A visit to the Jewish Museum on the occasion of an exhibition devoted to the bard of Montreal; poetic and emotional, a little happy, a little sad and bittersweet, bringing back memories to some and bouts of nostalgia to others. It was suitably unphotographable but, luckily, there were more works by other Jewish artists around to ”save the day”.
Claire Fontaine is a pseudonym that translates literally as ”clear fountain”. It may refer to Marcel Duchamp’s iconic 1917 Readymade sculpture Fountain, an inverted, signed urinal that is one of the founding works of radical modernism. ”Tears” is inspired by recorded memories of Ellis Island, which, beginning in 1892, welcomed (and also rejected) millions of people.
The Jewish Museum, Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything, April through September 2019
August 17th, 2019
The Humble Fabulist 