{"id":67497,"date":"2019-12-23T10:53:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-23T08:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=67497"},"modified":"2023-07-16T16:03:51","modified_gmt":"2023-07-16T13:03:51","slug":"picture-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/picture-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Picture It!"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[281],"tags":[854,506,369],"acf":{"old_id":"67497","type":"no","iframe":"","writer":59587,"related_cahpter":"378","type_929":"2","show_author_image":false,"old_create_date":"","old_url":"","post_main_content":{"description":"Assemblage, earth actions, and the art of exile","content":"

It may be impossible to answer who had it worse, the elites who were carted off to Babylon or those who were left behind in the rubble. Some scholars however have questioned whether life was indeed all that bad for the exiles and for their offspring in the decades that followed. A number of them likely assimilated; others didn\u2019t let humiliation or being a minority turn them and stuck instead to their religious guns. So it\u2019s tremendous news when God finally tells them they\u2019re all free to go home. The passage is so confident and all-caps, even the mountains and forests are alive with song (v. 23).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The chapter employs some popular visual strategies of this second section of Isaiah. It personifies Israel as God\u2019s servant, calls forth the heavens and the earth to praise, and envisions water as a medium of salvation. Structurally it is a six-part collage of poetic forms grafted around a chunky prose passage about those idiots who actually build houses for their handmade idols. History has proven there is no other god but YHWH.<\/span><\/p>\n

The opening oracle (continued from the previous chapter), broken trial speech (interrupted by the prose passage), eschatological hymn of praise (v. 23), and beginning of the oracle on Cyrus fit together in happy disjunction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

They are like the spontaneous assemblages Kurt Schwitters crafted as a refugee in the Lake District after World War II.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(Kurt Schwitters, Cigar, 1947 \/ wikimedia)<\/p>\n

Schwitters pasted together his jubilant compositions from whatever was at hand\u2014used bus tickets, greeting cards, Bovril wrappers. They reflect a man thanking God for the end of war. He even described his method as a form of prayer. As is the case in Second Isaiah, disparate fragments compile into a delightful totality.<\/span><\/p>\n

But prophecy is also oral. It is performance. And this one seems to enact that exile can be okay. One\u2019s identity as a descendant of Jacob and Israel can remain solid no matter where one ends up.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A similar counterpart can be found in the earth and performance sculptures of Ana Mendieta. She once molded a fertility sculpture into the shape of her native Cuba in the mud of the Iowa River (\u201cspringing up like poplars beside the water courses\u201d, v. 4) knowing it would erode in the current. <\/span>In the photograph of <\/span>Tree of Life<\/span><\/i> (1979) her body lies as a corpse with flowers sprouting from it, <\/span><\/a>a mortal member of the \u201ceverlasting people\u201d (v. 7), \u201cformed from the womb\u201d (vv. 2, 24) and returning to the \u201cdepths of the earth\u201d (v. 23).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

She also burned the silhouette of her hand onto an ethnographer\u2019s study of concepts of birth and rebirth. Does the child of Jacob not do likewise when he inscribes on his hand that he belongs to YHWH (v. 5)? The brand and the hand aren\u2019t forever; from dust to dust, one\u2019s relationship to the planet and to God somehow is. Sometimes it takes the liberating, even joyous experience of being an exile to see that. Prophetic art has the power to do so too.<\/span><\/p>\n","image":false,"embedded_video":"","video_duration":"","show_fb_comments":true,"credit_media":""},"tile":{"top_caption":"","main_caption":"Picture It!","main_caption_size":"1","sub_caption":"Assemblage, earth actions, and the art of exile","preview_embedded":"","preview_image":{"ID":68178,"id":68178,"title":"is44-BMorse-Schwitters2","filename":"is44-BMorse-Schwitters2.jpg","filesize":0,"url":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2.jpg","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/picture-it\/is44-bmorse-schwitters2\/","alt":"","author":"7","description":"","caption":"","name":"is44-bmorse-schwitters2","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":67497,"date":"2020-01-05 15:39:50","modified":"2020-01-05 15:40:05","menu_order":0,"mime_type":"image\/jpeg","type":"image","subtype":"jpeg","icon":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-includes\/images\/media\/default.png","width":1024,"height":1266,"sizes":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2-150x150.jpg","thumbnail-width":150,"thumbnail-height":150,"medium":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2-243x300.jpg","medium-width":243,"medium-height":300,"medium_large":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2-768x950.jpg","medium_large-width":768,"medium_large-height":950,"large":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2-828x1024.jpg","large-width":828,"large-height":1024,"1536x1536":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2.jpg","1536x1536-width":1024,"1536x1536-height":1266,"2048x2048":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2.jpg","2048x2048-width":1024,"2048x2048-height":1266,"post_full_size":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2-971x1200.jpg","post_full_size-width":971,"post_full_size-height":1200,"home_baner":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/is44-BMorse-Schwitters2-340x420.jpg","home_baner-width":340,"home_baner-height":420}},"preview_video":"","external_link":"","link_for_pay":false,"tile_gallery_items":false,"credits":""},"alternate_tile":{"top_caption":"","main_caption":"","main_caption_size":"1","sub_caption":"","hide_media":false},"tile_group":{"preview_image_url":false,"main_caption":"","sub_caption":"","":null,"popup_package_extra_content":"","read_time":""},"home_color":"","home_gallery_top":"","home_gallery_middle":"","home_gallery_book":"","home_gallery_bottom":"","seo":{"seo_title":"","seo_description":"","seo_default_title":"","seo_default_description":""},"links":false,"send_noty":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67497"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67497"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":68180,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67497\/revisions\/68180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}