Art at Mayo Clinic Welcome
Agam said, “My art is an introduction to the overcoming of visual illiteracy. Often, I feel most of us are visually illiterate.”
Rabbi of the Visual and Prophet of Hebraic Consciousness
In her 2013 “Agam Beyond the Visible”, Sayako Aragaki relates a self-perspective of Yaacov Agam: “Perhaps I am a visual rabbi’ smiled Agam shyly, indicating that he does secretly see himself as a spiritual inheritor of Rabbi Yehoshua.” Rabbi Yehoshua Gipstein his father, was a devotee of mystical Kabbalah and the search for the invisible, hidden divinity. Sayako Aragaki underscores Agam’s visual mission with his characterization of his artistic endeavors: “I don’t pray with words. I pray visually. My works are, so to speak, a visual prayer.” (Sayako Aragaki, Agam Beyond the Visible, Gefen Publishing House, Jerusalem, 1997, P,?)
Sayako Aragaki in her “Agam Beyond the Visible”, relates Agam’s self-description of his efforts as being Hebraic.
The motive behind Agam’s work as a whole is his ambition to represent in a visual, plastic form the concept of reality of ancient Hebraism. (We must note that he does not use the term “Judaism,” but rather ‘ancient Hebraism.”
For the concept of the God of the ancient Hebrews and their perception of reality forms the basis for Agam’s work.
Hebraic concept of God pp 239 or text 163
Hebraism itself is different from all other civilizations and religions in its realization that reality takes place in the fourth dimension…Kabbalah distinguishes Hebraism from many other cultures which have expressed “what already existed in the past” with their idols and statues, thus “freezing time forever” in their paintings and sculptures / in their graven images. (165)
They did not attempt to define time or fix it in images. For them it was out of the question to express visually “what is the Almighty” or “what is reality” because these are invisible and constantly changing. “ Thus does Agam explain the ancient Hebrew prohibition against graven images.
Agam defines a graven image as a “static image.” “There is no life in a static image, which Judaism despises and rejects (as a kind of idol), never accepting a graven image even as form to represent reality. It does not represent reality, because the most remarkable characteristic of reality is that it is always becoming.” Argues Agam. (P.164)