excerpt: HD video & 16mm, 25:25 min. 2015
This intimate film portrait explores how one Jewish Orthodox woman became a contemporary feminist artist. Aylon’s life literally transforms, due to several factors not the least of which was the feminist movement of the seventies. Still an active artist today in her 80s, Helène Aylon was raised in Borough Park Brooklyn, a conservative Orthodox Jewish community. Aylon was engaged to a rabbi at age 17 and didn’t venture towards becoming an artist until her forties. In 1982, Alyon organized women to travel cross-country to “rescue” earth from nuclear testing sites. In another ambitious installation, Aylon attempts to liberate G-d.
Helène Aylon is a living artist who is often overlooked by the larger art world even though her work has garnered some attention from feminist art critics, Jewish scholars, museums curators, and environmentalists. Her work gained some critical notice in the nineties due to the increasing awareness of an emerging public art movement that was politically challenging and strove to move outside the studio and gallery to engage with a larger public audience. Artist and critic Suzanne Lacy and prominent critic Lucy Lippard have written extensively about the role of public art within the larger contexts of burgeoning and otherwise critically ignored movements of conceptual, activist, and public performance. Their critical attention laid much of the groundwork for an appreciation for the kind of projects that Aylon pursued. Aylon’s work incorporates everything from process painting, performance art, collaborative public art, installation to video art. There is a need to better understand her work and her role as an artist, especially in terms of feminist art during the eighties. The film “The Liberation of Helène Aylon” brings attention to Aylon’s life and work so that the next generation of women artists and others may learn about the work of this earlier feminist artist.