A background on the blog art of Mel Alexenberg
By Yehudis Barmats/Harris

“Art today,” Mel Alexenberg says, “must think Jewish.”

When Mel Alexenberg had the image of an angel fly around the world using AT&T satellites and fax machines (AT&T Circumglobal Angel Flight, Oct. 4 and 5 1989) he was celebrating the angel of Rembrandt’s print works and making it ephemeral. He took the angel into the depths of the subways (Subway Angel series, 1987), sent it to Tokyo and had it return a day earlier to Los Angeles using AT&T communication satellites, spreading its name through Television publicity to homes throughout America. Angel is “malakh” in Hebrew. The Hebrew letters spell m’a’l’a’kh’-angel, as well as m’a’l’a’kh’a- work, and m’a’a’kh’a’l- food. The idea of merging angel with work and food inspired Mel’s decision to turn the angel of Rembrandt into a computer angel. He reinterpreted the biblical words for art, “mala’khet ma’khshevet” or “thoughtful craft,” as “mala’kh ma’khshev” “computer angel.”

Ori Z. Soltes, former director of the National Jewish Museum in Washington, describes the series of digital angels in his book “Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century” (Brandeis University Press, 2003). He calls Mel’s act of digitizing a sacred Rembrandt image as irreverent. Instead of allowing the image of the angel to exist only in books and archives, Mel Alexenberg flew it out of the frame around the world. Soltis writes, “Alexenberg appropriates an iconic image: Rembrandt’s angel who wrestles with Jacob. But he transforms and distorts it, digitalizing and dismembering it, transforming the normative Western tradition within which he works as he rebels against it.”
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