March, 2009: First Junior Scholars Conference on Jewish Art, Tel Aviv University. Judy Chicago's Double Jeopardy: A Feminist Response to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (English) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Through legends, the Jewish collective memory awards a significant place to the builders of synagogues, as it does to the painters of synagogue murals and the carvers of Torah arks. These narratives played an important role in the Jewish community's perception of and its self-identification in the townscape. Tales about masters, both Jewish and Christian, full of oddities, didactics, and miracles, believably circulated in Jewish traditional society, although they were not recorded until the early twentieth century. Sometimes a tale echoes an inscription left by a master on his work, but most often it is an independent form of collective memory. The legends live according to the rules of their genre, often making use of universal subjects, so that their understanding is difficult without the context of non-Jewish folklore. The Israeli School of Folklore Studies is deeply involved in the study of the international tale types and their adaptation to Jewish religious texts and daily life, to the Jewish addressers and addressees in their historical mutations and geographical variety. Such adaptation leads to the production of new narratives, called oicotypes in accordance with the theory and terminology transferred by Carl von Sydow from biology to ethnography. The present paper is dedicated to the adaptation of the Tale of a Giant as a Master Builder (AT 1099), which is popular in Jewish folklore and belles-lettres. The paper deals with the main components of this tale as rendered in a traditional society, its transformations in the writings of European acculturated interpreters, Jewish national romanticists, and those who abandoned this latter trend to embrace the artistic avant-garde.
From rejection to recognition: Israeli art and the Holocaust
Israel Affairs, 1998
The absence of Israeli artists from an international exhibition that presented responses to the Holocaust by contemporary visual artists is the starting point for a review of the absence of the Holocaust from Israeli art discourse since the 1950s and the re-introduction of the topic since the 1980s. The paper explores the ideological background of the rejection and the new spirits of the 1980s that allowed revisitng issues of Jewish idntity. Revised version in: Absence/Presence: Critical Essays on the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, ed. Stephen C. Feinstein, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005, pp. 194-218
The Holocaust and the Arts: Paths and Crossroads
Art in Hungary 1956–1980: Doublespeak and Beyond, 2018
The study provides the first comprehensive survey of the reception of the Holocaust in Hungarian art in the 1960s-1970s. Conclusion From the late 1950s onwards, the topic of the Holocaust had a significant reception in Hungarian art. Besides the artists discussed here, who returned to the subject several times, others also touched upon the topic in singular works. Additionally, there were state commissions, but it seems that the independently produced works and the commissioned ones resulted in developments unfolding in parallel, mostly disconnected from one another. This was due to the fact that the non-commissioned artists’ perspective was typically very different from that of official memory politics, which focused on the anti-fascist struggle and thereby instrumentalized the memory of the Holocaust, as exemplified here by the Mauthausen case study. The examples analysed here also shed light on differences in approach between periods and generations. Artists of the older generation, still temporally close to the traumatic experiences, used a surrealist, symbolic approach from the late 1950s; the primary objective of their works was the commemoration of the victims. Accordingly, they employed a Holocaust iconography referring to the locations and tools of the genocide, and symbols alluding to the victims and their memory. By contrast, a more open representation and a critical approach became prevalent in the mid-1960s, and particularly at the end of the decade; besides remembering, identifying those responsible for the Holocaust and the reasons behind it gained importance, which were frequently connected to present-day problems, such as contemporary anti-Semitism. This tendency was partly due to the fresh approach of the younger generation emerging at this time, but also influenced by the conceptual turn of the late 1960s, which brought new forms of expression. For example, the inclusion of texts helped foster a new, more open tone. It is also important to consider, besides the generational differences, the artists’ personalities, e.g. the works of Endre Bálint and János Major have significant affinities due to their satirical tone despite any differences in generation or genre. The 1960s and 1970s were characterized not only by the coexistence of generations and styles but also by a kind of thematic plurality in the works. In a number of cases the theme of the Holocaust surfaced in connection with further topics, thus visualizing different time periods simultaneously. The two possible perspectives on the Holocaust – social and individual – often appeared together, most notably in the works based on well-known documentary photographs but also recounting personal stories. These simultaneously reflect two tendencies that characterize further works as well: the generalization of the experiences of the Holocaust and personalization through emphasizing aspects of the event related to individuals or families. A number of works link the Holocaust and the Nazi era to contemporary anti-Semitism and to events such as the Six-Day War. These works represent the Holocaust as part of a broader narrative of anti-Semitism running from the past to the present. Another important characteristic of the period was the indirect articulation of messages that were nevertheless quite accessible to contemporaries. Such works leave it to the viewer to complement and interpret the visual representation by ‘reading between the lines’. A characteristic example of this elliptical mode of expression is János Major’s photograph of a gravestone marked ‘…ER ADOLF’, referencing Hitler. The use of biblical and historical allusions also belongs to this tendency. In these cases, the remote event is not used primarily to illustrate something about itself, but as a reference to the Holocaust: for instance, works dealing with the late nineteenth-century blood-libel case of Tiszaeszlár do not simply present an interesting historical episode, but use it as a parable to address the Holocaust and issues from the artists’ own era. A significant number of the works discussed here were shown to a Hungarian and (primarily in the case of conceptual works) international audience at the time of their production or a few years later. Even so, the public display of works was restricted: the works of neo-avant-garde artists, for example, often reached only a narrow subcultural audience, regardless of their topic. Despite occasional, temporary access to most of these works, no broad public discourse about the Shoah emerged during this period, and this lack of discourse was not exclusively the result of the socialist system in Hungary. In fact, such a discourse would have been anachronistic as it would have occurred before the memory of the Holocaust became globalized and the term Holocaust was widely established. The works discussed here are exceptionally significant for the very reason that (in time and in critical attitude) they were ahead of the prevailing social discourse, or – as seen in the case of the Roma Holocaust – even ahead of scholarly research on the subject.