24.04: EXHIBITION "SK8ART – VILNA EDITION BY NYC ARTIST STEVE MARCUS"

 

There is an intellectual game of imagination that sometimes gets played in regard to Jewish history. An alternate universe game, the „what if“ game. What if, for example, the Holocaust had never happened? What if the Nazis hadn’t murdered most of Poland’s Jews? What if three and a half million Jews had been allowed to flourish? What would their culture look like? What would Poland’s culture look like with a population that might have been 15 percent Jewish? Would there have been Yiddish rock & roll bands in the 1950s and 60s? What kinds of tv shows and movies might these people have created? How would Polish stand-up comedy be different? What does a 1960s-era summer of love look and sound like in Yiddish? Or what does a Yiddish punk rock scene look like? What does it sound like? 

 

According to this game, the Jews that didn’t get the chance to exist would get to do everything that everyone else does, although in their own language and with their own Jewish twists. Jewish popular culture would have looked quite different if it had been allowed to flourish. Young Jews would have sprayed Yiddish graffiti. There might have been Yiddish-speaking superheroes. All manner of pop culture phenomena would have been plied by these disappeared Jews. Among other things, they also would have skateboarded in Yiddish. While there have been many Jews who have skateboarded in real life, but it doesn’t seem likely that they did it while speaking Yiddish, the language of most of European Jews before the war.

 

Skateboarding was once a big part of my life. I remember sitting in school, watching the clock tick away the last moments of the last class of the day, waiting until I could zip off to the skateboard park and drop into the pool or pop an ollie off of a quarter pipe. These things brought me great joy. Sometimes, on the way home, I’d stop at my grandmother’s house for schmaltz on challah with some grivenes on the side. But I never connected the two worlds – the Jewish world and the skateboarding world. They seemed so distant, so impossible to bridge. What’s a skateboard in Yiddish? A redlbret? Would an ollie still be called an ollie? Or would it be Yiddishized into an arele? What other skateboard tricks would have had Yiddish names? A frontzayt krats? 

 

Skate culture has developed some incredible fashion and graphics. What’s the imaginary Jewish version of that? Well, here it is – Steve Marcus gives us an idea of what it might look like. With a magic brain that creates seamless connections between seemingly disparate matters, Marcus rolls us into an alternative universe where underground skateboard culture meets traditional Jewish culture. Steve’s art is magic and where you think these topics might clash, they actually meld into one, creating a natural transition in which you can truly imagine skateboarders popping an arele or a hinterzayt luft.