Julius, Chloe; (2022) A Category Out of History: 'Jewish Art' in 1990s America. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis surveys the category ‘Jewish art’ as it was articulated in 1990s America. During this period, efforts were made by scholars, curators – and some artists – towards a new ‘Jewish art’ that would be consummate with other contemporaneous identity-based practices. Although these efforts did not birth a new ‘Jewish art’, the category’s attempted re-articulation brought the histories of Eastern European Jewry, American Jewry, American art and their various and multiple intersections into the present of 1990s America. The reception of these histories gives this thesis its four chapters, which explore how history itself became the contested site in which ‘Jewish art’ was both affirmed and denied during this period. The first two chapters provide close studies of art works that resurfaced episodes in recent Jewish history: Chapter One takes up shtetl life at the turn of the century as it was constructed in Eleanor Antin’s 1992 film The Man Without a World; and Chapter Two surveys Elaine Reichek’s portrait of mid-century American Jewry in her 1994 installation A Postcolonial Kinderhood. The latter two deal with the reciprocal impact of discourse around the Holocaust in 1990s America on art: Chapter Three explores how the categorisation of ‘Jewish art’ mobilised by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in 1993 depended on a language of sculptural abstraction indebted to the 1960s; and Chapter Four connects the dominance of Holocaust readings in the 1990s reception of Rona Pondick and Philip Guston’s work to the demise of postmodernism through Gillian Rose’s concept of ‘Holocaust Piety’. By contextualising the presence of history in these works and their categorisation within the post-1989, post-postmodern context of the 1990s, this thesis will offer the category ‘Jewish art’ as a key vector through which the decade’s archival turn can be understood.

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