Shimon Attie

Concerned with questions of memory, place, and identity, Shimon Attie gives visual form to both personal and collective memories by introducing histories of marginalized and forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. The Writing on the Wall project (1991-1993) took place in Berlin’s former Jewish quarter, the Scheunenviertel neighborhood. There Attie projected slides made from pre-Holocaust photographs of the neighborhood’s Jewish residents and shops in the same (or sometimes nearby) locations where the original images were taken. He then photographed the resulting scene. A woman from the past looks out the window of a building now scrawled with graffiti. A pigeon shop with cages stacked on the sidewalk is restored to an otherwise empty street. The life and industry suggested in the projections of the past strike an unexpected counterpoint to the crumbling facades and apparently abandoned places of the present. (from: Museum of Contemporary Photography web page at: <a class=”aligncenter”

href=”http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/attie_shimon.php”>http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/attie_shimon.php

References: 

http://mocp.org/exhibitions/2004/05/shimon_attie_th.php

Attie, Shimon. Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie European Projects: Installations and Photographs. Burlington, VT: Verve, 1998.

Attie, Shimon, and Christopher Beaver. Between Dreams and History: The Making of Shimon Attie’s Public Art Projects(videorecording). Ben Lomond, CA: distributed by The Video Project, 2000 .

Attie, Shimon, Natasha Egan, and Alexander Stille. The History of Another. Santa Fe, NM: Twin Palms, 2004.

Attie, Shimon, et al. The Writing on the Wall: Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter. Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1994.

Christian Boltanski

Reserve (Réserve), 1990

”

Boltanski started using a new raw material, clothes, in 1988. They first appeared in a poignant piece, Réserve, Canada. This work echoes the warehouses that Nazis used to store the belongings of the deported. Boltanski, in other words, associated clothes with death from the outset (as he had with photography). In his words, “Someone’s photograph, garment or dead body are pretty much the same thing: there was someone there, now they’re gone.” Garments are also vestiges or marks that bear testimony to a life now past.

That is what clothes meant in the string of Réserves that followed. They are all installations that play on the subject of death and memory. In his 1989 Réserve: la Fête de Pourim (Purim Holiday) and 1990 Réserve: Lac des morts (Lake of the Dead), the clothes lay on the floor. In his 1989 Réserve du Musée des enfants (Children’s Museum), he stacked them in rows (1).

For his 1990 Réserve, he lined the walls of a whole room in loft-smelling hand-me-down clothes. Because this work’s overbearing presence is not just visual: it is also olfactory – a dimension that plastic art does not use enough (2).
Much like the other works in this series, the atmosphere that the 1990 Réserve creates is a door to melancholic contemplation of the body as a brittle vessel, vanity and death (all of which ranked among Boltanski’s favourite themes in the 1990s).” (from Centre Pompidou catalogue, online at: http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-boltanski_en/ENS-boltanski_en.htm

Autel de Lycée Chases (1987)

Christian BOLTANSKI, born in 1944 in Paris, has produced many works combining a variety of materials on the traditional theme in Western art of human transience as represented in vanitas. Starting his career as a motion picture maker, he began in 1985 a series called “Monuments” using portraits of children. 
Autel de Lycée Chases represents the extension of that series, with portraits of Jewish students enrolled in high school in Vienna in 1931 arranged in the shape of an altar softly illuminated by light bulbs. While this is all the information about the students provided by the artist and there is no overt reference to the Holocaust that the students would suffer in ensuing years, the scene nevertheless hints at the transience of human existence.

Melissa Gould

Still Life: Anne Frank Memorial Pencils (1988)

Floor Plan (1991)

“Notes From Underground,” by  Alvin Curran.  You can hear an excerpt here: http://www.alvincurran.com/NotesFromUndergroundhiMP3excerpt.mp3

From Adler to Zybler (1992)

“FROM ADLER TO ZYLBER (literally, “from eagle to silver”), “an alphabetic cosmology of the dead,” is an invented lexicon of obituary pictograms based on German-Jewish names taken from an Auschwitz transport list.

The original document inspiring this project is the 1000-name transport list of Convoy #42 (6 November 1942; France to Auschwitz), which I accidentally found in Memorial to the Jews Deported from France 1942-1944 by Serge Klarsfeld. My grandfather was among 1,000 Jews from all over Europe on this particular train, many of whom had sought refuge in what had been unoccupied France.

FROM ADLER TO ZYLBER is a symbolic continuation of Convoy #42’s journey.

From this transport list I originally selected 100 German-Jewish names with meanings referring to elements in the natural world. Each name is represented by a visual interpretation in the form of a pictogram–pairing the name, written in Gothic script, with a number and a different associative image. The images were taken from pre-War sources of European popular culture–lexicons, school- and text-books, fairy-tales, children’s books and other printed ephemera, then collaged together and sometimes slightly altered by drawing. This mixture of elements is contained by a black border (reminiscent of a death notice) and a thin outer edge of white. Each pictogram, photocopied onto white paper, measures 36″ by 36″ square. I now present this project as a 36-pictogram installation scaled down from the original 100 (36 is a multiple of 18; in the Hebrew alphabet the number 18 is equivalent to the word chai, meaning life).

The title FROM ADLER TO ZYLBER refers not only to the first and last names chosen from the transport list of Convoy #42 but also describes the system by which the pictograms are arranged within a given space. They mimic the order of nature–Adler (eagle) is hung high above, Zylber (silver) nearest the ground, and so on.

FROM ADLER TO ZYLBER is an ongoing project having many variants. The open-ended FROM ADLER TO ZYLBER cycle is a clue-filled rebus seeking to tell a story without words “illustrating” the tragic fate of the European Jews. I consider the pictograms as gravestones for people who had no funerals.”

Schadenfreude: an Installation (1995)

“SCHADENFREUDE 

explored anti-Semitism by way of a “Nazi wallpaper showroom.” (Schadenfreude is a German word meaning the delight one gets from someone else’s misfortune.) Using illustrations taken from one 1935 German Brockhaus dictionary I created six wallpaper patterns through combining and slightly altering the illustrations by drawing on them. While the designs may seem innocuous at first glance, their more tragic and ironic implications (as seen from the historical perspective of more than 60 years) are revealed with longer viewing. The motifs were first enlarged as photocopies, and then produced as silkscreened wallpaper which I ultimately arranged into a 1600-square-foot three-room installation at the Imperial War Museum, London, (1995).” >/p>

All text and images from artists web page. Online at:

http://www.megophone.com/projects.html

 

Ellen Rothenberg, “The Anne Frank Project”

“American artist Ellen Rothenberg (born 1949) gave artistic expression to a longstanding preoccupation in the form of her Anne Frank Project, a tripartite installation consisting of A Partial Index (1991), A Probability Bordering on Certainty (1993) and The Conditions for Growth (1994). Her realization, after reading the critical and unexpurgated version of the diary, that earlier editions had eliminated nearly all references to the young girl’s burheoning sexuality and her troubled relationship with her mother, as well as to the family’s German origins and the fact that now, in Amsterdam, they were in hiding from the Germans, prompted Rothenberg to explore the ways in which Anne Frank has been mythologized, turned into a kind of Jewish saint stripped of both specificity and individual complexity.” (from: Absence/Presence. Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, ed. Steve Feinstein)

 

Online at:

http://www.ellenrothenberg.com/index.html