Anselm Kiefer offers
a powerful instance of the wrestling match with identity and memory
within the context of the Holocaust from a German, as opposed to
a Jewish perspective. Geoffrey Laurence, one might say, summarizes
the interweave within the interweave against which Kiefer and Ma’or—and
indeed all of the artists under discussion—might be understood
to operate with respect to these paired issues. He is the child
of a survivor—but a survivor whose response to the horror was to
turn his back on anything and everything Jewish, since it was being
Jewish that resulted in so much pain. “Nearly all my relatives
on both sides perished in the mountains of ash of the concentrations
camps of Europe,” Laurence wrote in late 1999. But growing up, “I
was told that I was not Jewish. My father. . . was vehemently
anti-Semitic and refused to answer the obvious questions that occurred
to me about his background. . . I was told not to emulate ‘Jewish’
traits. . . [Through my painting] I have embarked on a journey to
find out exactly what being ‘Jewish’ means for me. Perhaps the Holocaust
informs every thing that I paint. How could it not?”1The
artist grew up with contradiction and identity confusion as part
of his essence. While this may be reflected in any number of his
works, nowhere is it as overt as in the painting “ISWASWILLBE” (fig.
69). In this work, two figures approach us on the front part of a
stage, its curtains pushed back, Baroque style, in order to facilitate
our view of the action.
The action is this: one of the figures is a Nazi officer, attired in
full uniform, with jack boots and leather. He presents the second figure,
arm around his shoulder, to us, the viewer—as if that second figure
is being stage-managed or directed by the first. That second figure
is a skeleton, and around its shoulders is what we can easily recognize
as a tallit—a Jewish prayer shawl. Thus the message is clear:
Jew and Nazi (Jew and German, Jew and Austrian, Jews and the representatives
of those locales where Nazism was born and most fully flourished) are
inextricably interconnected on the stage of history. Judaism has been
brought to front and center of that stage in the half-century since
Auschwitz, but the irony is that, when that position is dependant only
on the matter of the Holocaust, it is the Nazis who become the impresario
and the form of Judaism that they hoped to skeletalize has in fact
been reduced to a skeleton of the robust living creature that has marched
so dynamically across the stage of history for thousands of years.
In the context of this discussion, we have arrived full circle (with
more vehemence) to the beginning and the matter of R.B. Kitaj’s choice
of the chimney as the ultimate symbol in Jewish art.
The stage lights of Laurence’s visual and conceptual theatre are harshly
focused, sharpening the details and the edges of his paired characters
and the questions that their performance forces before us. In an oblique
manner we have returned to that question posed by Charlotte:2 but
rather than asking whether the horror is life or theatre, Laurence
asks whether in the theatre that is the life of the next generation
and the next we will act in concert to produce a theatre of ongoing
tragedy or arrive finally at a conclusion in which we might live happily,
even if thoughtfully ever after. Laurence’s is the ultimate unfinished
ending to the drama of the Holocaust and the varied arts struggling
to reflect on it. " 3
"Perhaps the most bizarre twist to this particular
thread in the post-Holocaust tapestry is that Sichrowsky became the
Cultural Minister cum Public
Affairs Officer of the Austrian “Freedom Party”—the right-wing, almost
Neo-Nazi party in Austria led by Jorge Haider—in 2001. This
certainly carries Primo Levi’s dictum that the Holocaust doesn’t
let go of our throats in an oblique direction: what drives the child
of survivors, whose grandparents all perished at the hands of the
Nazis, who begins his inquiry into the Holocaust by way of trying
to understand those, like himself, who continue to dwell in the lands
of the murderers, and who continues his inquiry by trying to empathize
with the discomfort of being a child of the killers—how does that
individual end up allying himself with the ideological descendant
of the killers?
In part the answer speaks simply of the unintelligible madness that
defines everything having to do with the Holocaust, which is in turn
a part of the unintelligible madness that defines much that has to
do with humanity. In part the answer offers its own internal logic:
of shifting from addressing the children of the uncomfortable victims
of whom he is one, to addressing the uncomfortable children of the
victimizers, to addressing and finding a place among those children
of the victimizers who don’t feel uncomfortable with their ideology.
In part it completes the picture of denial painted by Levi with regard
to surviving victims and victimizers by causing it to intersect his
notion of the long-term reach of the Holocaust: the place Sichrovsky
has found is one of even more radical disconnect and discomfort than
merely having been born in and living as a Jew in post-Holocaust
Austria. It also encapsulates with a particular and peculiar intensity
Levi’s articulation of the Grey Zone as it offers a reaching out
from the territory of the Holocaust onto new ground that remains
connected to that sacred territory.
Sichrovsky’s writing and his life are also simply a part of the fact
that books and musical compositions, theatre and dance pieces, films
and other works of visual art, as the new century arrived, have continued
to pour out of a constantly increasing array of grapplers with the
unresolved matter of the Holocaust. One of the most interesting of
recent Holocaust-related paintings that I have seen, by Geoffrey
Laurence, sums this up in visual terms. Laurence
depicts, in an almost photographically realist manner, a stage with
its curtains apart. Harsh footlights illuminate the two figures staring
out at us from the stage. The key figure—the impresario, one might
say—is a perfectly-attired Nazi SS officer, every detail conforming
to stereotype. The other is a skeleton, identified as a Jew by his tallit—Jewish
prayer shawl.
Out of this Baroque theatre setting the Nazi and the Jew step to
the front and center of the stage, the one interlocked with the other,
albeit the one in full-fleshed full uniform, the other reduced to
bones and a standard symbol of the religiously traditional side of
himself. On the stage of history, the artist suggests, the Holocaust
has pushed Jews to the front—the Nazis have, unwittingly,
pushed Jews and Judaism to the front and center of the stage.
But there is a double price that such repositioning has exacted.
One is that Jews are often reduced to a skeletal aspect of our former
selves, as a religion and as a culture: if our identity is limited
to seeing ourselves or being seen by others in the Holocaust context,
or even more broadly, the victim context, without engaging the rich
cultural and spiritual heritage that defines so much more of our
4,000-year history than the Holocaust does—however traumatic that
event—then we have lost much of the flesh and blood of what we should
wish to preserve from the Nazis and other predators. And if there
is no business like Shoah business (the painting, after
all, depicts the two figures in a theatre setting)—if the Holocaust
is used as a commodity to achieve various ends because of its ability
to pull certain strings of sympathy, grief or guilt—then both we
and the Catastrophe itself have been reduced to bones.
The second price is this: that in the uneven, unasked-for-by-us-Jews
arrangement in which we are pushed to the center by default,
we are inexorably, forever and ever—at least as long as memory exists
and humans still weave history and moral questions together—intertwined
with the Nazis. The Holocaust does not, as Primo Levi observed, let
go, and thus not only the feelings to which he refers in considering
“survivors” go on and on as long as they breathe and think. But
the intertwining of Nazi and Jewish worlds didn’t end in 1945 when
the War ended; it persists and will persist as long as there are
thoughts and words and images with which humans engage the world
and its problems and issues that are always all around us."
1 Originally
from Laurence’s artist’s statement for and extracted in the catalogue
of Jewish Artists: On the Edge, 70, but more fully extracted
in the discussion of his work in Soltes, Fixing the World,
122-125. return to text
3 It
goes without saying that there are many other artists whose work
might have been included in what is already an extremely long
discussion, and between the time of writing and the time of editing
that number has increased. (This is apart from the problem of
limiting the number of images that could be included of those
artists whose work I have managed to discuss.) I did
not discuss well-known work such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus,
since works like his are so well-covered by others. Conversely,
at the time that this essay was being written, for example, Sy
Gresser, a superb sculptor, among other things, began work on
an enormous Holocaust triptych that it would have been premature
to attempt to include in this discussion. I hope to be able to
write about work like his at a later date. I have also not discussed
any of the artists such as those whose cynical visual responses
to the Holocaust achieved such controversial renown in the 2002
Jewish Museum exhibit, “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art.” This
is neither because of a sense of those works as offensive (although
some of them were, to me at least, particularly coming from individuals
with no personal contact with, or sensitivity to the suffering
that was the hallmark of the Holocaust) nor because of a conviction
that the work is second-rate (although some of it was, to me,
but some of it was superb, and besides, some of the work that
I have discussed might be regarded as second-rate to others).
Both the matter of offensiveness and that of quality are, as
with all discussions and interpretations of art, largely subjective.
But for me to take seriously work that treats such an important
subject, I need to feel that the artist has genuinely been wrestling
with that subject, seriously and for some time, and not merely
doing what, particularly in the case of some of the more cynical
works of art, many of those works themselves criticize: seizing
an opportunity for publicity. Art may have the prerogative and
even a responsibility at times to epater le bourgeoisie,
but if the act of epater seems both cruel and designed
merely to gain notoriety for the artist and/or those who exhibit
his/her work, I feel justified in ignoring it in my discussion. return
to text
A
second play by Ari Roth, called Peter and the Wolf,
and based on this strange development, premiered at The Theatre
J in Washington, DC, in May, 2002. (See above, note #244).
See
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, chapters one,
two and three; also see chapter two in this volume.
I
discuss this painting in somewhat greater detail at the end of
chapter five in this volume.
Levi,
Ibid., 25 and chapter two in this volume.
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