I’ve gotten many calls since my last posting comparing the work of my good friend David Schoffman with that of my departed colleague R. B. Kitaj. Not a few people questioned my bona fides, challenging my ability, as a lapsed Catholic, to evaluate the Jewish nature of these two giants’ work. Yishai Bar Laytzan even went so far as to call me a “teleological Torquemada” and that I should “stay the hell away from Jewish history.” The Reverend Deacon Stephen Tigglight, despite being a great patron of the arts in his native Wythenshawe , expressed his strong reservations regarding my juxtaposition of Schoffman’s oeuvre to the Pentateuch. He said I hadn’t managed to assimilate the critical aesthetic differences between works that “were divinely inspired and those divinely produced.”
I stand by my assessment.
Forgetting Kitaj for the moment, David Schoffman’s reliance on formal, non-objective, non-narrative pictorial strategies is fully consistent with uniquely Judaic apophatistic skepticism. His work demands a visualization that avoids materiality. As a lapsed Catholic I am uniquely qualified to draw the appropriate distinctions. Christian art is pedagogical, Jewish art is philosophical. Christian art is illustrative, Jewish art is abstract.
The forms in Schoffman’s work confirm the paradoxical Jewish predicament of depiction versus idolatry. His rejectionist stance toward descriptive imagery solves this dilemma through his elastic use of ambiguous symbolism. Drawing from the Kabbalah, Schoffman notates and validates with great originality multiple readings of his work. To stand in front of a Schoffman is like being blinded by the Shekhinah. One is present to a palpable presence yet one remains unsure as to the exact nature of what one is seeing.
If that’s not Jewish art, I don’t know what is.
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