Felix Gonzalez-Torres

 

 

 

 

“Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1991

 

“Untitled (Ross in LA) 1991

 

 

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.

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.

Mikael Levin, “War Story”

“In 1944-45 an American war correspondent, Meyer Levin embarked on a journey through Europe. His assignment was to seek out the remnants of Jewish communities, to cover the “Jewish story”. Sharing a Jeep with him was French photographer Eric Schwab. Schwab was photographing the war. He was also on a personal mission, searching for his mother who had been deported in 1943. In his autobiography, In Search, Meyer Levin describes that journey from Paris to Prague, through the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the first stirrings of the Cold War. In the fall of 1995 Mikael Levin retraced his father’s journey. He photographed the concentration camps and the Europe of today, contrasting his journey to his father’s experiences of fifty years ago. Mikael Levin has assembled those photographs together with his father’s writings and with a selection of Eric Schwab’s photographs from 1945, creating a narrative of images and text that span fifty years and two generations.” (from artist’s web page, online at: <a class=”aligncenter”

www.mikaellevin.com

 

“The art of memory: Holocaust memorials in history”

The exhibition “The art of memory: Holocaust memorials in history “, was held at The Jewish Museum, New York, March 13-July 31, 1994.

Publications:

James, E. Young, Matthew Baigell, Romy Golan (ed.), The art of memory : Holocaust memorials in history, Prestel; New York 1994.

Online at: http://imaginarymuseum.org/MHV/PZImhv/YoungHolocaust1994.html

Daniel Libeskind

The Jewish Museum Berlin (2001)

Online at:

http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/projects/show-all/jewish-museum-berlin/

References:

Daniel Libeskind, Trauma, in: S. Hornstein, F. Jacobowitz (ed.) Image and Remembrance. Representation and the Holocaust, Indiana UP, 2003

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

 

Abraham Ravett

 

Abraham Ravett was born in Poland in 1947, raised in Israel and emigrated to the United States in 1955. He holds a B.F.A and M.F.A. in Filmmaking and Photography and has been an independent filmmaker for the past twenty years.

Mr. Ravett has received grants for his work from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Artists Foundation Inc., The Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, The Japan Foundation, The Hoso Bunka Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture.

His films have been screened internationally including the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, The Collective For Living Cinema, Pacific Film Archives, S.F. Cinematheque, L.A. Forum, Innis Film Society, and Image Forum in Japan.

Mr. Ravett teaches filmmaking and photography at Hampshire College, Amherst, MA.

 

Half Sister (1985)

At 26, Abraham Ravett learned that his mother had previously been married and lost her family at Auschwitz, including his half-sister, Toncia, who was killed when she was 6 years old. At age 36, Ravett saw a photograph of his half-sister for the first time. Half Sister is a cinematic amalgam of memory and imagination, inspired by Ravett’s conception of a life that would have been.

Everything’s For You (1989)

Ravett attempts to reconcile issues in his life as the child of a Holocaust survivor in this experimental non-narrative film. Ravett reflects upon his relationships with his family, from his now-deceased father (who survived both the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz) to his own young children. He utilizes family photographs and footage, archival footage from the Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel, cel animation by Emily Hubley, and computer graphics, to create a film about memory, death, and what critic Bruce Jenkins calls “the power of the photographic image and sound to resurrect the past.”

In Memory (1993)

n this non-narrative short, footage of life from the Lodz Ghetto is juxtaposed against the chanting of “Kel Maleh Rachamim,” a plea to God to let the souls of those “slaughtered and burned” find peace. Images include winter street scenes, women drawing water from a well, men breaking up ice, a Nazi roundup and a mass hanging. The message of this tribute to members of Ravett’s family (and to all those who perished under Nazi occupation) is “may their memory endure.”

The March (1999)

 

Both my parents were in Auschwitz and survived “The Death March.” My father, deceased since 1979, never spoke about his experiences. My mother, on the other hand, continuously made references to the “miracle” of her survival and recounted in vivid detail what it was like to walk for miles in the bitter cold with just a blanket and a pair of wooden shoes (“Trepches”). She tells a story of how one night when the entire column of inmates took a rest at a nearby farm, she found a small sack of sugar cubes in a hay loft, which kept her and a companion alive for several days. She recalls how the German soldiers would confront a weakened inmate who paused for a moment’s rest with the following shout: “Kanst du lofen?” (can you walk?) If the reply was negative or not forthcoming, she would be shot on the spot.

I’ve made six films which reflect on how the Holocaust affected my parents, our evolving relationship, and my own psychological and emotional response to their experiences. The March continues this cinematic exploration by detailing one woman’s recollections of that experience. It also serves as a meditation on time elapsed and the fragility of personal memory.

Utilizing a series of recorded film interviews conducted with my mother over thirteen year period (1984-1997), I ask the following question each time: “Mom, what do you remember about the March?” The complexity of her responses, the visible emotional toll experienced with each reply, and the ensuing portrait of her aging process, form the core of this twenty five minute 16mm film.

 

Lunch with Fela (2005)

Lunch With Fela, is the filmmaker’s response to the passing of his parent, Fela Ravett. Utilizing a combination of DV footage shot during her stay at a nearby nursing facility, excerpts from previously made 16mm films, animation sequences, plus remaining family memorabilia, the film renders the presence and absence of a much loved parent.

Art Spiegelman, “Maus”

 

Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale. My Father Bleeds History, New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale. And Here My Troubles Began, New York: Pantheon, 1991.

 

References:

James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.

Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1980.

Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.

Saul Friedlander, (ed.) Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.

Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, New York: Harper, 1984.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2278/is_n3_v20/ai_18298424/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

Rachel Whiteread, Holocaust Memorial in Vienna

Online at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2000/oct/26/kateconnolly

Alain Resnais, “L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad)”

Alain Resnais, “Hiroshima mon amour”

Based on the novel by Marguerite Duras, it is a romantic drama about a young French actress appearing in an anti-war film in the rubble and reconstruction of the city of Hiroshima. She quickly begins a brief unstable affair with a Japanese architect. The affair brings to light the political and cultural tensions that underlie even their most personal experiences and memories. The film made groundbreaking use of then innovative flashbacks to explore her repressed memories of a German lover killed in World War II and the subsequent humiliation and captivity imposed on her by her family. This movie was a great success for Resnais, garnering him international fame and cementing his place in French cinema history.

Alain Resnais, “Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog)”