The Brooklyn Rail

Remaining true to the original story, Genevieve Goffman has etched into the chest of her golem the magic letters that bring it to life and, when altered, deprive it of life: אמת (emet), which means “truth.” When the aleph (א) is removed, as it is on Goffman's sculpture, the remaining letters spell מת (met), meaning “dead.” Removing the aleph means that the motionless sculpture was once animate. Crucial also to Goffman’s interpretation of the golem is her insistence on its muteness, which is signified by stuffing a scroll inside its mouth that reads, “he can not call out to anyone with his mouth stuffed full of paper.” It is a wonderful irony that a homunculus brought to life through the power of language cannot speak. The above places us at the end of the golem story, after it is disarmed. The golem has now been wheeled out from its hiding place into the light of day, on view for the world to see in Manhattan. The only other artwork included in the exhibition is a poetic text by Goffman printed on transparent plastic sheets, which suggests how one might approach understanding the sculpture at the back of the gallery. She poses to the viewer: “Is it wrong to form with words something that cannot speak? / Terribly wrong, but this is the order of things / As it comes down from heaven— / All 600 letters, alphabetically.”

At first glance, the massive, silver-clad 3D-printed sculpture is impressive, but upon closer inspection its construction leaves much to be desired. It looks to have been printed in sections, each clumsily affixed to one another with obvious seams, then hastily painted. Now, I see how this might increase the authenticity of the sculpture, since the golem was homemade in its original iteration, so the DIY approach of 3D printing would be an appropriate choice. But Goffman neither says this, nor is it easy to glean with certainty that this was her intention, since there is no stylistic consistency to the golem’s imperfections. I lose the thread, since, like the golem, Goffman is surprisingly silent about what the material is supposed to convey. Her writing tends only to reinforce the golem’s silence or refer to another authoritative source for speech. She describes things the golem does: eating ghosts and hours, (not) talking to the dead. She suggests through speculation about the golem’s interior life that it is incomplete and possibly yearning to be whole. But despite being lovely poetry, the writing also appears to be a separate project, which does not lend insight to the body of the golem, with its own unique material qualities that also convey meaning.

What is most unusual about Goffman’s golem is that it does not resemble a human being, but rather a Chimera, a Pokémon, or a witch’s familiar, rendered in the style of a Japanese “lucky cat.” It's essential to the significance of the golem myth that it should be humanoid in form or at least in substance, as with Gustav Meyrink’s 1915 novel The Golem, where the golem represents the formless collective consciousness of the Jewish ghetto. The golem’s approximate humanness is also essential to its heresy, since, according to the book of Genesis, humans were formed from clay in the image of God by the ex nihilo (out of nothing) power of creation unique to God. The original Rabbi Loew of Prague fashioned his golem in imitation of God’s powers with tragic, unsatisfactory, and all too human results. Taken together, the subsequent iterations of the story are rich in theological, ontological, and existential problems concerning the limits of human creativity, mimesis, and the relationship between subjectivity and language. The story also stands as precursor to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and parallels to some extent the moral issues raised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. Expanding beyond this territory, the golem myth has been applied as an interpretive tool for describing the relationship between humans and technology, in reference to AI and cybernetics (see Norbert Wiener’s book God & Golem, Inc.). It also has bearing on the interpretation of hyper-objects like the stock market or the internet, which utilize reason and perform human-like data processing tasks at inhuman speeds and scales. But I’m afraid that Goffman has somehow missed the life force of the golem story in her installation, favoring a much less ambitious conception of the myth which is both too cute and too kitsch without breaking new ground on the subject.

All this being said, I believe the exhibition’s shortcomings open the door to something that lends Goffman’s experiment great value. While her project comes to overwhelm its own purposes by the sheer unwieldiness of its obscure subject matter, in a peculiar twist, her golem becomes a golem itself: a symbolic-linguistic machine that takes off on its own once manifest––even if “stillborn,” as Theo Belci described it in the April 2025 issue of Artforum. Goffman’s golem is one of very few contemporary artworks that directly and earnestly take up the subject matter of the golem folklore in its original form. So, what was Goffman’s aim in reviving the golem of Prague? What is the point of this mise en abyme of ironic distance? With such a dense cliché, rich in commentary, reference, influence, and variations spanning hundreds of years, which taps into some of the most fundamental of philosophical problems, there is incredible potential for contemporary art. It is impotent that anyone trying to innovate with this material have something clear to say with it, otherwise they risk biting off more than they can chew. The old golem does not perhaps have the truth content it once possessed, and so this anachronism might hide away again with מת (met) inscribed on it for a while longer.