Ruth Schreiber is a multidisciplinary artist who creates painting, sculpture, video art installations and ready-mades. Schreiber’s thought-provoking work inspires criticism and dissent, with themes derived from the cycle of life. Her discourse within her own environment, the modern orthodox Jewish community, is close and painful. She is a product of this space, and she continues to challenge it from within. Her projects in recent years have addressed gender in general, and religious feminism in particular, as well as familial memory and new structures, birth and death, anguish and loneliness.
Schreiber uses art to study and express protest as a means towards social reform. She creates in the here-and-now, using ordinary everyday materials, and illuminates a new and jarring perspective through her art.
One example of these complex connections is expressed in an earlier project by Schreiber, comprising an exhibition entitled Where do Babies Come From? The event took place in the Ramban modern orthodox synagogue in Jerusalem, and was attended by members and guests. The discourse centered on the structure of the new family, particularly LGBT couples, and what it takes for them to have a child.
Schreiber’s current exhibit, Ta’arokh: Prepare, materializes out of this critical and discomforting space. Prepare emerges partly from Schreiber’s own encounter with pain: coping with the illness, aging and death of a close friend. Her work reflects this experience, and emerges from a challenging meeting with her friend, who found profound faith in Psalm 23:
A Psalm of David: The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters.
He restores my soul; He leads me in right paths, for the sake of his name
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for you are with me.
Your rod and your staff – they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord my whole life long.
Schreiber is uneasy with the intersect between the agonizing reality of illness and pain, and the beautification of the world that enables everyone ‘to move forward’ – the space between optimism and the world of the believer; the cracks and breaks between the faith and hope expressed in the psalm, and banal everyday life. All of these are powerfully expressed in Prepare.
Prepare touches on “the valley of the shadow of death,” turning torment and illness, bleeding and suffering – into aesthetic anatomical close-ups of disease. There is an echo of critique on the sterility of modern medicine, which creates a disconnect between body and soul; also a harsh separation between the treatment procedure and the distress of the patient who requires relief and redemption. These echo from the aesthetic of the images. The disconnect between the suffering soul and the cold images of the disease are ironic and absurd. The clean representations contain no pain, no nightmare, no parting anxiety, and no anguished loneliness – as though the illness is a separate being.
Schreiber explores the images of the valley of the shadow of death, green pastures, still waters, You prepare [ta’arokh] a table before me, You anoint my head with oil, and my cup overflows. The larger room of the exhibition, through various displays including video art, highlights the jarring and thought-provoking differences between the utopia of the verses and banal reality:
Green pastures are represented by ordinary synthetic grass, made of plastic. This element is reminiscent of Schreiber’s Garden of Eden – a large wall covered with plastic flowers, expressing the falsity of the Garden of Eden, conveying the disquieting integration of simple everyday beauty and repugnance.
Still waters: a regular day on the Yarkon riverbank – chosen by Schreiber despite the fact that it is one of the least impressive rivers in the world; nonetheless, those who sit at the riverbank express a current Israeli approach to still waters.
You prepare [ta’arokh] a table before me: a table set for yet another family dinner, whose attendants devour the food on the table in a crazed rhythm of cooking and eating; preparation and elimination; organizing and disorganizing.
You anoint my head with oil is the straight-forward series of images of a face anointed with oil.
Schreiber is not willing to ensconce life in idyllic fantasy. She brings Heaven down to earth and critiques the attempt to turn earthly pain into something clean and sterile. Pain is here, and needs to be seen; fantasy cannot ignore what is present on earth.
This analysis is unique because it is intermingled with a complicated love: it does not conclude with an abandonment of the source. The recitation of the verses is perceived as a future comfort – an experience that should not be marginalized; but at the same time, it is painfully realistic, and will not stand fantastical embellishment.
Ruth Schreiber’s work is a fierce expression of her deep ongoing artistic coupling of spirit with matter; banality with hope for something more – for soulful satisfaction. A similar effect was achieved in her 2011 work, Kasher, Kasher, Kasher, which combined harshness and delicacy in the description of a woman’s getting ready for immersion. The meticulous preparation is depicted with both criticism and empathy: portraying a spirit which is dissected into details of simple matter, culminating in the smile of a now-pure woman, a smile that may be deciphered as pure joy or performance.
This is the introduction to a discussion about real life.