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Infinite layers An open book draws viewers into timeless landscapes
For The Prague Post March 24, 2005 The small room is empty except for a white lectern that holds an open book and a pen, inviting viewers to approach. When you move the pen over the book's pages, the back wall of the gallery comes alive with a whirl of projected visuals. You travel across deserts and over mountains, down the streets of ancient cities, through water and caves, and into the unfolding pages of the manuscript itself. Haunting voices build from a whisper to a crescendo and back to a whisper again, echoing like memories. The show is "Layered Histories" by American artists Cynthia Rubin and Robert Gluck. The book is The Marseilles Bible, a 13th-century illuminated Hebrew manuscript. The pen is like a silver yad, or Torah pointer; using it, viewers become like rabbis giving a sermon, illuminators decorating the pages, historians tracing the manuscript's path through time. This Bible's past is shrouded in mystery. Its richly patterned pages were created circa 1260 in Toledo, Spain, then an important center for Jewish art. In 1492 the book left Spain with Jewish refugees who were expelled by Spanish royalty; it showed up among Kabbalistic circles in Safed, Galilee, in 1562. It disappeared again until 1894, when it mysteriously surfaced in Marseilles as part of a museum's undocumented collection. When Rubin saw and photographed the manuscript in the museum, she became captivated "by the idea of a culture being embodied in an object, not tied to place but to other ways of remembering," she says. "I thought of the Bible as something living that had to witness history." Like the Jews, the book has wandered across borders and survived through time. "Layered Histories" traces the book's imagined paths in an abstract, nonlinear way, without presuming a story line. Digitally manipulated still photographs and video clips merge with sound samples to create an environment viewers can engage with. Through the tilt, speed and pressure applied to the pen, the viewer can influence the locations traveled to, the speed at which images melt into each other, and the audio volume.
Through the "eyes" of the book, viewers travel to Toledo and Safed and through abstract landscapes. Although absent of people, the visuals reference the convergence of human cultures: Jewish, Spanish, Islamic. "Each photo is incredibly manipulated," Rubin says, "but each frame had to be beautiful on its own." Rubin enlisted composer Robert Gluck, whose own work explores Jewish identity as embodied in musical instruments, to collaborate on the sound and programming. On separate tracks, samples range from ethereal chanting to metallic noise, evoking memory and dreams and creating a multisensory environment. Synchronizing the visuals and sound was a challenge, Rubin says. But because these elements "have the same spirit," transitions between them never seem choppy. The piece is about reading a book, not from beginning to end but rather from the inside out. It is about cultures but devoid of people, about a book but wordless. It is a digital palimpsest (a parchment from which the original writing has been erased to make room for new text) that provides a continually changing perspective, like a Mobius strip. "Layered Histories" gives us permission to see ourselves, like the book, as unconstrained by time and culture. And it brings us closer to the rootlessness, the searching for identity, of the Jewish experience. Kristin Barendsen can be reached at features@praguepost.com
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The Prague Post Online contains a selection of articles that have been printed in
The Prague Post, a weekly newspaper published in the Czech Republic.
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