A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew

Laughter has nowadays become a political adventure, quite often with an open end. The times are apparently too serious, and reality remains too volatile. By striving to do everything right, by wanting to please everyone, humor has gone astray—especially now, when we particularly need it, in art as well. Can one today, modifying Adorno’s famous dictum from 1949 after Auschwitz, after all the devastating events of today still ‘laugh’?

 

The Israeli artist Eran Shakine (*1962), himself the child of Holocaust survivors, persistently titles each one of his drawings with the same phrase, “a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew,” almost as though he wanted to begin telling a joke. Eran Shakine represents the figures of the three world religions as “identical triplets,” letting them wander through his visual universes as indistinguishable personifications. The headline of a (fictional) drawn cover of The Times announces: “Mother gives birth to identical triplets: a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew.” But only the artist’s title indicates that these are religious characters. The linguistic markers, not the figurative depiction, transmit the information about religious affiliation. In their indistinguishability, the three figures appear abstract, not just in the sense that one can stand for the other, but also in that the separations between them are fundamentally erased. Later, the three gentlemen, usually in top hats and black suits, roam all over the world: wandering through the human cultures of this world or flying beyond the world’s boundaries into the hereafter. In his drawings, Eran Shakine seems to explore God and the entire world.

 

Eran Shakine’s oil-stick paintings, which he now also realizes as cutouts and in colorful Oil on canvas painting, are built up line for line as anti-caricatures: exaggeration or stereotypical clichés are entirely absent as distinguishing characteristics among the three continually reiterated figures as representatives of the three world religions. Instead, his drawings fuse the distanced atmosphere of the characters from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with the easy recognizability of the stenciled graffiti of street-art drawings by Banksy and the delight in the burlesque graphic play of comic-book illustrations. However, one also detects the Enlightenment seriousness of the famous ring parable from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s drama of ideas Nathan the Wise.

 

Eran Shakine seems to present us with Lessing’s ring parable in drawing after drawing: how questionable, in the most literal sense, the claim of ideological preeminence by any of the three monotheistic religions is, and how necessary the defense of a fundamental notion of tolerance remains. In his unending play with visual references, which also extend to art history, as well as in his visual allusions and contextual ambiguities, Eran Shakine ironically sets an undrawn question mark after everything, including after God.

 

Moments of complicity emerge from the constant repetition in the drawings, which one can perhaps best approach through the French philosopher Henri Bergson and his reflections on laughter. Bergson analyzed laughter as the greatest differentia specifica of humans, of what makes us human. He shows that laughter always presupposes a human society: “the comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.” Consequently, the absence of laughter can be diagnosed as the loss of the formation of community.

 

It was the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, as Bergson reminds us, who pondered the following riddle: “‘Two faces that are alike, although neither of them excites laughter by itself, make us laugh when together, on account of their likeness.’ It might just as well be said: ‘The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.’ The truth is that a really living life should never repeat itself. Wherever there is repetition or complete similarity, we always suspect some mechanism at work behind the living. […] This deflection of life toward the mechanical is here the real cause of laughter.” Bergson, moreover, cleverly argues for the combination of laughter and aesthetics: “Laughter, then, does not belong to the province of aesthetics alone, since unconsciously […] it pursues a utilitarian aim of general improvement.

 

And yet there is something aesthetic about it, since the comic comes into being just when society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art.” In this, Bergson is serious about laughter: “In a word, if a circle be drawn round those actions and dispositions implied in individual or social life to which their natural consequences bring their own penalties, there remains outside this sphere of emotion and struggle, and within a neutral zone in which man simply exposes himself to man’s curiosity, a certain rigidity of body, mind, and character that society would still like to get rid of in order to obtain from its members the greatest possible degree of elasticity and sociability. This rigidity is the comic, and laughter is its corrective.”

 

In this zone, in which “society and the individual, freed from the worry of self-preservation, begin to regard themselves as works of art” and “man simply exposes himself to man’s curiosity,” is where Eran Shakine amazes us with each one of his drawings, with his seemingly light, free, and playful visual reflections. With each depiction of the diagrammatically repeated figures “a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew” he teaches us that amazement and laughter connect people with one another across all cultural and religious differences.

 

Christoph Wagner