From: Jason Francisco
Date: August 12, 2010 8:27:12 AM PDT
To: "jlfrancisco@earthlink.net"
Subject: camps and abstraction 6
rilke writes:
"we must assume our existence as broadly as we can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. that is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. that mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely related to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. to say nothing of god. but fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. for it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new, unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. but only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatic, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. for if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. thus they have a certain security. and yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. we, however, are not prisoners. no traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us... we have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not directed against us. it has its terrors, but they are our terrors. it has abysses, but those abysses belong to us. there are dangers and pitfalls, but we must try to love them. and if only we arrange our life so that we always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. how can we forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses? perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. "
rilke, of course, did not live to see the shoah, though it does not seem wrong to call it the very definition of his category of "most alien." one one level, rilke's proclamations are insipid. would he have blithely affirmed that the world is not directed against him--he who would barely have escaped being classified as a jew under the nuremberg laws (his mother came from a prosperous czech-jewish family that had converted to avoid anti-semitism)? would have seen the abysses of the ghettos and the camps as belonging to him (or to "us," whoever "us" turns out to be)? could he have "loved" auschwitz? were the nazis dragons that could turn into princesses? is genocide (contemporaneously or in retrospect) something helpless that wants help from us?
but on second thought, his sentiment isn't so easy to dismiss. while it's true that our lives are suffused with indifference to the suffering of others, now and in the past--a necessary indifference, because true awareness of the vastness of the suffering that surrounds us is impossible (who can know the pain of millions, or even hundreds?)--rilke's issue is the seriousness of our understanding of the suffering of others that we do have. the "endless harm" that results from our atrophied awareness of death and suffering is not rhetorical: not that we can redeem the horrors endured by others through our own awareness, but the basis of our ethics is an understanding that we are not liberty to isolate others in their own suffering. it seems to me that rilke's call--to assume our existence as broadly as we can--is also the basis of commemorative art in our own time.
and perhaps not only our own time: a good question--to which i don't know the answer--is whether art about the shoah resumes a type of artistic address that reaches into the history of western art, whose centuries-long religious character was, of course, continuously and intensely commemorative of jesus' pivotal and defining suffering. in this sense, art about the shoah could be said to represent the re-emergence of a deep mode of western artistic practice, albeit in very different forms and without salvific implications. or to ask the question differently: is commemorative art about the shoah a specialized artistic practice, as against the preponderance of contemporary art, and notwithstanding the central place of politics in western art since the sixties? are holocaust sites and museums the places to look at holocaust art, while general museums are for contemporary art more broadly construed?
recently in berlin--to offer the beginning of an answer--i spent an afternoon in the nationalgalerie im hamburger bahnhof, dedicated entirely to art since 1960. the two wings of the museum are dedicated, on one side, to joseph beuys and fluxus, and on the other side to andy warhol, robert rauschenberg, anselm kiefer and cy twombly (which is to say that the museum presents a narrow window onto art since 1960). as is well known, kiefer's career has largely been an effort to handle the legacy of the nazis (the generation of his parents), though the museum's curators fail to mention this, as for example his 1974 neo-expressionist piece, maikäfer fleig--
the painting's title is drawn from a traditional nursery rhyme dating to the 30 years war, calligraphed across hilltop at the top of the canvas--"Maikäfer fleig, Der Vater ist im Krieg, Der Mütter ist in Pomerland, Pomerland ist abgebrannt, Maikäfer flieg," or in english: "cockchafer fly, father is at war, mother is in pomerania [poland], pomerania has burned down, cockchafer fly." the cockchafer fly is a european beetle that flies at dusk and is known for crashing into lighted windows. kiefer's turbulent use of thick black paint is not (in contrast to the abstract expressionists) de-linked from pictorial illusion or from communication, rather the contrary: the painting depicts a bleak landscape bleakly, a landscape that is the wreck of an idyll (in this sense upending the landscape tradition), a landscape that voids innocence and children's songs and so doing, makes this particular song more real. it is also a landscape that seems to extend beyond the edges of the canvas itself. the picture's capacity to make us imagine its continuation beyond itself is to my eye a borrowing from a particularly photographic illusion, and leads to an awareness of the structural relation between the canvas and, for example, nazi photographs of ruin, such as this picture of the remains of the warsaw ghetto, made after jürgen stroop demolished it building by building following the ghetto uprising, killing some 50,000, famously proclaiming in may 1943, "the warsaw ghetto is no more"--
kiefer's 1990 work, lilith am roten meer (lilith on the red sea), approaches atrocity through allegory even more directly. the character of lilith appears originally in ancient babylonian mythology (lilitu), and has been elaborated by many cultures as an evil temptress--including contemporary feminism, which recasts her as a heroine. in jewish folklore (the point of departure for kiefer), lilith is adam's first wife, created at the same time from the same substance. rebellious by nature, she refuses a merely passive sexual role, and subservience of any kind. she and adam fight, during the course of which she pronounces the unutterable name of god in frustration, leaves adam and the garden of eden, and flies to the red sea. god promises adam that in retaliation 100 of her children will die each day (she is exceptionally fruitful), but lilith refuses to return, and threatens to kill 100 babies a day herself. ultimately lilith and god come to an agreement that she will not kill babies protected by an amulet. the small, soiled gowns of kiefer's piece allude strongly, and i would say unavoidably, to one of the emblematic (and for me, the emblematic) aspect of genocide, the systematic and concerted murder of children as enemies.
joseph beuys' practice pivoted on a wartime trauma, a plane crash he survived in central ukraine while serving in the luftwaffe in march, 1944. beuys claimed to have been rescued by tatar nomads, who wrapped his body in felt and fat--the key materials with which he later worked--and nursed him back to health. replaying the story in various ways, beuys' work and artist persona return again and again to art as ritual atonement: indoctrinated by the hitler youth, he becomes a soldier for a murderous regime, to crash and be reborn by way of an infantalized state of dependence on tribespeople outside the boundary of civilization. while i have always resisted the self-mythologizing and quasi-messianism of beuys' work, while admiring his innovative grasp of performance and public sculpture, until my visit to the hamburger bahnhof i hadn't really thought about how the libertinism of german fluxus movement--with which beuys was partially affiliated--also kept coughing up fascist references. otto muhl's materialaktionen (1964-1967), represented here in two photographs from a large grid of over 40, bears a strong relation to documentary images of nazi brutality, for example as represented in the pages of neue berliner illustrierte in 1945 (which i found in the library at stanford some years ago)--
i suppose that in this connection it is worth mentioning that the english word "happening," which fluxus artists used to describe their performances, carries an entirely more benign connotation than the the word beuys and the german fluxus artists used, "aktion," a word that in german has a distinct military application, approximately equivalent to the american military's use of the word, "operation."
the (vast) center and rear of hamburger bahnhof museum currently holds a large retrospective of bruce nauman, whose career trajectory i would characterize--if i had to put it in a nutshell--as a sustained investigation of death within the pop sensibility, the conditions under which pop irony gives way to nihilism. the exhibition traces the path from nauman's famous raw-war (1971)--
to his hanging heads of the late 80s--
whose references to torture are clear, for example torture at dachau--
but also replay the classical iconography of vengeance, as for example robert campin's (1374-1444) depiction of queen tomyris' victory over the persian king cyrus the great (a painting i was able to study at berlin's altes museum, not far from the hamburger bahnhof)--
the nauman retrospective's apex is a work on permanent display in the museum, titled Room with My Soul Left Out, Room That Does Not Care, less a sculpture than a piece of performative architecture about desolation, isolation and meaninglessness, inspired (as the curators write) by a section from samuel beckett's the lost ones: "Abode where lost bodies roam each searching for its lost one. Vast enough for search to be in vain. Narrow enough for flight to be in vain. Inside a flattened cylinder fifty meters round and sixteen high for the sake of harmony. The light. Its dimness. Its yellowness." the piece was first exhibited at castelli in new york in the mid 80s, then in the late 80s at the university of new mexico under the title The Centre of the Universe. nauman created this version specifically for the hamburger bahnhof gallery, calling it the final and most complete articulation of the work:
the curators' statement does not mention it, but the reference to the crematoria (as still standing, for example, at majdanek) is so obvious as to bring the shoah into the very center of the work--
on one hand, Room with My Soul Left Out handles the the dialectics of abstraction with agility: the piece's three corridors (representing all directions in space, as when you shake a lulav) invoke the shoah without representing it or attempting to say anything about it, simply drawing the viewer into the center, the interior point of intersection where the forces carried within each corridor seem to cancel each other out. i found the stillness within this intersecting space quite remarkable, almost soul-stirring--a stillness without serenity or consolation. on the other hand, the piece works through a gesture of startling hubris, in which we are to confront an elemental, at-large meaninglessness (of the human condition, of one's own life, of the universe) stripped of politics and history, meaninglessness as an assumption with a conclusive force. that a sublimated shoah reference propels nauman's poetics grates on me, as if the shoah were simply a weighty tool to make a big art statement, namely nauman's decades long effort to con art objects of their power, to lay traps for art's believers, to acidly mock some great, inchoate everything, and the great, inchoate nothing, too. whether you see nauman as an ethically serious nihilist or a fool (having spent time in his show, i could go both ways), his nihilism is not imageless: fascism dwells within and around his work in an orphaned guise.
all of this is just to say that if, as at majdanek and auschwitz, the museum has entered the camp, the camp has also entered the museum, even a museum as dutifully parochial and in the thrall of the art market as the hamburger bahnhof, not to mention (to take a final example) the new museum in the schindler factory complex in kraków, which conveys the city under nazi occupation not through informational displays but informational art environments, one after another, comprised of texts, photographs, videos, sound, dioramas, vintage objects of many kinds, and non-linear spaces and narrative techniques--
--including a room on the concentration camp at płaszów--
the curators of the schindler museum act like artists (fallen artists, artists not circling the divine throne and singing the praises of the god of high art), while artists like nauman play pseudo-commemorative games, in which paying homage to the camps is also feigning homage, because a meaningless universe accepts no sorrow. meanwhile, the camps abide, as ever, in the middle distance between death and the image of death, which is to say between the anonymity and the specificity of mass murder, and between the disclosure of loss and the loss of disclosure. in this middle space is both a terrible knowledge borne directly by a few still living, and rilke's "new, unforseeable experience" that the rest of us inherit as the obligation of history, the new history that begins with the camps.
the camps' expanses--such as the killing fields of the janowska street camp in lviv, ukraine, where 200,000 jews were murdered according to the red army's investigation--are vacant and not empty.
"it is in bones," explained old man i met there, speaking in broken english and waves of his hands, "it is all in bones."
____________________________________
jason francisco
בקש שלום ורדפהו
