Jewish "Ghosts": Judit Hersko and Susan Hiller and the Feminist Intersectional Art of Post-Holocaust Memory (original) (raw)
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Art after atrocity: post-Holocaust representation and affect
2019
The thesis investigates how to effectively address (through visual art) events of war and traumatic memory, with particular focus on the Holocaust and its subsequent visual representation. Through critical analysis and interviews with artists, theorists, historians, philosophers, writers and curators as well as the studio-based outcomes: the research creates a detailed analysis of traumatic, memory based visual representation and effective memorialization, and its purpose in contemporary society. The PhD advances the role, positioning and association of memory within the representation of horrific experience, and how this affects the creation, presentation and affecting qualities of art based on perpetrated atrocities and near incomprehensible human experience (Art After Atrocity). Accompanying the written research is a single, large-scale artwork produced in parallel to the written research. This artwork, Deathgate, consists of an individually handmade ceramic 'stone' for e...
Post-Holocaust Art and Post-Memory Art: A Reevaluation
Art of the Holocaust until 1989: Beyond an East/West Divide - Central Europe University, Budapest, 2022
A renewed attention has been paid after 1989 to the relationships between art and the Holocaust. This renewal might be enlightened by the questions and issues artworks made before 1989 raised in their time, and more specifically thanks to those which were produced in the direct aftermath of the Holocaust. In this regard, throughout this paper, post-Holocaust art will designate artworks and artefacts made by people who were active during and after the Holocaust, most of them with an experience of it, whether it has been direct or not. Postmemory art thus refers to an art whose authors did not experience this period of time, since they belong to the second or third generation. This distance allowed them to consider the situation with different eyes, maybe more theoretical ones. Notwithstanding, my main hypothesis is that a limited but highly significant number of issues post-memory art raised were already present, somehow in nuce, in post-Holocaust artworks. This is why those deserve a reevaluation, both as testimonial and artistic propositions. A rapid survey of the last four decades bibliography can help us to draw a state of the arts, and to understand the ongoing evolution of the successive perspectives in which relations between arts and the Holocaust art have been regarded.
EUtROPEs: the Paradox of European Empire, Parisian Notebooks vol. 7, ed. by John W. Boyer and Berthold Molden, Paris, Chicago 2014, pp. 162-82. , 2014
AbstractDominick LaCapra has brought into focus the relationship between the notions of trauma, absence, and loss, highlighting the need to differentiate these respective cultural phenomena. For the last two decades, Polish critical art has galvanized public opinion and shocked traditionally minded art critics. With time, artists have moved from waging a frontal attack on cultural taboos to a reassessment of the wartime past and its aftermath. Zbigniew Libera’s Lego Concentration Camp might serve as a proof of this transition. Recently, the focus has shifted again to the manifestations of Jewish presence in Poland, either in the past or in the future. As much as Mirosław Bałka’s monumental How It Is (2009) represents absence, Yael Bartana’s series of films, Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland: Mary Koszmary (“Nightmares”), The Wall and Tower, and Assassination, attempts to imaginatively reinstate Jewish life in Poland. Wojciech Wilczyk’s photographic project, There’s No Such Thing as an Innocent Eye (2008), cataloging the re-maining synagogues and houses of prayer in Poland, traces the posthumous life of Jewish architecture not only in the wake of the Holocaust but also after four decades of Communism and twenty years of capitalist ingenuity. Łukasz Baksik’s Matzevot 163for Everyday Use (2010) is another photographic project of interest. Last but not least, Rafał Betlejewski’s I Miss You, Jew! (2005–ongoing) proposes a reparative psychoanalysis of the body politic via a series of interventions in the public space.This paper is going to examine the aesthetic underpinnings of these represen-tations of absence/loss and a recent shift of emphasis to political interventions in Polish Holocaust art. The aforementioned artworks expand the problematization proposed by LaCapra by engaging the audiences in the process of reinstating Jewish presence. The invitation extended to the Jews is possible in the realm of art, as it can play with the sociopolitical, triggering a reconsideration of the traumatic past.
Agents of Liberation: Holocaust Memory in Contemporary Art and Documentary Film
Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2015.
This book explores representations of the Holocaust in contemporary art practices. Through carefully selected art projects, the author illuminates the specific historical, cultural and political circumstances that influence the way we speak-or do not speak-about the Holocaust. The book's international focus brings into view film projects made by key artists, reflecting critically upon forms of Holocaust memory in a variety of geographical contexts. Kékesi connects the ethical implications of the memory of the Holocaust with a critical analysis of contemporary societies, focusing upon artists who are deeply engaged in doing both of the above within three regions: Eastern Europe (especially Poland), Germany, and Israel. The case studies apply current methods of contemporary art theory, unfolding their implications in terms of memory politics and social critique. Budapest / New York, Central European University Press, 2015.
Remembering, Redeeming and Renouncing Through Art. Monuments, Memorials and Mourning the Holocaust.
Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, Università della Svizzera Italiana, 2014
Monuments and memorials attempt to create a shared memorial experience unifying plural segments of population, even if it is only during a brief “memorial moment”. But, although past history is shared, the ways to remember cannot be unified. By creating common shared spaces for memory, monuments spread the illusion of collective remembrance. But memory is always personal and disparate. Everyone memorializes something different. Context and circumstances change, politics and culture as well. So, without people’s intention to remember, these landmarks of remembrance are just inert fragments on the landscape. Placing the weight of remembrance and regret on art’s unbearable lightness of being, a public redemption is advertised and performed under high-art’s tutelage. But, where genuine art is produced as self reflexive, public monuments are produced to be historically referential, to lead viewers beyond themselves to an understanding or evocation of events. Where art invites viewers to contemplate its own materiality, or its relationship to other works before and after itself, the aim of memorials is to draw attention to past events. Preserving and cultivating the memory of an historical moment through a nation’s idealized self-presentation. Instead of placing memory at the disposal of public awareness, traditional memorials and monuments close memory from the consciousness of its viewers. Transforming what should be an exercise in self-determination and non-conformity, into a servile response to a dissimulated standardization of memory. Acknowledging such misconceptions and the impossibility of embodying memory-work. Some contemporary artists would question the status and representativeness of monuments, inquiring and breaking-down their purpose. As a result, the concepts of “vanishing monument” and “counter-monuments” emblematized Germany’s conflicted struggle with Holocaust memory. These “anti-monuments” formalize their impermanence and mutation of form in time and in space. In their conceptual self-destruction and self-negation, referring not only to physical impermanence, but also to the emergency of all meaning and memory, especially that embodied in a form that insists on its eternal fixity. If from one side, an important shift from conventional monuments was nevertheless achieved, trying to get rid of a posture of pious obeisance. On the other hand, counter-monuments were still subject to appropriation into the meta-narrative of redemptive memorialization. Thus, becoming no more than an attenuation of the monument as representation. By leaning specifically on the Holocaust and the German’s obligation to tangibly represent and atone their guilt. This work attempts to study the relation between landmarks of remembrance and collective memory versus collected memory. Baring the ambiguities and contradictions of this tantalizing altercation through a carefully selected body of works which show us how thinkers, artists and architects tackled with this daunting and stimulating task. Not only responding to a specific set of requests but also subverting and questioning the need for a catalyst of remembrance such as memorials and monuments.
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