When I was first born in Germany, I didn't speak the language; I saw only images. Then I came to America and, again, I didn't speak the language and saw only images. Images became symbols of experiences: the yellow star I wore, the swastika, the different languages, the different symbols in the Hebrew language that I studied as a child, the look of the German language and the biblical type that the Germans used in their propaganda art. Reclaiming the Symbol is the attempt to confront the symbols used by the Third Reich to empower and to terrorize. The work strives to reclaim the star, the cross and the swastika to their positive use. The swastika may well be the earliest known symbol, the solar wheel, the movement and power of the sun, the origin acting upon the universe, a positive symbol before the Nazis used it. By taking the swastika apart, by deconstructing its meanings and disempowering it, I hope to change its fearful energy. In a spiritual or mystical sense, I am exorcising the evil memory of the swastika, in hopes of healing our fear.
Edith Altman's father was arrested in Altenburg, Germany, and detained in Buchenwald in the days after Kristallnacht in November 1938. Eventually he was released and the family emigrated, after many desperate encounters, to Chicago. After an evolution through an academically-based art, Altman became a political artist, using installations as her form of fighting racism and prejudice. Altman's chief interest is in symbols and words, which she regards as having strong positive and negative attributes. An analysis of such words and symbols and their transformation from positive to negative and back again in an alchemical manner provides a way of understanding her art and aspects of contemporary history. The Nazis, for example, used all sorts of euphemisms to describe the killing of the Jews, the ultimate one being Endosslung or "final solution." Other phrases and words, such as Arbeit Macht Frei, created negative connotations to otherwise innocent words.
Altman sees her role as a priestess or shaman, with artistic powers to "reclaim" inverted symbols and words. The study of the Kabbala, with its focus on positive and negative attributes, white and black, forces of light and darkness, produces in her installation works a dialectic of words that cannot but impel the viewer to question his own values and prejudices. The Holocaust emerges as the greatest negative force. In the installation show It was Beyond Human Imagination, Altman asks questions about the working of the human mind and our learning processes, especially regarding definition of "the other" and victimization. The power of words is inescapable in Altman's works, as well as an understanding of how Hitler manipulated similar words as a language for genocide. Altman's healing power through art aims at deconstructing ominous symbols, like the black swastika. She changes it back to a positive force by introducing powders and earth that neutralize its negative attributes and transform it into spiritual gold. Reclaiming the Symbol/The Art of Memory is a powerful statement of the artist's ability to mend the world in the post-Holocaust era. Implicitly, it is the obligation of victims, like Altman herself, to take the leadership in this rebuilding process.
from Stephen Feinstein, Witness and Legacy
It is important to preserve these memories, not only to memorialize those who died, but also, to remember that it actually happened. These memories carry with them a responsibility, I would say. [4]
The artist doesn't always choose her subjects. Sometimes the time and place in history demands that certain work be done. [5]Edith Altman was born in Altenburg, Germany. She was eight years old on Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, when German troops came to the family home and took her father to one of many subsequent detentions in the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp. Altman's father fled to the United States in May 1939 by obtaining a forged passport. For the family left behind, conditions worsened. She and her brother were expelled from school and the family's property was confiscated. As conditions deteriorated, Altman's mother fled with the children to Amsterdam and later to the United States to reunite with her husband. When the war was over, it was learned that all eight of his siblings had perished in concentration camps.
After her father's death, Altman was compelled to return to the place where he was made victim. "I hoped that if I was able to reevaluate fears of old anger I could achieve balance in my life. My father's acceptance of his role as victim was his torment, and he could not help but turn his torment against those he loved." The shamanlike ritual Altman performed in Buchenwald in 1984 was her attempt to cleanse herself from this dibbuk ("demon"). This act enabled her, forty-five years after she had escaped Germany, to unite opposites: pain and joy, good and evil, anger and forgiveness.
In her installation The Art of Memory: Reclaiming the Symbol, Altman throws the spectator into the shaman's chamber. On one wall we are faced with a dominant, giant, gold swastika, with its mirror image, now in the familiar black Nazi color, rested on the floor. The wall on the opposite end of the room has detached elements of the Star of David, a shape made of triangles, used in different colors by the Nazis to identify other groups of prisoners: Communists, Gypsies and homosexuals. Incorporating textual and visual elements as didactic material to study these images, Altman encourages the onlooker to redefine his relationships with these symbols, so heavily burdened by attributes, evil or good, assigned by past societies and cultures. In her shaman dance, Altman has made gold out of base matter. Now she assumes the role of the alchemist, and we take part in her transformation of nature – in this case the nature of symbols.
from Yehudit Shendar, And the Lion Shall Dwell With the Fish
Edith Altman, who experienced Kristallnacht as a child, has developed imagery that is both interactive and mystical. Her first piece with Jewish subject matter, dating from 1987, is called When We Are Born, We Are Given a Golden Tent, and All of Life is the Folding and Unfolding of the Tent. The work includes a gold-painted canvas tent with images of herself and her father, who was briefly imprisoned after Kristallnacht. Altman has carried the tent to various parts of Europe and America and has invited people into the tent to speak about, as she says, "the pain of the past that we shared." Altman says that she wants to draw God's presence into the tent for purposes of healing and transformation, for the sense of Tikkun Olam ("To mend the world"). The tent is not a fixed structure, but rather symbolic of constructing temples within ourselves to house spiritual presences during our wanderings through life. As Altman says, "I was trying to face a personal dark as well as the darkness felt by other people." [17]
For Jews, the swastika, of course, is one of the darkest images to contemplate. Altman incorporates it into the multimedia installation of 1992, repeated in Witness and Legacy, called Reclaiming the Symbol/The Art of Memory. She used it for two main reasons. First, she wanted to overcome the sense of fear it created. Second, she hoped to restore its ancient meaning as a symbol of revival and prosperity. She said, "By taking the swastika apart, by deconstructing its meaning and disempowering it, I hoped to change its fearful energy. In a spiritual and mystical kind of way, I am exorcising its evil memory in hopes of healing our fear." [18] In this regard, her response is one of triumphant counter-aggression – to take a symbol that was perverted by the Nazis and restore it to its original meaning, to wipe out the memory of its use by the Nazis. This work is the only Holocaust-inspired work I know of that dwells on Jewish response rather than Jewish victimization. As such, it is as rare as its concept is interesting.
from Matthew Baigell, Persistence of Holocaust Imagery in American Art
The Art of Memory
Installation; Dimensions vary
1988-1992. Collection of the Artist
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