Exhibition | Helène Aylon: Undercurrent
This delicate pink dash sums up my striving for the inclusion of women. It is what has been missing since Abraham discovered monotheism. I had inserted a feminine presence into the Godhead. —Helène Aylon
This is how Helène Aylon (1931–2020) explained My Eternal Light: The Illuminated Pink Dash, her version of the eternal flame that hangs in every synagogue. Beginning in 1990—twenty years after her hard-earned career as an artist took off—Aylon looked back at her childhood and early adulthood in Orthodox Jewish communities. She began highlighting passages of divine and human cruelty in the five books of Moses using a pink marker. Working by candlelight, she inserted a vertical line wherever the feminine presence was absent, laying her marks on a translucent sheet placed over each page. Through her intervention, which was both respectful and radical, she sought to “liberate God” from what she viewed as the projections of men.
The title My Eternal Light expresses a paradox between that which is eternal and that which is subjective and embodied. The exhibition Helène Aylon: Undercurrent brings together twenty works from across Aylon’s fifty-year career that illuminate the artist’s openness to such contradictions.
In the late 1960s, Aylon embarked on her first major series, Elusive Silver. Painting on layered sheets of Plexiglas and aluminum, she sought a light that was not eternal but contingent: “depending on the position of the viewer, an elusive shine of the metal backing might peep through,” she said. Aylon drew inspiration from the subtle, black-not-quite-black paintings of the Abstract Expressionist artist Ad Reinhardt (1913–1967), with whom she had studied at Brooklyn College in the 1960s.
In Aylon’s next series, Paintings That Change in Time, she embedded change into the act of creation itself. “I wanted the art to tell me something I did not know,” she stated. “I painted from behind the surface of the paper, allowing the oils to seep through naturally, in their own time, outside of my doing. I’d wait for the image to manifest on the front through chance—absorption—and I would accept the outcome.” Created primarily with linseed oil as well as pigments, tar, metals, and bleach, the works—sandwiched between Masonite backings and Plexiglas panels—became richer and more beautiful with time, as the interaction of materials generated unexpected effects. Aylon recognized the resulting forms as “the handwriting of the universe,” linking the processes that created them to aging bodies and earth cracking beneath the sun’s rays.
The looming threat of nuclear destruction that characterized the Cold War was anathema to Aylon’s worldview. For a decade, beginning in 1980, she left her studio and embarked on a series of performances across the United States and in the Middle East, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Against the threat of nuclear war, she enlisted the “sac” (a deliberate misspelling of “sack”), in the form of a pillowcase, as a tool of survival. In the spring of 1982, Aylon invited a dozen women to embark on a six-week journey in a truck she transformed into a work called Earth Ambulance and an accompanying van. Between Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and a mass rally for disarmament at the United Nations in New York, the “Women’s SAC Caravan” stopped at twelve Strategic Air Command military bases; for Aylon the acronym SAC denoted both Strategic Air Command and the mantra “survive and continue.” (It also references the amniotic sac, which Aylon evoked in a body of abstract paintings from the late 1970s called Breakings.) At each site, members of the caravan, joined by local participants, gathered earth in “sacs”—pillowcases that women had inscribed with their dreams and nightmares for the planet. Once filled, the pillowcases were carried to the Earth Ambulance on decommissioned army stretchers and transported to the next site.
T
he exhibition includes photographic documentation of the Earth Ambulance’s journey—called Terrestri: “Rescued” Earth—along with works that attest to Aylon’s special genius for transforming time-based actions into compelling objects, installations, and videos. Stretched Canvas (1989) is one such example. Another is Bridge of Knots, which has been reimagined for the galleries at Art@Bainbridge. It consists of a small selection of the hundreds of ropes of knotted pillowcases that Aylon installed on the exterior walls of museum buildings in 1993, 1995, and 2006 to commemorate the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 2008 Aylon began a series of photographic self-portraits titled Turnings. They encapsulate her acceptance of change, of “the melodrama of looking forward and looking back simultaneously.” “I try to keep my balance, holding the paradoxes,” she stated, pointing out that The Book That Will Not Close, which she created as a conciliatory gesture to her beloved mother, an ardent believer, “also does not open.”
Rachel Federman
Guest Curator
Art@Bainbridge is made possible through the generous support of the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Program Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; the Kathleen C. Sherrerd Program Fund for American Art; Barbara and Gerald Essig; Gene Locks, Class of 1959, and Sueyun Locks; and Ivy Beth Lewis.
Additional support for Helène Aylon: Undercurrent is provided by Princeton University’s Center for Culture, Society, and Religion; Office of Religious Life; Program in Judaic Studies; Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies; and Department of Religion.