My first experience with ritual occurred at a Jewish Sunday school. I was instructed to decorate a challah cover. I engaged with ritual before I knew what it was, and did so with the oblivion only known in youth—and which permeates the subconscious in special ways.

The root of “ritual,” from the Latin ritus as in “religious observance,” rhymes nicely with my introduction to the word. Animated by an interest in the relationship between religious rituals and artistic ones, I locate the challah braid as the object at the center of this work. The form emerges from Judaism and extends beyond its religious bounds, as my intervention considers its Judaic underpinnings while surveying its looser interpretations. If a contemporary politic of ritual takes up the religious under the guise of the secular, this project does something of the opposite: traversing a religious object with a secular slant—in the spirit of my reformed Jewish upbringing. In what follows, I ask how religious and artistic rituals overlap and diverge, if that challah cover might have occupied a space between these two ritual forms, and if this project could do the same.

Constituted by three strands of writing and three pairs of photograph–sculptures, Needing Kneading Needing investigates the challah braid with an eye toward repetition. Assembling this triplicate as I move to Germany, I pursue both endeavors with a place-based will to unbraid my German–Jewish identity.

A DOCUMENT, A RECIPE

The challah braid is variable and malleable in form and interpretation. In one theory of its larger iteration, the six strands are said to represent the six workdays of the week. The seventh day of the week—the day of rest in Judaism—is not absent but self-reflexively invoked by the whole braid. Another theory holds the three strands of challah’s simpler form to represent the past, present, and future. Both interpretations rest somewhere between physical and abstract space, functioning via metaphorical logic. I offer other interpretations in a “visual poem” of my own. My first experience with ritual occurred at a Jewish Sunday school. I was instructed to decorate a challah cover. I engaged with ritual before I knew what it was, and did so with the atmospheric oblivion only known in youth—and which permeates the subconscious in special ways.

The root of “ritual,” from the Latin ritus as in “religious observance,” rhymes nicely with my introduction to the word. Animated by an interest in the relationship between religious rituals and artistic ones, I locate the challah braid as the object at the center of this work. The form emerges from Judaism and extends beyond its religious bounds, as my intervention considers its Judaic underpinnings while surveying its looser interpretations. If a contemporary politic of ritual takes up the religious under the guise of the secular, this project does something of the opposite: traversing a religious object with a secular slant—in the spirit of my reformed Jewish upbringing. In what follows, I ask how religious and artistic rituals overlap and diverge, if that challah cover might have occupied a space between these two ritual forms, and if this project could do the same.

“Challah” can be traced to the Akkadian ellu, or “pure,” referring to the bread’s sacral use, but also to the Hebrew root for “hollow” and “piece,” suggesting a perforated or rounded loaf. Orthodox Jewish tradition holds that a portion of dough is meant to be separated and burned before the prayer over the challah. One of the twenty-four kohanic gifts, the commandment to burn the dough stands as an offering to a kohen, or Jewish priest. This burnt dough becomes “hollow,” in the sense that it is smoldered and inedible and lost in a “pure” display of precarity. “Challah” does not actually refer to the bread we consume but to the burnt dough offering. The word, nonetheless, most commonly refers to the whole bread dish, in an inversal of food and ash, consumption and offering, sustenance and death.

The theme of ritual follows last year’s Guggenheim Summer College Workshop’s theme of the document. In the spirit of this experimental classroom setting, I take an interest in documentation’s bearing on the performance of ritual. Rituals are sustained, proliferated, and made repeatable through the document. But the document could also be said to function in tension with the intimacy of ritual. Document: from the Latin for “lesson, proof, teaching, or construction.” This meaning, however obsolete, posits the documentation of ritual as an “instruction” for it, something like a recipe for its future iterations. A recipe—something that has already been done and instructs something to be done—gathers temporality, folding the food’s history into the context of the present and its future. A document may effectively do something of the same: spreading ritual, folding ritual, kneading ritual.

The document is in this way tensioned with a personal understanding of ritual, such that the task of photographing a ritualistic object poses a paradox. But rather than seeing this paradox as an impasse, this project takes it as a point of departure. These photographs document my attempt to photograph a ritualistic object with ritualistic intimacy. That is, I photograph the braid in the interest of making felt the ritualistic potential of documentation itself. Not exhibition photographs in the traditional sense, these images function as artworks unto themselves: not documenting a sculptural practice so much as layering another visual practice atop it. Needing Kneading Needing problematizes the braided form with and through its documentation.

CONTINUE THIS UNTIL ALL STRANDS ARE BRAIDED

It is some Friday evening and there is flour all around when my mother tells me to shift the outside strand to the center, to alternate between the left strand and the right strands, and to continue.

Continue, or make continuous, or repeat, or preserve, or maintain, sustain, remain. Braiding, like many other forms of domestic labor, could be characterized by the repetition of tactile motion. The simple, three-strand braid is achieved by continually shifting the outside strand such that it becomes the center strand. Through the repetition of this motion, dough turns to challah. The recipe I use provides instructions for a six-strand braid, followed by an indication of repeated motion: “continue this until all strands are braided.”

A commitment to repetition also appears in religious texts surrounding the challah. In Jewish tradition, the Hamotzi is the prayer recited before consuming any bread. A principal feature of this text-based prayer, recited daily, is repetition. Commensurate with repetition, the prayer echoes the repetitious process of braiding that impels its utterance. To repeatedly read a prayer is to cease to read and to begin to remember, to perform a text, to need a text, but also to knead text—as in to verbally exhaust its words, to semantically satiate its language to the point of meaninglessness.

Text, necessarily regarded as two-dimensional, might appear far from the affectual valence of baking and handiwork. But on Shabbat, the text introducing the challah is materially fixed in textile. The prayer over the wine precedes the prayer over the challah, and to preserve this order and not shame the challah, the bread is hidden from view by the cloak of a challah cover, often woven with Hebrew text. Text and textile are mutually constituted: the challah cover is written on top of, also inside of, with, and through. Text(ile) surfaces in and around the challah: in the cloth that rests atop it, and in the words recited over it.

In fact, aesthetic resonances surface between the braided dough and a beige, textile-based work by Cecilia Vicuña—who serves as the springboard for this year’s workshop. The room-size soft sculpture, Quipu Desaparecido, reimagines the quipu, an ancient system of knot-making and weaving that records and communicates information. Exceeding a mere thinking of domestic object as art object, by now a tired scaffold for feminist art, the textile-based work renews attention toward the formal continuum of scale as an arbiter for interpretive iteration.

The soft architecture of these textiles could also describe the twofold space between food and sculpture.Both central to this project, food and sculpture are so often assigned opposite associations: food with transience, sculpture with permanence (consider art object). To be sure, the works pictured here mediate the two forms, inhabiting an ornamental space between them. Traditional food displays (e.g., plates) and sculpture displays (e.g., pedestals) have been traded in for the wood of the floor, the white of the wall, or, in short, the domestic space.

The photograph–sculptures included in Needing Kneading Needing were assembled on the ground. In doing so, I meditate on the relationship between this very kitchen ground and the broader grounds of my German surroundings: grounds strewn with Jewish gravestones and brass cobblestones. Known as stumbling stones (in German, stolpersteine), these cubes memorialize the Jewish lives lost to the Holocaust. The memorials are to be “stumbled upon,” to break an ambient stride. (To some, stepping on them is not understood to be disrespectful, because doing so shines the brass.)

In my work, challah is on the ground and challah is like the ground. It is an object for sustenance—for being and moving and walking. Or, as in the non normative sense of the word, it is a burnt piece of dough, an ash, an offering. The ground on which I walk becomes the ground on which I work becomes the grounding of the work.

PRAYER IS A PRAYER IS A PRAYER IS A PRAYER

Language could be said to categorize our world based upon a thinking of repetition. To teach a child the word “prayer,” one might treat each individual prayer as if it were the same. In this sense, our text-based world is simplified and learned through a recipe-like indexical logic and an illusion of repetition. Language involves naming a noun again and again, as to effectively collapse differences between individual nouns, as to noun the object.

The use of the word “Hamotzi” to describe a prayer over the challah functions by this same logic. The mere name “Hamotzi” imposes an assumption of repetition that obscures the singularity of each Hamotzi, and collapses the difference between one prayer and the next. Repetition seems to exceed its own scope, for it takes a schematic view of its object: a top-down thinking at odds with the porosity of its entities—the prayer and the braid alike.

Shabbat, the most religious holiday in the Jewish tradition, is also the most frequently recurring one. This fact, however counterintuitive, seems to allow repetition to work in tandem with sacredness. In this way, Shabbat elides a view of ritual as luxury, and instead weaves ritual into the fabric of weekly life.The cumulation invoked by repetition could also be seen to amount to continuous transformation, such that each Shabbat is informed by each Shabbat prior. Each Hamotzi is then in some way the first, remembering nothing but itself. This reading makes nonsense of repetition, such that each challah braid, each candlelight, and each Shabbat is singular.

Considering this cumulative theory of repetition, a recipe for challah dough is not so much an instruction manual from which repetition persists but a prompt that sets iteration in motion (repetition with difference). My own iterations (iterate, as in “do again, repeat”) of the recipe are in a sense returns and reconstructions and remembrances (re-, as in“again, anew”). In another sense, each iteration is a deviation from the original: a production of a recipe-to-be. Such is the case that each iteration on (from) this recipe (prompt) amounts to a photograph that could also be called a sculpture or a food or a document or a recipe-to-be.  

To entertain food as sculpture: to allow the materials of our everyday to form artwork, however ephemeral. Perhaps also to gesture toward its inverse: poiesis as sustenance, consumed and metabolized for survival.There are many stories of the challah braid. Needing Kneading Needing offers an entrance into one such story, narrated through the modernist trope of repetition and difference. Needing, as in desiring, requiring, necessitating. Kneading, as in the pushing away and folding under and pulling back—of bread, but also language, recipe, photograph. This essay submits a particular resonance, if not interchangeability, between needing and kneading.

Like the blank textile to be decorated as a challah cover, I was blank in oblivion: blind to categorical distinctions between ritual forms that the textile aimed itself toward: religious and artistic. This plain fabric now stands in for a planal relation between its different ritual forms, if not obliterating “difference” altogether: art as religion, religion as art.