HOLOCAUST PROJECT: FROM DARKNESS INTO LIGHT
Or consider Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s great nine-and-a-half-hour Holocaust film. We see the testimony of survivors, we see the mass-murder sites today, but he uses no footage or photos from the actual period. Nor does Lanzmann cast himself as perfect: his hatred of old SS men is apparent, but he also reveals the lies he himself told to get one of them to recall his “glorious” years at Treblinka. As the film unfolds and we learn more and more about things we never see, the effect is of a whirlpool swirling around an empty center, of a horror so great it defies imagination, and thus certainly defies depiction.
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In the room that introduces the exhibit we learn that when Chicago and Woodman were engaged, in 1985, they were both assimilated Jews who knew little of the Holocaust. “In 1985, Donald and I saw Shoah. It totally overwhelmed me . . . . Sitting in the theater . . . holding hands with Donald and sharing this painful confrontation with the terrible tragedy that had befallen the Jews, I felt bonded with him by our joint heritage.” I found the conflation of bonding with one’s fiance with the “terrible tragedy” (those with a refined sense of the word “tragedy” might take offense at its use to describe genocide) to be more than a little odd, but soon discovered that this observation fit right in with the show, which is a highly personal interpretation of the Holocaust: in her texts Chicago constantly informs us as to how her work affected her own life.
Her central idea is that the Holocaust should be seen not as a unique event but as part of the long history of patriarchal oppression, which in her view includes the killing of animals for food, inadequate health care, and even man’s landing on the moon. The relationship of the Holocaust to other historical events is of course a legitimate subject of debate. I agree with Claude Lanzmann that the Holocaust shouldn’t be seen as merely another instance of evil–its concentration of horrors was unique in kind, number, and degree–but it’s hard not to be sympathetic to Armenians or Cambodians who question the “the” in front of “Holocaust.” Certainly it makes sense to investigate the relationship between what the Nazis did and other forms of brutality. Chicago’s multipanel configurations, she writes, provide a “way to assert the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which [Woodman and I] always present in distinct spaces–a metaphor for the fact we are examining connections, not suggesting that the Holocaust is exactly like any other historical event.”
Most of the next 14 works–all but the very last piece–are on photolinen, a material that can both record photographic imagery and receive paint. Woodman’s photographs were combined with Chicago’s drawings and painting through painstaking rephotography–the project took eight years to complete. The two different forms of representation are combined with care and delicacy, and the results are rather interesting to look at. Woodman and Chicago apparently intended the two forms to have different effects: “The photography roots the image in the reality of the historic event,” a pamphlet asserts, “while the painting expands and transforms that reality.” But in much of the work, photo and painted imagery are blended almost seamlessly. Rather than maintaining a distinction between imagery that traces reality and imagery generated by an artist’s imagination, the visual enjambment of photo and paint suggests that an inner, personal reality is not only as important as but almost the same as our shared, external reality. This is truly the work of an artist who doesn’t see much difference between her hope, expressed in a wall text, that her collaboration with her husband on this project will help their marriage and her hope that her art will heal the world–presumably of meat eating and space travel as well as of war and genocide.
Four Questions, made up of four panels, uses a different method to compare the Holocaust with other evils, a technique borrowed from abstract artist Yaacov Agam, one of whose works is on view in the museum’s lobby. The picture surface is not flat but folded like a fan (though it’s not gathered at the bottom); each picture has two images divided into bands and placed on opposing facets. Viewing the panel from the left reveals one image; from the right, the other; and from the center, fragments of both. Each panel has a question printed at the bottom that can be read only when the panel is viewed head-on.
Rainbow Shabbat is certainly meant to be a sign of hope for the future, but it fails completely. Perhaps no single work could transform Holocaust imagery into a prayer to heal the world, but this window is an object lesson in bad art.
