Before and during the time I painted Subject Matters in the late 1980s, I had been reading a great deal about identity and representation. The most exciting art that was being made was also concerned with these issues. But while race, gender, and sexuality were sanctioned sites of these explorations, as was photography and installation art, ethnicity and painting were not. At the same time I was seeing and reading all this stuff, I was obsessively reading book after book about the Holocaust. Consequently, I started thinking about my Jewishness along with my gender and sexuality. And as a painter, I was considering the possibility of incorporating these complex issues into the language of painting. Could painting, the sign for modernism, even address issues of specificity and identity? Was Jewishness "different" enough even to be considered part of the then urgent intellectual and aesthetic intervention, named by Cornel West, "the cultural politics of difference"? I thought so.


In this painting I tried to address subjectivity and objectification, naming and anonymity, seeing and invisibility, issues that continue to be just as urgent 10 years later, in all of my overlapping communities, whether it is who is a Jew in Israel, to the ordination of Gay and Lesbian rabbis, to art in the age of "Post-Feminism"
-Deborah Kass, 1999