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"
The comic strip at the service of memory
* Pascal Croci,
* Art Spiegelman,
Léo Haas, Theresienstadt, 1943
The dictionary gives a definition to art: "
How does graphic art contribute to the memory of the Shoah?
First, we will address the subject of the artists' lives with more precisely those they led in the camps. Then, we will focus on art as testimony, in addition to the expression of a pain. Then 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 the camps or outside, 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 managed to exist thanks to their art.
Boris Taslitzky was born on September 30, 1911, in Paris. His parents, of Russian origin, took refuge in France after the failure of the 1905 Revolution. His mother died during deportation at Auschwitz.
At 17 years old, Boris enters the Ecole nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. At the end of 1933, he joins the Communist Party. On March 2, 1937, the first issue of the communist newspaper
Mobilized on August 26, 1939, soldier Boris joined the 1O1e Infantry in Meaux. After his escape following imprisonment, he actively engages in the organization 'National Front of Struggle for the Liberation and Independence of France' until November 13, 1941, the date of his arrest. On December 11, 1941, he was sentenced to two years in prison by a military court for having 'made several drawings intended for communist propaganda'.
After his judgment, Taslitzky is directed towards the central house of Riom in Puy-de-Dôme. On July 23, 1943, he was transferred to the prison of Mauzac in Dordogne. At the end of his sentence, he is taken to the supervised residence center of Saint-Sulpice-Ia-Pointe in the Tarn. There, he painted large frescoes of revolutionary inspiration on the planked partitions of five of 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 upon seeing the detainees in striped rags, his first thought was expressed
The political commitment of Boris Taslitzky, "
In 1971, he was appointed professor at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs in Paris. On 7 March 1997, Boris Taslitzky received the insignia of Knight of the Legion of Honor with the title Resistance and Deportation.
The analysis of some constituent elements of a table will allow us to distinguish the different elements as well as to observe their possible meaning.
We have chosen a painting by Boris Taslitzky entitled:
This 1945 oil on canvas 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; lively in colors it stands out from other works. Indeed, the drawings or paintings concerning the camps and the deportation have often been translated by gray and sad colors. Artists, whether they have been deported or not, always establish a cause-and-effect relationship between deportation and greyness.
The plastic elements or axes are shapes, composition, and colors.
1) Forms and composition:
By simplifying the painting with geometric shapes or fundamental lines; this allows to highlight its expression and that desired by the author, without reducing it only to a simple diagram or sketch.
We therefore notice in the first place that the table is cut in two by a horizontal line. It separates about two-thirds of a 'mass' made up of emaciated characters leaving or rushing in line into the barracks, the dead merging with the living. This is the representation of real chaos.
In the foreground, a child in the right angle of the painting observes a body lying in front of him.
On the left, two dogs jump in the middle of the corpses. Men from the 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 gun in his right hand. He represents the threat and the power. His left hand resting on the hip, he wants a strong and impressive look. Nevertheless, it remains crushed 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 barracks of the camp in the upper part of the painting obstruct the viewer’s view, isolating the scene from the outside world. They form a wall, an impassable and imposing barrier; they seem unlimited, as far as the eye can see.
Moreover, large diagonals build the table. These lines of leaks, formed either by the queue of deportees or by the roof of the barracks, meet in a vague imperceptible horizon. A man standing, 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 and the crowding of corpses. He too does nothing, he is the link between the suffering of life and the respite so eagerly awaited by 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 for the filmed images, the action always comes from the void.
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 as well as the wooden planks 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 off 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 colours:
The colors decline a variation of 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 harmless either, it is painted in red and yellow and wears the colors of hell, of fire. The white represents the end of a struggle, freedom, innocence.
This is perhaps for the painter a way to highlight the dead who could not survive the Nazi barbarity, to pay tribute to them. Did Boris Taslitsky want to create in the viewer a feeling of recognition? By colouring his painting so much, he makes his work a revolt, a real attack on the conventional gray or black of the mortuary universe.
It represents the unimaginable, the inexpressible and revolutionizes the representation of the Shoah.
b) Biography of Serge Smulevic:
Serge Smulevic was born on April 6, 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 in Strasbourg from 1935 to 1939, where he graduated.
He joined the Resistance in the FTP in Grenoble in 1942. He was arrested there for giving false papers that he made himself to children. Shortly after, he was deported to the camp of Drancy
Here is his testimony about his life in the camp:
" It then came to my mind to address one of these "privileged " to ask him if he wanted me to make 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 one-there [...] and as I could only do that in the evening after the distribution of the soup, it took a while. And that translated into a quarter of a loaf of bread. What a bargain! Then it was the turn of another of these gentlemen, and little by little, I was accumulating food [...] To the point that the block leader from whom I had also drawn the portrait allowed me to have a small wardrobe [...] Privileged people and neighboring block leaders came very regularly to ask me to take their portraits and paid me in food. Some a little more, others a little less.
And that’s when I began to be called 'der Mahler', that is to say the painter or draftsman. There are some who even asked me to draw their house by 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] [...].
I was able by doing so hundreds of portraits and other drawings, to avoid stealing and trafficking, because I used at the camp my faculties as a good draftsman in this way, and it saved my life for sure. [...] Not everyone had the privilege of living like this in the camp, and I am very aware of that. The fact of working very hard as a convict all day, but knowing that after coming home in the evening, after the call and the soup, I was going to be able to draw and get paid for food was so encouraging for me, morally (and physically of course) that my life at the camp and at the factory felt it deeply. "
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. He made 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 raid on May 14, 1941. Interned at the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande, then transferred to that of Pithiviers, he was finally deported to Auschwitz on July 17, 1942.
During his incarceration in Beaune-la-Rolande, he created the portraits of his detention companions. It is thanks to this that Zber could survive until his gassing on October 26, 1942.
These drawings are now, following a donation, preserved in Paris at the Museum of Art and History of Judaism.
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The living conditions in the camps were not the easiest. The humiliation, the illnesses, the death, the horror, that’s all these men and women experienced and it is unforgettable for 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 would 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 detainees who often kept them at the risk of their lives.
Zoran Music, Max Ernst, Serge Smulevic, Boris Taslitzky ... to name but a few, have felt, some very quickly others later, the need to testify, thus proving that if one does not quite escape from the camps, one can nevertheless try to represent them.
a) 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 on 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 Theresienstadt, 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 retrieve his drawings in the hiding place whose location he had carefully noted.
His drawings are simple, devoid of colors and coarse graphics. However, when he says: "
Drawings by Léo Haas
Surrealism, born after the First World War, stands against all logical, moral and social forms and opposes 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: he stands out for 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 titled one of them
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The Stateless |
Woman’s head on a tower |
The eyes of silence
Max Ernst works in the company of Hans Bellmer. Some drawings are even done in pairs.
Hans Bellmer was born in Katowice in Silesia in 1902. He definitively left Germany in 1938 to live in Paris as a draftsman and engraver. In the south of France, during the summer of 1939, he is 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, meanwhile, was born in Berlin in 1913. He became interested in photography very early and followed an artistic training. In 1932 he met Max Ernst, Miro and others during a first stay in Paris. He frequents the surrealist milieu. While starting to paint watercolors, he becomes a painter by trade. In September 1939, he was interned at the Camp des Milles as a German national. The numerous drawings by Wols teem with bizarre characters in an environment that is disorganizing. It brings out a teeming worry, like that of a bad nightmare. One of his drawings,
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The camp guarded |
La Puce |
Wols
Surrealism is the exteriorisation of a whole difficult experience through paper and pencil or brush. These improbable images are the 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. Everyone could then in their own way, according to their point of view, bring to the common testimony and to all the detainees and victims of the Nazis.
The works of these survivors, with their diverse 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.
b)
Zoran MUSiC: exhibition 'We are not the last' (1970-1975)
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Zoran Music, internationally renowned painter was born in Dalmatia (then Austrian-Hungarian 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: the hanging scenes, the crematory ovens, the corpses stacked by dozens, that is to say, the indescribable. Upon his return, after stays in Venice and Switzerland, he settled in Paris in 1952. He seeks to erase the horror from 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 be revisited and he starts drawing again. The memories of deportation resurface; he then continues his work.
Writings and remarks by Zoran Music,
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I timidly start drawing. The way, perhaps, to get out of it. In this danger, I might have a reason to resist. I first try in secret, in the drawer of my turn, things seen along the way on my way to the factory: the arrival of a convoy, the cattle wagon ajar and the corpses overflowing. The journey lasted a month, more maybe, without food, without drinks, all hermetically curled. A few survivors gone mad scream, their eyes popping out.
Later, I draw at the camp itself. The days pass... 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 a trance, morbidly clinging to my scraps of paper. I was as if blinded by the hallucinatory grandeur of these fields of corpses.
And the fear of not betraying these diminished forms, of managing to restore them as precious as I saw them, reduced to the essential. As 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 only alive for the day, tomorrow it will be too late. Life, death, for me everything hung on those sheets of paper.
But these drawings, will we ever see them? Will I be able to show them? Will I get out of here alive? We knew that it had been decided to annihilate this camp, and us inside.
I learned to see things in a different way. In my painting itself, later, it’s not that everything has changed radically. It is in no way by reaction against horror that I rediscovered the happiness of childhood. Small horses, landscapes of Dalmatia, women of Dalmatia, they were there long before. Only after, it was given to me 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 I have discovered the terrible and tragic truth that it was given to 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 interior 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 true and just 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 very walls where he was imprisoned from 1943 to 1945. He paints and then engraves a series of sixteen works grouped under the name "We are not the last". He then exhibited throughout Europe during the 1990s. The exhibition is made up of rare drawings, saved from destruction, made a few months before its release. It invites a journey through all the periods and themes of the artist: a poignant cycle from beginnings to old age, from candid innocence to the experience of horror.
He is the first painter to be exhibited during his lifetime by the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris in 1972. It has since been the subject of important celebrations at the Pompidou Centre, the Grand Palais or even in Venice. The Jenisch Museum 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 rail (to exhibit, wall suitable for receiving paintings in a gallery or museum) of a suave gray and an equal 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 19441945. The others were burned or disappeared at the time of the camp’s liberation.
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 weight, two corpses are arranged head-to-tail. The heads are skulls to which there are still eyes, and these dead eyes become immense because there is no more flesh and no more hair. The gaze sees nothing else, queues of turned-over corpses that fill the space, which leave no respite to the sight, which obstruct the horizon.
The second half of the retrospective brings together canvases, visions transformed and purified by memory, spectral visions:
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The toothless mouths of the dead scream in the rising night. The bodies have disappeared into the darkness, only tense faces and hollow eyes. There remains only obsession from which it is difficult to discard afterwards.
The drawing is very simple: fine lines trace the contours of these forms that the thinness has made angular and bristling with points. A few crossings and shading suggest shadows in places. The hand does not tremble, it notes what was in front of the illustrator, a few steps from him.
With charcoal sticks and earthy, extinct colors, Music attempted 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 deepest part of 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 inscribing their experiences in universal memory and thus 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, to posters, comics, photography, photomontage, or video editing... through performance or in-situ work; themes, forms and means are almost inexhaustible.
a) The comic strip 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 having seen or reviewed several documentaries or films on the deportation, he published in 2000 a realistic comic strip that represents Auschwitz in a less symbolic way, he titled it
This album required five years of work due to the documentation but especially the search for a publisher, because few of them wanted to risk in this adventure. A debate was then initiated: can camps be made the graphic setting of a fiction?
Indeed, this document-fiction teems with realism: abandoned doll, deported which owes its survival to the drawings he sketches on the mail of Nazi officers, endless camp call sessions, "terrible work" of the SonderKommandos... This story features Kazile and Cessia, a couple who survived the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, and who remember almost fifty years later what they experienced each on their own. Through their eyes is suggested all the horror of deportation: the waiting for death at the entrance of the gas chambers, the experiments of Mengele...
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, sketched 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 to redo the same images. There is mist everywhere, a heavy atmosphere, I did not want to show the horizon so that the reader enters 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 have not been graphically faithful to certain historical details: for example the weapons. The reader knows that this object is used to kill, it’s enough
Pascal Croci encourages us to think about the fact that this could happen again, particularly by bringing the two characters back to life in 1993, in the former Yugoslavia where they are imprisoned and accused of political treason. Thus 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 themselves admit to having felt a priori some distrust towards the treatment of such a subject by the comic strip. But the approach of the author and the editor, the well-documented realism of the narrative, the concern for authenticity and finally the trust established between the various protagonists were the strongest.
Above all, this album was mainly a duty of memory.
Nevertheless, Pascal Croci does not duplicate the narrative of personal interrogations, 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 in which he is influenced by events. The construction of a work is always oriented by emotions, ideas.
Maus
It comes in two volumes:
1) My father bleeds the story
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, full of meaning. Art is ten years old and following a fall on roller skates, his friends abandon him. Returning home in tears, his father will respond to him: "your friends? Lock yourself for a whole week in one room without anything to eat, then you’ll see what friends are like!
The author also informs the reader of the difficulties caused by the project.
Since 1979, the scene is set: the Jews are mice, the Nazis are ferocious and wild cats with shining canines, the French are frogs, the Americans dogs and the Poles pigs. Each category of population is recognizable at first glance, a bit like at the time with yellow stars or coding by triangles in the camps. When there is identity falsification, it is a mask that 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 it and tells about his life in his native Poland, the meeting with Anja, Art’s mother, 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 of Poland from 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 presents a particular aesthetic: no abundance of details, no concern for historical veracity.
Nevertheless, perhaps more than the holocaust, it is the father/son relationships that are central in
A deep misunderstanding exists with his son and even beyond with all humanity. One can wonder if, as an extremist of survival, Vladeck S. has not forgotten life itself... Perhaps indeed Art undertook this work to get closer to this 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 have died. It is this overwhelming burden that his father seems to strive to pass on to him through his incessant recriminations.
Her mother, on the other hand, is the great absent whose shadow hangs over all of history, and for the father a taboo subject to such an extent that he will burn its writings the day after his death. Her fate reminds one of a Primo Levi: she will slit her veins 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 by reading these books. These event-albums are a part of the great book of history. Frightening and always heavy with emotions, they are the bearers of an unspeakable cry for freedom and respect for man. They pay a soberly but beautifully tribute to the million dead of Auschwitz.
Nowadays, the young generations therefore have at their disposal numerous works of art that bear witness to the Shoah. Some of them are presented in 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 memory. For half a century, these 'in-situ' works have multiplied in Europe.
Definition
Artists or architects, whether Jews, Germans, Jewish-Germans or other nationalities have set about 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 works 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 practices photography since 1969. Then in 1972, he made videos of the installations and performances in public spaces. He appears as one of the most important protagonists of art, around image and word, information and its mediatized reality.
Here are several projects completed:
* In 1977:
Jochen Gerz traveled the route Moscow-Khabarovsk-Moscow sitting in a compartment of the famous Trans-Siberian. During 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 the outside. He crossed Siberia round trip, 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 per day so as not to leave any traces of his passage in the compartment. All the elements that could have testified to his presence on the train, tickets.. etc., were burned upon arrival. So that upon his return, one would no longer know very well whether the journey had really taken place or not.
* From 1986 until 1993: the "
He erects with his wife Esther Shalev-Gerz a column covered with a layer of lead 12 meters high on which passers-by could engrave their signature. The latter, slowly sinking into the ground, disappeared completely on November 10, 1993. At the place he occupied: an empty place.
The interactive aspect therefore lasted seven years. We saw appear violently hostile inscriptions, gunshots against the structure but also signatures that approved the operation.
* In 1990:
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It was a question of unsealing, little by little and clandestinely, 2146 paving stones out of 8000 in the parliament square in Saarbrücken, of engraving on their bases the names of the 2146 Jewish cemeteries of Germany, then of concealing 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 fine arts students, decided to turn to the official authorities. The Saarland Parliament 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 in Saarbrücken.
These works play on the materiality and immateriality of memory, forgetting, and remembrance. Each time, the same issues return: disappearance of traces, fragility of testimony, tenuous presence of absence. The monument is erasing, there are no more traces. The inhabitants will have to, whether it is for their friends foreign to the city or their children, tell about the monument, describe it, give an account of its penetration, for example for the
The artist explains himself several times about the meaning of his company: "
Born in Paris in 1944, Boltanski is a French artist, largely self-taught. For years, his work continues to question various and crucial issues such as death, identity, the sacred, memory, banality, the 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 ones. He then restores the biography through photography, narrative, collection or presentation of familiar objects. It is emblematic of the experimental art of these last 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 questions it for now.
A large part of his work focuses on what he calls '
Memory
He evokes 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 insubstantial as newspaper clippings, rusty tin boxes, old photographs, used clothes, flickering shadows.
*1990:
This is an installation from October 1990, in Berlin in the former Jewish quarter. He chooses a building destroyed during the last world war whose absence is still visible today. He affixes on the two adjoining walls of the houses nearby commemorative plaques bearing the names of the former inhabitants, their profession and the date of their departure, almost always 1942. On its own
Boltanski therefore does not treat death and war as abstract concepts, but through the little story. The big story is the sum of small stories. The collective memory, which is that of everyone, not joining the small memory of each one becomes in this case that of no one.
He therefore shows us precisely the place of memory, a hidden memory like dusty and forgotten archives to which he refers. Memory is indeed the central point of his work.
Shimon Attie, for his part, took over the old Jewish quarter of Berlin, now in the eastern part of the city. Along these desolate streets and empty of their inhabitants, he created an original installation.
He first found photos from the 1930s of this neighborhood with the storefronts of Jewish shops and their signs. He transformed them into slides and projected them at night, in situ, on the very places 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 of today, next to a porte-cochère:
Or again, 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 those powerfully lit areas, skylights 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 exasperates 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, concrete?
One wondered in the early 70s, if it was not necessary to build each time two copies of each monument. The first to fix a historical state, the second destined to be distorted, transformed and corrected afterwards, permanently bearing the trace of the attitude of the new generations towards it.
In conclusion, we will present to you a type of art located between the commemoration and the artistic representation, a place known by all the French on which an enormous work of implementation has been carried out.
If graphic art and monuments have contributed enormously to the work of memory, memorials have also participated. One of them is the Shoah Memorial, opened since January 2005. It qualifies as a "
Not far from the memorial is located 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 the people moving between them have a feeling 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 and not in columns. Add to that the recent commemorations made in Paris and the wall of names is also part 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." That’s what the deportees wanted, their relatives, that’s what we ourselves understood and that’s why, in turn, we are sending this message...
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Internet addresses:
http://www.memorialdelashoah.fr/
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/d-d.natanson/artiste_milles.htm.
http://olivier.mercadier.free.fr/