margaret olin | Yale University (original) (raw)
Papers by margaret olin
German Art History and Scientific Thought, 2017
Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 2023
In Das Heilige, Rudolf Otto discusses not only conceptual, but artistic parallels to the idea of ... more In Das Heilige, Rudolf Otto discusses not only conceptual, but artistic
parallels to the idea of the "numinous". The artistic styles and periods that
he mentions are those admired by European literati and intellectuals of his
time. They include the spare Chinese landscapes "of emptiness", made in
the classical period of the Tang and Sung dynasties, as well as the gothic
art that inspired the movement towards abstraction in the early twentieth
century. Related ideas continue to pervade the discourse of champions
of abstract art well into the twentieth century, as in in Michael Fried's
exegesis of "presentness", in his essay "Art and Objecthood". Seemingly
counterintuitively, ideas associated with the numinous also infiltrate discourses
of the art of social justice. Some Jewish thinkers who referenced
or absorbed Otto's ideas, translated them into relational notions or ethical
ideas of responsibility. When these ideas seep into the contemporary
discourse of social justice art, concepts of the numinous cling to them.
An investigation of a significant work of art in the service of social justice
reveals a connection between conceptual art, the numinous, and social
justice that extends from the era of the early 1980s into our own time.
Ars Judaica, 2022
Carol Zemel (née Moscovitch) was a central figure and an inspiration to many of us in the 1990s. ... more Carol Zemel (née Moscovitch) was a central figure and an inspiration to many of us in the 1990s. The study of Jewish art and visual culture in the United States and Canada was just beginning to lure scholars away from more canonical areas. Inspired by up-and-coming art historical movements in feminism and LGBTQ identity, and by initiatives in African-, Hispanic-, and Asian-American art, Jewish scholars, critics, and curators started "coming out" as Jews. They began to reconsider the place of "Jewish art" in classic nationalist-oriented art historical scholarship, which had heretofore excluded it or explained it away.
Journal of Art Historiography, 2011
Review of: Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Schol... more Review of: Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship, Cambridge and Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 2009. This analysis of Suzanne L. Marchand's German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship reads her contribution in part against the background of Edward Said's path breaking book Orientalism. Differences lie in her more expansive understanding of the term 'Oriental' to include the Far East and her concentration on German scholarship. Approaches to Orientalist scholarship are often judgmental. Marchand complicates the discourse by speaking to the individual and institutional circumstances, and not overestimating the effect that scholars have when they talk truth, or even merely ideas, to power. Her treatment of scholarship of visual art and of Jewish learning are the areas that could benefit from more nuanced thought and more research.
The Yale ISM Review, 2021
The murals in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp outside of Bethlehem play an important role in the memori... more The murals in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp outside of Bethlehem play an important role in the memorial culture of the camp. This essay details the way in which the murals are a local response to an ongoing disaster, that of the occupation of Palestine.
World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe, 2010
Photography and Imagination, 2019
Studies in Visual Communication, 1985
Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, is a long, passionately writte... more Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, is a long, passionately written account of the looting spree that created modernity. The book reads as though it were composed by Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” who backs, horrified, into the future while in front of him the ruins pile up. The angel, in this case, is the citizen, forced into the position of a perpetrator and trying to unwind history, to undo it not to return to a “golden age,” but to do away with traditional chronological thinking altogether. Azoulay’s angel (my word, not hers) wants to find a way to think history as something other than a timeline of so-called “progress,” replete with befores and afters, backwards and forwards, a history that makes the state of things at present appear inevitable. Even the fight against tyranny in all its forms is generally tamed when it plays a role in a history with an inevitable timeline and direction, a series of steps, or milestones. The ambition of Pote...
Ars Judaica: The Bar Ilan Journal of Jewish Art
IMAGES: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture
Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, 2008
Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, 2015
An eruv enhances the Sabbath by facilitating carrying. Jewish law does not normally allow the car... more An eruv enhances the Sabbath by facilitating carrying. Jewish law does not normally allow the carrying of objects in public spaces or between private and public spaces on the Sabbath, a prohibition based upon the biblical imperative to "do no work" on that day. This rule can make some simple activities complex. A visit to a synagogue, for example, could involve leaving one's door unlocked or wearing the key as a decoration. To push a stroller, or a wheelchair, is proscribed. Children may not carry their toys outside to play. If, however, the inhabitants of private dwellings constructed around a common shared courtyard form a partnership allowing them to regard themselves as living together in one home, then during the Sabbath they may carry throughout the courtyard as if in their own homes. Both the proscription and its amelioration are Talmudic.
Timescapes of Waiting Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral Edited by Christoph Singer, Robert Wirth, and Olaf Berwald, 2019
This essay on the Dheisheh refugee- camp in Palestine shows how the experience of being suspended... more This essay on the Dheisheh refugee- camp in Palestine shows how the experience of being suspended in time and imprisoned in a camp may lead to the creation of very specific myths and narratives. This article shows how the refugees’ waiting, which spans generations, is represented and discussed on the walls of Dheisheh. This is exemplified by means of a cartoon figure called Handala which can be found all over the camp’s walls. Handala, the barefoot refugee boy who is always depicted with his back
turned, is the personification of a young child that cannot grow up. Often depicted alongside murals of martyrs the cartoon figure takes on a life of its own and is transformed into a powerful symbol.
Jewish Religious Architecture: From Biblical Judaism to Modern Judaism, edited by Steven Fine (Brill), 2019
Palestine-Israel Journal vol 23, no. 4, 2018
Resistance and the City: Challenging Urban Space, 2018
The eruv, or Sabbath boundary, is a distinctive spatial practice of Judaism that resembles stealt... more The eruv, or Sabbath boundary, is a distinctive spatial practice of Judaism that resembles stealth architecture in the urban fabric. Its primary purpose is to allow orthodox Jews to carry small objects outside of their homes on the Sabbath, a practice otherwise forbidden by the Talmudic interpretation of the commandment to " do no work " on that day. Materially, the eruv border consists of an almost invisible brico-lage made of materials such as wires and utility poles found on the street. It is a minimalist work of architecture whose simple line surrounds and delimitates the complexity of urban space while it defines the human community that inhabits its space. The material borders of the eruv have increasingly inspired artistic and literary responses, but also legal ones, which sometimes proceed for years. An investigation of the mate-riality of this invisible urban boundary and the metaphorical activity that accumulates around it has a wealth of implications for the uneasy relations between modern religious spatial practices and the urban contexts to which they seek to adjust and within which they take shape.
In nonsite, issue 11, a response to Walter Benn Michaels, "The Force of a Frame: Owen Kydd's Dura... more In nonsite, issue 11, a response to Walter Benn Michaels, "The Force of a Frame: Owen Kydd's Durational Photographs." http://nonsite.org/feature/the-force-of-a-frame
German Art History and Scientific Thought, 2017
Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift, 2023
In Das Heilige, Rudolf Otto discusses not only conceptual, but artistic parallels to the idea of ... more In Das Heilige, Rudolf Otto discusses not only conceptual, but artistic
parallels to the idea of the "numinous". The artistic styles and periods that
he mentions are those admired by European literati and intellectuals of his
time. They include the spare Chinese landscapes "of emptiness", made in
the classical period of the Tang and Sung dynasties, as well as the gothic
art that inspired the movement towards abstraction in the early twentieth
century. Related ideas continue to pervade the discourse of champions
of abstract art well into the twentieth century, as in in Michael Fried's
exegesis of "presentness", in his essay "Art and Objecthood". Seemingly
counterintuitively, ideas associated with the numinous also infiltrate discourses
of the art of social justice. Some Jewish thinkers who referenced
or absorbed Otto's ideas, translated them into relational notions or ethical
ideas of responsibility. When these ideas seep into the contemporary
discourse of social justice art, concepts of the numinous cling to them.
An investigation of a significant work of art in the service of social justice
reveals a connection between conceptual art, the numinous, and social
justice that extends from the era of the early 1980s into our own time.
Ars Judaica, 2022
Carol Zemel (née Moscovitch) was a central figure and an inspiration to many of us in the 1990s. ... more Carol Zemel (née Moscovitch) was a central figure and an inspiration to many of us in the 1990s. The study of Jewish art and visual culture in the United States and Canada was just beginning to lure scholars away from more canonical areas. Inspired by up-and-coming art historical movements in feminism and LGBTQ identity, and by initiatives in African-, Hispanic-, and Asian-American art, Jewish scholars, critics, and curators started "coming out" as Jews. They began to reconsider the place of "Jewish art" in classic nationalist-oriented art historical scholarship, which had heretofore excluded it or explained it away.
Journal of Art Historiography, 2011
Review of: Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Schol... more Review of: Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship, Cambridge and Washington, D.C.: Cambridge University Press, 2009. This analysis of Suzanne L. Marchand's German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and Scholarship reads her contribution in part against the background of Edward Said's path breaking book Orientalism. Differences lie in her more expansive understanding of the term 'Oriental' to include the Far East and her concentration on German scholarship. Approaches to Orientalist scholarship are often judgmental. Marchand complicates the discourse by speaking to the individual and institutional circumstances, and not overestimating the effect that scholars have when they talk truth, or even merely ideas, to power. Her treatment of scholarship of visual art and of Jewish learning are the areas that could benefit from more nuanced thought and more research.
The Yale ISM Review, 2021
The murals in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp outside of Bethlehem play an important role in the memori... more The murals in the Dheisheh Refugee Camp outside of Bethlehem play an important role in the memorial culture of the camp. This essay details the way in which the murals are a local response to an ongoing disaster, that of the occupation of Palestine.
World War I and the Cultural Sciences in Europe, 2010
Photography and Imagination, 2019
Studies in Visual Communication, 1985
Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, is a long, passionately writte... more Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, is a long, passionately written account of the looting spree that created modernity. The book reads as though it were composed by Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” who backs, horrified, into the future while in front of him the ruins pile up. The angel, in this case, is the citizen, forced into the position of a perpetrator and trying to unwind history, to undo it not to return to a “golden age,” but to do away with traditional chronological thinking altogether. Azoulay’s angel (my word, not hers) wants to find a way to think history as something other than a timeline of so-called “progress,” replete with befores and afters, backwards and forwards, a history that makes the state of things at present appear inevitable. Even the fight against tyranny in all its forms is generally tamed when it plays a role in a history with an inevitable timeline and direction, a series of steps, or milestones. The ambition of Pote...
Ars Judaica: The Bar Ilan Journal of Jewish Art
IMAGES: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture
Images: A Journal of Jewish Art and Visual Culture, 2008
Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion, 2015
An eruv enhances the Sabbath by facilitating carrying. Jewish law does not normally allow the car... more An eruv enhances the Sabbath by facilitating carrying. Jewish law does not normally allow the carrying of objects in public spaces or between private and public spaces on the Sabbath, a prohibition based upon the biblical imperative to "do no work" on that day. This rule can make some simple activities complex. A visit to a synagogue, for example, could involve leaving one's door unlocked or wearing the key as a decoration. To push a stroller, or a wheelchair, is proscribed. Children may not carry their toys outside to play. If, however, the inhabitants of private dwellings constructed around a common shared courtyard form a partnership allowing them to regard themselves as living together in one home, then during the Sabbath they may carry throughout the courtyard as if in their own homes. Both the proscription and its amelioration are Talmudic.
Timescapes of Waiting Spaces of Stasis, Delay and Deferral Edited by Christoph Singer, Robert Wirth, and Olaf Berwald, 2019
This essay on the Dheisheh refugee- camp in Palestine shows how the experience of being suspended... more This essay on the Dheisheh refugee- camp in Palestine shows how the experience of being suspended in time and imprisoned in a camp may lead to the creation of very specific myths and narratives. This article shows how the refugees’ waiting, which spans generations, is represented and discussed on the walls of Dheisheh. This is exemplified by means of a cartoon figure called Handala which can be found all over the camp’s walls. Handala, the barefoot refugee boy who is always depicted with his back
turned, is the personification of a young child that cannot grow up. Often depicted alongside murals of martyrs the cartoon figure takes on a life of its own and is transformed into a powerful symbol.
Jewish Religious Architecture: From Biblical Judaism to Modern Judaism, edited by Steven Fine (Brill), 2019
Palestine-Israel Journal vol 23, no. 4, 2018
Resistance and the City: Challenging Urban Space, 2018
The eruv, or Sabbath boundary, is a distinctive spatial practice of Judaism that resembles stealt... more The eruv, or Sabbath boundary, is a distinctive spatial practice of Judaism that resembles stealth architecture in the urban fabric. Its primary purpose is to allow orthodox Jews to carry small objects outside of their homes on the Sabbath, a practice otherwise forbidden by the Talmudic interpretation of the commandment to " do no work " on that day. Materially, the eruv border consists of an almost invisible brico-lage made of materials such as wires and utility poles found on the street. It is a minimalist work of architecture whose simple line surrounds and delimitates the complexity of urban space while it defines the human community that inhabits its space. The material borders of the eruv have increasingly inspired artistic and literary responses, but also legal ones, which sometimes proceed for years. An investigation of the mate-riality of this invisible urban boundary and the metaphorical activity that accumulates around it has a wealth of implications for the uneasy relations between modern religious spatial practices and the urban contexts to which they seek to adjust and within which they take shape.
In nonsite, issue 11, a response to Walter Benn Michaels, "The Force of a Frame: Owen Kydd's Dura... more In nonsite, issue 11, a response to Walter Benn Michaels, "The Force of a Frame: Owen Kydd's Durational Photographs." http://nonsite.org/feature/the-force-of-a-frame
As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to... more As the prototypical exemplar of modern visual technology, photography was once viewed as a way to enable vision to bypass imagination, producing more reliable representations of reality. But as an achievement of technological modernity, photography can also be seen as a way to realize a creation of the imagination more vividly than can painting or drawing. Photography and Imagination investigates, from diverse points of view focusing on both theory and practice, the relation between these two terms. The book explores their effect on photography’s capacity, through various forms and modalities of imaginative investments and displacements, to affect even reality itself.
Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to... more Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world.
Looking through the history of art, a reader might conclude that Jews could not create art—and su... more Looking through the history of art, a reader might conclude that Jews could not create art—and such an assumption, historically incorrect, would be no accident. As we see with disturbing clarity in this book, the discipline of art history—even the first scholarly studies of Jewish works of art—encourages the idea of the nonartistic Jew. Covering the last two centuries, The Nation without Art illuminates the rise of the paradigm of the non-artistic Jew and expresses the ways in which theorists, critics, and artists have sought to subvert, overcome, or work within it.
How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignorin... more How do some monuments become so socially powerful that people seek to destroy them? After ignoring monuments for years, why must we now commemorate public trauma, but not triumph, with a monument? To explore these and other questions, Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin assembled essays from leading scholars about how monuments have functioned throughout the world and how globalization has challenged Western notions of the "monument."
This is a blog, which you can access at touchingphotographs.wordpress.com
Shaping Community: Poetics and Politics of the Eruv (Catalog)