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Kafka in Space (Parsing the Eruv) on exhibition now

Suzanne Silver, Assistant Professor Art, is one of the artists currently exhibiting work as part of a show entitled Of Other Spaces, running through April 25, 2009, at the Bureau for Open Culture, the Canzani Center Gallery, the Columbus College of Art and Design; further information about the exhibition, hours and location can be found at: The Bureau for Open Culture Web site.

Silver's piece will be of interest to scholars of religion, and particularly those who study the creation and manipulation of space through religious ritual. About it, she writes:

Kafka in Space (Parsing the Eruv) is an installation composed of building materials, including wood, vinyl, rope, rubber, muslin, wood glue, wire, chalk, pigment, and neon. I used these materials along with "White-Out" strips to construct a visual diagram of a quotation by Franz Kafka: "The true path leads across a rope that is not suspended on high, but close to the ground. It seems more intended to make people stumble than to be walked upon."

In the floor component of the installation, Kafka's sentences are parsed in the form of a "tree diagram", the system of grammatical analysis favored by contemporary linguists. Through the configuration of materials, language becomes a physical object which is constructed and deconstructed in a conflation of conceptual and physical space.

Kafka, whose language could be matter-of-fact and legalistic even when describing the most nightmarish of conditions, may have been commenting on the eruv in his Aphorism quoted earlier. The institution of religion is the likely focus of his remarks. The "rope" to which he refers may be the material used with wire, string, walls, and poles to demarcate space in a functioning eruv. The eruv is constructed via a set of architectural laws from the Talmud. Traditionally observant Jews erect an eruv, a boundary made of walls or wires to transform public to private space through which one can move freely and carry objects on Shabbat. In essence, public space becomes redefined within the boundaries of the eruv and becomes the private space of the particular community. I am interested in notions of the transformation of public to private and secular to sacred in the context of my personal art and as it relates to my project for the exhibition, "Of Other Spaces". I often pursue line as cartographic and conceptual boundary and have now introduced line as eruv, which allows for the conceptual transformation of space.

The eruv is a legal condition through human intention which inscribes a ritual space. In Kafka in Space (Parsing the Eruv) I introduce an eruv made of white neon. My interpretation disregards actual requirements of size, material, and site (distance from urban centers, etc.). My illuminated eruv functions symbolically (its "language" being very different from the philological parsing of the Kafka quote). The neon eruv represents the idea of an inscribed space and functions literally as a sign to announce eruv in both Hebrew and English. In this installation, the neon sign is suspended in the rafters high above the diagram of the parsed sentences from Kafka in a dialectical relationship between ritual, religion, language, and the inscribed and prescribed parameters of human behavior.
[This story was posted March 2009]