Charley Friedman, A Serious Man

Charley Friedman, A Chasid in the Woods

Charley Friedman, A Serious Man
Elder Gallery, Nebraska Wesleyan University, 5040 Huntington Ave, Lincoln, NE 68504

By Katie Anania March 3, 2025

Flora Klug, an actor and drag king in early-twentieth-century Prague, attracted the frequent attentions of Franz Kafka. The thing that Kafka seems to have found so alluring about her was that her performances not only disrupted his sense of binary gender, but that onstage she also portrayed men who were noticeably and even stereotypically Jewish. When she appeared onstage in October 1911 playing an ultra-orthodox Jewish man, Kafka spent an entire paragraph in his diary describing her costume. In another entry, he called out Klug’s “tightly twisted curls at her temples” that mimicked the payot curls of Orthodox men. It turned out that the thing that made Kafka notice masculine stereotypes, was to see them performed on a new body.

Charlie Friedman, Gun Show: Special Powers Science Project
 

A viewer walking through Charley Friedman’s exhibition A Serious Man at the Elder Gallery at Nebraska Wesleyan University might experience this same offbeat sense of recognition. Or one might sense that the big ideas and cultural passions of some culture are at least being put under a microscope.  In this exhibition of moving sculptures, wall installations, photographs, and riffs on conceptual art, Friedman takes on many types and stereotypes, and they are all stereotypes that we think we already know. Friedman, who has an affinity for Baldessari-like conceptual art jokes, assures you that yes, you know, but also, no, you do not. He brings entire cultural myths out of the closet.

Charley Friedman, I like Moist Things
 

On one side of the exhibition space, for instance, three works of art are arranged in a cruciform pattern common to churches. Anyone whose body remembers being in a church, will immediately sense the position they’re put into, and will then start looking at the three works with an uncomfortable reverence. The first of the three works – installed at the “bottom” of the cruciform arrangement – is a stack of photocopies of a fake art review blurb in the New York Times. The fake blurb is a short, printed critical review of Abraham, the biblical patriarch, and critiques Abraham’s founding of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, using the high conceptual language of New York Times art critics. The review is dated 1885 BCE, as though its writer had just released this for our consideration. The stack of printouts is directly across from a large photograph, Chasid in the Woods, that shows Friedman himself standing naked in the woods, wearing nothing but a black Orthodox fedora and a set of payot curls. To cover his penis, he holds a Bible.

The entire exhibition is a series of similarly jokey asides about the human condition. An entire wall is taken up by flat guns made from laser-cut wood – not guns that one would recognize as current designs, but created in exaggerated ways, as though they were blueprints from some Seussian planet. A viewer looking at this wall of guns could make a 180-degree turn and see a large work on paper, Holocaust Denier Word Search, which contains known phrases and citations that have been invoked to argue that the Holocaust didn’t exist. This show is funnier than I’m describing – in the same room as the cruciform works about humanity, history, and religion is an installation of five giant used Q-tips stacked in a seemingly random arrangement. Overall, this is a highly successful play on  Conceptual art’s continued relevance  – especially in a historical moment where our access to information (not to mention our access to sincere, engaged spaces where we can debate politics or religion) is really a pitch-and-swell pattern. Are we doomed as a species? Friedman shows that we are not, provided we’re willing to turn cultural values into a drag act. WM