OY/YO: An Icon Revisited
Jewish Museum intern Ariel Fishman reflects on the Yiddish influences in OY/YO, a sculpture by Deborah Kass.
When I walk onto the third floor of the Jewish Museum, my eye is immediately drawn to artist Deborah Kass’s bright yellow aluminum sculpture OY/YO. Recently acquired for the Jewish Museum collection, the work is now also on view in Scenes from the Collection, the Museum’s rotating exhibition that places contemporary art alongside ceremonial objects to explore Jewish identities past and present. First encountered as a work of public art in Brooklyn Bridge Park, the words OY/YO became an instant icon through its placement between two New York City boroughs: YO would welcome viewers to Brooklyn, while OY faced Manhattan. Later adapted as an edition for the Jewish Museum, the sculpture gains new meaning within the context of a dynamic collection spanning 4,000 years of art and Jewish culture.
Since the 1980s, Kass’s practice has riffed on modern artworks by famous white men to assert her own experience as a Jewish woman artist. Inspired by Ed Ruscha’s 1962 painting OOF, Kass’s text-based sculpture draws connections to Yiddish, a language which struggles for its posterity. Despite its dissolution as a commonly used language among Jews, certain phrases (such as oy vey) have persisted, and become deeply embedded within mainstream American language.
While my grandparents spoke fluent Yiddish, only a few phrases have seeped into my vocabulary, such as kvetcher or schvitzer. On a wall directly behind OY/YO in the exhibition gallery, Mel Bochner’s 2012 painting The Joys of Yiddish is filled with Yiddish phrases from Leo Rosten’s classic 1968 book The Joys of Yiddish in yellow paint against a black background. The yellow writing, evocative of the Star of David that Jews were required to wear during Nazi Germany, play off of the vibrant yellow in Kass’s sculpture.
I recall my dad telling me once, how embarrassed he would be when my grandmother spoke Yiddish with her friends in public. He described how Yiddish sounded so foreign and alien in an assimilated American society that had not encountered the language before. Yet I take those Yiddish phrases in Bochner’s painting for granted as an inherent part of my culture. Oy feels like such a modern sentiment, but it is also weighed by history.
I don’t recognize all the phrases in The Joys of Yiddish, but OY/YO complements their sentiment and creates a universal accessibility to Yiddish. In this context, the sculpture proudly asserts a Jewish narrative, while simultaneously pointing to universal experiences shared among people of all faiths and backgrounds: “yo” has become a casual greeting accompanied by a wave (in Spanish, “yo” also means “I), while “oy” has served as an easily grunted exclamatory phrase. Kass once said about her sculpture:
“The fact that this particular work resonates so beautifully in so many languages to so many communities is why I wanted to make it monumental.”
It is impossible to only peripherally engage with Kass’s large, bright, and commanding sculpture. The words “oy” and “yo” are monumentalized in this way as icons: the aluminum suggests a sense of solidity and weight, that the words are heavier than we may think. By utilizing the visual language of Pop art, Kass also makes the joys of Yiddish accessible for a generation far removed from our Yiddish-speaking ancestors.
—Ariel Fishman, Communications Intern
See OY/YO by Deborah Kass and The Joys of Yiddish by Mel Bochner on view now in Scenes from the Collection.
