The Jewish Week, August 17, 2001
Chai Concept at the Jewish Museum: Video part of 'Too Jewish' exhibit stands on its own.

Ellen Cohn

Video installations are trouble. I'm not talking about all-video exhibitions, but those that either augment an art show (with background, historical context, artist interviews, etc.) or as in "Too Jewish?" are as much the main event as any item in the wall show.

Unless the video runs under five minutes (as if!) or you have more luck than anyone has a right to, you will arrive at the installation at the exact moment when you're dying to sit down, only to discover the tape in mid-flight; it won't be starting from the top for another 40 minutes.

NO such complaint at The Jewish Museum where the video art portion of "Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities" is more than catalogue copy, more than an opportunity to rest your feet. And though it runs 70 minutes, its six brief sections — each complete in itself or an excerpt from a longer work — make it easy to join in at any time without bafflement.

Two pieces are standouts — Barbara Nuddle's "Coping with Clothing" and Seth Kramer's "Untitled." In each work the artist excepts the new ethnic consciousness ("Yes, I am a Jew") and reworks the public definition into a private one.

In the first, the artist takes on the does-it-match-any-discount-for-cash? stereotype of the Jewish American Princess.

Nuddle recognizes clothing as a female Madeleine — the doorway to memory for all women who can recall, as integral to even the most mundane events of their lives, the color, texture, appropriateness, and fit of what they wore at the time. The video will remind every woman of the Eternal Question she's had to answer since childhood — "What will you wear?"

"Clothing" (in this excerpt) is a witty unapologetic rumination on the message-sending, image-making, life-saving power of putting something on. And, as Nuddle remembers her mother, the punning "Coping with Clothing" becomes a moving memoir of love and loss filtered through the language of dreams.

In "Untitled" a work both stunningly simple and profound, Seth Kramer takes on the challenge of the Holocaust: how can one experience rationally, in a tangible way, the "magnitude of Nazi criminality"; how to understand facts that break "the limits of understanding."

He begins with the number, the unfathomable number, six million. How old, for example, would he be if he lived six million hours? Over six hundred years.

Try again, On Jan. 1, 1994, Kramer determined he'd count out and collect six million grains of rice. And we see him (along with his current store) counting, counting, counting to classical music, counting to pop sounds, counting to "Jeopardy" on the telly and to "Shoah on the VCR. After eight months, he has counted one million grains — not even, he notes, enough to stand in for the 1.5 million children that the Nazi's slaughtered.

Don't miss "Untitled," one of the very few times that the name is not a failure of the imagination, but altogether pat. Seth Kramer's "Untitled" is chai concept.