ART AND THE SHOAH
Amandine Bardou -
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Transcending suffering, two visions of horror
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Zoran Music "We are not the last ones"
Comics at the service of memory
* Pascal Croci,
* Art Spiegelman,
Léo Haas, Theresienstadt, 1943
The dictionary defines art as: "
How does graphic art contribute to the memory of the Holocaust?
First, we will address the subject of artists' lives with more precisely that they led in the camps. Then, we will look at art as testimony, in addition to the expression of a pain. Finally, the theme of art and the young generations who also contribute to the perpetuity of the memory of the Shoah.
The life of artists, whether inside or outside the camps, is different from that of other men. The gift that was given to them will allow many of them to escape the tragic fate promised by the camps. Here are two examples of these men who have been able to exist thanks to their art.
Boris Taslitzky was born on 30 September 1911 in Paris. His parents, of Russian origin, took refuge in France after the failure of the 1905 Revolution. His mother died during deportation to Auschwitz.
At the age of 17, Boris entered the École nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris and joined the Communist Party at the end of 1933. On 2 March 1937, the first issue of the communist newspaper
Mobilized on 26 August 1939, soldier Boris joined the 1O1e Infantry in Meaux. After his escape following imprisonment, he actively joined the organization "National Front for the Liberation and Independence of France" until November 13, 1941, the date of his arrest. On 11 December 1941, he was sentenced to two years in prison by a military court for having "made several drawings intended for communist propaganda".
After his trial, Taslitzky was directed towards the central house of Riom in Puy-de-Dôme. On 23 July 1943, he was transferred to the prison of Mauzac in Dordogne. At the end of his sentence, he was taken to the supervised residence center at Saint-Sulpice-Ia-Pointe in the Tarn. There, he painted large frescoes of revolutionary inspiration on the plank partitions of five in the camp barracks. The archbishop of Toulouse provided the painting, he even agreed to decorate the chapel at the request of some of his comrades.
On 30 July 1944, handed over to the Germans with 622 other internees, Boris Taslitzky left the French camp of Saint-Sulpice for Buchenwald. Upon arrival in the camp and seeing the inmates in striped rags, his first thought is expressed
The political commitment of Boris Taslitzky, "
In 1971, he was appointed professor at the École nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris. On 7 March 1997, Boris Taslitzky received the insignia of Chevalier of the Legion of Honor for the Resistance and deportation.
The analysis of some elements constituting a table will allow us to distinguish the different elements as well as to observe their possible meaning.
We chose a painting by Boris Taslitzky entitled:
This oil on canvas of 1945 was made from memory by the painter after his release, using clandestine drawings made inside the camp. We chose this painting that caught our attention; bright in color it stands out from other works. Indeed, the drawings or paintings concerning the camps and the deportation were often translated by gray and sad colors. Artists, whether they have been deported or not, always establish a cause-and-effect relationship between deportation and droughts.
Plastic elements or axes are shapes, composition and colors.
1) Forms and composition:
By simplifying the table with geometric shapes or basic lines; this allows to highlight its expression and that intended by the author, without reducing it only to a simple diagram or sketch.
We therefore notice first that the table is cut in half by a horizontal line. It separates about two-thirds of the way a "mass" of emaciated characters leaving or rushing in a queue into the barracks, the dead merging with the living. This is the representation of real chaos.
In the foreground, a child in the right corner of the painting observes a corpse lying in front of him.
On the left, two dogs leap among the corpses. Men from SonderKommandos are busy with their terrible task, piling up the bodies. They concentrate all the activity of the painting, unlike the other deportees waiting for death; they are the only active characters.
In the background, a German officer, characterized by his uniform, watches the scene. Passive, he smokes and holds a weapon in his right hand. He represents the threat and the power. With his left hand resting on his hip, he wants to have a strong and impressive look. Nevertheless, it remains overwhelmed by the scene; it is not highlighted either by its size, identical to that of the other characters, or by its place in the painting.
Secondly, the camp barracks in the upper part of the painting obstruct the viewer’s view, isolating the scene from the outside world. They form a wall, an impenetrable and imposing barrier; they seem unlimited, as far as the eye can see.
Furthermore, large diagonals build the table. These lines of leaks, formed either by the line of deportees or by the roof of the barracks, meet in a vague imperceptible horizon. A man standing with his hands in his pockets, his gaze empty and distant forms the central element of the work.
More than the others, it seems impossible to define his state. Is he dead? His shirt, half-opened, reveals a skeletal neck. He still seems full of dignity. Or is he only resigned? In front of him is a cart, used to transport the bodies. These two elements seem to separate the deportees in rags from the crowding of corpses. He too does nothing, he is the link between the suffering of life and the respite so expected from the dead, he no longer struggles.
In the foreground at the center of the painting, the floor is empty; like a call, an "invitation" to look at the painting. Indeed, as with the filmed images, action always comes from a vacuum.
There is therefore no vertical axis in the image, no elevation towards the sky. The vertical lines that make up the work are the striped pajamas of the deportees and the wooden boards of the barracks. There is an analogy between these stripes and the ribs of the characters. Moreover, the stripe is never neutral. It is generally the symbol of negation; the action of crossing someone off, barring someone, or something allows either its enhancement or its elimination.
Moreover, the frame of the painting looks like a fresco; it is longer than wide. The action is frozen in time.
2) The colors:
The colors vary from simple tones such as red, green and yellow; associated with blood, hope and light. These lively and feverish tones reinforce the violence of the painting. The contrast between it and the whitish hue of the skeletal bodies is poignant. The sky is not insignificant either, it is painted in red and yellow and wears the colors of hell, of fire. White represents the end of a struggle, freedom, innocence.
This may be a way for the painter to highlight the dead who could not survive the Nazi barbarism, to pay tribute to them. Did Boris Taslitsky want to arouse in the viewer a sense of recognition? By coloring his painting so much, he made of his work a revolt, a real attack on the conventional gray or black of the mortuary universe.
He represents the unimaginable, the inexpressible and revolutionizes the representation of the Shoah.
b) Biography of Serge Smulevic:
Serge Smulevic was born on 6 April 1920 in Warsaw into a rather modest family with a grandfather who was a former teacher of Hebrew, and another rabbi. Arrived in France in 1923, his parents opened a shirt shop. After this first trip, they made the journey again to Petite-Roselle then Thionville and finally Nice where they both died. Serge Smulevic studied at the Beaux-Arts de Strasbourg from 1935 to 1939, where he graduated.
He joined the Resistance in the FTP in Grenoble in 1942. There, he was arrested for giving false papers that he made himself to children. Soon after, he was deported to the camp of Drancy
Here is his testimony about his life in the camp:
" Then came the idea of addressing one of these privileged " " to ask him if he wanted me to do his portrait so that he could send it to his family (since they had the right to correspond, just as they had the right to receive parcels). [...] I think I have never done a portrait as well as this onethere [...] and since I could only do that in the evening after the soup was distributed, it took a while. And this resulted in a quarter of a loaf of bread. What a bargain! Then it was the turn of another one of these gentlemen, and little by little, I accumulated food [...] To such an extent that the head of the block, from whom I had also drawn the portrait, allowed me to have a small cupboard [...] Privileged people and heads of neighboring blocks came very regularly to ask me to do their portraits and paid me in food. Some a little more, others a little less.
And that’s when they began to call me "der Mahler", that is, the painter or the draughtsman. There are some who even asked me to draw their house for them, describing it meticulously. [...]
I must have made at least a good hundred drawings, or more, which represents quite a bit of work and quite a lot of additional food intake. [...]
The important thing is that I was able to share what I received with three of my friends [two of whom survived] [...]
By making hundreds of portraits and other drawings in this way, I was able to avoid stealing and trafficking, because I used my skills as a good draftsman at the camp in this way, and it certainly saved my life. [...] Not everyone had the privilege of living like this at camp, and I am very aware of it. Working very hard all day, but knowing that after coming home in the evening, after the call and the soup, I would be able to draw and get paid for food was so encouraging for me, morally (and physically, of course) that my life in the camp and at the factory was deeply affected by it. "
With the approach of the Russians, the deportees from Drancy [
The drawings of Serge Smulevic were important in the testimony to which they contribute. But he also made drawings to testify at the IG Farben trial in Nuremberg, and did others for the Papon trial.
Drawings made by Sala, daughter of Serge Smulevic, in 2004
The death march
The survivor
Drawings made by Serge Smulevic for the IG Farben trial at Nuremberg after the request of Mr. Hoffstein present at the trial. |
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Drawing by Serge Smulevic during the Papon trial
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Zber, whose real name is Fiszel Zylberberg, was born in 1909 in Poland. After studying fine arts in Warsaw, he emigrated to Paris in 1936 where he was arrested during a roundup on 14 May 1941. Interned in the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande, then transferred to that of Pithiviers, he was finally deported to Auschwitz on 17 July 1942.
During his incarceration in Beaune-la-Rolande, he made the portraits of his fellow prisoners. It is thanks to this that Zber was able to survive until his gassing on 26 October 1942.
These drawings are now, following a donation, preserved in Paris at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism.
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Living conditions in the camps were not easy. The humiliation, the illnesses, the death, the horror, that’s all these men and women experienced and it is unforgettable to them. But the memory of others was not as marked... is why they felt the need to testify so that no one forgets what happened.
Despite repression and torture, graphic art did not cease to exist during the concentration camp period. Although clandestine, many works (sketches, portraits, paintings, engravings) will be produced in the camps. Most were found during the liberation in hiding places within the camps or on inmates who often kept them at risk of their lives.
Zoran Music, Max Ernst, Serge Smulevic, Boris Taslitzky... to name just a few of them, some very quickly others later on, felt the need to bear witness, proving that even if we don’t quite survive the camps, we can nevertheless try to represent them.
) Transcending suffering: two visions of horror:
The realist is interested in nature and men as they are reality and not idealized.
Despite all the horror experienced, Léo Haas manages to convey what he sees in his drawings in a realistic way. And yet, it is an example of the persecution of artists in concentration camps. Press cartoonist interned in the camps during the entire war, he survived Thérésienstadt, Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and Mathausen. He is one of those clandestine artists who, despite repression and even torture, have managed to keep their drawings in hiding places. Léo Haas survived the camps and after the liberation he managed to recover his drawings in the hiding place whose location he had carefully noted.
His drawings are simple, devoid of color and coarse graphics. However, when he said: "
Drawings by Léo Haas
Surrealism, born after the First World War, stands against all logical, moral and social forms and opposes to them the values of dream, instinct, desire and revolt in the expression of the "functioning of thought".
Among the artists who survived the camps, those who chose surrealism are the most numerous, perhaps because it is impossible to imagine the camps or simply because they had been drawing like that since their beginnings.
Max Ernst is one of the great painters of the twentieth century, born in Bruhl (Rhineland) in 1891. He moved to Paris in 1922 and became one of the members of the surrealist group: there he distinguished himself with his collages and decals where dreams are far stronger than reality.
Max Ernst draws a lot at the camp of the Thousand of curious creatures made of limes. He calls one of them
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Stateless persons |
Woman’s head on a tower |
The eyes of silence
Max Ernst works with Hans Bellmer. Some drawings are even done in pairs.
Hans Bellmer was born in Katowice, Silesia in 1902 and left Germany for good in 1938 to live in Paris as a draftsman and engraver. In the south of France, during the summer of 1939, he was interned at the Camp des Milles. The works of Hans Bellmer often have brick as a basic element such as in his work
Alfted Otto Wolfgang Schuize dit Wols was born in Berlin in 1913 and took an early interest in photography and trained as an artist. In 1932 he met Max Ernst, Miro and others during a first stay in Paris. He frequented the surrealist milieu. While starting to paint watercolors, he became a painter by trade. In September 1939, he was interned at the Camp des Milles as a German national. The many drawings by Wols abound with bizarre characters in an environment that is getting out of kilter. It brings out a teeming anxiety, like that of a bad nightmare. One of his drawings,
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The guarded camp |
La Puce |
Wols
Surrealism is the externalization of a whole difficult experience through paper and pencil or brush. These incredible images are a reflection of these traumatic and unforgettable experiences.
Some artists were able, armed with their charcoal, to capture scenes of horror and take note of acts of degradation committed on the detainees. Each person could then, in his own way and according to his point of view, give common testimony to all the detainees and victims of the Nazis.
The works of these survivors, with various artistic approaches, were gradually offered to the public through exhibitions. This public presentation, which testifies and denounces the Nazi atrocities; becomes a real link between the artist and the world around him and then begins all the work of transmitting memory.
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Zoran MUSiC: "We are not the last" exhibition (1970-1975)
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Zoran Music, internationally renowned painter was born in Dalmatia (then Austria-Hungary Empire, today Croatia) in 1909. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Zagreb, then traveled to Italy, Spain and Paris. Accused of belonging to the Resistance, he was arrested in Venice in 1944 by the Gestapo. Deported to Dachau, he realizes at the risk of his life, a hundred drawings describing what he sees: scenes of hanging, crematoria ovens, corpses piled by tens, that is to say the indescribable. On his return, after stays in Venice and Switzerland, he settled in Paris in 1952. He seeks to erase the horror of his memory, dreams, poetry, and joy of life then irrigate his work. But the vision of corpses imposes itself on him as a subject to which he must return and he starts drawing again. Memories of deportation resurface; he then continues his work.
Writings and remarks by Zoran Music,
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I timidly start to draw. Maybe the way to get by. In this danger, I might have a reason to resist. At first, I try in secret, in the drawer of my lathe, things I see on my way to the factory: the arrival of a convoy, the cattle car half-open, and the overflowing corpses. The trip lasted a month, more maybe, without food, without drinks, everything tightly sealed. A few survivors who had gone mad howled, their eyes bulging.
Later, I draw at the camp itself. The days go by... And here I am in the last weeks of the camp, the danger of being discovered has somewhat diminished. I manage to find, in the factory, paper and ink.
I draw as if in trance, biting morbidly on my scraps of paper. I was as if blinded by the hallucinating grandeur of these fields of corpses.
And the obsession not to betray these diminished forms, to succeed in restoring them as precious as I saw them, reduced to the essential. As if crushed by I don’t know, what a fever, in the irresistible need to draw so that this grandiose and tragic beauty does not escape me. Every day, I was alive only for the day; tomorrow it will be too late. Life and death, for me everything hung on those sheets of paper.
But will we ever see these drawings? Will I be able to show them? Will I get out of here alive? We knew that it had been decided to destroy this camp, and us inside.
I learned to see things in a different way. In my own painting, later on, it’s not that everything changed radically. It is by no means a reaction against horror that I rediscovered the bliss of childhood. Little horses, landscapes of Dalmatia, women of Dalmatia, they were there long before. Only afterwards, I was given the opportunity to see them differently. After the vision of these corpses stripped of all external marks, of all superfluity, freed from the mask of hypocrisy and the distinctions with which men and society adorn themselves, I believe to have discovered the terrible and tragic truth that it was given me to reach. [...]
When I returned to Venice in 1945, I started painting landscapes and horses. I was coming out of a black hole, I needed light and space. Then a long inner work began in Paris. When I arrived, in the 50s, I found myself among all these great abstract masters: Wols for example. ... Abstraction was a definitive thing, the only right and true one. But I didn’t know how to approach it. It gradually became a profession.
Between 1962 and 1970, I did nothing but draw, without painting... I knew that it was supposed to come out, I didn’t know how.
From 1970 to 1975, Zoran Music returned to Dachau, within the same walls where he was imprisoned from 1943 to 1945. He then paints and engraves a series of sixteen works grouped under the name "We are not the last ones". He then exhibited throughout Europe during the 1990s. The exhibition is made of rare drawings, saved from destruction, made a few months before its release. It invites to a crossing of all the periods and all the themes of the artist: a poignant cycle from beginnings to old age, from candid innocence to the experience of horror.
He was the first painter to be exhibited during his lifetime by the Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1972. Since then, it has been the subject of important celebrations at the Pompidou Centre, the Grand Palais and even in Venice. The musée Jenisch in Vevey presented a retrospective of the painter from 15 June to 21 September 2003.
The works of Zoran Music were presented to the public. Strange and painful exhibition, it benefits from a picture frame (to display, wall suitable for receiving paintings in a gallery or museum) of a suave gray and an even light. In a round room are gathered all the drawings of Dachau, executed secretly on poor quality paper with ink and stolen pencils. There remain only about thirty of the hundred that Music accumulated during the winter of 1944-1945. The others were burned or disappeared when the camp was liberated.
On most of these sketches: bodies reduced to skeletons are lying on the ground or in rudimentary coffins. To save space and because these mummies no longer have any weight, two corpses are arranged head to toe. The heads are skulls to which there are still eyes left and these dead eyes become immense, because there is no more flesh and no more hair. The gaze can only see this, lines of overturned corpses that fill the space, which leave no respite to the view, which obstruct the horizon.
The second half of the retrospective brings together paintings, visions transformed and purified by memory, spectral visions:
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The toothless mouths of the dead cry out as the night rises. The bodies have disappeared in the darkness, only contorted faces and hollow eyes. There remains only an obsession that is difficult to get rid of afterwards.
The drawing is very simple: fine lines trace the contours of these forms that the thinness has made angular and bristling with points. Some crosshatching and blurring suggest shadows in places. The hand does not tremble; it notes what was in front of the artist, just a few steps away from him.
With charcoal sticks and earthy, extinct colors, Music has tried the impossible and faced absolute terror. These works are an exceptional testimony of the deportation, and perfectly express the pain and suffering endured. His painting touches the depths of the being.
Deported artists convey the story of deportation. They bear witness and restore to the world the unimaginable image of the camps through the exhibition of their works, denouncing an unbearable daily life under the Nazi scourge. They contribute to inscribe their experiences in the universal memory and encourage reflection through art.
But what will happen when the last witnesses have disappeared? The descendants already feel concerned to perpetuate the testimony and associate with the simple recording of facts a philosophical and moral meditation. They thus invite the generations who did not live at that time to become aware of their role as new witnesses, perhaps in turn conveying a desire for transmission.
From the canvas to engraving, posters, comics, photography, photomontage, or video editing... through performance or in-situ work; themes, forms and means are almost inexhaustible.
) Comics at the service of memory
Comics, this so-called minor art, readily rubs against major events. Even if the Holocaust remains an exception.
Pascal Croci was born in 1961 and currently lives in Aveyron. He devoted himself for ten years to historical and religious comics for various magazines. After seeing or rewatching several documentaries or films on the deportation, in 2000 he published a realistic comic book that represents Auschwitz in a less symbolic way, he called it
This album took him five years of work because of the documentation, but especially the search for a publisher, as few of them wanted to venture into this adventure. A debate was then launched: can we make camps the graphic setting of a fiction?
Indeed, this document-fiction teems with realism: abandoned doll, deported who owes his survival to the drawings he sketches on the mail of the Nazi officers, endless camp call sessions, "terrible" work of SonderKommandos... This story features Kazile and Cessia, a couple who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and who remember almost fifty years later what they each experienced on their own. Through their eyes is suggested all the horror of deportation: the waiting for death at the entrance to the gas chambers, Mengele’s experiments...
Out of modesty and to remain in a serious atmosphere, close to that of Auschwitz, he drew this story in black and white. His drawing, penciled then slightly inked, remains nevertheless very beautiful. He offers the vision of bodies and faces undone, bled out, with gigantic eyes.
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I also had the anxiety of redoing the same images. There is mist everywhere, a heavy atmosphere; I didn’t want to show the horizon so that the reader could enter into a timeless place. This representation is close to the memories of the witnesses. For them, Auschwitz is a cold, misty place where death reigns. However, I was not graphically faithful to certain historical details: for example, the weapons. The reader knows that this object is used to kill, that’s enough
Pascal Croci pushes us to think about the fact that this could happen again, notably by bringing back the two characters in 1993, in ex-Yugoslavia where they are imprisoned, accused of political treason. So the album does not only revive memory, but also links it to the most recent news.
Even if this story is a fiction, it is, of course, inspired by testimonies collected by the author from people who survived this, alas, famous death camp. All these witnesses, all these survivors, admit themselves to having felt a priori some distrust with regard to the treatment of such a subject by the comic strip. But the approach of the author and the publisher, the well-documented realism of the story, the concern for authenticity and finally the trust established between the various protagonists were the strongest."
First of all, this album was above all a duty to remember.
Nevertheless, Pascal Croci does not double the narrative of personal questions, nor does he stage his own story, unlike Art Spiegelman, author of
Indeed, the work reflects above all the personality of the artist, the way he is influenced by events. The construction of a work is always guided by emotions and ideas.
Maus
It comes in two volumes:
1) My father is bleeding history
2) And that’s where my troubles started
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The injunction "zakhor!" - "remember" in Hebrew - guided the development of this masterpiece. Like an architect, the draftsman goes in search of his origins. It exposes its author and reveals slices of his own past at the same time as he chooses to tell us the story of his parents, survivors of the death camps. He begins his story with an anecdote, heavy with meaning. Art is ten years old and following a fall on roller skates, his friends abandon him. Returning home in tears, his father replied: "Your friends? Lock yourself for a whole week in one room with nothing to eat, then you’ll see what it’s like friends!"
The author also informs the reader of the difficulties caused by the project.
In 1979, the scene was set: the Jews are mice, the Nazis are ferocious and wild cats with shiny canines, the French are frogs, the Americans dogs and the Poles pigs. Each category of population is recognizable at first glance, a bit like back then with the yellow stars or the codification by triangles in the camps. When there is identity falsification, a mask appears on the faces of the characters.
Art Spiegelman visits his father at the family home in New York and asks him to tell his story. He, sick with the heart, does so and tells of his life in his native Poland, the meeting with Art’s mother Anja, the rise of Nazism, his commitment to the Polish army, the war, and finally the horror of the camps. All this represents hours of conversation, stories, portraits. It’s all the Poland of the dark years that we travel with these little mice who struggle to survive.
Spiegelman’s line is simple, rather thick. The very sober black and white representation can be off-putting. However, the work has a particular aesthetic: no abundance of details, no concern for historical veracity.
Nevertheless, perhaps more than the Holocaust, it is the father/son relationship that is central to
A deep misunderstanding exists with his son and even beyond with all of humanity. We can wonder if, as an extremist of survival, Vladeck S. has not forgotten life at all... Perhaps indeed, Art undertook this work to get closer to the complex being that is his father, in the hope of understanding him. He also evokes very well this feeling of guilt; that of having survived where others died. It is this overwhelming burden that his father seems to be trying to pass on to him through his incessant complaints.
His mother, for her part, is the great absent whose shadow hangs over the whole story, and for the father a taboo subject to such an extent that he will burn its writings in the aftermath of his death. Her fate is reminiscent of that of a Primo Levi: she will cut her wrists in 1968.
Maus
What is certain is that these little mice who have shown the courage and dignity of giants; denouncing the horrors of the human race, inspire a vibrant plea for humanity.
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The Literary Fortnight
From the unnatural encounter between comics and the Shoah comes a shock. You will not leave unscathed reading these books. These event albums are a part of the history ledger. Frightening and always heavy with emotions, they are the bearers of an inexpressible cry for freedom and respect for man. They pay soberly but beautifully tribute to the million dead at Auschwitz.
Nowadays, the younger generations have at their disposal many works of art that bear witness to the Holocaust. Some of them take the form of monuments or experiments, made by artists who did not necessarily experience the camps, but who nevertheless remain sensitive to the duty of remembrance. For half a century, these "in-situ" works have multiplied in Europe.
Definition
Artists or architects, whether Jews, Germans, German-Jews or other nationalities have taken on the task of dealing with the unrepresentable. A whole representation was made around the representation, not of the event itself but of the relationship between memory and this event.
We will discuss the work of Jochen Gerz, Christian Boltanski and Shimon Attie.
Jochen Gerz, was born in Berlin in 1940. He has lived and worked in Paris since 1966. He began to practice photography in 1969. Then in 1972, he made videos of installations and performances in public spaces. He appears as one of the most important protagonists of art, around image and word, information and its mediated reality.
Here are several completed projects:
* In 1977:
Jochen Gerz traveled the Moscow-Khabarovsk-Moscow route sitting in a compartment of the famous Trans-Siberian railway. For the duration of the trip, the windows were not only closed but covered with paper or fabric and as a result, nothing could be seen from outside. He thus crossed Siberia back and forth, more than 16,000 kilometers. During the sixteen days that lasted the journey, he had sixteen slate plates; he placed his feet on them, one plate a day so as not to leave any trace of his passage in the compartment. All the items that could have testified to his presence on the train, tickets etc., were burned upon arrival. So that when he returned, it would no longer be clear whether the trip had really taken place or not.
* From 1986 until 1993: the "
He erected with his wife Esther Shalev-Gerz a column covered with a layer of lead 12 meters high on which passersby could engrave their signature. The latter, sinking very gently into the ground, disappeared completely on November 10, 1993. At the place he occupied: an empty spot.
The interactive aspect therefore lasted seven years. We saw the appearance of violently hostile inscriptions, gunshots against the structure but also signatures that approved the operation.
* In 1990:
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It was a matter of unsealing, little by little and clandestinely, 2,146 paving stones out of 8,000 in the parliament square in Saarbrücken, engraving on their bases the names of the 2,146 Jewish cemeteries in Germany, then storing them. At the beginning of the work, descellement and recellement were "clandestine, made at night. However, after 70 pavements thus engraved and placed back in a kind of clandestinity, Jochen Gerz and his team, mainly made up of students of fine arts, decided to turn to the official authorities. The parliament of Saarland supported the company and renamed, in 1993, the square "place du Monument invisible".
This invisible monument against racism is therefore trampled daily by the regulars of the central square of Saarbrücken.
These works play with the materiality and immateriality of memory, forgetting, and remembrance. Each time, the same issues come up: disappearance of traces, fragility of testimony, tenuous presence of absence. The monument is fading, there are no more traces. The inhabitants will have to, whether for their friends outside the city or their children, tell the story of the monument, describe it, give an account of its sinking, for example for the
The artist explains himself several times about the meaning of his undertaking: "
Born in Paris in 1944, Boltanski is a largely self-taught French artist. For years, his work has been constantly questioning various and crucial issues such as death, identity, the sacred, memory, banality, family...
His artistic commitment is truly a therapy, a return to the traces and traumas of the past; whether it is his personal story or that of anonymous people. He then restores the biography through photography, storytelling, collecting or presenting familiar objects. It is emblematic of experimental art in recent decades. He never fails to question the traditional parameters of the work of art and associates in his work the most diverse modes of expression, thus defying any classification. Moreover, he does not simply link the story to a specific context; he draws from it a question for now.
Much of his work focuses on what he calls "
Memory
He evokes the episodes of the exodus or the Holocaust, through installations where he spreads clothes by kilos, testifying to the carnal reality of history and death. Indeed, these objects full of history come from someone. A person chose them, loved them, but the life they carried is now dead: showing them is then like resurrecting them. His works always start from elements as little substantial as newspaper clippings, rusty tin boxes, old photographs, used clothes, flickering shadows.
*1990:
This
Boltanski does not treat death and war as abstract concepts, but through the little story. Big history is the sum of small stories. Collective memory, which is that of everyone, does not join the small memory of each one becomes in this case that of nobody.
He thus shows us precisely the place of memory, hidden memory like dusty and forgotten archives to which he refers. Memory is indeed the central point of his work.
Shimon Attie, meanwhile, took the old Jewish quarter of Berlin, now in the eastern part of the city. Along these desolate streets and emptied of their inhabitants, he created an original installation.
He first found photos of the 1930s in this neighborhood with the storefronts of Jewish shops and their signs. He turned them into slides and projected them at night, in situ, on the very place where they had been taken.
Shimon Attie, Almstadtstrasse (fruhere Grenadierstrasse) Ecke Schendelgasse, Berlin, 1994
The artist began his projections in September 1991 and continued to do them for a year. The passer-by who is there receives a shock, literally seeing spectral images on the walls of the street. This is how one sees on a leprous wall today, next to a porte-cochère:
Or, inside a porch: Conditorei Cafe, with, again, silhouettes of pious Jews in hats.
These photos are striking by the contrast that is established between the darkness of the streets and these powerfully lit areas, a well of light coming to pierce the night of oblivion. It is the very absence that is at the heart of this project.
The installation itself was photographed with its contrasts of light, so that there is a trace of the ephemeral installation by definition.
The artist also recorded the reactions of residents in the neighborhood and passersby. At first, they were rather favorable to his installation, but he gradually felt the hostility against him growing. These installations were disturbing: indeed, the creator often infuriates contemporaries who would prefer to "forget".
A man, seeing the projection on his own building shouted to him that his neighbors would believe he was Jewish and that he wanted to call the police...!
Faced with such reactions, the question arises: can an event like that of the Jewish genocide during the Second World War be inscribed in the urban landscape, in stone and concrete?
In the early 1970s, people were wondering whether it was not necessary to build two copies of each monument every time. The first to fix a historical state, the second destined to be deformed, transformed and corrected later, permanently bearing the trace of the attitude of new generations towards it.
In conclusion, we will present to you a type of art that lies between commemoration and artistic representation, a place known to all the French on which an enormous amount of work has been carried out.
If graphic art and monuments have contributed enormously to the work of memory, memorials have also participated. Among them is the Shoah Memorial, opened in January 2005. It is called a "
Not far from the memorial is the Wall of Names on which were engraved the names of 76,000 deported and exterminated Jews. This wall restores an identity to children, women and men that some Nazis tried to dehumanize.
The wall of names has a real symbolism. Indeed, its walls are very close together so that people moving between them have a sense of oppression. Other symbols remain to be analyzed, such as the writing of names in black and white or the fact that they were written consecutively rather than in columns. Add to this the recent commemorations in Paris and the wall of names is also one of its unforgettable monuments that inscribe the Shoah in our now indelible memories.
Art has contributed enormously to the work of memory. Through the symbolism of the Shoah in all forms and at all times, man has managed to convey a message: "Never again." This is what the deportees wanted, their loved ones, this is what we ourselves understood and that’s why, in our turn, we are sending out this message...
Le Magazine littéraire
Le Monde
The World of Education
Le Monde des débats
Beaux Arts Magazine
Maus
Auschwitz
Introduction to image analysis
Internet addresses:
http://www.memorialdelashoah.fr/
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/d-d.natanson/artiste_milles.htm.
http://olivier.mercadier.free.fr/