Steve Marcus creates art at the intersection of cannabis culture and counterculture to take Jewish art to new heights.
Jews have been a distinct tribal people for approximately 4,000 years. In that time, the Jewish people created a lot of music, visual art, and literature. Although I’ve never read much of the Bible, Google tells me that Ecclesiastes 1:9 famously said: “There is no new thing under the sun.”
Well, Steve Marcus’ Psychedelicatessen: A Powerful Dose of Art exhibition seems pretty new.
In it, Marcus playfully mixes Hasidism and rabbinic history with 1960s counterculture and underground comics. Who would’ve thought you could tie an Orthodox Jew’s tzizit string to a roach clip and turn a mezuzah into a one-hitter? Or that a museum would display those items? But coming from the counterculture himself, Marcus’ art offers proof that, for some, cannabis culture and psychedelics are as much a part of Yiddishkeit—which is Yiddish for Jewish life—as Torah and Hanukkah.
This winter and spring, the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, in Portland, has been hosting Marcus’ Psychedelicatessen. Or, more appropriately, they’ve been dosing visitors with this playful vision of Jewish identity.
The Exhibition Experience
“The artist exposes the essence of the thing he portrays,” said Rabbi Menachaem Mendel Schneerson, “causing the one who looks at the painting to perceive it in another, truer light, and to realize that his prior perception was deficient.” Change the gendered ‘his’ to ‘the viewer,’ and the Rebbe is spot on.
I was born Jewish and raised outside of the religion. There, in that secular space far from synagogue, my family quoted Seinfeld, slurped matzo ball soup, and trash-talked conservative politics, and I never met any Jews who connected Jewish identity to such ’60s icons as the Merry Pranksters …
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Author: Aaron Gilbreath / High Times
