Today, fifty years after the end of World War II, more American artists than ever before are using Holocaust imagery. The artists include concentration camp survivors, others who experienced Nazi brutality directly and those who were born in the United States and elsewhere both before and after the war. Although each artist works in his or her own particular way, their art is not differentiated by age, experience or personal memory. What they do share are greater or lesser amounts of anger, desire for reconciliation of people, the necessity of remembrance and a concern for victims of brutality in Vietnam, Bosnia and elsewhere. But in most instances, the spark that ignites this aspect of their art is the Holocaust.
Of the many artists who use such imagery, I want to discuss only a handful whose work has been available to the public through gallery and museum exhibitions and installations. Compared to American artists who used Holocaust imagery in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, contemporary figures are distinguished by two characteristics. First, they are more interested in Jewish particularity than in universalizing their subject matter to include the sufferings and afflictions of others. It is as if they instinctively understand literary historian Alvin Rosenfeld's admonition that "to generalize or universalize the victims of the Holocaust is not only to profane their memories but to exonerate their executioners." [1] And second, there is little interest in couching their imagery in mythological or biblical imagery derived from sources such as Lamentations or the Book of Job.
A few examples may be given at first from artists who do not appear inWitness and Legacy, not because of artistic quality but simply because of space considerations. Murray Zimiles (born in the United States) ignores myth because "the subject requires force, not myth." Zimiles, who paints burning Polish synagogues, goes on to say that "the artist must confront the viewer in an unambiguous way. He must show the horror, the pain and the loss. The image must be a vehicle that propels the viewer into a world of undeniable recognition of what happened fifty years ago." [2] Howard Lee Thiele (born in the United States) also finds less need for mythological or biblical imagery because "right here on earth the Germans made manifest for us what massive, unrelenting, inescapable suffering and despair looked like. "For me," Thiele says, "any introduction of myth or drama can only serve to reduce the horrible reality of the Holocaust." [3] American-born Marty Kalb finds the public less knowledgeable about biblical sources and therefore cannot make appropriate connections between such imagery and the Holocaust. Rather, he believes that "a direct graphic representation of an incident can usually transcend the barrier to communication." [4]
Gerda Meyer-Bernstein (born in Germany), whose installation Shrine appears in Witness and Legacy, witnessed Kristallnacht and states simply that documenting the Holocaust is more important now than ever before. We have an obligation and a responsibility to "re-examine and analyze the atrocities of the Holocaust." She wants people to deal directly with their feelings and attitudes, and, as the Holocaust recedes into memory, she wants her art to be more confrontational, as if to deny the passage of time. To make her points with clarity, she has exhibited Block 11 in dark, claustrophobic spaces since 1982. It is made up of about 550 suitcases covered with names, birth dates and concentration camp numbers of both the living and dead. She feels that in such environments there is little chance to escape direct confrontation with these suitcases and what they represent. [5]
Pearl Hirshfield (born in the United States) has also created spaces that evoke concentration camp experiences by creating installations resembling cattle cars and ramps. In Shadows of Auschwitz, originally exhibited in 1986 and reproduced for Witness and Legacy, she includes a part of a cattle car and a section that includes mirrors with numbers painted on them, so that the viewer sees him or herself reflected with a number across the body. In Shadow of Birkenau-Zur Desinfektion of 1993, the viewer enters a narrow corridor bounded by fences and paintings to suggest brick chimneys. There are naked electric lightbulbs and photos of victims collaged to various surfaces. The exit corridor, lit by a red light, contains a mirror to which is attached a sign: Zur Desinfektion. [6]
It is as if in these works the artists are recalling visually what novelist Cynthia Ozick suggested verbally: "The task is to retrieve the Holocaust freight car by freight car, tower by tower, road by road, document by document. The task is to save it from becoming literature." [7] These artists, in their different ways, are saving the Holocaust from becoming art, preferring instead to emphasize, obviously from a distance, the look and feel of the camps.
Pier Marton (born in France after the war) also used a simulated cattle car for one of his video pieces entitled Say I'm A Jew, first seen in 1985. The piece lasts twenty-eight minutes. From benches viewers watch a video screen on which European-born Jews now living in the United States discuss anti-Semitic incidents experienced in Europe. Works of this sort serve as historical reminders of European anti-Semitism as well as help exorcise those experiences by allowing the participants to talk about their feelings. But such memories can be so traumatic that one of the first times Marton had to say "I am a Jew" before a group of people he almost fainted, so overwhelming were his anxiety and fear. [8]
Many American-born Jews, in search of an ancestral home, have enshrined the shtetls and ghettos of Eastern Europe with a bittersweet nostalgia based on family reminiscences, novels and short stories. American-born Eleanor Antin, who in 1992 produced a silent, black-and-white film The Man Without a World, has said, "What haunts me is the loss of the rich Jewish culture of Eastern Europe, the world the Holocaust destroyed. That loss, and the need to invoke it, are at the core of my Jewish works."[9] The Man Without a World, starring Pier Marton, evokes the lost world of the shtetl. And in 1994, Antin completed an installation in the Jewish Museum of New York called Vilna Nights, in which the viewer looks into a courtyard partially destroyed by bombs. In the windows, the viewer sees aspects of Jewish life projected by video discs.
The shtetl also appears in the works of Ruth Weisberg and Murray Zimiles. Weisberg's 1971 book, The Shtetl: A Journey and a Memorial, includes imagined views of shtetl life, based on the supposition that the artist "might have been amongst them" and that she is now "a branch, a resting place for their souls." [10] Zimiles, on the other hand, has depicted scenes of destruction of synagogues in his Fire Paintings of 1994. For Zimiles, the burning of these great synagogues marked the end of Jewish culture itself in Poland. [11] Discussing the motivation for these works Zimiles has said, no doubt reflecting the thoughts of many, that "the Holocaust is the pivotal event of our century and perhaps of all human history. As an artist it is my obligation to deal with this subject."
For Howard Lee Theile, who has painted portraits of camp survivors from archival photographs, the question is not why an artist should employ Holocaust imagery, but rather how to find the most effective kind of presentation in order to make impossible the act of forgetting.
Jerome Witkin, born in the United States in 1939, finds that the Holocaust did not exist only from 1933 to 1945, but rather "in every moment from that time onwards forever." He has asked, "how can an imagist not paint this and not become obsessed by it?" So strong are his feelings that he has called his paintings of Holocaust scenes "my purpose in life." [12] Of all the works by artists in America, his are the most nightmarish. One three-part work completed in 1981, Death as an Usher: Berlin 1933, includes a theater interior, a Hitler-like usher who lights the way to the exit of death, and the victim, a young girl who runs toward her doom or toward the final solution. Another multipart work, The Butcher's Helpers of 1992, depicts the sadistic mutilation of helpless victims. [13] Witkin's contribution to Witness and Legacy is The Beating Station, Berlin, 1933, which shows the brutality of Nazi rape and street violence.
By contrast, two artists who experienced brutality firsthand have painted works much more muted in their effects. Alice Lok Cahana, who was an inmate at Auschwitz and liberated at Bergen-Belsen, refuses to reveal the kind of anger of Zimiles and Witkin. She has said that if she hates, then she has been contaminated by Hitler's germs and that she will not pass on that kind of hate. Yet for her there is the necessity to tell the stories she has witnessed, even if there is no language to describe the horrendous experiences. So, her images are semi-abstracted and often veiled behind washes of beautiful color. [14] Hannelore Baron, a survivor who died in 1987, made small assemblages of paper and wood that suggest time's ravages and, more important, secrets hidden behind closed and boarded-up spaces. For many camp survivors and children hidden during the war, such as those found in the paintings of Kitty Klaidman, allusion substitutes for description, whether in conversation or in art, of the memories too horrendous to confront directly, let alone reveal to the public.
But what about imagery that suggests the inability to cope with or respond to the brutalization inflicted upon Jews, imagery that suggests that there is no meaning in suffering and death, imagery visually equivalent to these words written by literary historian Alvin Rosenfeld: "There are no metaphors for Auschwitz, just as Auschwitz is not a metaphor for anything else. The flames were real flames, the ashes only ashes, the smoke always only smoke. [The burnings] can only be or mean what they in fact were: the death of the Jews." [15] The work of Israeli-born Natan Nuchi (who is not represented in this exhibition) visually parallels these remarks more than the works of other artists with whom I am familiar. His emaciated nudes, which float in a nonenvironment, seem stripped of everything. They seem to be neither survivors nor victims, but rather products of moral meaninglessness, of societal nothingness and universal indifference. They seem neither dead nor alive, but totally dehumanized. Nuchi's figures also seem to be the sad embodiment of critic Andreas Huyssen's words: "After we have remembered, gone through the facts, mourned the victims, we will still be haunted by that core of absolute humiliation, degradation, and horror suffered by the victims." [16]
In contrast, 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.
All of these artists are involved, as historian Lucy Dawidowicz has stated, in a "secular act of bearing witness to Auschwitz and the mystery of Jewish survival." [19] But serious questions must be raised about these works and what they might represent, particularly in the United States where so many Jews have been acculturated if not totally assimilated. Does remembering the Holocaust substitute for a live ethnic culture? Does remembering the Holocaust substitute for some distinctive everyday practice? Do these works contribute to the substitution of a Holocaust memory for active participation in Jewish life? As Pier Marton, the author of the video Say I'm a Jew, has said, "As a non-religious Jew, you have only a tradition of martyrdom. I don't say that one needs to become religious. But to look at this huge body of Jewish knowledge and not to do your best to pass it on, to honor it, is another type of murder. It is my responsibility to know as much as I can." [20] For Jews, the value of all of these works, then, must lie not just in memorializing the most tragic episode in Jewish history, but in helping forge a modern Jewish identity.
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