Danielle Durchslag has exhibited around the world, including solo shows at Denny Gallery, Yale, and London’s Four Corners Gallery. Her art has shown at venues including the Jewish Museum, Toronto Shorts Film Festival, Jewish Museum of Vienna, UK Jewish Film Festival, Jewish Museum of Maryland, Foley Gallery, and NY Jewish Film Festival. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Artforum, Time Out NY, The Huffington Post, and on NPR. She is a selected fellow of the New Jewish Culture Fellowship. The entire four-minute Sabbath Queen performance can be found at www.danielledurchslag.com.

 

Image: You’re well known for your satirical take on contemporary Jewish identity. How do you find non-Jews respond to your Jewish references and in-jokes?

DD: I tend to think of my work as predominantly for a Jewish or Jewish-literate audience. However, I’ve been surprised and delighted over the years by the responses of non-Jews. They may not know every Yiddish word or in-joke, but the broader themes seem to prove universal. During an exhibition opening at a Christian seminary, for example, several students approached me to tell me one of my video pieces was really their story. That piece portrays a difficult, highly enmeshed mother-daughter dynamic exploding during the mother’s preparations for a Passover meal. Even if you’ve never heard of Passover, you may well understand what it feels like for family conflict to surface around ritual, or the experience of being pressured by a parent. In that way, the work has a broader reach than I initially expected.

But the two groups respond differently to my work in one glaring way. Unless they’re ensconced in very Jewish communities, non-Jews tend not to be familiar with the contours of collective Jewish anxiety, and so my work reads as less controversial or bold to them. Many times at an opening or event with a diverse crowd, I’ve had Jews tell me how “brave” or “dangerous” they find a piece, while non-Jews have described the same work as “fun” or “playful.”

Image: Some Jewish cultural critics get antsy about surfacing intra-Jewish debates in front of non-Jews, especially in periods and places of increased anti-Semitism. How do you respond to that kind of anxiety?

DD: Expressions of that anxiety come at me a lot from Jewish audiences, particularly older folks. For some, simply publicly acknowledging intra-Jewish disagreement can read like a traitorous act, an open invitation to anti-Semites to attack us.

I understand where this perspective comes from, but I strongly disagree. Letting our public discourse be constricted by the bigoted fantasies of people who hate us just doesn’t work for me. And frankly I find that line of thinking anti-Semitic. If Jews are fully human—and I happen to know we are—that means we do everything humans do, including disagreeing with one another. Portraying ourselves as a monolith denies our humanity, and the idea that we can somehow reduce anti-Semitism by presenting ourselves without conflict feels to me like a false fantasy of control.

Image: There have been numerous great Jewish comedians, and a mini-genre of scholarly books about Jewish humor. There’s a lot written about Jewish writing, film, and occasionally music in these surveys, but relatively little about visual art. Why do you think that might be? Is it harder to be funny in art?

DD: Being (hopefully) funny in my work is an act of Jewish allegiance to me, and an extremely important aspect of my practice. I love the role humor plays in Jewish culture and life. Generally, visual art isn’t known for comedy. You don’t think of a gallery as a place to head for big laughs. But inserting jokes into fine-art contexts feels to me like a delectably anti-assimilationist act.

Early generations of American Jews played a huge role in the worlds of performance and entertainment, and they brought the funny to those spaces. The same can’t be said of visual art, where Jewish content has a much smaller place. In the art world, which encourages a broad kind of seriousness, funniness can sometimes be viewed as dumbing down the work, somehow diminishing it. As a Jew, I don’t like that norm, and I refuse to adhere to it. Comedic content helps viewers metabolize challenging information and can make fine art much more accessible. One of my favorite sounds on earth is a viewer laughing out loud at one of my pieces in an otherwise quiet art space.

Image: Your recent Sabbath Queen performance is deliciously subversive, even wither-ing, about Jewish fantasies of power and dogmatic observance. Can you describe how you came up with the work and what it felt like to perform it?

DD: Almost always, a project starts for me with an idea that makes me laugh. The inspiration for Sabbath Queen came from those gorgeous sixteenth-century portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, and realizing that some of her sleeves reminded me of challah. Imagining a version of these portraits that somehow incorporated real challah felt funny to me, and that started me down this path.

My Sabbath Queen costume combines symbols of Tudor power with visual representations of items used on the Sabbath table. I’ve employed Queen Elizabeth’s aesthetics to pose as and embody my vision of Judaism’s most famous female monarch—the invisible, holy, regal entity who visits Jews at their Sabbath tables each Friday night to begin the holiday. The hat is fashioned from actual challah bread, and a real challah cover makes up the bodice and shoulders. You can also see Elizabeth’s central symbols of political power in the embroidery, her Tudor rose and pearl adornments.

Sabbath Queen references not only Queen Elizabeth’s looks but also her politics. Alongside showcasing how Jewish ritual objects often copy the aesthetics of European Christian royalty, the piece also critically and comedically examines the contemporary Jewish relationship to conservative political power. My version of this queen is a haughty, superior, right-wing Zionist, imperialist, intolerant, and lethally confident monarch.

I premiered the project last fall by performing a short comedic monologue as the queen at Jewish Currents Live, a daylong conference for a very politically progressive magazine. Five male Broadway dancers wearing only yarmulkes and Speedos carried me into the space on a large palanquin, much to the surprise of those gathered. Once deposited on stage, my character insulted the audience for their lefty political views, expressed her disdain for their life choices, and instructed them on how to become, in her eyes, better Jews. It was an absolute blast! I’ll never forget the feeling of slicing through the air in full Sabbath Queen costume and makeup, buoyed up over the crowd on the shoulders of these dancers. My face communicated derision and judgment, but inside I just kept thinking, “This is my adult job! I’m the luckiest person alive!”

Image: For a performance artist, your voice is an important medium—not just the words but the sound itself. When you take on a character are you conscious of modifying your voice?

DD: When preparing my performance as the Sabbath Queen, I gave my voice a lot of thought. Initially I wondered whether I should deliver her words in a formal, tight English accent, a personal kind of channeling of my imagined version of Queen Elizabeth I. I tried speaking that way in rehearsals, but it felt forced, so clearly distant from my natural way of speaking that it distracted from the content of the monologue. Then I remembered Katharine Hepburn’s masterful turn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. Surrounded by incredible British actors all speaking in beautifully regal English accents, Hepburn more than holds her own as a European monarch on screen, despite delivering all her dialogue in an accent that can only be described as High Connecticut. That performance reminded me that a voice’s emotional power can override other factors, and I ended up speaking in a more imposing version of my own voice while performing. Later, when some close friends saw the performance and asked whether it had really been me playing the queen, I took it as a sign that I had made the right choice. My energy informed my way of speaking enough to create the illusion, even without an English accent.

Image: This is a time of anxiety for a lot of Jews, but also of new ideas and directions in Jewish thought and creativity. In fact, anxiety and creativity often intertwine in Jewish history. What new directions do you see or predict for Jewish artists?

DD: This is a particularly difficult time for Jewish artists like me, who make work that challenges institutional and tribal norms. Censorship has been an issue in Jewish art spaces my whole career, but since October 7 it’s gone through the roof. Unless something dramatically changes, I fear that Jewish art museums will be aligned more and more with right-wing values and conservative taste, making them inhospitable to many contemporary Jewish makers. Several curators at Jewish museums have told me in the last year that they would love to show my work but can’t, because their institution’s funders would disapprove. Just my having shown pieces critical of Israel in the past is enough to make exhibiting any of my stuff a nonstarter. I sadly think we’ll find, moving forward, that the most exciting, dynamic, and layered art about Jewish life will be shown mostly in non-Jewish institutions.

Image: For generations, many artists who were Jews shuddered at being described as “Jewish artists,” feeling this would marginalize them and limit the reception of their work. How do you feel about that label?

DD: I love it.