guide to the Jewish holidays]( for which we had commissioned a series of 11 original artworks by the Brooklyn-born painter and muralist Archie Rand. Rand’s collaged interpretations of the major Jewish holidays now serve as elegant banners in our pages, evoking the spirit of each of the chagim. Recently, as we settled into the time of reflection that accompanies the start of a new year, Tablet spoke to Rand about his collages and the Jewish holidays. Tablet: Having painted all the mitzvot and having decorated synagogues, you're no stranger to a completist approach to visualizing Jewish liturgy, but what challenges did you encounter in trying to represent all the Jewish holidays? Archie Rand: In my earlier work I had to invent iconography as little existed, paying attention to what Orthodox viewers could validate as kosher. There was no desire to illustrate narratives as that was available and dicey as much of the precedent existed in Christian art... but there was an increasing, less-traveled, focus on the portraying of whole glossaries of Midrashic and Scriptural “nouns”—those objects or circumstances that could be found in text and then made manifest as images. Later, in the mid-1980s, there was more comfort in gradually indulging more aesthetically opulent options to the point where I was eventually grafting distant iconographies to texts that didn’t seem to require them—as I had been doing frequently when collaborating with poets. The challenge of working with the holidays was that my reference to the specifics of joy, reverence, history and meaning had to be mentally addressed in a way that paralleled my earliest work. There was a reversion to a more “frum” position.... But, unlike the earliest work, I wanted the images to be coherent rather than schematic, enveloping the memorable “situations” of the holidays and making them digestible as visual nutrition rather than being declaratively obedient and educative. I wanted to emphasize the “where” and the “how” and the “why” instead of the “what.” I wanted to engage how they “felt”. I wanted them to hum, muse, giggle, and console rather than preach. Describe the process of creation of these mixed-media collages. Do you start with an idea, a composition, or do found materials dictate the shape of things? It occurred to me that a painting would necessarily, inevitably, identify only one viewpoint because of the unconscious insistence of the artist’s hand. That is the nature of the process regardless of how much dicing, splicing, and importation is done. But collage invites the co-opting and invasion of unwilling voices that sabotage any artist’s tactics by inserting alien visions. Intention is upended and the artist receives a battlefield commission to an improvisational leadership. These stolen pictures, imported recruits, are subsumed into the melodies of an alien song that is monitoring its own creation. Snippets cribbed from Jewish and other publications are reincarnated as unwilling elements, jammed to be catalysts in a composition that (to my mind) must offer an emblematic palatability rather than an academic recognition. I wanted these images to be user-friendly and not exhibit the pretense of proclamation. I wanted each character to exhibit voice and then have each picture implode to its own unity, vibrating with each holiday’s emanations. Delacroix wrote, “sacrifice everything for effect.” I know this is all a bit wordy but at least, that was the hope… Cecil Taylor told me that “if the music is true, the form takes care of itself.” There’s also the subcutaneous lurk of diversity, inclusiveness, implicit in the very process of collage. PHOTO: Kevin Blumenthal What do the Jewish holidays mean to you? The holidays are those cards in the Rolodex that crop up, announce themselves, and then clutch me to my inheritance. Although I know they’re there, always around the corner, I don’t prepare to meet them until they are on top of me. Then, I take a breath and dive into cold communion with both my ghosts and fellow Jews. I am not an observant person but my acknowledgment of a holiday’s dutiful recurrence is a tether. OK... Many can live without such affiliation and appear no worse off. The holidays, whether I ritually celebrate them or not, are the nudge of my ancestors annealing me to my Jewish identification. They need not be welcomed but if they are not received then history has displayed that the world will remind us. These are the attachment offerings, the gift revealing from where I've come. To not accept them as a sustenance is anorexia. That is their meaning. They impart our flavor. I am grateful. Rilke asks, “does the outer space into which we dissolve taste of us at all?” Which of the holidays is closest to your own sensibilities, and why? It’s an impossible question as they all have the purpose of activating different and considered reflections. Each holiday functions uniquely, releasing a balm for our essential needs. The holidays are wise medicine. That question is the Jewish joke of the mother who bought her son three shirts and when he appears wearing one she says, “You didn’t like the others?” This email was sent to you by [Tablet Magazine](#) Tablet Magazine | P.O. 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