I would also say: I love you, Moti and Malka. That will never change.
I would say: Mother, I love you too. Almost all mothers can be loved, and you weren’t even close to the most difficult.
I say:
Farewell, Maimuna!
Farewell, Nina!
Wlibgis, you who left in anger, farewell!
Rosa, Rosa the forerunner, farewell!
Goodbye, Ulrike!
Farewell, Polina!
We were quite the madcap group, weren’t we? We were fiercer than the legions of death! If I could feel anything, I’m sure I’d feel longing. Pure, numinous longing mingled with no shade of darkness or involuntary renunciation.
Now I’m ready. Thank you for your patience. Let’s get going. Don’t delay. If I can still hope for anything it’s only that this won’t take long . . .
Oh—was that it?
Just a thump in the pit of my stomach: I wouldn’t even really call it pain . . .
I’m sitting on a wooden stool. On a red cushion. I look myself in the eyes. I can see that I’m already looking through everything; I see that I don’t see anything any more. Viewed from a distance, for a few more seconds it still seems as if I’m ready to accept hugs and sign autographs.
I hear the rustling. People have organized themselves in a line. Katie McKeen notices something now and takes a step.
There’s only one way . . .
My eyes snap wide. My mouth opens. I jerk, then slump. I don’t have time to fall off the stool because Katie’s hands catch me. Katie and a man with the look of a marathoner who has appeared next to her, lower me to the floor. The man begins CPR, and Katie talks into a radio, giving instructions.
The noise and commotion in the hall begin instantly. The whole goddamn circus we’ve practiced so many times, just in case, swings into motion. From the beginning this has been obvious to everyone, including me: my body won’t necessarily hold out to the end.
Katie McKeen is golden and quick despite the panic.
All the people are fast, as if driven by the lash.
If I could, I’d say: Calm down. I’m dead.
Shlomith, farewell!
Hunger Wins Out Over Art
Controversial performance artist Shlomith-Shkhina leaves behind a legacy of contradictions
SUZANNE LEBLANC
Performance artist SHEILA RUTH BERKOWITZ, better known by her stage name Shlomith-Shkhina, succumbed to anorexia on August 16 at the age of 61. Unique to the case is that she died before an audience in the Scheuer Auditorium at the Jewish Museum at the conclusion of her lecture performance on connections between anorexia and Judaism. At her death, Berkowitz weighed 62 pounds.
The technical cause of death appears to be heart failure. Although Berkowitz was quickly transported to a hospital, she could not be saved due to the poor health of her internal organs. Preliminary autopsy results reveal that Berkowitz’s heart weighed half that which it should have weighed.
Sheila Berkowitz was born in New York in 1946 and spent her childhood and teenage years in Brooklyn.Prior to her main artistic career, she played drums in a Fluxus-inspired band named Entropy.
In 1967 Berkowitz married a Polish Jew, DOVID NIEWIAROWSKI. The couple soon moved to Israel to live on a kibbutz named Methuselah and had two children.
Seven years later, in 1974, Berkowitz divorced her husband. She returned to New York and began her career as a performance artist.
Berkowitz adopted the combination Shlomith-Shkhina as her stage name. “Shlomith” derives from the Hebrew word shalom , meaning peace, which also indicates perfection, welfare, and prosperity. “Shkhina” , on the other hand, has reference in Judaism to the feminine aspect of God, the presence of God.
According to Jewish art specialist EVE KRONENBERG, this name evokes the idea that even God is not free from suffering. In the Talmud, the spirit of Shkhina is described as suffering along with her chosen people:
Whenever Israel went into exile, the Shkhina [God’s presence] went along into exile. They went to exile to Egypt, the Shkhina went with them . . . They went to Babylon in exile, and the Shkhina went with them . . . And when they will eventually be redeemed, the Shkhina will be redeemed along with them.
“The name Shlomith-Shkhina contains internal contradictions, and it also contradicts the content of Berkowitz’s art,” observes Kronenberg. “Of course this is intentional. Berkowitz’s work drew its power from unresolved ambivalence.”
Berkowitz intentionally exposed herself to malicious attention and criticism, which was often uncommonly aggressive. Religious circles considered Berkowitz’s performances profane, while many in the art community saw her breaking of taboos as cheap attention-seeking.
“She’s found the perfect recipe for getting publicity,” said one anonymous New York art critic in 2004 while the founding members of the New York Feminist Art Institute, MIRIAM SCHAPIRO and CAROL STRONGHILOS, were curating a 30-year retrospective on Berkowitz’s art at the Brooklyn Museum.
As early as 1976, in her work Food Meditation, the future trademarks of Berkowitz’s art were visible: Jewish culture, in this case kosher rules, and a very personal, physical style.
In most of her performances, Berkowitz was naked or scantily clothed. She did not shy away from pain, whether emotional or physical.
All of these elements combined in her breakthrough 1979 work I Shall Fear No Evil for Thou Art with Me, in which the role of the audience was to demean the naked artist by reading anti-Semitic comments to her after choosing them blindly from a wicker basket.
“I still have the slip of paper I fished out of that basket,” says the French performance artist ORLAN (b. 1947). “It was an excerpt from Hitler’s Gemlich letter from 1919. I was also asked to pin a Judensau under Shlomith’s left collarbone. I’m used to pain as an element of art, but I’ve never experienced the sort of unease that piece aroused in me then.”
Prior to her fateful final performance, Berkowitz’s most controversial work was the The
