The 613

by Archie Rand

Overview

Artist Archie Rand creates a glorious reimagining of the 613 Jewish commandments using comic strips and pulp fiction jackets to capture each mitzvah. A gift for the eyes, this unique collage of images, ranging from Lox to superheroes, is not your Bubbe’s graphic novel.

"If Leviticus seems an unlikely text for a comic strip, look again. Or rather look at Archie Rand's magnificent series of commandments, The 613. The beauty, terror, and fun are all there in one magic, mesmerizing wall of colored shapes and visual oratory. It's a splendid series."
—John Ashbery
 
“[R]ichly colored, always stirring works of visual art…[The 613] is something like seeing a cinema-sized version of ancient wisdom transmuted through a comic (and then blown up again).”
—Flavorwire
 
“A new book by a trailblazing artist...The 613 pairs mitzvahs with appropriated images from Mad Magazine, pulp and 20th-century illustration. Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes intriguingly oblique. It is outrageous and inviting, in-your-face and mysterious, making Rand’s case 613 times over.”
—David Van Biema, Religion News Service

Archie Rand's career as an artist spans five decades and myriad themes and genres. Among his pioneering explorations, The 613 is surely one of his most ambitious feats yet. Without any idea where the work would be exhibited, Rand began transforming each and every one of the 613 mitzvahs, or commandments, into its own breathtaking painting, a series that took five years to complete.
        Each of the gorgeous and perplexing panels features a vibrant, unexpected image that brings forth the heart of its law and commands our eyes to linger. Rand is startling and original in his rich color choices, bold characters, and extraordinarily expressive approach. The New York Times describes the paintings as "rendered in the style of comics and pulp fiction book jackets, a dash of Mad magazine, a spoonful of Tales of the Crypt, some grotesques, some superheroes, always action, emotion, drama." Whether grotesque or dramatic, each painting provokes a sense of wonder and self-reflection, making The 613 a book to be visited time and time again. Perfect for readers of art, religion, or popular visual culture, The 613 may be the most audacious and distinctive gift book of its kind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399173769
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/10/2015
Pages:	640
Sales rank:	122,698
Product dimensions:	6.70(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Archie Rand, born 1949, is an artist from Brooklyn, New York. Rand's work as a painter and muralist is displayed around the world, including in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. There have been over 100 solo exhibitions of his work. He has published collaborative work with poets Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Clark Coolidge, David Plante John Yau, David Lehman and Jim Cummins. He was awarded, among numerous honors, the Achievement Medal For Contributions to the Visual Arts by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture and he received the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Formerly the Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at Columbia University he is currently the Presidential Professor of Art at Brooklyn College, CUNY. His home and studio are located in Brooklyn.

Read an Excerpt

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Introduction

THE 613

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Introduction

If you want to get through to somebody you better be funny.

JULES FEIFFER1

Comedy is what yeshiva is all about. You cannot survive there without a sense of humor.

DAVID STEINBERG2

Judaism and art don’t mix well.

There is a 1933 Max Beckmann painting, Brother and Sister,3 of a couple in bed with a sword between them.

Beckmann had just been listed as a “degenerate artist” and was dismissed from teaching at Städelsches Kunstinstitut. As the coupling of Sigmund and Sieglinde, a major theme of Wagnerian opera, would have been distasteful to Beckmann, and the placement of the sword Gram in their bed is not consistent with the Norse myth, it is likely that this painting may have another narrative more sympathetic to Beckmann’s viewpoint, despite its titling. In Berlin, Beckmann had already (temporarily) renamed his hidden masterpiece Departure as Scenes from Shakespeare’s Tempest to deflect suspicions about his portrayal of Nazi madness and his hopes of flight.

Brother and Sister is more clearly a faithful representation of the biblical Paltiel and his wife, Michal, who, according to the Talmud, never consummated their marriage—they were separated in bed with a sword between them. According to rabbinic commentary, Michal was given in marriage to Paltiel, who was either homosexual or transgendered, by King David because David had married too many women, among whom was Michal, and he had to stash some of his excess wives elsewhere. The commentary then records Paltiel saying, “Whoever initiates physical contact will be killed by this sword.”

Members of Die Brücke had frequently used biblical subject matter. Art historians haven’t recognized the source of Beckmann’s image because etiquette tends to exclude Jewish scholarship from the discourse. The sketch for this painting is part of a series depicting myths of sexual frustration that includes Ulysses and Siren and The Rape of Europa. Academia has decided that sibling incest is a perfectly acceptable explanation for this image because its pedigree derives from the approved Freudian canon. So in spite of the incongruity of the image versus the ascribed myth, it retains the title Brother and Sister. Go figure.

The painter R. B. Kitaj, with whom I had a fruitful correspondence, was outspoken in his enthusiasm for the construction of a contemporary Jewish art, and he was excited by my doing The 613. I was grateful for his encouragement. In 2007 Kitaj published his Second Diasporist Manifesto,4 in which his 615 verses relate to the 613 Jewish commandments (+2). He was fulfilling the commandment that every Jew should write a Torah. Several of Kitaj’s Manifesto verses echo notes he shared in his letters to me, one of which is:

GEMATRIA (Biblical numerology) is numerical interpretative freedom gone mad in which any text can be made to mean anything through numbers, even the 613 Commandments, which fascinate me. . . . I often dream of doing these 613 Mitzvot into art, but it’s too late for me.

Postwar Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where I grew up, is bookended in popular culture between Ralph Kramden’s rants and John Travolta’s dance. It was actually home to an enormous group of working musicians, athletes, comedians, actors, mobsters, and their jazz-loving, hipster sidekicks. Anything was possible. We all felt it. Ambition and nerve were thick in the air. It was a hotbed of wise guys.

Having attended after-school Hebrew instruction and Saturday-morning synagogue service, I had some dormant Jewish grounding. An obligatory but unimpressed chunk of my youth was spent identifying with Jewish Scripture and liturgy.

By 1974 I had been a working artist for eight years, toying with abstraction, conceptualism, and Jewish themes. That same year Mel Brooks released Blazing Saddles, where Yiddishisms were dropped throughout the film. In the movie poster, Brooks dons a feathered war bonnet inscribed with the words “Kosher l’Pesach” (Kosher for Passover) written in Hebrew. Blond people in the Midwest thought this film was terrific. There was a freedom to openly express Jewishness.

Concurrently in 1974, I received a commission to paint the 9,000-square-foot interior of an entire synagogue, Congregation B’nai Yosef in Brooklyn. There were no precedents. I had to invent a Jewish iconography.

The mural work was stopped by the congregation and the paintings were put on trial for heresy. The case was presided over by Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who was considered to be the world’s greatest Talmudic scholar. He acquitted the paintings and added, surprisingly, that Judaism also accepted the making of art. Rabbi Feinstein’s decision was a generous permission that I thought would presage an outpouring of Jewish painting. It didn’t. With slight ruptures, Judaism remains iconoclastic and B’nai Yosef remains the only completely muraled synagogue in the world.

Throughout my teenage years Lenny Bruce was admired by the hard-bop-savvy crowd. We all dug him. He did not ridicule his Jewishness and he was assertive. His performances played against stereotype, confronting the taboo against Jews being “attractive.” In previous Jewish showbiz types, the eroticism of the Jewish intellect was deflected by the performers making themselves unavailable as objects of desire—by being clowns, acting asexual, or by alluding to fidelity, as in George Burns’s act. Bruce’s smart, questioning, Jewishly flavored logic was hip and appealing. It invaded the restricted avenue of American sexuality, which made some Jews uncomfortable, as it was feared that the ire focused at Bruce would extend to the larger community. Bruce’s contributions were invigorating. While working on B’nai Yosef, I bought Frank Kofsky’s book about him. It had a great effect on me.

Lenny, on the other hand, took a diametrically opposite tack. . . . His assumption was not that he, as a Jew, should learn to conform to the expectations and mores of the gentiles, but rather that the gentiles should be exposed to some of the time-honored ethical values of Jewish life and thought.5

In 1978 Arts magazine published an appreciation of the B’nai Yosef murals in which Ross Feld’s analysis evaluated the Jewish iconography as being worthy of inclusion in the secular aesthetics. I liked the idea of riffing on religious themes and, having made an educated guess as to how art was going to proceed for a while, I was no longer interested in strategy. In 1978, on the recommendation of the novelist Gilbert Sorrentino, the Jargon Society published a book of wry drawings by William Anthony called Bible Stories, with back-cover blurbs by Tom Hess, Andy Warhol, R. B. Kitaj, Roy Lichtenstein, and George Plimpton, imparting an unprecedented coolness to religious tales.

I had been thinking about how it would look if there were no stigma attached to doing Jewish work—as if Jews were viewed nonjudgmentally and were presented with a limited focus on persecution. What would that be like? I had previous conversations on this topic with Philip Guston, and later with Will Eisner and R. B. Kitaj.

For decades I made a lot of paintings that looked Jewish. I was fully aware that these paintings were not a marketable product. I just wanted to do them. Barnett Newman had quipped that painters paint so they can have something to look at.

When I asked him [Robert Mapplethorpe] what drove him to take such pictures, he said that someone had to do it, and it might as well be him. . . . What excited Robert the most as an artist was to produce something that no one else had done.

—PATTI SMITH, Just Kids6

At the time of his death, Jackson Pollock was working on murals for a Catholic church and considered converting to Catholicism while revisiting Krishnamurti’s teachings. Kiki Smith said that she likes making prints because their repetition recalls counting the rosary—and Warhol’s regular church attendance has been well documented. Duke Ellington performed his Sacred Concerts, which he called “the most important thing I have ever done,” and John Coltrane’s liner notes to A Love Supreme began: “All Praise be to God to whom all praise is due.” Late in life Philip Guston confided that he wanted to change his name back to Goldstein and began including Torah scrolls and Jewish headstones in his drawings.

But belief remains suspect:

Dylan sang . . . about how, at the end of the day, these big cheeses all had to serve somebody. I was twelve, and even then I could tell that he was setting up straw men as some ridiculous proof that religious faith was universally necessary. This was the revolutionary guy that people droned on about?

—SASHA FRERE-JONES7

Editorial Reviews

The canvases are, by turns, funny, sad, thoughtful, silly and bizarre, some respectful, some profane; 613 screams and cries and laughs from a human being struggling to come to terms with this Thing, this Life, this Being, this inexplicable This, and dredging through the original First Edition that claims to have the answers…Rand's work here is a brilliant mash-up of comic books, True Detective magazine covers and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and they feel like Marc Chagall on a bender, as if Marc got sick of all the cows and the fiddlers and the Torahs, bought himself a case of gin, locked himself in a room and painted for five years without stopping…Religion isn't easy. For some, it is redemptive and consoling; for others, it is disturbing and awful, and we never quite get over it. It causes guilt and depression, it breaks families apart and drives people to war. But it also gives us Archie Rand's The 613. Thank God for that.

The New York Times Book Review - Shalom Auslander

"Archie Rand's The 613 is all the religion one can use in a lifetime—It sends eye and mind careening as it oscillates dizzyingly between sacred and secular, postmodern and pre-modern, high and low, word and picture, trash and treasure, sublime and silly, conceptual and retinal, altar and push-cart, lox and bagels. In the beginning was the word, and the word was 'Wow!' " —Art Spiegelman

"Part circus ringmaster and part vaudevillian, Archie Rand takes us on a rat-a-tat arts-ride that mixes biblical, comic book and movie history in which danger leads to violence on its way to melodrama that plunges into tragedy; a pouring out of panels that provoke, compel, resonate, and go on resonating." —Jules Feiffer

"If Leviticus seems an unlikely text for a comic strip, look again. Or rather look at Archie Rand's magnificent series of commandments, The 613. The beauty, terror, and fun are all there in one magic, mesmerizing wall of colored shapes and visual oratory. It's a splendid series." —John Ashbery

"Archie Rand's work reveals the truth on the most basic level, through the struggle to create. With The 613, he is like a biblical sage for the postmodern world, embracing the viewer and all of history."—Ang Lee

"Panel by panel, visionary window by visionary window, invention after invention, shock upon shock, Archie Rand's The 613 seizes willful human life in all its transgressions and transports, its obstinate whim and its self-regard, and fashions out of mortal intransigence and desire a dazzling narrative tapestry. Rand's serious wit of riotously colorful contemporary comic-book art applied to Commandments, as it morphs into a seamless mural, rings out with the ironic and iconic underground teasing of 'thou shalt not' simultaneously luring us to a half-Socratic, half-Biblical KNOW THYSELF." —Cynthia Ozick

“A monumental art project is transformed into wildly ambitious graphic literature….a series of paintings that some might find transgressive, transcendent, or both….a visual universe in which time is out of joint, where edicts from the distant past receive interpretation from a more recent past or an imagined future. As a book, The 613 stands on its own rather than merely evoking a larger wall display, reaching a much wider audience in the process.”
—Kirkus (Starred)

 
“A new book by a trailblazing artist...The 613 pairs mitzvahs with appropriated images from Mad Magazine, pulp and 20th-century illustration. Sometimes the connections are obvious, sometimes intriguingly oblique. It is outrageous and inviting, in-your-face and mysterious, making Rand’s case 613 times over.”
—David Van Biema,Religion News Service

“[R]ichly colored, always stirring works of visual art…[The 613] is something like seeing a cinema-sized version of ancient wisdom transmuted through a comic (and then blown up again).”
—Flavorwire

“By turns, funny, sad, thoughtful, silly and bizarre, some respectful, some profane…Rand’s work here is a brilliant mash-up of comic books, True Detective magazine covers and obsessive-compulsive disorder…like Marc Chagall on a bender.”
—Shalom Auslander, The New York Times Book Review

“The 613 presents colorful, attention-grabbing scenes…The colors are warm and bright, with a joyous, expressive quality about them—the book is a feast of images.”
—The Jewish Week

“Rand is a virtuoso…I am in awe of his inventiveness, essential good will and his sense of humor. I can’t believe that every reader of this review isn’t going to rush out and purchase The 613.”
—David Carrier, artcritical

From the Publisher

★ 2015-08-15
A monumental art project is transformed into wildly ambitious graphic literature. In his introduction, artist Rand (Art/Brooklyn Coll., CUNY) invokes Lenny Bruce, Franz Kafka, and Robert Mapplethorpe as inspirations in his creative impulse to turn the 613 Jewish commandments from the Torah into a series of paintings that some might find transgressive, transcendent, or both. "Its effectiveness is factored by the degree of the viewers' engagement or skepticism," writes Rand. "Its sacred implications are formatted in a way that makes them seem impudent. Although comic, they are not ironic. Kafka said his art was his prayer." Thus he takes the commandments seriously enough to make them the subject of art and takes his art seriously enough to infuse it with a spirit of playful subversion. Many of his full-color panels invoke pulp novels, comic-book heroes, and magazines of satire. It took five years for the Brooklyn-based artist to finish the project (in 2006), a series of 16-by-20-inch paintings that required "1,700 square feet of wall space." Such a display must have been overwhelming for the viewer, a riot of images and color. Here, the work is more like the comic-book panels that also inspired it, inviting readers to savor each law, perhaps puzzling over the connection (or disconnect) between the words and the image. It opens with the startling image of an astronaut free-floating against a backdrop of stars, illustrating the commandment "To know there is a God." The continuity of panels on purity of sacrifices or prohibiting sexual relations have a narrative pull on the page that they would not have on the wall, while images of cowboys and boxers, molls and floozies and hustlers, some verging on cartoon and others edging toward surrealism, create a visual universe in which time is out of joint, where edicts from the distant past receive interpretation from a more recent past or an imagined future. As a book, it stands on its own rather than merely evoking a larger wall display, reaching a much wider audience in the process.

Kirkus Reviews