Contemporary alchemy

The Golem, Prague's most mysterious and enduring Jewish legend, is closely associated with Rabbi Loew, also known as the Maharal of Prague, who died 400 years ago and is currently the subject of an exhibition at Prague Castle. Meanwhile, local artist and performer Petr Nikl is offering a different take on the Golem at the Robert Guttmann Gallery in Josefov.

Loew was the chief rabbi, and thus leader, of Prague's Jewish community from 1596 to 1604. This was during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II, who, as monarch of the Holy Roman Empire, made Prague the center of his esoteric activities. According to legend, he even visited Rabbi Loew's home in the Jewish Quarter, along with the famous German astronomer Johannes Kepler and the Danish alchemist Tycho Brahe.

Nikl is a contemporary artist-alchemist who creates interactive sculptures and installations as if he were a direct descendent of Brahe or Kepler. His Golem, described as "a tactile sculpture for drawing with light," takes the form of a huge crystal ball - or at least that's how it appears from a distance in the dimly lit, elongated gallery space.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors are given instructions on a video screen to look for a sign or word that will revive the Golem - that is, their own "imaginary Golem," using a combination of letters, symbols or whatever other marks they choose to make on a drawing board in the room, which they should imagine to be the Golem's forehead.

Nikl is drawing on a legend with many roots. In the Hebrew bible, there is a word similar to Golem - "Golmi" - used in the Talmud to describe something that is unfinished and requires completion. It can also refer to a primitive person. The Talmud contains a story about an artificial man created by a third-century scholar named Ravi, and it also describes other scholars studying the mystical Book of Creation to create a small calf in an effort to imitate an act of God.

There are also medieval records from the Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern Europe referring to the creation of Golems from earth and water, which were animated by the mystical efforts of scholars through a combination of Hebrew letters. For Sephardic Jews, this same effort of combining letters involved ecstatic meditation, leading to the creation of a spiritual Golem.

Elijah Ba'al Shem of Chelm, who was a practitioner of the Kabbalah, is said to have created a Golem that went out of control and injured him. According to this legend, Elijah, who died in 1583, then had to destroy his creation. A variation on this story ends with the Golem killing him.

Prague's Golem is a legend first found in Bohemia and Poland in the 17th century. It grew in popularity at the beginning of the 19th century through the German Romantics, then was used in Czech art by National Revival figures such as Mikuláš Aleš and Alois Jirásek.

The Prague Golem is a figure of revolt and destruction, an artificial man who ends up threatening his creator. In 1909, a book by Yudel Rosenberg, The Wonders of the Maharal, told how Rabbi Loew created the Golem on the banks of the Vltava River to protect the Jewish community, which was under attack due to the blood libel, a rumor that Jews were making Passover bread from flour, water and the blood of Christian children. This gave the Golem a new face, which was developed further in Gustav Meyrink's novel The Golem (1915), illustrated by Prague native Hugo Steiner-Prag. Meyrink brought the Golem into 20th-century literature as a "formless phantom, a figure appearing from time to time in the ghetto streets like the materialization of collective thoughts, feelings, dreams of its inhabitants."

In Nikl's installation, upon closer examination, the crystal ball turns out to be an illusion; it is actually a circular projection screen tilted forward over a circular table with a glass top and a lamp underneath. The glass is covered with fine sand. If the table is scraped smooth, the crystal ball (the screen) is clear. If the screen is covered with sand, the screen turns black. Visitors who make their marks in the sand cause white patterns to appear on the overhead screen.

Entering your code on the screen forces you to erase the previous one, unless you choose to build on what is already there. However, a tiny overhead camera located behind the screen records every entry made on the table, in essence creating an evolving drawing that charts everyone's code. So all participating visitors become part of a reanimating ritual organized by Nikl.

The installation is, in effect, a formless phantom, a smoke-and-mirrors act befitting the ongoing work of a modern-day alchemist.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at
features@praguepost.com