Felix Gonzalez-Torres

 

 

 

 

“Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1991

 

“Untitled (Ross in LA) 1991

 

 

S-21 / Tuol Sleng

 

In 1979, a couple of days after the Vietnamese army entered Phnom Penh, two photojournalists who had accompanied the invasion were drawn toward a particular compound by the smell of decomposing bodies. The site was surrounded by a corrugated tin fence topped with coils of barbed wire and looked like an abandoned school building. Over the gate was a red placard inscribed in yellow with a Khmer slogan: “Fortify the spirit of the revolution! Be on your guard against the strategy and tactics of the enemy so as to defend the country, the people and the Party.” The place carried no other identification. In rooms on the ground floor of the southernmost building, the two Vietnamese came across the corpses of several recently murdered men. Some of the bodies were chained to iron beds. The prisoners’ throats had been cut. The blood on the floors was still wet. Altogether the bodies of fourteen people were discovered in the compound, apparently killed only a couple of days before. In the days that followed, the Vietnamese army found more then 50 bodies, all kinds of torture devices and an immense archive. This is how the secret prison of Khmer Rouge, called S-21 in which more then 15 thousand people were killed, saw the light of day. Only three months after its discovery, the Vietnamese government turned it into the Museum of Genocidal Crimes, Tuol Sleng (name of the hill on which it stands, meaning sleng tree, which is known to bear poisonous fruits) and opened it to the public. The compound besides being cleaned, was left intact. 

 

 

Post-Memory

Marianne Hirsch describes post-memory as the relationship of the children of those who survived or witnessed cultural and collective trauma, to the experiences of their parents. These experiences transmitted through stories or images, where so strong, so monumental, that they conjured up there own memories:

“Post-memory is a powerful form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through projection, investment, and creation. It describes the relationship of the second generation to the first – their curiosity and desire, as well as their ambivalence about wanting to own this knowledge.” (M. Hirsch and L. Spitzer, War Stories: Witnessing in Retrospect, in: Image and Remembrance. Representation and the Holocaust, ed. S. Hornstein and F. Jacobowitz, Indiana University Press 2003, p. 139.)

 

Secondary trauma

Geoffrey Hartman on the other hand supposes that direct and extremely realistic representations cause desensitization in the viewer, or as Robert Lifton writes: ‘psychic numbing’. “Terrible things, by continuing to be shown, begin to appear matter-of-fact, a natural rather than man-made catastrophe.” (See:  G. H. Hartman, Public Memory and Its Discontents, in: “Raritan” 14, 1994)

Comparable to an earthquake or tornado attack. The human element is taken out, therefore the possibility to hold others responsible for these acts is put into question. Moreover transmission of information about historical events such as Holocaust or other genocides doesn’t lead to conscious remembrance or healing of wounds, but secondary trauma, which is the result of representing the Holocaust, wars and other massive violations of human rights in modes that are themselves traumatizing. Ernst van Alphen, writes:

“Modes of representation capable of causing secondary trauma are those which seek to overwhelm the viewer with naked imagery: docudramas, the journalistic image and reports that attempt to expose the ‘bare truth’ or ‘naked facts’ – in short, those realistic modes that strive to convey historical truth. [...] It’s a paradoxical and ultimately hopeless endeavor to counter traumatic effects by using traumatic modes of representation, because a foreground effect has to be apprehended intellectually to be acted upon. In this case, the viewer is too overwhelmed to arrive at such a response.” (E. van Alphen, Caught by History. Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art. Literature and Theory, Stanford University Press 1997, p. 165-66.)

  

Trauma

Trauma occurs when an experience or event is so strong, that it escapes understanding because it doesn’t fit into any known frame of reference (both symbolic and empirical). When an event ‘makes no sense’ it can’t really be remembered, understood or even truly experienced. Without concrete frames of reference that give cognitive distance a person constantly reenacts the event, repeats it in direct experience. When the human psyche tries to process a traumatic event it will endlessly replay it, struggling to find meaning, or resolution through the replay. In this sense re-visits it rather then remembers. This visitation has nothing to do with memory, whereas memory needs distance, separation from actuality in order to re-present the event, trauma melts reality with representation, diminishes all the differences between them – the event becomes the representation or in the words -although used in an entirely different context – of Norman Bryson: The representation absorbs the house. This is explicitly evident for example in Cambodia’s Genocide Museum where the excavation and uncovering of the history of the Khmer Rouge Regime was done simultaneous with showing it, as the museum opened for the public only three months after its discovery.

Genocide memorial museums

The idea of memorial museums is based on a fundamental aspect of human culture: the ritual o visitation. This is linked to the process of memorialization as mourning and acknowledging the tragic fate of others, trying to understand it. In order to fully experience this we must visit places where the things we mourn are present or took place, because only through this are we able to activate the process of memory. We visit cemeteries as a sign of respect for the dead, commemoration and foremost a way of upholding memory of them.

Alvin Curran, “Crystal Psalms”

 

“On October 20, 1988, a large part of western Europe heard a unique radio concert — CRYSTAL PSALMS — a concerto for musicians in six nations, simultaneously performed, mixed and broadcast live in stereo to listeners from Palermo to Helsinki. 

This special event, composed and coordinated by myself, while part of a worldwide series commemorating the 50th anniversary of the infamous Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), was, through its unusual concept, one which demanded and demonstrated an exceptional quality of international artistic and technological collaboration — the bringing together groups of musicians and technicians (some 300 in all, in six major European cities) who neither saw nor heard one another, yet performed as one unified ensemble to realize this complex score.” 

 

text from artist web page: http://www.alvincurran.com/ 

CrystalPsalmshiMP3excerpt.mp3

Crystal%20Psalms%20part%202.mp3

See Also:

Composer’s notes on the piece:

http://www.alvincurran.com/writings/CrystalPsalmsnotes.html

http://www.newalbion.com/NA_CDS/NA067/NA067.htm