The Postmemory Paradigm: Christian Boltanski’s Second-Generation Archive
A thesis presented to
the faculty of
the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University
In partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree
Master of Arts
Jenna A. Altomonte
June 2009
©2009 Jenna A. Altomonte. All Rights Reserved. 2
This thesis titled
The Postmemory Paradigm: Christian Boltanski’s Second-Generation Archive
by
JENNA A. ALTOMONTE
has been approved for
the School of Art
and the College of Fine Arts by
______
Jennie Klein
Assistant Professor of Art History
______
Charles A. McWeeny
Dean, College of Fine Arts
3
ABSTRACT
ALTOMONTE, JENNA A., M.A., June 2009, Art History
The Postmemory Paradigm: Christian Boltanski’s Second-Generation Archive
(133 pp.)
Director of Thesis: Jennie Klein
As a second-generation survivor of the Holocaust, Christian Boltanski
incorporates his familial heritage into his performance and photographic installations.
Boltanski’s status within the context of the postmemory generation, an era defined by the
memories of primary Holocaust survivors, materializes as a constant theme throughout
his visual oeuvre. He appropriates elements of his personal history in the discursive space
of the postmemory archive, merging personal and collective histories commonly
associated with a traditional archive. As a traditional space for storing mnemonic
documents and artifacts, the archive serves as the primary media form to represent the
task of memorializing the deceased through material remembrance. The second-
generation of Holocaust survivors in the post-World War II era sought to develop a
dialogue with the primary generation of survivors. The main goal of this thesis is to
examine Christian Boltanski’s oeuvres within the space of the postmemory archive. I
argue that Boltanski’s position as a second-generation survivor working within
postmemory results in the creation of archival works based in his familial heritage.
Approved______
Jennie Klein
Assistant Professor of Art 4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the Ohio University department of Art History, especially my
advisor Jennie Klein for the valuable guidance throughout the entirety of this thesis. I
would also like to thank my committee members Jaleh Mansoor and Matthew Friday for
their time and contribution.
5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………3
Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………….4
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………………..7
Introduction………………………………………………………………………………10
Chapter I: Postmemory and the Nachgeborenen………………………………………...18
The Survivor: The Essential Postmemory Form……………………………….19
Postmemory: Fragments Reconstructed……………………………………….21
Trauma and Postmemory………………………………………………………24
The Postmemorial Object: The Photo as Witness……………………………...25
The Photo as Memory………………………………………………………….27
The Postmemory Response: The Object as Art………………………………..32
Chapter II: The Post-War Aesthetic: “Art after Auschwitz”…………………………….39
The Post-War Aesthetic: Adorno and Celan…………………………………...41
Post-War and Kitsch…………………………………………………………...47
The Myth of Joseph Beuys…………………………………………………….50
Adorno and Beuys……………………………………………………………...58
Chapter III: The Early Years of Boltanski……………………………………………….61
Boltanski’s Early Life: The Nachgeborenen…………………………………...65
Situationist International: Guy Debord and Beyond…………………………...67
Les evenements de mai, 1968………………………………………………….75
La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski………………………………………79 6
The Breakdown of the French Art Scene: Boltanski’s Ascendance…………...83
Early Displays of Collecting: Boltanski’s Albums…………………………….87
Chapter IV: The Archive as a Mnemonic Device: Boltanski’s Monuments, Archives, Le Lycee Chases……………………………………………………………………………..96
The Initial Archive: Early Roots……………………………………………….99
The Post-War Archive...... 106
Christian Boltanski’s Archival Connection: Monuments...... 111
Boltanski: Archives and Le Lycee Chases……………………………………116
Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...122
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………128
Appendix A: “Todesfuge” By Paul Celan (Original German Text)……………………133
7
LIST OF FIGURES
Page
Figure 1: Christian Boltanski, Monuments, black and white photographs, metal frames, light bulbs, wire, 1986…………………………………………………………………...11
Figure 2: Christian Boltanski, detail Monuments, black and white photographs, metal frames, light bulbs, wire, 1986…………………………………………………………...13
Figure 3: Christian Boltanski, Monument: The Children of Dijon, black and white photographs, metal frames, glass, light bulbs, wire, 1986……………………………….30
Figure 4: Christian Boltanski, detail from Monument: The Children of Dijon, black and white photographs, metal frames, glass, light bulbs, wire, 1986………………………...31
Figure 5: Margaret Bourke-White, Buchenwald, black and white photograph, 1945…...33
Figure 6: Art Spiegelman, cover from Maus II…………………………………………..35
Figure 7: Yitzhak Uri Katz and various unknown, Tower of Faces at the USHMM, black and white and color photographs, multiple dates...... 36
Figure 8: Christian Boltanski, Photographic Compositions, color photographs mounted on board, 1977…………………………………………………………………………...49
Figure 9: Joseph Beuys, Auschwitz Demonstration 1956-64, vitrine with sculptures and objects, 1968……………………………………………………………………………..52
Figure 10: Joseph Beuys, detail Auschwitz Demonstration 1956-64, vitrine with sculptures and objects, 1968……………………………………………………………..52
Figure 11: Photograph of a performance by Joseph Beuys, 1969……………………….53
Figure 12: Photograph from Documenta 5……………………………………………...55
Figure 13: Joseph Beuys, photographic still from I Like America and America Likes Me (Coyote), performance, 1974…………………………………………………………….57
Figure 14: Joseph Beuys, photographic still I Like America and America Likes Me (Coyote), performance, 1974…………………………………………………………….57
Figure 15: Christian Boltanski, Lettre manuscrite demandant de l’aide, (Handwritten letters asking for helping), ink on paper, 1969-1970…………………………………….63
8
Figure 16: Christian Boltanski, Entrée des Tures a Van (The entry of the Turks into Van), oil on board, 1961………………………………………………………………………..68
Figure 17: Photograph of Guy Debord, date unknown…………………………………..69
Figure 18: Photograph of the SI, date unknown…………………………………………71
Figure 19: Guy Debord, Image still from Society of the Spectacle, film, 1973………….73
Figure 20: May 1968 Protest Banner…………………………………………………….77
Figure 21: Photograph of street riots from the May 1968 riots………………………….77
Figure 22: Christian Boltanski, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (The impossible life of Christian Boltanski), mixed media/film, 1968……………………………………80
Figure 23: Marcel Duchamp, Miles of String, mixed media/string, 1942……………….81
Figure 24: Christian Boltanski, still from La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (The impossible life of Christian Boltanski), mixed media/film, 1968………………………..81
Figure 25: Christian Boltanski with Jean Le Gac and Gina Pane, La Concession a perpetuite (Grant in perpetuity), mixed media, dirt, fabric, metal, plastic, 1969………..84
Figure 26: Christian Boltanski with Jean Le Gac and Gina Pane, detail from La Concession a perpetuite (Grant in perpetuity), mixed media, dirt, fabric, metal, plastic, 1969………………………………………………………………………………………86
Figure 27: Example yizker bikher or memorial books…………………………………...89
Figure 28: Christian Boltanski, Album de photos de la famille D., 1939-1964, (Photo Album of the Family D), black and white photographs, tin frames, 1971………………91
Figure 29: Christian Boltanski, detail of Album de photos de la famille D., 1939-1964, (Photo Album of the Family D), black and white photographs, tin frames, 1971……….91
Figure 30: Christian Boltanski, Reference Vitrine, wood vitrine with objects, 1970……94
Figure 31: Example of Alphonse Bertillon’s archive………………………………..…100
Figure 32: Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, mixed media collage, 1919-20...... 103
Figure 33: Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, page from Fin de Copenhague, mixed media/artist book 1959...... 105
9
Figure 34: Gerhard Richer, Atlas, mixed media/album photographs, 1972……….…...108
Figure 35: Gerhard Richer, detail from Atlas, mixed media/album photographs, 1972…………………………………………………………………………..…………109
Figure 36: Hannelore Baron, Untitled, mixed media, 1981…………………...………..111
Figure 37: Christian Boltanski, Monuments, black and white photographs, metal frames, light bulbs, wire, 1986-91………………………………………………………………115
Figure 38: Christian Boltanski, detail from Monuments, black and white photographs, metal frames, light bulbs, wire, 1986-91……………………………………………….115
Figure 39: Christian Boltanski, Archives black and white photographs, glass, metal screens, lamps 1987…………………………………………………………………….117
Figure 40: Christian Boltanski, variation of Le Lycee Chases, black and white photographs, tin drawers, lamps, 1988…………………………………………………121
Figure 41: Christian Boltanski, detail from Le Lycee Chases, black and white photographs, tin drawers, lamps, 1988…………………………………………………122
Figure 42: Micha Ullman, Bibliotek, 1996……………………………………………..126
Figure 43: Jochen Gerz, Place of the Invisible Memorial, 1997……………………….127
Figure 44: Jochen Gerz, cobblestone detail from Place of the Invisible Memorial, 1997……………………………………………………………………………………..127
10
INTRODUCTION
In 1985, Christian Boltanski exhibited Monuments as the first reference to the
Holocaust in his catalogue of works [figure 1]. The installation consisted of old tin boxes, desk lamps, and re-photographed portraits of children. The objects, compiled in an altar- like structure, mirrored the compositions of post-war monuments scattered across
Europe.1 The post-war monuments to fallen soldiers throughout France and Germany
utilize the same altar-like format to commemorate the dead. The monuments often focus
on one particular individual, whether solider or patriot martyr, to represent the entire
body of the deceased from a specific traumatic event.2 For Boltanski, the photographs
commemorate not only an individual, but the mass dead associated with the atrocity of
the Holocaust. The images confront the viewer with empty sunken faces of children,
similar to concentration camp images from Auschwitz or Buchenwald. The children in
these re-shot photographs appear skeletal, starved within their mechanical frames and
illumined by crude lamps.
For Boltanski, confrontation and collective response uncovers memories otherwise
embedded in the annals of the unconscious. Monuments served to expose suppressed
memories through the use of common, everyday objects in order to embody the process
of remembering and forgetting ruptured by the survivor generation. Boltanski’s status as
a second-generation survivor of the Holocaust permeates the space of the installation by
conjuring images associated with his childhood in the immediate post-war years after the
1 Lynn Gumpert, “From The Life and Death of Christian Boltanski,” in Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, ed. Howard Singerman (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), 65. 2 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 65. 11
Figure 1: Christian Boltanski, Lessons of Darkness: Monuments, black and white photographs, metal frames, light bulbs, wire, 1985
12
liquidation of European Jews. Though fictional in construction, for Boltanski the success
of the piece lies not in the material but in the collective response of the viewer.
Similar to the way in which Holocaust survivors deliver testimonies to their
children, Boltanski utilizes his work to create a collective, mnemonic response based on
past trauma. Monuments began as a project by Boltanski to expound the postmemory
paradigm or example, for work based around the Holocaust. The piece appeared in
numerous variations throughout the 1980s, coinciding with other similar series.3 Archives
and Le Lycee Chases also exhibited with tin boxes, re-shot photographs of children, and
desk lamps. The dim lighting surrounding all the series proved essential to the display of the installation, alluding to the somber atmosphere of a church or synagogue [figure 2].
The crude lighting of the re-shot faces of children present the viewer with an aura of saturated light around the frame of the portrait.4 The images become otherworldly as the light of the lamps illuminate their position within the installation. The viewer experiences a similar response in all three works based in an unconscious connection to trauma
associated with the re-shot photographs and the altar-like arrangement of the images.
The connection between the images of children and the altar-like display of the
photographs automatically creates an assumption about the fate of the children. Boltanski
argues that the role of the children is a means to convey innocence, a concept lost during
the years under Nazi brutality.5 During a memorial service at a church or synagogue,
images of the dead remain central, often illuminated or enlarged for dramatic affect.
Thus, Boltanski utilizes the same method in Monuments, Archives, and Le Lycee Chases,
drawing on the assumption that the viewer’s experience with memorial services creates
3 Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 83. 4 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 87. 5 Ibid., 87. 13
Figure 2: Christian Boltanski, detail Lessons of Darkness: Monuments, black and white photographs, metal frames, light bulbs, wire, 1985
14
an unconscious connection to the images of the children. The material objects within the
piece serve to provoke an unconscious, mnemonic reaction from the viewer. This reaction
remains central in terms of how generations who never experienced the Holocaust
firsthand can create artificial memories around the trauma of the event.
The development of a post-war dialogue concerning the representation of the
Holocaust in the visual and literary arts began with the statement, “after Auschwitz, to
write a poem is barbaric,” by Theodor Adorno in “An Essay on Cultural Criticism and
Society.”6 For the second-generation of survivors, the task of reinventing and
reinterpreting the memories and experiences by the primary generation maintain a
controversial and sacred relationship. Adorno’s statement created a challenge for artists
like Boltanski to produce art works that focused on the space around the Holocaust.
Adorno’s status as a German Jew creates a common separation associated with survivors
and perpetrators. The second-generation of Germans trace their primary familial link to
the first-generation of perpetrators and witnesses, whereas the second-generation of
German Jews associate with the survivor. The memory of the survivor serves as the
polemical space of reference, a sacred void directly linked to the trauma of the Holocaust.
Postmemory, a term coined by Marianne Hirsch, exists as a contemporary space for
remembering the events of the Holocaust without contaminating the direct memory of the
survivor. The second-generation’s development of ‘postmemory’ separates the temporal
and spatial boundaries from the actual site of trauma.7 Boltanski’s status within the realm
of postmemory relies on material objects and narrative to construct a space reminiscent of
Holocaust trauma. A collection of materials and photographic-objects re-appropriated
6 Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art After Auschwitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 17 7 Hirsch, Family Frames, 22. 15
and compiled in a shared space, parallel the ritual act of archiving data. The postmemory
artist relies on the photographic-object as a referent for memory. Boltanski utilizes the
space of the archive as a collective unit for compiling artifacts based on the Holocaust.
The archive for Boltanski serves to fill the mnemonic voids or memory gaps within his
personal history. Through the compilation of objects within the pseudo-archive, post-
generations or generations born after the Holocaust, transcend temporal boundaries and
forge new memories based on the trauma of the Holocaust.8
The goal of this thesis is to place Boltanski’s work within the context of a second- generation Holocaust child who uses his heritage as a basis for work that addresses both the idea of postmemory and the archive. I argue for Boltanski’s position within the space of the second-generation survivor, utilizing his familial heritage as a basis for his postmemory, archival works during the post-War era. Traditionally, the archive serves to collect and categorize personal and historic materials as a device for remembering and preserving the past. For Boltanski, the use of the archive in Monuments, Archives, and Le
Lycee Chases acts as a mnemonic device for linking the original site of memory to the space of postmemory. His use of the photograph allots the space of postmemory a link to the original referent, activating a personal connection to the photographic object and the viewer.
I will investigate Boltanski and the theoretical, artistic, and sociopolitical spaces surrounding his life in order to articulate his methodological process. His catalogue of work includes a vast array of media forms and themes. This thesis will primarily focus on
Boltanski's photographic installations based on the post-Holocaust paradigm. The first chapter is about trauma and postmemory coming out of the Holocaust. I will first define
8 Ibid., 22-24. 16
trauma and postmemory within the space of second-generation children of the Holocaust.
As a dialogue between trauma and postmemory is established, arguments concerning the
object-photograph as a primary function within postmemory discourse will be addressed.
The second chapter articulates the role of the post-war artist within the immediate
years after the end of World War II. Controversial claims in reference to Holocaust
representation by Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg will be addressed in relation
to the poetic and visual oeuvres of Paul Celan and Joseph Beuys. I will argue that Adorno
and Greenberg’s stance on the creation of post-war art varies according to Celan and
Beuys who represent the trauma of the Holocaust within their works. This division
between both respected groups will prove the different ways in which trauma affects
individuals, namely those whom experienced the direct space of trauma during the
Holocaust.
Through the work of Beuys, the space for confronting the taboos of history, namely the Holocaust, commence. The tumultuous, sociopolitical situation of the 1960s impacted
Boltanski’s oeuvres, evident through the memento mori images of his early performances.
Chapter three will examine the postmemory aesthetic and Beuys’ influential performances on the construction of Christian Boltanski’s visual and methodical works during his early career. Beuys’ I Like America and America Likes Me and his
performance lecture at Documenta 5 provide evidence of his “myth persona,” which
impacted Boltanski’s works. The final chapter will examine Boltanski’s main body of
works from the 1980s, furthering his status as a postmnemonic, second-generation
survivor. I will examine Monuments, Archives, and Le Lycee Chases and the ways they 17 confront the Holocaust using an archival disposition.9 Boltanski explains his method of producing memory through the temporal space of the postmemory archive.
9 Monuments, Archives, and Le Lycee Chases appeared in numerous locations throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s. Monuments first appeared in 1985 at Le Consortium in Dijon and travelled to Kunstverein Munchen, Germany, Galerie Crousel-Huessnot, France, and the Palazzo delle Prigione during the Venice Biennial. Archives exhibited at Documenta 8 in Kassel in 1987. The first show of Le Lycee Chases was the Castelgassethe, Vienna. The piece also exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago a few years later. 18
CHAPTER I: POSTMEMORY AND THE NACHGEBORENEN
“Forgetting extermination is part of extermination, because it is also the extermination of memory, of history, of the social, etc. The forgetting is as essential as the event, in any case unlocatable by us, inaccessible to us in its truth.”
– Jean Baudrillard, Holocaust
The statement by Jean Baudrillard defines a generation inundated by the presence of
trauma in the era after the Holocaust. How does a generation born right after unspeakable
traumas confront the events of their predecessors? The Nachgeborenen or ‘born after,’ the post-generation of survivors, witnesses, bystanders and perpetrators all represent a
generation whose “memories” of the Holocaust are re-told stories from the first
generation. This chapter will examine the role of trauma within the second-generation of
Holocaust survivors and witnesses. Their role as a collective group born after the primary
trauma of the Holocaust constructs the “postmemory” discourse of the post-generations.
According to Marianne Hirsch, postmemory began as a term to describe the second-
generation of writers and artists born after the Holocaust.10 Eventually, the term
encompassed the greater population of the entire second-generation and subsequent
generations born after:
Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.11
Those who witnessed and experienced trauma through the lens of the original survivor serve as the postmemory generation, beginning with the discourse of the second- generation and expanding to future generations of survivors and witnesses.
10 Marianne Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today 29, no.1 (Spring 2008): 106, poeticstoday.dukejournals.org/cgi/reprint/29/1/103.pdf. 11 Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” 106. 19
In order to understand the artistic oeuvres of Christian Boltanski, a central discussion
about the establishment of postmemory must first be addressed. The first part of chapter
one will examine the function of the second-generation as collectors of memories of the survivor’s experiences. The second part of chapter one will delve into the notion of
“postmemory” and trauma as concatenations of survivor memory and the memory of the
second generation.12 The third part of chapter one will articulate the role of the object, specifically the photograph within the space of postmemory. The photographic-object becomes polemical in the materializing of postmemory experiences where the physicality of the object becomes the site for remembrance and forgetting. The final part of chapter one will examine the role of postmemory artists of the second-generation and how the photographic object affects their works. As suggested by Baudrillard’s statement, postmemory seeks to reemphasis and reconstruct the experiences of the primary survivors through the imaginative representation of the second-generation.13
The Survivor: The Essential Postmemory Form
The survivor, the one whom experienced the trauma of the “event,” embodies the
archetypical figure for the second-generation. For those who did not experience the
atrocities and destruction of the Holocaust firsthand, the survivor becomes the primary
form of reference for the memory of the event. Familial objects, diaries, journals,
personal narratives, and photographs serve as the only material form of witnessing for
survivors.14 In At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art
12 Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “From War Stories: Witnessing in Retrospect,” in Image and Remembrance: Representation and the Holocaust, ed. Shelley Hornstein and Florence Jacobowitz (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003), 139-141. 13 Hirsh and Spitzer, War Stories, 139. 14 James Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 2. 20
and Architecture, James Young situates survivor memory as a problematic space for
remembering and forgetting. He argues that “memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the
motives of memory are never pure.”15 The experience of the survivor subverts the process
of memory construction, obstructed by traumatic experiences and the constant act of
remembering and forgetting.
For those who lived during the time of the Holocaust, “memory serves as an act of
mourning for those who cannot return to the original sites of trauma.”16 Memory from the
survivor to the second-generation creates a transfer of memories from the primary to the
“post” or secondary memory. The problem arises with how to differentiate between the
personal histories of the event versus the actual event of the Holocaust.17 When a
memory is expounded in verbal, literal, or visual outlets, the filters through which memory pass are often obstructed through the constant act of forgetting and
remembering. According to Young, this process of moving between remembering and
forgetting often affects the way in which the second-generation views history. He argues that the second generation “tends to aesthetize and attempt to fill the void left behind by the murder of Europe’s Jews…which is simply intolerable on both ethical and historical grounds.”18 The “hyper-mediated experience of memory” is a result of the voids within
survivor memory, a space the second-generation’s attempt to confront with their personal memories and reflections.19
15 Young, At Memory’s Edge, 2. 16 Hirsch, Family Frames, 242-243. 17 James Young, “From After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art,” in After Images: Kunst als soziales Gedachtnis, ed. Thomas Deecke (Weserburg Bremen: Neues Museum, 2004), 17. 18 Young, After-Images, 17. 19 Ibid., 17-18. 21
The problem with the “hyper-mediation” of survivor memory is how and why the
second-generation appropriates survivor experiences into their oeuvres. In response to
James Young, Saul Friedlander argues:
Nazism has disappeared…but the obsessions it represents for the contemporary imagination –as well as the birth of a new discourse that ceaselessly elaborates and reinterprets it – necessarily confronts us with this ultimate questions: Is this attention fixed on the past only a gratuitous reverie, the attraction of spectacle, exorcism, or the result of a need to understand; or is it, again and still, an expression of profound fears and, on the part of some, mute yearnings as well.20
Friedlander and Young express an awareness of the problem involved in second-
generation remembering and recollection. The inherent need to understand and reinterpret the memories of the survivor often creates a paradox between the history of the past and the reinterpretation of the past. The result of this reinterpretation is a new set of memories, constructed through temporal and mnemonic voids. Henri Raczymow characterizes this as “memorie trouée …or memory shot through with holes.”21 The
“leftovers of memory” become new, rooted in the survivor’s personal experiences and
trauma, yet appropriated within the memory and recollection of post-generations.22
Postmemory: Fragments Reconstructed
Through the “leftovers” and the fragments of survivor memory and trauma, the
construction of new outlets of memory emerges within the second-generation. What are the new memories of the second-generation? In what milieu do the memories of the second-generation serve concomitantly with that of the survivor? Hirsch appropriately
20 Ibid, 19. 21 Hirsch, Family Frames, 24. 22 Ibid., 24. 22
situates the term “postmemory” as the primary definition of second-generation memory.23
She discusses the vicarious connection of memory and postmemory:
…postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and created…memory is more connected to the past [versus postmemory]. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grew up by narratives that preceded their birth whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by the traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.24
Hirsch uses specific language when defining the complexity of ‘postmemory.’ The object
and the narrative represent the aftermath of the primary memory of the survivor. Since
the second-generation lacks the ability to experience the Holocaust, they become
dependent on the survivors’ personal and collective memories. 25 ‘Postmemory’ acts as a
linkage between the survivor and the second-generation. Hirsch reiterates the function of
“traumatic repetition” in the construction of ‘postmemory’ discourse.26 She argues the
connection of the second-generation to the first through the repetition of survivor
testimonies and cross-generational dialogue.27 Repetition in ‘postmemory’ can be productive, however it must tread cautiously so as not to overshadow and reproduce the memories of the survivor.
Part of the problem with ‘postmemory’ is how to define the space of trauma for the second-generation. Through the process of deportation, emigration/immigration, and extermination of European Jews during the Holocaust, the familial and cultural histories
23 Ibid., 22. 24 Ibid., 22. 25 Elke Heckner, “From Whose Trauma is it? Identification and Secondary Witnessing in the Age of Postmemory,” in Visualizing the Holocaust: Documents, Aesthetics, Memory,” ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager, and Michael D. Richardson (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), 67. 26 Hirsch, Family Frames, 24. 27 Ibid., 24. 23
of the survivor generations diminished over time. Far removed from the original site,
diasporic locations serve as the new spaces of postmemory. In Postmemories in Exile,
Hirsch recollects her parent’s birthplace in Czernowitz, Austria. She remembers the lack
of permanence while growing up in Romania, plagued with feelings of exile from her
ancestral homeland.28 Even when the opportunity to revisit home confronted Hirsch, she
did not return. The Czernowitz of her memories was “an imaginary city,” a space constructed by the fragments of her parent’s memories and her creative response to those memories.29 Nadine Fresco argues the absence produced by diaspora within the second-
generation. The absence felt by Hirsch in relation to her ancestral home is a product of
“absent memory,” a term coined by Fresco.30 The site of “origin has been reduced to
ashes,” thus the presence of the city in Hirsch’s imagination is actually a void of absence
of her postmemory.31 The imaginative city discussed by Hirsch through her
postmemories reflects the Proustian notion of ‘voluntary memory.32’ Since memory in all
forms utilizes various impressions, it is a definitive form of imagination.33 Hirsch
automatically recognizes events, memories, and experiences from her familial history and
voluntarily reacts through personal manifestations of Czernowitz. Memory becomes
cooperative with imagination, transferring into postmemorial recall.34
28 Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 661, www.jstor.org/stable/1773218 29 Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 664. 30 Ibid., 661-663. 31 Ibid. 32 Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 1-2. 33 Gibbons, Contemporary Art, 2-3. 34 Ibid., 2-3. 24
Trauma and Postmemory
Hirsch’s statement regarding “traumatic repetition” relies on confrontation through a
repeated process. Sigmund Freud developed the notion of trauma in relation to the
suppression of childhood experiences. In Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth Leys places
Freud’s argument as a concept that relies on two events from the past. Freud’s notion of
“Nachtraglichkeit or deferred action” emphases the notion that the actual traumatic
experience is divided into two major sections: the original traumatic experience from the
past and the moment in which the event is triggered in the present.35 The distance, both
temporally and psychologically, hinders the original site of trauma through repeated acts
of remembering and forgetting in the unconscious.36 Freud situates the act of repetition in
trauma as a hindering effect, a concept reiterated by Hirsch. The constant act of
repetition, through remembering and forgetting, tropes the memory of the experience. As
memory travels through temporal voids and unconscious suppression, the memory of the experience subverts and changes.37
Trauma operates as a form of memory, processed through repetition and weakened by temporal distance from the initial experience. Cathy Caruth reinforces Freud’s concept of “deferred action,” namely through temporal distance.38 She argues that “trauma is
experienced belatedly and invokes the unknown as much as, or even more than, it can
reveal the known.”39 For Caruth, the time after the initial traumatic event produces new
forms of memory recall. Thus, the trauma resonates and repeats in the unconscious,
traveling through filters of repression and sublimation.
35 Andrea Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2000), 20. 36 Leys, Trauma, 20. 37 Ibid., 21. 38 Gibbons, Contemporary, 74. 39 Ibid., 74. 25
For the second-generation of Holocaust survivors, trauma serves as a form of memory
retrieval. Postmemory and trauma both travel through filters of memory, repetition, and
repression. In Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and
Theory, Ernst van Alphen furthers the notion of repetition in the process of postmemory
simulation. He contends that the trauma of the Holocaust in photos can only be
experienced through the process of simulated recall and repetition:
Trauma cannot not be experienced at the moment it happens, therefore it cannot be remembered. Only in repetition, after the fact, can a trauma become an experienced event. Whereas a memory is clearly distinct from the event being remembered- it is memory of something- in the case of trauma, reality, and representation are inseparable. There is no distinction: the representation is the event.40
Thus, the inability of the second-generation to experience the Holocaust firsthand results
in the construction of postmemory representation. Van Alphen’s argument about
traumatic memory and repetition realizes the inherent response of the second-generation
to the atrocity of their predecessors. Simulation through representation in the visual and
literary arts of the second-generation provides a didactic response to the understanding of
photographic witnessing from the Holocaust.
The Postmemorial Object: The Photo as Witness
For the second-generation, the photo functions as a historical reference to life before
and during the Holocaust. Andrea Liss argues for the hermeneutic role of the photograph
as a document of remembrance;
Holocaust photos do not function solely as objective documents: on a psychic level, they set up the shock of the unimaginable made visible …they challenge and expand the limits of documentary.41
40 Ernst Van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 36. 41 Liss, Trespassing, 1-2. 26
Liss’ argument provides the viewer with a paradigm for how Holocaust photos function in the space of history. She continues by stating:
The extraordinary depictions in Holocaust photographs come through the lens of realism, which further heightens and estranges their function as objective documents.42
The problem arises when the viewer attempts to absorb and comprehend the magnitude
of the photograph. Since photography is vital to postmemory experience, the second- generation utilizes the image as a constructive mechanism for “materializing memory.”43
No direct act of witnessing exists, thus they rely in the material photograph to physically witness the event.
The material connection to the past, through the use of photography, conjures the notion of “witness by adoption,” a statement articulated by Geoffrey Hartman.44 Since the second-generation has no direct connection to the Holocaust, the “adoption” of the photograph serves as a source of witnessing. According to Hirsch, the image is imperative to the adoptive witnessing of the second-generations:
These postmemory viewers do more than listen to the witness; they gaze at the image…thus they can reenact, recall in the very sensations of the body, that fateful walk in the snow…however, photos cannot measure the space of destruction.45
The connection of the image to the physical event presents a complex assumption. Hirsch
articulates the notion that the photo can symbolize the event of the Holocaust through
simulation.46 The viewer must be aware, however, of acknowledging the imaginary space
of simulation and not the physicality of the event. Through this process of simulation,
42 Ibid., 4-5. 43 Marianne Hirsch, “From Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 216- 218. 44 Hirsch, Surviving Images, 221. 45 Ibid., 224. 46 Ibid., 224-225. 27
repetition becomes evident, eliciting a tension between the presence of the event and the
absence of the experience. The simulation of the event must remain separate from the
trauma experienced by the primary generation of survivors. Their experience and the
memory surrounding the trauma of the event remains too sacred to associate with the
simulated experienced of the second-generation.
The Photo as Memory
The process of transferring memory to an object relies on the experiences of the
survivor. The object from the survivor generation serves as a mnemonic device, an article
of remembrance. The Nazi purges and appropriation of Jewish goods and personal
objects during the Holocaust left the majority of families deprived of physical items.
Articles of clothing, jewelry, heirlooms, and albums represent the majority of objects
safeguarded during the camps and hidden below the floorboards of homes by Jewish
family members. These objects serve as a historical reminder of the lives before the
Holocaust, physical documents before the Nazi purges.47 Albums containing family
photos reflect a life of normalcy prior to the extermination of Europe’s Jews. Juxtaposed
with the photos taken during and after the Holocaust, the pre-war photo presents a life
prior to the mass deportations and “Final Solution” of European Jews. The images document de-evolution of social forbearance reminding the viewer of two histories
forged in life and the other in death.
The inherent function of the Holocaust photo presents a problematic context for the
second-generation. According to Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, the “shock of
recognition…the response to a photographic detail that attracts and repeals us at the same
47 Young, After-Images of the Holocaust, 17. 28
time,” can be applied to how post-generations view Holocaust images.48 The photo serves
as an index, a print of a former life left behind as a “ghostly referent” which “insists upon
its pastness.”49 Rosalind Krauss argues that; “Indexes are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify.”50
She contends that the index is caused by time, “which provides the past with an existential and physical presence.”51 The photos from the Holocaust tend to emit traces
from the past, a sense of “time-past.”52 The “shock” of viewing a picture from the
Holocaust acknowledges the trauma involved in the history of the image. Unlike the pre-
war photos of family events and gatherings, the photos from Buchenwald concentration camp by Margaret Bourke-White document the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” Bourke-White’s
photos rupture the space of the family image by presenting the traumatic aftermath with
unabashed clarity. The photos act as indexical prints, spatial scars on the surface of the
object.53.
As Bourke-White’s photos come directly from the referent, Boltanski filters the
original site of the photograph by re-photographing the image. The use of the photograph,
namely the re-shot photograph, serves as the primary medium for his work relating to
postmemory. In Monument: The Children of Dijon, re-shot photographs present the
viewer with a copy of a reproduced image [figure 3].54 He chose to exhibit the piece in a
48 Hirsch, Family Frames, 4-5. 49 Ibid., 4-5. 50 Van Alphen, Caught by History, 126-127. 51 Ibid., 126-127. 52 Ibid., 126-127. 53 Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 86. 54Donald Kuspit, “From In the Cathedral/Dungeon of Childhood: Christian Boltanski’s Monument: The Children of Dijon,” in Christian Boltanski, ed. by Tamar Garb, Didier Semin, Donald Kuspit (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1997), 99-100. 29
place of trauma and unease, notably the former Palazzo delle Priogione prison in Italy.55
The installation incorporates re-shot photographs of children as a mechanism to convey
the process of memory transference.56 Crude lamps surround the images, framing the photos as window frames within the space of Palazzo [figure 4]. The somber expressions from the photographs, juxtaposed with the environment of the Palazzo create an atmosphere of “mnemonic traces.”57 The traces come from the photographs that connect
the present site to the past through a temporal link. Not only do the images present the
viewer with a referential link to the past, but the space of the exhibition expounds
memories of trauma and chaos. The Palazzo disturbs the ordinary exhibition space of the
gallery by forcing the viewer to contemplate the trauma involved in the space and the
experience of the prisoners who once resided in the barren cells. The viewer’s emotions
and personal experience manifests within the space. The viewer knows nothing of the fate
of the children in the photographs, nor of the prisoners who once occupied the Palazzo.
55 Kuspit, “From In the Cathedral/Dungeon of Childhood, 98-99. 56 Ibid., 98-99. 57 Ibid., 98. 30
Figure 3: Christian Boltanski, Monument: The Children of Dijon, black and white photographs, metal frames, glass, light bulbs, wire, 1986
31
Figure 4: Christian Boltanski, detail from Monument: The Children of Dijon, black and white photographs, metal frames, glass, light bulbs, wire, 1986
The photographs and the installation space take on particular agency within the memory
of the viewer, linked temporally by personal and collective history.
Bourke-White’s photograph entitled, Buchenwald, 1945, documents Nazi atrocity
[figure 5].58 The piles of dead bodies on the left portion of the photograph, juxtapose with
the figures of bystanders shielding their eyes from corpses on the right. The trauma of the
actual event remains embedded in the memory and experience of the survivor. Unlike
58 Geoff Walden, “Buchenwald Concentration Camp,” Third Reich in Ruins, http://www.thirdreichruins. com/buchenwald.htm. 32
Bourke-White where the image comes directly from the source of trauma, Boltanski’s
photos originate from a copy. When one views Bourke-White’s photos, the fate of the
victim is known, whereas the fate of the children in Monument: The Children of Dijon
remains unknown. The history of the photograph by Boltanski remains vague,
incorporated in a fictional account, whereas Bourke-White’s images document the
aftermath of an actual traumatic event.
The Postmemory Response: The Object as Art
The Holocaust photo emits a “pastness” that the second-generation survivor attempts
to recapture in their artistic oeuvre. Similar to Boltanski, Art Spiegelman, graphic author
of Maus I and Maus II and second-generation survivor, argues the location of the photo in
the space of the post-Holocaust era:
The power of photographs…lie not in their evocation of memory…but in their status as fragments of a history we cannot assimilate; Thus the past can only remain, only its fragments can be assimilated in various forms of the present.59
59 Hirsch, Family Frames, 40. 33
Figure 5: Margaret Bourke-White, Buchenwald, black and white photograph, 1945
According to Spiegelman, the past can only be achieved through postmemory
representation. In Maus, Spiegelman details the story of his parents, namely his father’s
experience during the Holocaust [figure 6]. He strategically appropriates photos from the
Holocaust and redraws the images through his own adoption of imagery using the
personification of the mouse as a symbol of the Jew.60 The photos, when placed in the
60 Andreas Huyssen, “From Of Mice and Mimesis: Reading Speigelman with Adorno,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 24-25. Note: In Maus, the personification of animals is used by Spiegelman to show stereotypes. Jews are represented by the mice, typically associated with filth and vile. Cats symbolize the Nazis; Dogs personify the Americans, Frogs as the French, etc. 34
context of his father’s story, embody Hartman’s notion of “witness by adoption.”61 Since
Spiegelman remembers Auschwitz from his father’s stories and photographs of the camps published after the war, he can only simulate the experience through postmemory.
Through the process of repetition, the fragments appropriate into the postmemory of the author and the viewer. No longer are the memories of Spiegelman’s father personal, they become collective.
In the series Maus, Spiegelman juxtaposes drawings and photos with text, however many second-generation artists working with the photographic object choose to present the photo as an autonomous form. Hirsch points out the prominence of the Holocaust photo, namely in the Tower of Faces at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C [figure 7].62 Similar to Monument: The Children of Dijon by
Boltanski who uses the photo to create a unified experience, the Tower of Faces confronts the photo as a collective whole. The hall in which the Tower of Faces occupies oscillates between the second and fourth floors of the USHMM. Photos cover the walls from floor to ceiling, organized in random chaos and situated with no chronology or
61 Huyssen, Of Mice and Mimesis, 25. 62 Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 668-670. 35
Figure 6: Art Spiegelman, cover from Maus II
36
Figure 7: Yitzhak Uri Katz and various unknown, Tower of Faces at the USHMM, black and white and color photographs, multiple dates
37
methodology.63 The photos depict familial scenes of picnics, birthdays, weddings, and
seasonal outings. The faces of the persons depicted represent a pre-war era of communal abundance and prosperity. Viewers gaze upon the faces, noting the common link between the photos and their own familial experiences at summer picnics and birthday parties. The identification and shared experiences result in the bridge between survivor images and the postmemory of the viewer. 64
Upon closer inspection of the Tower of Faces, it becomes evident that the images
were gathered from the town of Ejszyzski, Lithuania, a predominantly Jewish settlement.
Resident and town photographer Yitzhak Uri Katz and his wife Alte Katz shot the
photographs prior to the deportation and liquidation of the town’s Jews.65 His
granddaughter Yaffa Eliach Shtetl compiled the remaining photographs for the
USHMM.66 The Yaffa Eliach Shtetl Collection serves as an archive for Ejszyzski and
remains on permanent display at the museum.67 Hirsch writes of the images and their
setting within the space of the USHMM:
…we respond with horror, even before looking at the caption and knowing the context of the image. Knowing the context increases the horror, as we add to the bodies, or the hair of the shows depicted, all these other we know about but that are not in the picture of are unrecognizable…it is precisely the displacement of the bodies depicted in the pictures of horrors from the domestic setting and their disfiguration, that brings home (as it were) the enormity of the Holocaust destruction.68
The “bringing home” of the image to the space of the post-generation viewer provokes a
response of horror and trepidation. The images resemble a general activity practiced by
63 Ibid., 670. 64 Ibid., 664. 65 Ibid., 669. 66 Ibid., 669. 67 Ibid., 664. 68 Ibid., 666-667. 38
all, in a shared environment. The response from the viewer to the image connects the past
to the present. The familiarity of the activity connects the image and the viewer, expanding the “circle of memory to postmemory.”69 The Tower of Faces represents a
trend utilized by a number of artists who are second-generation survivors. Artists like
Boltanski and Spiegelman use the photograph and the manipulation of the photo in various contexts as a means to expound the connection of memory to postmemory. In the works of artists emerging out of the second-generation, the use of the photograph in the
space of postmemory subverts the typical methods of examining and appropriating
images of atrocity. Much like the Tower of Faces at the USHMM the photo becomes a mechanism for collective response, namely for those born after the trauma of the
Holocaust.
69Ibid., 670. 39
CHAPTER II: THE POST-WAR AESTHETIC: “ART AFTER AUSCHWITZ”
“The role and the aim of an artist is to disappear. The I no longer exists. It is only a collective image, only the reflection of the desire of other people. He who has made this image where other people recognize themselves no longer exists. The artist is like someone who underlines a work in a piece of writing and indicates in this way a reality that everyone has within them. Is this reality universal or cultural? There are universal forms that are outside cultural. There are collective subjects like death, the search for God or birth, but in certain details things cannot be recognized by other cultures.”
– Christian Boltanski
The second-generation’s indirect connection to the trauma of the camps creates a difficult task for the primary-generation in terms of how trauma can be represented.
Artists and writers who survived the trauma of the Holocaust are confronted with the task of choosing how and when to represent the atrocities of death and destruction in their
works. Numerous scholars, artists, and writers who survived the events of the war and
oppression under the Nazi regime forged a dialogue concerning the affects of post-war representation. The primary generation of survivors and witnesses established the arduous task of parlaying their experiences into paintings, poetry, and theoretical discourse. Chapter one sought to establish the dialogue of postmemory in the era after the
Holocaust. Second-generation artists living through postmemory took guidance in the works of the primary generation who broke the silence commonly associated with the traumatic memory of Holocaust survivors and witnesses.
The goal of this chapter is to argue the problem with post-war representation.
Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg’s arguments concerning post-war art will be challenged by Paul Celan and Joseph Beuys’ literary and visual oeuvres. Prior to his inception as a post-war artist, Christian Boltanski was influenced by the visual 40
installations of Beuys, rejecting Adorno’s post-war discourse in the process.70 Though
Adorno never personally acquainted himself with Boltanski, his work nonetheless served
as a source of reference for Boltanski’s visual oeuvres.71 Adorno’s statement about poetry and art after Auschwitz creates a dialogue concerning the use of visual and literary works after the Holocaust, namely the use of journals, personal testimonies, and diaries as acceptable forms of representation.72
The first part of chapter two will introduce Adorno and Greenberg’s arguments
about “art after Auschwitz” and the controversial poem, “Todesfuge” by Paul Celan.73
Adorno argued that artists and writers who utilized the Holocaust and themes based on the Holocaust should feel “guilt from beauty” in the representation of trauma in their works.74 He feared the sacred space of silence would rupture under the visual and literary
works of artists and writers who sought to abuse the pain and trauma of the Holocaust.
Cultural exploitation of the trauma involved in the memory and experience of the
survivor proved too sacred for representation according to Adorno.75 Thus, the creation of
“art after Auschwitz” carried an emotional challenge of figuring out a way to depict
beauty in the aftermath of the Holocaust.
Adorno’s claim impacted the realm of the visual and literary arts for decades,
challenging artist and writers to figure out methods of conveying the traumatic experience of the Holocaust. Many artists and writers sought to debunk Adorno, claiming
70 Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans, “Impossible Self-Representation,” Image and Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, (July 2006), http://www.imageandnarrative.be/painting/kasia_ruchel.htm 71 Ibid., 19. 72 Ibid., 18-19. 73 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer,17 74 Brett Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 21-22. Kaplan furthered Adorno argument in Unwanted Beauty by claiming that in Negative Dialectics, Adorno reversed his claim and “lifted his original ban on poetry after Auschwitz.” 75 Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, 21, 41
that trauma can be represented by beauty. By acknowledging the theoretical response
against the visual and literal arts after the Holocaust, the second part of chapter two will
investigate the visual works of Joseph Beuys and his status as a former Nazi youth
member. Beuys status as a perpetrator remains unique amongst the post-war society of
artists and writers coping with the events of the Holocaust. Respectively, Beuys
experience with the Holocaust presents a different perspective when compared to the
hardships of the survivor. His status as a perpetrator articulates a unique sense of trauma
and loss evident in his performance and installation works. Beuys rejected Adorno’s
discourse concerning the production of aesthetic works “after Auschwitz,” elevating the
status of post-war art to the mainstream.
The Post-War Aesthetic: Adorno and Celan
The Nachgeborenen community of post-war survivors, perpetrators, and witnesses
infiltrated the visual, literary, and performing arts following the disbandment of National
Socialism in Germany by 1944.76 Though Adolf Hitler’s suicide and the remains of the
Waffen-Schutzstaffel (SS unit) disbanded, anti-Semitism continued throughout France and
latter Europe during the immediate years after the war. Those associated with the Nazi
regime and the Nazi-allied Vichy governments were banished into exile or sentenced to
death.77 In France, Jews that had fled the occupied–zone into allied territory returned
home to ravaged property or homes occupied by former-Vichy families. French residents
blamed the Jewish population for the deaths of thousands of soldiers and civilians,
76 Gumpert, Chrisitan Boltanski, 54. 77 Susan Zuccotti, “From Surviving the Holocaust: The Situation in France,” in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998), 494-495. Former WWI French hero and Vichy President Philippe Petain was sentenced to death by the War Tribunal, however Petain was pardoned by Intern Prime Minister Charles de Gaulle after his trial. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he died in 1951 of heart failure at the age of 95. 42
creating animosity for years after the war. Many Europeans remained silent, attempting to
forget their experiences, however many found art and literature as an outlet for expounding memories of anguish and pain.78 Theodor Adorno, a writer, composer, and critic from Germany, initially argued against literature coming out of the Holocaust. He stated, “after Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric.”79 Along with Max Horkheimer,
Adorno argued in Dialectic of the Enlightenment the relationship between barbarianism
and modernism as a concept evident in post-war representations of the Holocaust.80 They claimed the influx of mass, social domination within the era of modernity caused a role reversal within society. 81 National Socialism replaced capitalism and consumerism as the dominant form of social order. The Nazi Party created an oppressed and chaotic regime, leading to the barbaric oppression of the Jews and other minority members of society.82
The atrocities committed by the Nazis impacted Adorno’s idea concerning the representation of images and text after the Holocaust. He disputed the notion of creating beauty from barbaric displays of intolerance:
When it [the Holocaust] is turned into an image…, for all its harshness and discordance it is as though the embarrassment one feels before the victims were being violated. The victims are turned into works of art, tossed out to be gobbled up by the world that did them in. The so-called artistic rendering of the naked physical pain of those who were beaten down with butts contains, however distantly, the possibilities that pleasure can be squeezed from it…83
78 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 17 79 Ibid., 17. Adorno eventually dismissed the statement and argued that you can in fact represent atrocity, however restrictions to representation after Auschwitz remain limited to the ego-personal and documentary arts. 80 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “From Elements of Anti-Semitism: Limits of Enlightenment,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 142-149; 152. 81 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 142-150; 152. 82 Ibid., 142-148. 83 Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History, 18. 43
This ‘harshness’ described by Adorno appears habitually within the catalogue of post-
Holocaust authors. Artists and writers working within the post-Holocaust era constantly
challenge aesthetic representation within their art pieces and literary work, namely those
confounded with the stigma of confronting the totalitarianism of the former Nazi regime.
Paul Celan, a poet and Romanian Jew, disagreed with Adorno’s theory about post-
Holocaust representation.84 His relationship, unlike Christian Boltanski, was based on a direct dialogue with Adorno concerning his use of poetry after Auschwitz. His poem,
“Todesfuge” (“Fugue of Death”) published in 1945 and translated by modernist critic
Clement Greenberg in 1955 in the Jewish journal Commentary, expressed the trauma of the Holocaust with unashamed beauty.85 Celan attempts to make a connection with the
listener, expounding the experiences of the Holocaust and creation of post-war aesthetics.
The animosity and aggression towards the Jewish population of post-war Europe
occupied Greenberg’s personal convictions about his own Jewish heritage.86 Greenberg
argued, “it is more than time that we all begin to make a real effort to digest the fact of
Auschwitz psychologically.”87 The time in which to “digest Auschwitz” remained a controversial issue for Greenberg, a synchronic event waiting to confront the psyche of the witness and survivor.
Though Greenberg’s translation did not appear until 1955, “Todesfuge” was available in 1951, first appearing in Celan’s native German language.88 Adorno initially
84 Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, 22. Note: Celan had a unique relationship with Heidegger, whose former Nazi affiliation caused controversy. In terms of the post-Holocaust memory, victim-perpetrator relationships often symbolized a binary opposition; Celan and Heidegger’s relationship fascinated and angered many Holocaust survivors, whom viewed their friendship as blasphemous. 85 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 74. Greenberg chose to translate “Todesfuge” in the wake of Jewish literary reviews he critiqued during the 1950s. 86 Godfrey, Abstraction, 16. 87 Ibid., 16-17. 88 Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, 23. 44
rejected the poem, stating the events of the Holocaust cannot be represented, especially
through aesthetics and poetry.89 The English translation of the poem by Greenberg reads:
Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night we drink it and we drink it we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete he writes it and walks from the house the stars glitter he whistles his dogs up he whistles his Jews out and orders a grave to be dug in the earth he commands us strike up for the dance
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink in the mornings at noon we drink you at nightfall we drink you and we drink you A man in the house he plays with the serpents he writes he writes when the night falls to Germany your golden hair Margarete Your ashen hair Shulamith we are digging a grave in the sky it is ample to lie there
He shouts stab deeper in earth you there and you others you sing and you play he grabs at the iron in his belt and swings it and blue are his eyes stab deeper your spades you there and you others play on for the dancing Black milk of daybreak we drink you at nightfall we drink you at noon in the mornings we drink you at nightfall drink you and drink you a man in the house your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents
He shouts play sweeter death's music death comes as a master from Germany he shouts stroke darker the strings and as smoke you shall climb to the sky then you'll have a grave in the clouds it is ample to lie there
Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night we drink you at noon death comes as a master from Germany we drink you at nightfall and morning we drink you and drink you a master from Germany death comes with eyes that are blue with a bullet of lead he will hit in the mark he will hit you a man in the house your golden hair Margarete he hunts us down with his dogs in the sky he gives us a grave
89 Ibid., 23. 45
he plays with the serpents and dreams death comes as a master from Germany
your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith.90
The poem, written after the liberation of Auschwitz, presents two female characters,
Margarete and Shulamith, the former, a representation of feminine, German beauty and the latter, a reference to the Jewish temptress.91 The poem begins by referencing the
“Mann” who orders the Jews to dig graves in the morning sun, while he “writes to the
Germany your Golden hair Margarete.”92 “Celan references Margarete with her “Golden
hair” as the Aryan beauty of the Nazi female prototype. Shulamith, the “ashen hair”
counterpart to Margarete, symbolizes the Jews in the second stanza of the poem.93 The relationship between the victim (Shulamith) and the perpetrator (Margarete) establishes the binary between death and life. The “Mann” demands the graves dug deeper as the
“dance” intensifies, which refers to the act of dying. Shulamith’s hair, “ashen” from the concentration camp crematoriums “dies” while Margate’s hair “survives.”94
The third stanza of the poem takes an unexpected turn, by melding both women into one. The figure of Shulamith becomes one with the serpents, a metaphor for temptation.
Margarete and her “Golden hair” merge with the “Mann,” intertwining the perpetrator
and the victim, Shulamith. Lisa Saltzman argues that the connection between the
Shulamith and Margarete is “sensualized,” by the “mixture of sensuality and death.95 By
the fourth stanza, the fate of the two women becomes evident. The Germans and Jews
90 Ibid., 26-31. See Appendix A for original German text. 91 Andrea Lauterwein, Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning, and Memory (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007), 87. 92 Ibid, 26-27. 93 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 82. 94 Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, 29. 95 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 30. 46
represent the struggle for life/domination and death/submission. Celan’s unabashed use
of beauty and sensuality caused many people to reject his work as a defamation of
Holocaust remembrance and respect.
Adorno called the poem, “too metaphorical…too beautiful to confront history.”96
The poem reinforces Adorno’s claim about invading the sacred space of the survivor.
Celan’s poem confronts the atrocity of death with fluid clarity and succinct language. It forces the reader, specifically the German audience, to confront the traumatic history of their past and to realize the memory of the Shoah through collective and personal experience.97 Like the majority of Jews during the Holocaust, Celan experienced the ruthless atrocities of the Nazi regime. Celan’s parents lost their lives after a mandatory deportation from the Czernowitz ghetto in Transnistria, Romania. The guilt over his parents’ death and the inability to save his mother haunted Celan throughout his whole life and served as the inspiration behind “Todesfuge.”98 Celan committed suicide
eventually, overcome by survivor guilt and the pains of the Holocaust.99
Clement Greenberg espoused the poem’s message, namely the role of the Jewish
female victim and German female perpetrator. 100 History, according to Greenberg, could
not be represented in painting, therefore Celan’s poem serves as a space for articulating
experience and memory. Greenberg viewed Celan’s poem as a realization of the
victimization of the “Jewish psyche” in terms of its content.101 He argued that, “the Jews
96 Eric Kilgerman, “From Reframing Celan in the Painting of Anselm Kiefer,” in Visual Culture in Twentieth Century Germany: Text as a Spectacle, ed. by Gail Finney (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 269. 97 Kilgerman, “From Reframing Celan” 269. 98 Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, 24. 99 Michael Auping, Anselm Kiefer: Heaven and Earth (Fort Worth: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 2005), 36-37. 100 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer,78-79. 101 Godfrey, Abstraction, 16. 47
were unable to live at ease with their Jewishness” stemming from the inability to move past the camps.102 To Greenberg, the poem validated the suffering experienced from the
camps and suppressed the ability of the Jews to the move past Auschwitz. 103
Post-War and Kitsch
During the time of Adorno and Greenberg’s criticism of Celan’s poem, Avant-Garde
and Kitsch by Greenberg was published in Partisan Review. For Celan, Avant-Garde and
Kitsch realized the fear of commodifing the trauma of the Holocaust by simulating Nazi atrocity and Jewish suffering. Greenberg furthered the notion of how the “avant-garde” functions within climates of change and revolution.104” Adorno agreed with Greenberg’s
notion that capitalism, deterioration of consumer judgment in the visual arts, and the
failure of the Ecoles added to the construction of “kitsch,” which nonetheless configured
the value of revolution in the visual avant-garde. The violence expounded during the
Holocaust generated a revolutionary change in the global development of the visual arts.
Adorno agreed with Greenberg’s stance on “kitsch” and the problem with standardizing
and exploiting the cultural arts.105 According to Adorno, the problem with “post-war
kitsch was as follows:
In both art and kitsch, ‘freedom from nature is celebrated yet remains mythically entrapped’- not overcome but seemingly so. Kitsch lavishly relishes imitation; art hides the fact but utterly depends on it. Art separates itself from nature as absolutely as possible, though without succeeding: its proclaimed made-ness defines the very nature of the dominant subject who, by making, overcomes nature.106
102 Ibid., 16. 103 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer,78-79., 23. 104 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3; 18-21. Avant-Garde and Kitsch by Greenberg was originally published in 1939, becoming popular nearly a decade later. 105 Richard Leppert, “From Commentary,” in Essays on Music, ed. Theodor Adorno, Richard D. Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), 363-364. 106 Ibid, 363-364. 48
For Adorno, kitsch presented the opportunity to parody consumerist markets and the
aesthetic hierarchy of the arts.107 The later works of Joseph Beuys and Christian
Boltanski utilize kitsch as a form of parody in the post-Holocaust aesthetic.108 Boltanski’s
work, like Beuys, utilizes nostalgia as a mechanism for representing the Holocaust.109
In the one of Boltanski’s early series, Photographic Compositions (1977), the use of consumer-based objects confront the viewer [figure 8]. The series consisted of childhood toys, puppets, dolls, and blocks, photographed in color. 110 The color of the toys against
the black background enriched the boldness and clarity of the objects presented. The photographs, enlarged and placed generically on the wall, exhibited at the Sonnabend
Gallery in New York City. Boltanski stated the reason for using toys in the piece:
The toys [used in Compositions] interest me in that they are a cultural representation of reality…I hope that my Compositions play the same role for the spectator that toys do for children: codified and collective images of realty.111
Boltanski’s use of the toys as kitsch served as space for cultural and social significance.
He stated that, “taste, in other words, is variable and culturally determined,” meaning that
the space of kitsch remains socially relevant.112 Toys, lamps, boxes, and dolls serve as the
main media forms in Boltanski’s works, items that Greenberg negatively labeled as
107 Ibid., 363-365. 108 Liss, Trespassing, 49. 109 Michael Newman, “From Suffering from reminisces,” in Postmodernism and the Re-Reading of Modernity, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 105-106. 110 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 67;70. 111 Ibid.,70. 112 Ibid.,74. 49
Figure 8: Christian Boltanski, Photographic Compositions, color photographs mounted on board, 1977
50
kitsch.113 Boltanski viewed the “investigation” of kitsch as a necessary practice for
conveying collective experiences within postmemory. The potential of the object as an
agent for recognition by the viewer creates a space for personal and collective memory, a
concept utilized in Boltanski’s later, postmemory installations. Objects classified as
kitsch serve to heal through the collective act of remembering.
The Myth of Joseph Beuys
For Boltanski, the works of Joseph Beuys serves as the superlative example of the
post-war aesthetic.114 Beuys lived through the events of the Holocaust, thus utilizing the
space of his direct memory versus the space of postmemory enacted by Boltanski. Beuys,
often attributed with being the first German artist to represent the Holocaust in his works,
utilized his personal experiences during World War II as a source for inspiration in his
performance works.115 A former member of the Hitler Youth, Beuys often referred to the
events of his childhood as, “everyone went to church, and everyone went into the Hitler
Youth.”116 During the post-war years, he confronted his involvement in the war by
reflecting events and scenarios from his experiences as a German soldier.117 According to
Lisa Saltzman,
“…the belated aesthetic confrontation with traumatic national history, begun by Beuys in 1955, is essentially a belated experiencing of his own traumatic history, whereas the [second generation] of artists, authors and filmmakers, that history can be confronted, but never reclaimed, as a primary experience.”118
113 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,”17-22. 114 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 13. 115 Auping, Anselm Kiefer, 31. 116 117 Joan Rothfuss, Joseph Beuys, http://www.walkerart.org/archive/4/9C43FDAD069C47F36167.htm. 118 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 15. 51
The experiences of Beuys during World War II parlayed into his installation works in the
1950s and 1960s, namely his confrontation with Auschwitz. In Auschwitz Demonstration
1956-64, (1968) Beuys sought to debunk the traditional space of the monument and instead use abstraction as a way to expound his critique of trauma [figure 9] .119
Auschwitz Demonstration was originally entered in an Auschwitz Memorial competition in which hundreds of artists submitted material and exhibited at the Hessisches
Landesmuseum in Germany.120 Auschwitz Demonstration comprised small items,
including sketches of emaciated women, tallow, wires, maps of railroad tracks to death
camps, and clay figures placed within a vitrine [figure 10] . 121 The piece was meant to
imply a sense of loss, trauma, and universal suffering. To Beuys, Auschwitz
Demonstration “universalized Auschwitz, to suggest that the human condition is
Auschwitz.”122 The specificity of trauma was a universal experience. Thus, effects of
trauma could transcend temporal and spatial bounds confronting post-generations.
By the early 1960s, Beuys resided in Dusseldorf and aquatinted himself with Nam
June Paik and the Fluxus group.123 His passion for performing enriched his reputation as
a public activist and teacher. Beuys often toured solo or with Fluxus to promote his
“messianic teaching style and shamanistic performances [figure 11].”124 He lectured
about the “need for conscious creativity…and the need to transcend social conditioning,”
using performance and speech as a teaching device.125 He challenged the binaries of
119 Ibid, 13. Beuys piece subverts traditional notions of the memorial, insinuating a transition to the counter-monument era of the 1970s and 1980s. 120 Ibid, 13-14. 121 Ibid, 13-14. 122 Ibid, 13. 123 Rothfuss, Joseph Beuys, http://www.walkerart.org/archive/4/9C43FDAD069C47F36167.htm. 124 Brandon Taylor, Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970 (New Jersey: Pearson-Prentice Hall, 2005), 42. 125 Taylor, Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970, 42. 52
Figure 9: Joseph Beuys, Auschwitz Demonstration 1956-64, vitrine with sculptures and objects, 1968
Figure 10: Joseph Beuys, detail Auschwitz Demonstration 1956-64, vitrine with sculptures and objects, 1968
53
Figure 11: Photograph of a performance by Joseph Beuys, 1969
54
acceptance and denial, often through his performance art pieces.126 Beuys partnership in
the group Fluxus gave him an outlet to portray his proverbial “myth of the artist” persona
later adopted by Boltanski.127 Beuys “pronounced a virtual moratorium on painting,”
using installation and mixed media to satisfy his performance-driven works.128 Beuys denial of painting and his reaction to the formal space of the Ecoles infiltrated Boltanski’s early methodological process. Boltanski admits, “I think what was important was the example, that he [Beuys] gives. The facts don't count.”129
Boltanski first met Beuys in 1972 during the Documenta 5 exhibition entitled
“Questioning Reality-Image Worlds Today,” in Kassel, Germany [figure 12].130 The
event, organized by famed curator Harald Szeemann, focused on the role of the spectacle
in society and contemporary culture.131 Works by Marcel Broodhaer, Edward Ruscha,
Vitto Acconci, Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Boltanski, Beuys, and hundreds of other
artists graced the Documenta roster. For the artists participating, the premise of their
work focused on the reality of contemporary society and the pictorial image. The show’s
premise was to debunk the realist mode of representation and to present other ways of
seeing and understanding conceptual art. Beuys performed a one-hundred day debate at
126 Auping, Anselm Kiefer, 31. Note: Beuys was part of the Fluxus group in the 1960’s and continued to expound social and political themes in his work until his death in 1986. 127 Taylor, Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970, 11. 128 Ibid, 11. 129Katarzyna Ruchel-Stockmans, “Impossible Self-Representation,” http://www.imageandnarrative.be/ painting/kasia_ruchel.htm 130 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 45-46. The 1972 exhibition catalogue was organized in a 3-ring binder and pages could be added or subtracted. The reader can open the book to any random page and browse accordingly. Though the catalogue is organized to be functional, the metal spirals make it nearly impossible to open. 131 Roberta Smith, “Documenta 5,” New York Times, September 7, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/07/arts/design/07gall.html?pagewanted=1&_r=3. 55
Figure 12: Photograph from Documenta 5
56
the event under the Organization for Direct Democracy political campaign.132 The ODD
began as a radical platform for debate against the conservative, capitalist political agenda
of the West German government. The radical autobiographical statements debated by
Beuys impacted the way in which Boltanski confronted his early work; “Boltanski’s
methodical self-mythologizing embellished and enhanced by (pseudo)autobiographical
anecdotes, mirrored Beuys' own tactics.”133
Beuys “myth” and his confrontation with post-war trauma culminated in the 1970s
with I Like America and America Likes Me, an installation piece exhibited in 1974 [figure
13] . The premise of the piece was based on an experience during World War II in which
Beuys’ plane crashed in Crimea. He claimed to be rescued by Tartars, who dressed him
in fat and felt to keep him insulated from the cold and to heal his wounds.134 The piece
encompassed Beuys’ “myth of the artist” utilizing poetics and mythic biography, rather
than factual experience. For the performance Beuys flew into New York City and
wrapped his body in fat and felt en-route to the Rene Block Gallery in SOHO.135 Once in the space of the gallery, Beuys situated himself amongst piles of hay, gloves, a flashlight, a triangle instrument, editions of the Wall Street Journal, and a hooked herders cane used to entice a live roaming coyote [figure 14].136 For three days, Beuys lived within the
space of the Rene Block Gallery. Everyday, he struck the triangle which caused a remote
recording of a “loud engine noise” to infiltrate the gallery space.137 Beuys remained
hidden under the felt, only allowing the top of his herders cane to peak through. He
132 Smith, “Documenta 5,” http://www.nytimes.com. 133 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 45-46 134 Rothfuss, Joseph Beuys, http://www.walkerart.org/archive/4/9C43FDAD069C47F36167.htm. 135 Taylor, Contemporary Art: Art Since 1970, 42. 136 Ibid., 42. 137 Ibid., 42. 57
Figure 13: Joseph Beuys, photographic still from I Like America and America Likes Me (Coyote), performance, 1974
Figure 14: Joseph Beuys, photographic still I Like America and America Likes Me (Coyote), performance, 1974 58
assumed the role of a “human sculpture,” moving in tune to the coyote that snipped and
tugged at the felt around his body.138
In I Like America and America Likes Me, Beuys invoked his method of radical politics to expound the degradation of capitalist culture.139 The use of the coyote, often
attributed with Native American spiritualism, signified the annihilation of the Native
American civilization by the white, Anglo-Saxon Europeans. 140 Beuys sought to evoke a spiritual experience for the viewer through the use of visual and aural media. His movements and the exact timing of the triangle during the three days of performance created a ritualistic method of confronting the trauma of loss for the Native Americans.
Similar to Auschwitz Demonstration, the site of memory shifts according to the experience desired. The use of personal and collective viewership resonates within the work of Beuys, both through the use of his body and through the use of found-objects.
Adorno and Beuys
To Beuys, the use of his body in I Like America and America Likes Me subverts post- war aesthetic theory by Adorno. Beuys “declared that the artist’s body needed to be healed by means of ritual performance, by surrounding and infesting the body with base materials.”141 In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer suggested that the
body was a casualty of consumerism in the post-War era.
Horkheimer and Adorno believed that "the body had been maimed" by the official state narratives of industrialized countries and that this repression
138 Ibid., 42-43. 139 Rothfuss, Joseph Beuys, http://www.walkerart.org/archive/4/9C43FDAD069C47F36167.htm. Beuys political platform within the German Student Party, The Organization of Nonvoters Free Referendum, and the Organization for Direct Democracy appeared throughout his performance lectures. He dismissed mass consumerism and sought to “resurrect society as a whole.” He believed art could rupture the conservative, capitalist regimes in Europe and the US during the 1960s and 1970s. 140 Ibid. 141 Katrien Jacobs, Performance Art Statement on Vietnam Coyote Speaks in New York City, May 1974, http://www.libidot.org/v2/articles/beuys-print.html. 59
had helped produce the event of Fascism. They equally believed that the artist's body continued to be effaced and maimed in mechanized production processes of consumerist art and pop culture.142
Beuys’ confrontation of Adorno's argument and his subsequent embracement of the body
challenged the way in which the post-war aesthetic confronts trauma, history, and
postmemory.
Beuys promotion of “anthropological art” and his rejection of modern art
confronted the claims made by Adorno and Greenberg in the decades prior. According to
Beuys, “the period of modern art ended in Germany with the beginning of the Hitler
era.”143 He sought to incorporate all aspects of social life as part of the artistic or
“aesthetic involvement” of the artist.144 Performance elevated aesthetic involvement through the use of the body and material deemed “kitsch” by Adorno and Greenberg. For
Beuys, the role of the artist remained limitless:
Man really is not free in many respects. He is dependant on his social circumstances, but he is free in his thinking…My theory depends on the fact that that every human being is an artist. I have to encounter him when he is free, when he is thinking.145
Adorno’s claim that the "the body had been maimed” by the political repression and
industrialization, appears in tension with Beuys. Beuys sought to teach the method of
living through the body as a source of artistic and political expression. The “art after
Auschwitz” statement by Adorno lapsed in the wake of Beuys, expounding the mythic
142 Jacobs, Performance Art Statement, http://www.libidot.org/v2/articles/beuys-print.html. 143 Nicolas Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1993), 60. 144 Zurbrugg, The Parameters of Postmodernism, 60-61. 145 Ibid., 61. 60
persona of the artist evident in the later works of his contemporary, Christian
Boltanski.146
146 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 17. 61
CHAPTER III: THE EARLY YEARS OF BOLTANSKI
“It is very important for an artist to come from somewhere, to have a history, a “village”, but this history must tend towards the universal. In my case, it is that I was born right at the end of the war, that as a child practically the only thing I heard people talk about was the Shoah, and that all the friends of my relations were survivors, which formed me. I didn’t experience all this directly, but I did suffer the consequences, like the fear of the outside, the idea of danger, the thing to hide, of being proud of something while at the same time contemplating its danger.”
– Christian Boltanski
The statement by Boltanski confronts his status within the second-generation of
Holocaust survivors. The “consequences” and the “fear” of living outside trauma and
atrocity repeatedly appear throughout the visual oeuvres of Boltanski. He attempts to
cope with the memory and experience of the primary generation of Holocaust victims.
Boltanski lives within the space of postmemory discourse, relying on the memory and
experience of the survivor as a means for confronting personal and collective trauma. As
Beuys utilized performance and mixed-media installation to expound the trauma of racial
and political oppression, Boltanski incorporates similar methods in his work confronting
trauma and memory. The use of found objects, appropriated materials, and reused photographs construct the space of Boltanski’s installations, redefining the objects’ agency through the use of personal and collective memory.
On January 11, 1970, Christian Boltanski mailed sixty letters to random homes
throughout Paris. The content of the letter alluded to his depression, insinuating his intent
to “do away with himself” as a final cry before he took his own life. Out of the sixty
letters sent, five people responded recommending he rethink his decision to end his life and work through his problems as a failed artist. The letters, unbeknownst to the credulous participants, corresponded with a series of mail-performance pieces Boltanski 62
sent between 1969 and 1970.147 Lettre manuscrite demandant de l’aide, (Handwritten
letters asking for helping), captured Boltanski’s fascination with death and the trivial
angst of youth [figure 15]. In typical Boltanski form, he merged the binaries of life and
death, truth and obscurity for the sake of confrontation and conflict. He argued that his
Lettre manuscrite series channeled the conflicting perceptions of reality he felt as a
young, self-trained artist, perhaps saving him from the inevitable burden of mortality:
..If I hadn’t been an artist, I would have jumped out the window. But since I’m a painter, I wrote sixty of them, that is the same one sixty times, and told myself, ‘What a good piece and what a fine reflection on the relationship between art and life!’…When you want to kill yourself, you make a portrait of yourself in the process of committing suicide, but you don’t actually do it.148
By exposing the recipients of the letters with his emotional adversity, he no longer felt
responsible for the content. Instead, the burden fell on the unsuspecting reader, the
innocent victim.149 Through the transference of emotion, Boltanski lost a part of himself,
appropriated by the victimized recipient of his letter. Through this appropriation of the
letter, the burden was transferred inviting death and subversion into the space of the
reader.150
Lettre manuscrite represents the move from memory to postmemory in terms of
emotional transition. Similar to the testimony of Holocaust survivors, Boltanski’s letter
creates a dialogue about a traumatic experience. The letter informs the reader about an
event from his past that impacted his life and artistic works. The private space of
Boltanski’s self transfers to the space of the other or the outside reader. The reader
147 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 54. 148 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 9. 149 Ibid, 10. 150 Mary Jane Jacob, introduction to Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, ed. Howard Singerman (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), 10. 63
Figure 15: Christian Boltanski, Lettre manuscrite demandant de l’aide, (Handwritten letters asking for helping), ink on paper, 1969-1970
64
becomes aware of Boltanski’s past through the testimony in his letter. This process of
transferring an experience simulates the way in which memory transitions to
postmemory. Boltanski’s mail performance piece serves to represent the original site of
trauma. The reader simulates the postmemory experience of the second-generation
Holocaust survivor, who relies on the primary survivor for remembering the original site
of trauma.
Lettre manuscrite announces a personal message by Boltanski, enticing the reader
into his private space. Lettre manuscrite was his earliest piece to confront the themes of death and psychological angst, subjects that frequently emerge throughout his oeuvres.151
Matthias Winzen details Boltanski’s choice to incorporate the themes of life and death in
his work:
If death of the individual is recognized (as a subliminal motivating force), then the character of collecting changes. The artists do not battle or deny death, rather it becomes integrated into their works. It symbolizes the fear of one’s own death.152
Boltanski’s fascination with salvaging old projects from his earlier oeuvres alludes to his obsession with preserving his familial heritage and warding off the inevitable façade of mortality. To Boltanski, the obsession with preserving his personal and familial history lies in his internal struggle to cope with his family’s connection to the Jewish Holocaust during World War II. Lettre manuscrite resonates between the innocence lost from his youth caused by the ramifications of the Holocaust and his struggle as an amateur artist.
Boltanski’s depression was an act of personal performativity via the letter and also a
151 Didier Semin, “From Survey: Boltanski: From the Impossible Life to the Exemplary Life,” in Christian Boltanski, ed. Tamar Garb, Didier Semin, Donald Kuspit (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 1997), 46-47. 152 Matthias Winzen, “From Collecting-so normal, so paradoxical,” in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1998), 31. 65
collective statement about the function of post-Holocaust art and aesthetics during the
early 1970s.
The diversity of Boltanski’s artistic methodology often confronts his audience with
opposing sensations of child-like bliss and depressing mortality. For instance,
Photographic Compositions presents the viewer with images of toys and dolls, commonly
associated with childhood innocence. Conversely, Lettre manuscrite confronts the
viewer with a depressing sense of loss and failure. His work, though aloof and often
contradictory, centers on mnemonic events involving the process of life and death. The
post-World War II era for Boltanski impacted his visual and textual oeuvres, confronting
his personal response to the trauma of the Holocaust. The first part of chapter three
invites the reader to examine the formation of Boltanski’s early works in the late 1960s
and 1970s by presenting a variety of installations based on the post-World War II era and
anti-Semitism in Europe. Boltanski’s place as a second-generation survivor living
through postmemory culminates through self-introspection and personal realization of his
familial connection to the Holocaust. The second part of chapter three will discuss the
polticalscape of 1960s France and the effects of social and political movements on
Boltanski and his proceeding series of works. In the wake of Adorno and Beuys,
Boltanski’s agenda with formulating his methodological oeuvres relies on his relationship
to postmemory, postmodern aesthetics.
Boltanski’s Early Life: The Nachgeborenen
While Beuys and other post-war survivors/perpetrators served as the source for
postmodern transition in Europe, those born after World War II forged a new aesthetic
reaction to the preceding generation of artists and writers. Those born after, the 66
Nachgeborenen, undertook the task of having to cope with the events their parents and neighbors experienced. Born in 1944 on Liberation Day, Boltanski matured in an atmosphere scarred with the memory of Nazi hypocrisy and anti- Semitism. 153 Remnants
of Vichy-ideologies lingered throughout France, implementing racial profiling in the years after 1944. Boltanski’s father, born a Ukrainian Jew, spent the entirety of the war
hidden under the family residence protected by his Parisian mother from the Vichy
police.154 His father developed agoraphobia after the war, rarely leaving the home
unescorted until his death.155 The strains of his father’s paranoiac behavior burdened
Boltanski as a child, imposing an unconscious withdrawal from his peers at a young age.156
Though never formally educated through the Ecoles in Paris during the 1950s and
early 1960s, Boltanski nonetheless educated himself through informal lessons with post-
Vichy imagery around his home. His mother taught him practical lessons about history
and social sciences. However, by age 15 Boltanski officially dropped out of school.157
From the education he received at home and his observations of post-war Parisian society, he gained a fascination with violence, a theme visible in his early paintings. One of his earliest works, Entrée des Tures a Van (The entry of the Turks into Van), 1961, depicts a floating figure in the center of the painting with his arms surrendering to an
153 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 54: On Liberation Day in Paris, Boltanski’s father bestowed him with the middle name, “Liberte,” to commemorate the event. Though his middle name connotes the political codes of freedom, Boltanski’s family never felt fully liberated from oppression. 154Ibid.,, 54. 155 Adela Abella, “Christian Boltanski: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through in Contemporary Art,” (paper presented at the Berlin Congress 2007), 2. 156 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 54. 157 Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty. 127-128. Note: Boltanski had been truant since age 11. His mother taught him lessons throughout his adolescence until age 15. His brothers became highly educated individuals, receiving doctoral status within their respected disciplines. 67
unknown, metaphysical being [figure 16]. 158 Two figures in the lower corners enter on
the right, while figures on the upper regions enter on bicycles. A monstrous figure
provokes the scene, reminiscent of the Vichy police entering the home of the Parisian
Jews during World War II.159 The piece, like numerous other early Boltanski paintings
was a rejected entry into the Salons de Jeune Peinture.160 Discouraged by rejection,
Boltanski refused to enter exhibition searches for years, which allowed him time to contemplate his choice of media representation.
Situationist International: Guy Debord and Beyond
The 1960s proved a challenging space for political and artistic expression. While
Boltanski was beginning his early career, the polticalscape of France began to shift under
the strains of social reforms and student revolution. Angst and mistrust grew rapidly in the spaces of the university and intellectual troupes. Marxist ideology infiltrated the
French academic scene, championed by revolutionary poet and Marxist, Guy Debord
[figure 17].161 Debord grew-up in the midst of World War II and the immediate post-War
years, living through the waning era of the Surrealist movement. His membership in the
Letterist International, a breakaway sect of Isidore Isau’s Letterists, allotted him the space
to pursue Marxist politics and avant-garde cinematography, screening films centered on
minimal shapes and “meaningless poetry.”162 Poets, painters, theorists, critics, social
outcasts, and criminals represented a variety of occupations held by members of the LI.
158 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 16. 159 Ibid, 16. 160 Ibid, 17. 161 Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2005), 15. 162 Ford, The Situationist, 16. 68
Figure 16: Christian Boltanski, Entrée des Tures a Van (The entry of the Turks into Van), oil on board, 1961
69
Figure 17: Photograph of Guy Debord, date unknown
70
Notable members included Gil J. Wolman, Michele Bernstein, Eliane Brau, Serge Berna,
Rene Leibe, Pierre-Joel Berle, and Barabara Rosenthal.163 Members contributed to the
Internationale Lettriste newsletter, promoting “psycogeography and derive.”164
Psycogeography, a theory in which the effects of geography permeate the emotional
psyche of the individual, influenced the way in which the LI interacted with urban spaces.
Derive consisted of drifting and wandering through the urban space of the city, taking
note of everyday interaction between people and space of the city. The LI sought to
infiltrate the art scene through “transcendence,” using psychogeography and derive to
drift through terrain of the city.165
Though Debord left the LI by the early 1950s, he sought to reinvent the movement by forming the Situationist International.166 The role of the artist diminished according to
Debord, lost in the spectacle of consumerism and materialism. Thus, the new creed of the
SI merged the notions of Marxism and the avant-garde to form a new transcendental
school of thought. Asger Jorn, Pinot-Gallizio, Ivan Chtcheglov, Michele Bernstein, and
Piero Simondo governed the new SI roster, pulling from their theoretical, artistic, and
poetic oeuvres to manifest new ideas concerning avant-garde methods and political
activism [figure 18].167 By 1957, the SI infiltrated the Parisian avant-garde scene,
recruiting members to experiment with new intellectual mediums and to reject former
avant-gardist ideologies.168
163 Ibid., 30-31. 164 Ibid., 33. 165 Ibid., 30-33. 166 Ibid., 50-51. 167 Ibid., 51. 168 Ibid., 52. 71
Figure 18: Photograph of the SI, date unknown
72
Debord sought to elevate the status of the SI by publishing the Internationale
situationniste journal, which published articles by Jorn, Pinot-Gallizio, and
Chtcheglov.169 The journal preached revolution through anti-capitalism and liberal
freedom through creative expression. For Debord and the SI, the city was the focal point
for these ideals, especially Paris. Debord and Jorn shared a common argument in their
writings, often alluding to the failure of the “art object” and the influx of capitalist
consumerism within the space of the city. Theodor Adorno preached a similar stance in
his eristic text, Aesthetic Theory.170 Jorn, Debord, and Adorno petitioned for the radical
autonomy of the art object. Art must transcend the façade of capitalism in order to
survive in a consumer-based society. This notion resonated with Jorn, Debord, and
Adorno, however Adorno sought to glorify the art object as a “utopian” ideal, which
“realist work can transcend reification precisely through its honest self-criticism.”171 The
SI rejected Adorno’s claim, arguing the transcendence of art to an utopist space through alienation and subversion.
By the early 1960s, the SI’s presence as an international movement resulted in various sects and groups devoted to radicalizing the SI. Debord maintained his presence in the SI, eventually publishing his magnum opus, Society of the Spectacle in 1967
[figure 19]. The text comprised of 221 theses arguing the “revolutionary role of workers councils” and Hegelian and Marxist ideologies.172 Spectacle, according to Debord was a
concept devised in the early 1920s as a means to “encompass much more than the mass
media of film and television, ‘rather, it is a social relationship between people that is
169 Ibid., 56. 170 Claire Gilman, “From Asger Jorn’s Avant-Garde Archives,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004), 201. 171 Gilman, Asger Jorn’s, 201-202. 172 Ford, The Situationist, 101-102. 73
Figure 19: Guy Debord, Image still from Society of the Spectacle, film, 1973
74
mediated by images.’”173 Appearance, illusion, commodity, and alienation were attributes
of the spectacle, offering no “salvation or escape” according to Debord.174 He later
argued in retrospect to Spectacle:
Since art is dead, it has evidently become extremely easy to disguise the police as artists. When the latest imitations of a recuperated neo-Dadaism are allowed to pontificate proudly in the media, and thus also to tinker with the décor of official palaces, like court jesters to the king, it is evident that by the same process a cultural cover is guaranteed for every agent or auxiliary of the state’s networks or persuasion. Empty pseudo-museums, or pseudo-research centres on the work of nonexistent personalities, can be opened just as fast as reputations are made for journalist-cops, historian-cops, or novelist-cops.175
Accordingly, “society cannot be won ‘until individuals are directly bound to universal
history; until dialogue has taken up arms to impose its own conditions upon the
world.’”176 Debord’s argument about the failure of society to recognize the revolution of
art obstructs the way in which the spectacle exists. The text existed as a Marxist critique,
rejecting the strata of “commodity fetishization,” a component of the increasing capitalist
markets.177 A film by Debord was eventually released, sharing the Society of the
Spectacle title and alluding to the problematic nature of promoting commodity over the
value of life.
For Boltanski and the second-generation after World War II, Debord’s dialogue
concerning the “commodity fetishization” and the spectacle of consumerism affected the
methodological process of art. Boltanski states, “I think that all human activity is
173 Ibid., 102. 174 Ibid., 103. 175 Ibid., 103. 176 Ibid., 104. 177 Ibid., 102-103. 75
stupid…artistic activity is also stupid, but you can see it more clearly.”178 As Debord
criticized consumerism of society, Boltanski embraced the idea of permeating the space of the individual through dialogue. Lettre manuscrite demandant de l’aide exhibits the
way in which human interaction, though unsolicited, forces a dialogue between the unsuspecting individual and the artists. Boltanski's work forces a dialogue, whether through a personal or collective experience. Debord stated that alienation contributes to
the spectacle, however Boltanski sought to further Debord’s concept by forcing
interaction, even though the interaction appears random and threatening.179
Les evenements de mai, 1968
The SI movement had tremendous influence in Parisian intellectual and student circles by 1968. The United States Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam protests served as revolutionary ammunition for the group.180 The ‘spectacle’ diminished under
the revolt of society, thus protests in the United States inspired the SI to resort to
grassroots campaigns against the conservative capitalist space of the French government.
On The Poverty of Student Life considered in its Economical, Political, Psychological,
Sexual, and Particularly Intellectual Aspects, and a Modest Proposal for its Remedy was
published by SI member Abdelhafid Khatib to educate the student populous about the frivolous and demeaning existence of the police and religious leaders.181 The text called for students to reject a life of mediocrity and submission and to rebel against the conservative stereotypes and embrace dissidence.
178 Michele C. Cone, “From “Metro, Boulot, Dodo:” The Art of Everyday in France, 1958-1972,” in The Art of Everyday: The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 53-54. 179 Cone, “From “Metro, Boulot, Dodo,” 54. 180 Ford, The Situationist, 112. 181 Ibid., 114. 76
Larger in the scale than the anti-war rallies and civil right protests in the United
States, a mass counterculture emerged from the universities demanding social reform and
international amity. In early January and February 1968, restrictions on liberal student
protests concerning the Vietnam War and free speech ensued throughout Paris. The
Sorbonne and Nanterre College served as the focal points for student leftist activity,
eventually rallying a formidable army of 10 million protesters around France [figure
20].182 By May, French students, professionals, officials, and laborers clashed with police forces in public demonstrations protesting Vietnam and the conservative socio-political
atmosphere of the French government.183 Charles de Gaulle and Prime Minister
Pompidou deployed police units with tear gas and barricades to neutralize the crowds.184
Numbers totaled to nearly a million protestors in Paris, consuming the entire city with
police violence and riots [figure 21]. The SI’s manifesto about rebellion and revolution
against conservative society was realized through the confrontation of the students
against the capitalist regime of French conservatives:
The hierarchal pyramid had melted like a lump of sugar in the May sun. People conversed and were understood in half a word. There were no more intellectuals or workers, but simply revolutionaries engaged in dialogue, generalizing a communication from which only ‘proletarian’ intellectuals and other candidates for leadership felt themselves excluded…the streets belonged to those who were digging them up.185
182 Meier, “Les Evenements,” 53. 183 Ibid, 53-54. 184Steven Erlanger, “May 1968-A Watershed in French Life,” http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/04/29/ europe/france.php. 185 Ibid., 125. 77
Figure 20: May 1968 Protest Banner
Figure 21: Photograph of street riots from the May 1968 riots
78
The Marxist society envisioned by the SI culminated under evenements de mai. Workers,
intellectuals, and the whole of the ‘proletariat’ entertained the fantasy of artistic freedom
and critical dialogue within the streets of Paris.
By the end of May 1968 the fantasy envisioned by the SI began to wane. President de
Gaulle called an end to the protests, resulting in more revolts within the student populous.
By June, the police eventually reclaimed the Sorbonne and ended the uprisings and
dispersed the remaining crowds. Though de Gaulle claimed total success in defusing the
protesters, the implications of the movement lingered.186 The SI had achieved their
objective by revolting against the foundation of capitalism and conservative ideologies.
Though they viewed the evenements de mai as anti-climactic, they nonetheless forged an
image of defiance against the mass markets of capitalism.
1968 ruptured the rigid space of conservative social and political codes. Debord, the
SI, and the student uprisings represented the rise of the second-generation, born in the
aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust. Similar to the rupture of survivor memory,
the student rebellion and the teachings of Debord and the SI assisted in unearthing the
post-War, postmemory space of the second-generation. Activism and representation
replaced the silence associated with survivor memory. Boltanski sought to transcend the code of survivor silence, representing his personal, postmemory experiences within the
post-War era, evident in his mixed-media performance works in the late 1960s.
186 Rebecca J. DeRoo, The Museum Establishment and Contemporary Art: The Politics of Artistic Display in France after 1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19-20. The result of the 1968 protests eventually led to the construction of the Centre Pompidou, a new modern art center commissioned by newly elected President Pompidou in 1969. The success of the student protests had allotted a new space for artistic representation outside the rigid structure of the French museum system. 79
La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski
Concomitantly, 1968 proved a landmark year for Boltanski as well. Boltanski’s first
solo exhibition, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (The impossible life of
Christian Boltanski) opened at the Le Ranelagh Cinema in Paris [figure 22]. The violent
theme portrayed by the performance in La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski
presented an uncanny parallel to the events occurring outside the space of the Le
Ranelagh lobby. The film exhibited Boltanski’s obsession with death, performed by a
group of actors and life-size dolls. The installation combined film, live performance, and
manufactured mannequins. The lobby of the Le Ranelagh was divided into spaces,
similar to Surrealist Marcel Duchamp’s Miles of String installation in which he
transformed the gallery space of the Whitelaw Reid mansion during the First Papers of
Surrealism exhibition in New York City, 1942 [figure 23] .187 Like Duchamp, Boltanski
obstructed the space of the lobby using his performers and mannequins as barricades.
Chambers constructed throughout the lobby housed the remains of decrepit
mannequins.188 In one of the chambers, an 8mm film sharing the same title as the
exhibition filled the space. The actors throughout the film, including members of his
family and close artist friends, portrayed scenes of violent fights, dead bodies, and public malevolence [figure 24].189
Boltanski utilized elements of Debord’s social theory within the Situationists to
further the theme of his exhibition. Though Boltanski never participated in the political
187 TJ Demos, “Duchamp’s Labyrinth: First Papers of Surrealism, 1942,” October 97, (Summer, 2001): 91- 92, http://www.jstor.org/stable/779088. 188 Didier Semin, “Survey: Boltanski,” 50. 189 Vanessa Morisset, “Christian Boltanski,” Centre Pompidou, Educational Dossiers: Museums Collections, http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-Boltanski_en/ENS- Boltanski_en.htm. 80
Figure 22: Christian Boltanski, La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (The impossible life of Christian Boltanski), mixed media/film, 1968
81
Figure 23: Marcel Duchamp, Miles of String, mixed media/string, 1942
Figure 24: Christian Boltanski, still from La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski (The impossible life of Christian Boltanski), mixed media/film, 1968
82
campaigns of the Situationists nor interacted personally with Debord, he incorporated the
revolutionary agenda of the group into La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski. The
chaos of the space agreed with Debord’s notions of free association within the masses, rejection of rigid consumerist practices, and the transcendence of art over capitalism.190
The violence in the space of the lobby shared a similar premise with the evenements de
mai, paralleling the social unrest instigated by the Situationist International and French
student populous. Boltanski’s choice to exhibit the piece during the evenements de mai
reinforces his attempt to confront trauma.
Boltanski “collected” traumatic themes from his previous works and applied them to his film within La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski. In this process, his materials and themes merge in an autonomous space within the film, presenting a mini collection of his previous works. Similar to the way in which postmemory collects fragments of memory from the site of the original experience, Boltanski’s piece merged fragmented materials within the film, resulting in a violent display of sadism and confusion. The events of the film present a nonlinear, chaotic sequence of death and destruction. Visually, the piece left spectators uneasy and confused, causing an uncomfortable reaction within the space of the lobby.191 Ernst van Alphen, noting that the audience never identifies with the film
writes; “In this way, they [the films] are not just about trauma; rather, they convey
cinematic trauma in a performance that is itself traumatic.”192
Unlike the work of Beuys, Boltanski’s use of traumatic performance remains current
throughout the entire performance. In I Like America and America Likes Me, Beuys
overcame the trauma of his past through the use of performance, confronting his personal
190 Gilman, Asger Jorn’s, 201-202. 191 Van Alphen, Caught by History, 163-164. 192 Ibid., 164. 83
memory and experience. Boltanski’s installation remains constant, never culminating in a
conclusion or realization. The performance introduces trauma, a concept Adorno claimed
as a negative dialectic for overcoming the stress and angst of atrocity.193 Boltanski sought
to use trauma to confront his viewers and to create a dialogue about social and political inequalities. This dialogue concerning the social and political hegemony appears in later series involving the trauma of postmemory remembrance involving the Holocaust.
The Breakdown of the French Art Scene: Boltanski’s Ascendance
Corresponding with les evenements de mai, the grandeur and hierarchal structure of the French art world began to crumble by 1968. Artist’s experimentations with video, performance, site-specificity, and multi-media installation broke the traditional hierarchy of the French Ecole scene. Boltanski’s work by the late 1960s exemplified the changing façade of the French art scene. He extended his artistic and methodological influence to a group of colleagues during this time, including Jean Le Gac, Paul-Armand Gette, Sarkis,
Gina Pane, and Annette Messenger. The group, appropriately named L’Equipe Boltanski, worked as a collective for numerous installation projects during the late 1960s and early
1970s.194 At the 1969 Paris Biennale, L’Equipe members Boltanski, Le Gac, and Pane
exhibited La Concession a perpetuite (Grant in perpetuity) [figure 25]. The piece included an array of performances and installations relating to the topic of death and rebirth.195 The collective wanted to create an outdoor installation based on found- materials and the environment. By using the space outside of the intended exhibition
193 Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty, 21, 194 Cone, “From “Metro, Boulot, Dodo,” 53. 195Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 20-21. The piece was originally constructed at Pane’s residence and re- exhibited for display at the Paris Biennale. 84
Figure 25: Christian Boltanski with Jean Le Gac and Gina Pane, La Concession a perpetuite (Grant in perpetuity), mixed media, dirt, fabric, metal, plastic, 1969
gallery, they rejected the “authority” imposed by the museum.196 During each day at the
Biennale, Boltanski, Le Gac, and Pane each constructed a site-specific piece using found materials.197 Pane incorporated markers and posts to mark the passage of the group’s
movement through the outdoor space. Boltanski placed half-buried mannequins in the ground, flanked by Le Gac’s Baches or plastic sheets and Pane’s blue lacquer markers
[figure 26].198 The site-specificity of the piece presented a substantial distance between
its actual location and the institutional space of the museum.199 This detachment from the
196 DeRoo, Museum Establishment, 80. 197 Semin, “Survey: Boltanski,” 51. 198 DeRoo, Museum Establishment, 80. 199 Ibid., 80. 85
museum gave the piece an ephemeral presence, subverting the role of the museum as the
primary site for exhibition.
In 1969, Le Gac and Boltanski exhibited another similar piece entitled “Works in
Progress” for the American Center where the director invited artists to create work for the
exhibition. The Center served as a space for “experimental art,” funded by the American
Embassy and private donors.200 The purpose of the exhibition centered on the notion of
process, not product. The show lasted for the entire month of October, during which time
the director and other curators documented the artists creating their work.201 Boltanski
planted pink sticks in the garden of the American Center, and then unearthed the items as
a display of absurdity, proving that the process of the piece trumps the final product. The
piece coincided with Boltanski’s philosophy of death that the process of living ellipses
the final product of mortality.202
200 Ibid., 75. 201 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 21. 202 Ibid., 21. 86
Figure 26: Christian Boltanski with Jean Le Gac and Gina Pane, detail from La Concession a perpetuite (Grant in perpetuity), mixed media, dirt, fabric, metal, plastic, 1969
Early Displays of Collecting: Boltanski’s Albums
The use of media by Boltanski shifted dramatically throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, beginning with the traditional “high-art” medium of painting during his early years as a struggling artist and the transition to the “low art” of photography and mixed media. Didier Semi points out;
Nothing that he uses has played a direct part in the history of the fine arts; the register in which his world develops includes the theatre, writing, and the readymade. His territory is defined as he advances. This is…a trait in all works of contemporary art, whose merit lies in inventing by breaking pre-established rules.203
203 Ibid., 21. 87
The use of kitsch as a mechanism for conveying personal and collective memory
reappears in Boltanski’s work. Evident in the series Photographic Compositions,
Boltanski’s early use of found-material trope the reputation of low-art objects as a source
for his installations. Items left behind at the camps, including glasses, shoes, dolls, toys,
clothing, photographs, and personal artifacts fall under the category of kitsch when
placed in a public space, such as a mall, store, or consumer-based magazine. Thus,
Boltanski merges the two within the space of the postmemory archive combining the
memory associated with the trauma of the Holocaust and the agency of the found-object.
The plurality of the media allots Boltanski the freedom to construct objects otherwise
limited to a singular space of representation.
By 1971, Boltanski transitioned from the material-centered use of objects to the
construction of artist books and albums.204 The artist’s books containing found materials
and photographs coincide with an ancient Jewish tradition, revived by the exiles of the
Holocaust. Traditionally, diasporic communities of Jewish exiles collected materials,
photos, and familial objects to construct yizker bikher or memorial books [figure
27].205According to Hirsch, the yizker bikher “prepared in exile by survivors of the
pogroms, were meant to preserve the memory of their destroyed cultures.”206 The books
become, “agents” of memory, a “site for postmemory.”207 Boltanski enacts the role of
the second-generation collector, compiling his own yizker bikher, using prefabricated materials and photographic documents as pieces of faux memory.208 Discarded
204 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 59. 205 Marianne Hirsch, “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile,” Poetics Today 17, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 664, http://www.library.ohiou.edu. 206 Hirsch, “Past Lives,” 664. 207 Ibid., 666. 208 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 12. 88
materials, though no longer associated solely with pogrom diaspora, become essential to
Boltanski and his attempt to construct his own adaptation of memory.
The Musee de l’Homme in Paris was a good resourceful for Boltanski, permitting him to explore his fascination with discarded materials. The Musee displayed historical
objects in particular chronology and categories, meticulously placed in glass boxes and
vitrines.209 The organization of old jewelry, clothing, and archaic documents roused
Boltanski’s obsession with collecting and the formation of personal experience in relation to the object. Album de photos de la famille D., 1939-1964, 1971 recreates Boltanski’s experience at the Musee [figure 28].210 For the piece, he reshot a series of family photos
from close friend and gallery connoisseur, Marcel Durand-Dessert.211 He borrowed one-
hundred and fifty photos from Durand-Dessert’s family albums and re-shot each
photograph, placing the images in tin frames covered with glass. Compositionally, the
209 Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 53. 210 DeRoo, Museum Establishment, 100. Boltanski’s work was categorized under “individual mythologies” and placed with other documented installations. Artistic hierarchies were broken during the show, challenging the authorship of the artist. 211 Arturo Schwarz, “The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp,” The Burlington Magazine 140, no. 1142 (May, 1998): 338, http://www.jstor.org/stable/887905. 89
Figure 27: Example yizker bikher or memorial books
90
photos form a grid-like pattern along the wall of the gallery.212 The arrangements of the
photos correspond with Boltanski’s assumed chronological order of the family’s history.
He created fictional biographies for each person photographed, creating a pseudo-history
based on the context of the image.213 According to Lynn Gumpert:
He wanted to reconstruct a family history with new identities; however the sequence he constructed was not correct…implicit in the photographs of family gatherings and holidays is not only a collective memory but what can be referred to as a ‘collective amnesia.214
Boltanski stated, “I realize that these images were only witnesses to a collective ritual.
They didn’t teach us anything about the Family D…but only sent us back to our own
past.”215 The photo’s chronology no longer mattered according to Boltanski. When the
viewer gazes at the images of familial picnics, barbeques, and holiday celebrations, an
unconscious association with the image resonates [figure 29]. This “collective amnesia”
discussed by Gumpert culminates once the viewer recognizes familiar images from the
past. To Boltanski, this inherent recognition resonates with the mnemonic threads of the unconscious.
Memories and personal experiences result from the recognition of such images and the viewer constructs a personal relationship to the event depicted. To Boltanski, indexical objects involved in the preservation of memory commonly refer to “small-
212 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 59. 213 Ibid., 59. 214 Ibid., 59. 215 Ibid, 59. 91
Figure 28: Christian Boltanski, Album de photos de la famille D., 1939-1964, (Photo Album of the Family D), black and white photographs, tin frames, 1971
Figure 29: Christian Boltanski, detail of Album de photos de la famille D., 1939-1964, (Photo Album of the Family D), black and white photographs, tin frames, 1971
92
memory,” whereas works pertaining to death translate into “large memory.216” In
Contemporary Art and Memory, Joan Gibbons writes of Boltanski’s use of indexical objects in his work; “he tends to give new life and new stories to meaning in his work…notion of ‘having-been-thereness' of the image.”217 The “new life” within his
works arises from the personal relationship the viewer forges with the image. Boltanski’s
correlation between the object and personal memory allocates his title as an “artist-
historian.”218
According to Boltanski, death relies on the process of forgetting. Through forgetting,
memories from the past vanish, concealing experiences and events from history. By
remembering moments in life through the preservation of objects and photographs,
mortality temporarily diminishes. He contends,
We will never realize quite clearly enough what a shameful thing death is. In the end, we never try to fight it head on; doctors and scientists merely establish a pact with it, they fight on points of detail, they slow it down by a few months, a few years, but it all amounts to nothing. What we need to do is attack the roots of the problem in a big collective effort in which each of us will work towards his own survival and everyone else’s.219
The termination of mortality achieves success through self-preservation and
documentation. As an “artists-historian,” he continues by plotting his own course of
action for remaining immortal through the documentation of his life:
…the task is vast, and my means are frail. Why didn’t I start [collecting] before? Almost everything dealing with the period that I first set about saving (6 September 1944 to 24 July 1950) has been lost, thrown away, through culpable negligence…but the effort still to be made is great. So
216 Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and Remembrance, (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), 76-77. 217 Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory, 76. 218 Ibid, 73-74. 219 Christian Boltanski, “From Research and Presentation of All That Remains,” in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2006), 25. 93
many will be spent searching, studying, classifying, before my life is secured, carefully arranged and labelled [sic] in a safe place – secure against theft, fire, and nuclear war- from whence it will be possible to take it out and assemble it at any point. Then, being thus assured of never dying, I may finally rest.220
The content of the quote and Boltanski's real-life obsession with documenting reinforces
the irony he creates within his works. Life becomes a written story, documented through
the collection of personal objects. Conversely, the obsession with immortality and self-
denigration overwhelm his work. The vitrines he observed at the Musee de l’Homme
appear in pieces confronting the simulation process of collecting and memorializing.
Reference Vitrine, 1970-73 is a series of found objects and constructed items by
Boltanski exhibited at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris [figure 30]. The
piece served as a device to “immortalize” Boltanski by collecting and preserving items
from his past.221 Items from his early works appear within the vitrine, including previously published photos, balls of dirt, carved sugar cubes, and letters. The items, organized as a collection of artifacts, form a fictional classification system with each item dated and labeled. Semin equates Boltanski’s use of preservation and personal history with a permanent mourning for the self:
Marcel Duchamp said that it’s always other people who die; Boltanski might say that you never stop dying, and he represents life as a series of successive deaths, a permanent mourning for the self, for the child that one has ceased to be and to whom is forever erecting memorial plaques, but also for the person one ceases to be the moment one begins to talk about him.222
220 Boltanski, Research and Presentation, 25. 221 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 63-64. 222 Semin, “Survey: Boltanski,”55-56. 94
Figure 30: Christian Boltanski, Reference Vitrine, wood vitrine with objects, 1970
The fear of forgetting and the process of collecting simulate the procedure museum archivists and collectors use to preserve artifacts and art pieces.223 Reference Vitrine uses
the space of fictional memory and appropriated objects to construct a collective
experience.224 Similar to Album de photos de la famille D., 1939-1964, the attempt to
create a history based on photographs or found-objects fails. In Reference Vitrine, many
items appear as “unknown” or unlabeled, just as the photographs in Album de photos de
la famille D., 1939-1964 appear out of order.225 The gap in memory through the process
of remembering and forgetting remains inevitable.
223 Ibid., 55-56. 224 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 63-64. 225 Van Alphen, Deadly Historians, 67. 95
Reference Vitrine presents a different order of collection and display than does
Beuys. In Auschwitz Demonstration by Beuys, the intent of the piece focused on loss and trauma as a universal experience. For Boltanski, Reference Vitrine served as an attempt to preserve history through the collection of found-objects and personal memorabilia. Beuys connection to the Holocaust appears in the materials he uses in Auschwitz Demonstration: fat, tallow, wires, and railroad track maps.226 The objects in Beuys’ vitrine represent
items he used while experiencing a traumatic plane crash in Crimea. His direct, traumatic
connection to World War II and the Holocaust separates his work from Boltanski.
Whereas Reference Vitrine assists Boltanski in immortalizing himself and his work,
Auschwitz Demonstration serves to aid Beuys in remembering his traumatic past.
The objects used by Boltanski serve as mnemonic devices linked to his experience
through postmemory. Whereas Beuys attempts to universalize his experience during the
Holocaust, Boltanski personalizes the affect the Holocaust expounded on his childhood
and young adulthood through the construction of the vitrine. For Boltanski, the archive
serves as the primary source for illustrating his postmemory experience as a second-
generation survivor. Though his fascination with death and remembrance remain evident
in his early archival pieces, the role of Boltanski as “artist-historian” culminates in the
1980s through his construction of his postmemory, archival installations.
226 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 13. 96
CHAPTER IV: THE ARCHIVE AS A MNEMONIC DEVICE: BOLTANSKI’S
MONUMENTS, ARCHIVE, AND LE LYCEE CHASES
“Memory exits in an ongoing process of performance and response. Traces of the past otherwise slip into the archive, an ever-present but usually ignored repository filled with random survivals of antecedent social relationships stored in buildings, landscapes, libraries, museums, store windows, the electronic media, as well as in the everyday lives of the countless unknown people whose paths cross ours. One person’s memory is another person’s archive.”
- Richard Candida Smith
Through his performance and visual oeuvres, Boltanski seeks to emphasize the
problematic discourse in defining the “art after Auschwitz” within the dialogue of
postmemory.227 Throughout the process of defining postmemory within the context of the
second-generation survivor, a dialectic concerning the creative and methodological
process becomes evident in his work. For Boltanski, finding a space between the annals
of history and memory exists through the collection of evidentiary documents and
photographs. These objects serve to concatenate history and memory to the discursive
space of the archive. The construction of the archive brings memory and history to the
present, utilizing physical objects from history or simulated objects based on history.228
According to Hal Foster, “the object becomes inherent to the piece, thus installations are
commonplace for archival artists.”229 Boltanski uses materials as mnemonic devices to construct the personal archive. His postmemory installations compile fragments of
history, questioning the status of the historical object and the constructed agency of
material objects from the present.
227 Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer, 17 228 Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October , no. 110 (Fall 2004): 4. 229 Foster, “An Archival Impulse, 4. 97
Donald Kuspit maintains the argument that Boltanski’s work in Monuments,
Archives, and Le Lycee Chases focuses on religious imagery. He argues that the
installations are juxtaposed with spaces associated with religious rituals or simulated
religious shrines.230The Palazzo delle Priogione, Le Consortium in Dijon, and the
Friedericianum exemplify Kuspit’s argument concerning the location of Boltanski’s work
and the connection to religious imagery. Kuspit’s presents a formidable argument,
however Boltanski’s postmnemonic, archival position debunk Kuspit’s argument.
Boltanski’s archive serves to confront the viewer, producing a collective experience
working around the trauma of the Holocaust. The locations in which Boltanski chooses to
exhibit reflect the act of mourning associated with death and Holocaust atrocity.
The goal of this chapter is to argue for the construction of the postmemory archive in the works of Boltanski. The first part of this chapter will examine the archive and the early construction of the archive as a discursive space. The second part of chapter four will examine the archive through the lens of the post-war, postmemory era. Early archival works by Boltanski, including his Monuments series during the mid-1980s, will be examined as a reference to other series, Archives and Le Lycee Chases from 1987-
1991.231 Boltanski’s use of the fictional archive in Archive, and Le Lycee Chases will be
argued in part three of chapter four, exemplifying his inherent response to his second-
generation status. Boltanski’s work in the 1980s culminates a lifetime of work based on
self-reflection, remembering, and forgetting.
230 Ibid., 98‐100. 231 Danilo Eccher, “From Exhibitions.” In Christian Boltanski, ed. Danilo Eccher (Milano: Charta, 1997), 193-195. 98
The Initial Archive: Early Roots
The dependence of the archive on memory is often argued as a necessary mechanism
for sorting through trauma and history. The post-World War II era is often attributed with
the “rise of information in or as art,” a time in which artists, “amplify the avant-garde’s
critique of nineteenth-century historicism by conceiving of the archive as the rules and
protocols that are basic to art’s production.”232 Accordingly, the waning of the photomontage and the Dadaist collage of the 1910s and 1920s resulted in the formation of the archive as an artistic mechanism for compiling personal and collective histories.233
By the late 20th century, the use of the photograph as a primary source for the archive was
gaining ground with artists such as Boltanski.
The space of the archive exists as a visual mechanism for collecting and documenting
the past. For Boltanski, the archive serves as a space for collecting personal memories
based on events from the past. In “The Body and the Archive” Alan Sekula argues the
formation of the archive within the context of the 19th century as a study of physiognomy
and criminal classification through the use of photography.234 The photograph as a
classifying space for the archive, according to Sekula, served to capture racial proofing
and profiling of convicted criminals/degenerates.235 The “portraits” of criminals created
through the use of the camera advanced the space of photography as a non-
transcendental object for subverting the hierarchal structure of the high arts. In lieu of the
“Self,” the photo could capture the “Other,” or criminal as a “symbol of power,” troping
232 Spieker, The Big Archive, 12-13. 233 Ibid., 132-133. 234 Alan Sekula, “From The Body and the Archive,” in The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992), 343-345. 235 Sekula, The Body and the Archive, 345. 99
the space between the camera and the sitter involved in the portrait.236 The photograph,
once compiled in a filing or archival system, could render the criminal/degenerate categorically, providing “a standard physiognomic gauge of the criminal…a relative and
quantitative position within a larger ensemble.”237 Accordingly, the work of Alphonse
Bertillon, criminologist and founder of anthropometry, compiled photographs to
recognize the variation of identities within the criminal repertoire [figure 31]. Bertillon
traced the photograph as one of the “final conclusive signs in the process of
identification,” a crucial concept in the system of the archive. To Sekula, the archival
paradigm exists as an indexical space for tracing the referent of the criminal body.238
Sekula’s argument concerning the early role of photography realizes the trend of categorizing the body through the archive. In The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy,
Sven Spieker charts the transition of the nineteenth-century archive to the early twentieth- century’s appropriation of the “avant-garde archive.”239 To Spieker, the archive of the
19th century recognized the space of the rational through the investigation of legal and
criminal activity:
Crucially, the nineteenth-century belief that archives had the ability to register what eludes symbolic representation has its basis in the reality that they were compiled for reasons -mostly legal- that were different from those that motivated historians to visit them. When one of the nineteenth- century’s most prominent historians, Leopold von Ranke, remarked that he wanted to ‘as it were erase my own Self in order to let only things speak,’ his statement reflected the confidence that in an archive, the historian, duly confining himself to more or less complete passivity, confronted the sediments of forces and processes whose authority was underwritten by the fact that they were not recorded there.240
236 Ibid., 346-348. 237 Ibid., 353-356 238 Ibid., 360-363. 239 Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2008), 6-7. 240 Spieker, The Big Archive, 6. 100
Figure 31: Example of Alphonse Bertillon’s archive
101
Thus, the object’s agency within the archive could trope the space of the historian. The
object becomes central to the archive, serving as a mnemonic link to the past. In relation to Sekula’s argument of Bertillon, the space of the archive through the compilation of the object, serves as a temporal space for reference.
Prior to Sekula’s argument concerning the construction of the archive as a mechanism for categorizing data, Aleksandra Rodchenko argued in favor of a mass system of compiling images in an effort to “demonumentalize” photography as a source of reference.241 According to Rodchenko, the use of the photographic archive replaces the
need for painting as it presents an autonomous moment in time. “No single image, no
single moment” appears in the archive, only a collective.242 The collective representation of photographs in the archive creates a “mythical” space for compilation, organized in albums, repetitive grids, and pairs.243 The mythical pattern and the variations of the
images within the temporal space of the archive remain in flux, constantly challenging
the way in which data and images coexist.
Sekula and Rodchenko present comparable positions as to the function and use of the
archive in terms of meticulous organization and compilation. Both men position the
archive as a space for collecting and categorizing data. Boltanski’s use of the archive
focuses on the collection of materials based on personal and collective experiences.
Reference Vitrine incorporates personal elements from Boltanski’s past, compiled and
categorized.244 The use of the criminal body discussed by Sekula differs for Boltanski,
whom instead incorporates Rodchenko’s notion of the mass database of collecting into
241 Ibid., 133-134. 242 Ibid., 135. 243 Ibid., 136. 244 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness, 63-64. 102
his works. Reference Vitrine reinforces the role of Boltanski’s postmemory archive as a
space for preserving and collecting objects linked to a personal referent from the past.
The rationale behind the nineteenth-century archive eventually destabilized under the reprisal of the avant-garde in the twentieth-century. Through the construction of the
photomontage and collage by the Dadaists, the rational space of the nineteenth-century archive subverted in the wake of the “nonarchival.”245 The Dadaists sought to challenge
the modern notion of the archive and its “oscillation between narrative and
contingency.”246 The use of trash, paper, glass, and other found-materials by Duchamp
and other Dadaists sought to ridicule the “mass paper jam” elicited by the feverish
compilation of documents within the modern archive.247 Arguably, the notion of the
rational no longer existed in the space of the modern archive. The Dadaists sought to
disrupt the central notion of organization and collection, previously articulated by
Bertillon. The photomontage and collage presented the most appropriate form of radical subversion against the preceding notions of the archive. Hannah Hoch’s Cut with the
Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany,
1919-20 represents the Dadaist trend of collage and material appropriation [figure 32].
The piece is compiled of newspaper and magazine images, pasted together in a network
of chaos. The image represents the disorder involved in defining the avant-garde archive
amongst the technological and communicative exodus of the post-World War I,
mechanical era. Benjamin Buchloh reiterates the importance of the photomontage to the
archive in “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive.” The work of photomontage
and collage become “storage for the discarded,” utilizing the unorthodox space outside
245 Spieker, The Big Archive, 7. 246 Ibid., 7-8. 247 Ibid., 8. 103
Figure 32: Hannah Hoch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, mixed media collage, 1919-20
104
the institutional archive.248 Thus, the transcendence of the archive outside of the temporal
constraints of the institution recognizes the shift in the act of collecting:
The structural emphasis on discontinuity and fragmentation in the initial phase of Dada-derived photomontage introduced the subjects’ perceptual filed to the ‘shock’ experiences of the daily existence in advanced industrial culture. While the metonymic procedures of photomontage and their continuous emphasis on the fissure and the fragment- at least in their initial appearance- operated to dismantle the myths of unity and totality that advertising and ideology consistently inscribe on their consumers, photomontage paradoxically collaborated also in the social project of perpetual modernization and its affirmative agenda.249
Through the manipulation of the archive, the Dadaist served to trope the space of the
rational. The archive nonetheless remains pragmatic in the context of the twentieth
century.
For the Situationist working out of the Dadaist movement, the role of the
photomontage and collage reinforce the radical language of the group. Jorn and Debord
incorporated newspaper images, magazine ads, and text, superimposed with paint
drippings and splotches. Fin de Copenhague, 1959 utilizes “detournement,” or the
process of reusing materials from other sources [figure 33].250 The piece, compiled as a
book, appropriates found-text and images from local newspapers and magazines. Images
of cigarettes, nude women, musical instruments, wine, clothing, and sporting materials
juxtaposed with text promoting foods, consumer products, and ad campaign slogans appear on every page of the book.251 Like Reference Vitrine by Boltanski, the use of found material rejected the notion of consumerism by using discarded objects, instead of
248 Ibid., 11. 249 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Gerhard Richter’s Atlas: The Anomic Archive,” October , no. 88 (Spring 1999): 131. 250 Ford, The Situationist International, 60. 251 Ibid., 60; 63. 105
Figure 33: Guy Debord and Asger Jorn, page from Fin de Copenhague, mixed media/artist book 1959
purchasing new canvasses and paper. For Debord and Jorn, the rejection of the
“spectacle” of mass consumerism succeeded in their appropriation of discarded, consumer-based products.
The Post-War Archive
By the mid -1980s, Christian Boltanski sought to challenge the trauma of his family’s past by appropriating the space of the archive to his personal oeuvres. Mourning and loss remain central to Boltanski’s archival installations, blurring the line between the
“fictional and historical.” His archival works utilize the photograph as the primary media form. The photograph's relationship to the archive, both as a historical referent and a 106
mnemonic device, expound Boltanski’s method of presenting death and trauma. Adela
Abella examines Boltanski’s use of the photograph to represent his main methodological
theme, death:
Boltanski explores certain paradoxes of photography: aspiring to reflect reality in fact it mystifies and misleads; in wishing to withhold a moment in life it becomes the witness of its death. Photography appears thus as an agent of death for several reasons: first, the fact that photography reflects necessarily a no longer existing past; second that its medium- paper- is fragile and perishable.252
The photographic-object within the archive represents a temporal link to the past,
inherently linked to its referent. The original memory attached to the photograph no longer exists, thus the postmemory space for interpretation and experience materializes.
For Boltanski, the space within postmemory serves to recall and reinterpret the past, procuring a personal connection to the photographic object. Through the postmemory connection, the archive becomes a space for collective experience, a concept realized through Boltanski's archival installations.
Boltanski recognized the role of the archive in Reference Vitrine through the collection of personal material as mnemonic devices. The inclusion of personal artifacts and photographs serve as the primary media for collecting within Boltanski’s archive, due in part to the nascent technological form of photography in the nineteenth-century and the indexical quality of the photographic print. Walter Benjamin sought to reiterate the importance of the photo, arguing that the “camera serves as an archival machine, every photo is a priori of an archival object.”253 Okwui Enwezor, editor of Archive
Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, furthers Benjamin’s argument by
252 Abella, “Christian Boltanski,” 5. 253 Okwui Enwezor, “From Archive Fever: Photography Between History and the Monument,” in Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, ed. Okwui Enwezor (New York: The International Center of Photography, 2008), 11-12. 107
contending the role of the photograph in the archive. He states that photographs capture
ordinary moments in life: weddings, birthdays, and every day events that privatize the
archive.254 Thus, technology allots photography the transformation from the indexical to the temporal.
Similar to the role of the photograph in Reference Vitrine by Boltanski, Gerhard
Richter’s Atlas serves as a polemical piece in relation to the photographic archive of the post-war era [figure 34]. Buchloh places Atlas at the forefront of the post-war, archival paradigm. The piece consists of numerous photographs from sources compiled by
Richter. Atlas consists of over six-hundred panels, filled with thousands of photographs, drawings, and found-materials compiled by Richter since 1964.255 Images from Richter’s
personal life juxtaposed with photographs of Hitler, concentration camps, landscapes,
newspaper clippings, and portraits create an archival affect [figure 35].256 The images are organized in an album-like composition. Like Reference Vitrine by Boltanski, Atlas incorporates decades of the artist’s life and history to create a unified piece based on his personal collection. Similar to the chaotic “mass paper jam” argued by the Dadaist in the early twentieth-century, Richter’s Atlas serves to further the notion of the archive as a continuous presence, a never-ending construct. In “Gerhard Richter: Atlas,” Lynne Cooke
claims the following about the piece:
Atlas hovers, therefore, between the promise of taxonomic order as divulged in the archive and the total devastation of that promise, which is implicit, for example, in the amorcellated, antirelational potential of photomontage. The images, fragments or details are commonplace, almost stereotypical. In their sheer ordinariness, conventionality, and ubiquity, many of these photographs seem almost interchangeable or generic, and
254 Enwezor, “Archive Fever,” 13. 255 Lynne Cooke, “Gerhard Richter: Atlas,” Dia Art Foundation, http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs/richter/ atlas/essay.html. 256 Cooke, “Gerhard Richter,” http://www.diacenter.org/exhibs/richter/ atlas/essay.html. 108
hence serve to underplay those staples of photographic discourse: the photo as icon and the photo as index.257
The space of Richter’s archive is bifurcated between the “concrete and the abstract.”258
The lack of homogeneity in Atlas recognizes the failure of the archive to remain constant.
“The archive can manifest itself in the form of traces; it contains the potential to fragment and destabilize,” according to Charles Merewether.259 Thus, the archival nature of Atlas
serves as a mnemonic device, traces of the past forged within the context of the post-war
era.
In terms of postmemorial representation, Richter situates Atlas as a device for
extracting collective memories from the past. Richter’s familial link to the Holocaust is
Figure 34: Gerhard Richer, Atlas, mixed media/album photographs, 1972
257 Ibid. 258 Ibid. 259 Charles Merewether, “From Introduction: Art and the Archive,” in The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Charles Merewether (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006), 12-13. 109
Figure 35: Gerhard Richer, detail from Atlas, mixed media/album photographs, 1972
connected to the Nazi perpetrator. His family worked as solders in both the German
Army and the Nazi Youth during World War II.260 His work employs images and items from his past and places them within the post-War context. 261 His primary experiences
with World War II situate him with Beuys. Richter and Beuys use items for a universal,
collective response employed by the second-generation to understand the experiences and
memory of the primary generations. Atlas creates a postmemorial response through the
recognition of images, including photographs of Hitler, Nazi campaigns, and
260 Joe Hage, Gerhard Richter, http://www.gerhard‐richter.com/biography/work/. 261 Hage, Gerhard Richter, http://www.gerhard‐richter.com/biography/work/.
110
concentration camps.262 His archival composition, similar to Auschwitz Vitrine by Beuys,
seeks to universalize the past as a collective space of remembrance.
Hannelore Baron, a German-born Jew exiled during the Holocaust, incorporates the
archive in the similar method of Richter. Baron compiles her archive in old suitcases and
boxes. In Untitled, 1981 Baron placed old match boxes, fabric pieces, old game pieces,
clothing fragments, and string into a suitcase, arranging the objects in crude order [figure
36].263 The chipped paint and worn edges give the piece an aged appearance, reminiscent of objects found in old attics or storage spaces. Untitled serves to collect artifacts from
the past, similar to the way in which Boltanski and Richter collect items in Reference
Vitrine and Atlas to signify their personal history. She attempts to preserve a past
obstructed by the trauma of the Holocaust through the preservation of found-material and
262 Ibid. 263 Ingrid Schaffner, “From Hannelore Baron,” in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (New York: Prestel-Verlag, 1998), 62. 111
Figure 36: Hannelore Baron, Untitled, mixed media, 1981
objects. The mnemonic devices serve as traces to her past and the traumatic loss of life and culture associated with the Holocaust.264
Christian Boltanski’s Archival Connection: Monuments
Boltanski began Monuments in 1985 as a reaction to his second-generation status as a
Holocaust survivor. Freud’s “deferred action,” of trauma reinforces Boltanski’s decision
to create works based on the Holocaust nearly two decades after he began his career. For
Boltanski, Monuments served to re-establish his connection to the Holocaust through
simulation and remembrance by appropriating the photographic-object. The exhibition
264 Schaffner, Hannelore Baron, 62. 112
of: Monuments travelled through the 1980s in various locations and forms. First
appearing in Le Consortium in Dijon, France the installation travelled the next several
years to the Kunstverein Munchen, Munich, Galerie Crousel-Hussenot, Paris, Palazzo
delle Prigione at the Venice Biennale.265 According to the size and lighting of the
exhibition space, the installation varied in height and width. At the Palazzo in Venice, the
piece appeared with more photographs then in the Galerie Crousel-Hussenot due to the
greater size of the space.
No matter where the piece appeared, it remains illuminated in “semi-darkness.”266
The piece incorporated re-shot photographs, desk lamps, and tin frames [figure 37].267
The lamps, suspended around the photographs, created an altar-like glow around each
individual face. The re-shot photographic portraits of children, enlarged so the entire face
filled the frame were stacked in various heights along the wall, supported by tin boxes.
The crude desk lamps with exposed wires dangled around the portraits, serving as a
mechanical frame [figure 38]. 268 The original Monuments at the Galerie Crousel-
Hussenot appropriated seventeen portraits of children, including a childhood portrait of
Boltanski. The zoomed in faces appeared skeletal and gaunt, a simulated-effect applied to
the images by Boltanski.
The monumental construction of the installation assumes the presence of death
through the absence of a historic narrative. Only through the realization of Boltanski’s
familial connection to the Holocaust does the viewer assume the fate of the children
265 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 183. 266 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness 65. 267 Ernst van Alphen, “From Deadly Historians: Boltanski’s Intervention in Holocaust Historiography,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 57-58. Monuments: Odessa and Monuments: Les Enfants des Dijon are reproductions of the piece dating 1987- 1991 and bearing the same theme and media, however constructed in various sizes and spaces 268 Van Alphen, Deadly Historians, 57-58. 113
within the portraits. However this assumption does not establish a definitive answer to the
formation of Monuments as a simulated archive. Are the images meant to remember the
deceased children of the Holocaust through a collective memorial? On the other hand, are
the images merely replicates of random portraits from the present? To Boltanski, the
context of the images is important. The collective experience surrounding the
construction of the installation serves a residual effect on the viewer, a privatized
confrontation. The monumental construction of Monuments expounds a deep-mnemonic
reaction, assuming that we are mourning the death or destruction of some unknown
subject.269 Boltanski stated in reference to Monuments:
Of all these children, among whom I found myself, one of whom was probably the girl I loved, I don’t remember any of their names, I don’t remember anything more than the faces on the photograph. It could be said that they disappeared from my memory, that this period of time was dead. Because now these children must be adults, about whom I know nothing. This is why I felt the need to pay homage to these ‘dead,’ who in this image, all look more or less the same, like ‘cadavers.’270
The “death” Boltanski references is the “loss of innocence” experienced as a youth. The
children are temporally dead in the portraits; however the fate of their corporeal being
remains unknown. The portraits linger as a bifurcated path between the stationary space
of death and perpetual space of life. Arguably, Boltanski has no real relationship with the
children in the portraits, as Monuments uses “found snapshots,” re-photographed and
displayed.271 By re-photographing the portraits, he is capturing “two realties:” the first
269 Ernst van Alphen, Art in Mind: How Contemporary Images Shape Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 38. 270 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 80-82. 271 Van Alphen, Deadly Historians, 54. 114
through the original indexical print, and the second through the “re-photographed”
image.272
Similar to the space of the archive, the act of re-filing and reorganizing changes the
original context over time. Monuments recalls and re-enacts various realities, shifting
through temporal spaces. Monuments reinforces the space of the archive through the
appropriation of found materials and photographs. Similar to Beuys’ Auschwitz
Demonstration Boltanski’s installation gathers fictional artifacts that reinforce the
memory and postmemory surrounding the trauma of the Holocaust. The tin boxes below
the illuminated photographs suggest a file comprised of archival data about the children
in the photographs. It is assumed that the boxes contain old documents, medical records,
birth certificates, death certificates, old school papers, and toys.273 Similar to the way in which items of the deceased are placed in boxes or bags, the tin boxes used in
Monuments suggests the same fate. The archival collection of documents creates an
272 Ibid., 54. 273 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 80-82. 115
Figure 37: Christian Boltanski, Lessons of Darkness: Monuments, black and white photographs, metal frames, light bulbs, wire, 1986-91
Figure 38: Christian Boltanski, detail Lessons of Darkness: Monuments, black and white photographs, metal frames, light bulbs, wire, 1986-91 116
unconscious assumption that the children presented in the piece died during a traumatic
experience, remaining memorialized within the altar-like composition of the installation.
Boltanski: The Archive and Le Lycee Chases
Boltanski’s objectification of the photographic portrait becomes evident in his later series Archives. The piece memorializes the victims who suffered under Nazi rule during the Holocaust. Similar to the Monuments series, Archives appears throughout the later
1980s and early 1990s in various forms.274 The first exhibition appeared at the
Documenta 8 show in Kassel, Germany, 1987.275 The piece was shown in the
Friedericianum, a neoclassical space newly renovated after massive Allied bombing
during World War II [figure 39].276 The space now served as an international exhibition
hall, allotted to Boltanski to use solely for the display of Archives. The room was divided into three spaces, reminiscent of The Impossible Life of Christian Boltanski from 1969.
Wire screens adorned with black and white photographs hung from the walls and cell dividers. The photographs appeared in various sizes, held up with black tape and illuminated by crude desk lamps attached to the walls.277 The claustrophobic space and
obstructed pathway through the piece caused a chaotic experience for the viewer.
Gumpert argued that the space of the piece recalled the barracks of Auschwitz and other
camps, as well as the horror vacui of [Boltanski’s] earlier installations.278
274 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, Lessons of Darkness, 80-82. The Documenta exhibitions are every 5 years in Kassel. In recent years, the show has become a contemporary art show centered on site-specific works. 275 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 99-100 276 Ibid., 100. 277 Ibid., 100-101. 278 Ibid.,102. 117
Figure 39: Christian Boltanski, Lessons of Darkness: Archives black and white photographs, glass, metal screens, lamps 1987
The altar-like presence of the piece, through the lighting and gaze of the portraits,
instills a sense of mourning within the viewer. Similar to the affect of Monuments, the
absence of a known narrative about the lives of the people in the photographs remains
elusive. The absence allots the viewer a space to create personal narratives based on the
similarity between the photographs content and the viewer’s personal memory. In typical
Boltanski form, the fictional and factual no longer matter, instead the subject of
Holocaust remembrance surfaces as the primary source for postmemory recall. Since the 118
codes associated with Holocaust pictures remain too horrific, Boltanski chose to use
photographs instead of actual images from the death camps.279 Original Holocaust
images remain too embedded with codes to appropriate in contemporary works according
to Boltanski.280 The simulated affect of the re-photographed images presents a greater
conceptual effect than original images appropriated from the Holocaust. The images
force the viewer to observe through a re-photographed filter, distancing the original referent in the photograph. The re-shot photographs within Monuments force the viewer
to rethink the space of the original photograph. Similar to the distance between memory and postmemory, the original and re-shot photographs represent the difference in
temporal and contextual spaces. The temporal distance separating the original photograph
from Boltanski’s re-shot photograph parallel the temporal voids between original survivor memory and second-generation postmemory.
For Boltanski and other second-generation survivors, the 1980s proved an immensely
important time to utilize the archive as a form of artistic expression. It was during this
decade that many primary survivors of the Holocaust began to perish, forging a response
by the second-generation to preserve their familial heritage and the memories of their
parents. Thus, Boltanski's use of the archive serves as a mnemonic device for capturing memories, whether factual, fictional, or simulated, in order to continue the space of survivor memory into the post-generations. Jean Le Gac argues Boltanski's prerogative in
relation to preserving history through memorial remembrance:
By appropriating mementos of others lives and presenting them as if they were his [Boltanski] own, he could both depersonalize and generalize their
279 Ibid.,102. 280 Ibid.,102. 119
content, allowing each of us to share in the remembrances and to see in them our own experiences.281
The collective response of the audience to Archives produces a reaction, both to the atrocity of the Holocaust and to personal codes associated with the referential familiarity of portraiture photography.
As Monuments and Archives appear in numerous variations through the 1980s and
1990s, Boltanski's Le Lycee Chases also reappears in various forms. Le Lycee Chases first exhibited in 1987 in Castelgassethe, Vienna with another show at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago.282 Unlike other Boltanski installations the photographs came from a Jewish School in Vienna, dated 1931.283The photographs were enlarged,
zoomed-in, and illuminated by desk lamps [figure 40]. The portraits, supported by tin boxes, appear gaunt and skeletal with sunken black voids in the spaces where their eyes and mouth should appear [figure 41]. The fate of the people in the photographs remains unknown, but the viewer knows the atrocities committed against the Jews during the
1930s in Europe. Abella discusses the role of repetition in Le Lycee Chases:
Repetition glides here towards the side of death: it serves to embody death, but it also succeeds in turning us into active participants and 284 symbolic accomplices in the act of killing...
Through the constant act of witnessing through repetition, the individual agency of the
portraits diminishes. Boltanski's re-photographing of the images tropes the act of
repetition further, completely erasing the original, indexical connection between the
camera and the individual. Thus, the collection of re-photographed portraits becomes a
281 Jacobs, Introduction, 10. 282 Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 99-100 283 Abella, Christian Boltanski, 7. 284 Ibid, 7-8. 120
unified archive based in recall and collective experience. The postmemory archive’s
survival relies on this process of repetition in order to produce new spaces of
remembrance and witnessing.
Throughout the 1990s, modifications of Monuments, Archives, and Le Lycee Chases appear. Repetition and documentation serve as primary attributes of the modern archive.
Unlike Beuys, who enacted various performance pieces based on an assortment of political and social agendas, Boltanski repeatedly uses the same materials throughout his visual oeuvres. The recycling of exhibitions and materials serves as a methodological trait associated with preserving Holocaust postmemory. Beuys sought to continuously rupture the space of memory through his shamanistic performances, whereas Boltanski attempts to preserve memory through the process of postmemory recollection, remaining silent and autonomous outside the space of his work. Though the media and materials vary, the act of repetition and appropriation continue in Boltanski’s oeuvres, successfully preserving the delicate space of Holocaust memory while reinforcing a new dialogue within the memory of the post-generations.
121
Figure 40: Christian Boltanski, Lessons of Darkness: Le Lycee Chases, black and white photographs, tin drawers, lamps, 1988
122
Figure 41: Christian Boltanski, variation of Lessons of Darkness: Le Lycee Chases, black and white photographs, tin drawers, lamps, 1988
Conclusion
This thesis examined the development of postmemory during the years after World
War II. The role of the second-generation within the strata of postmemory relies on
physical material and conceptual dialogue with the primary generation of survivors in
order to forge a connection to the original site of trauma. Christian Boltanski’s work
within postmemory, namely the postmemory archive, confronted the taboo of 123
representing the Holocaust within the visual arts. Issues surrounding Boltanski’s heritage,
sanity, methodology, and position within the postmemory, postmodern era serve as the
basis for his work and his popularity amongst post-generations working around the
Holocaust.
The argument concerning the task of the second-generation to delve into the visual
and literal arts during the post-war era proved a trying and critical undertaking. Critics
Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg articulated the problematic discourse involved
in facing the atrocity of the Holocaust with poetry, literature, and the fine arts. The
reaction against Adorno and Greenberg began with Paul Celan and Joseph Beuys’ poetic
and visual oeuvres, transcending the boundary of silence between primary and second
generations and allotting a space of dialogue and remembrance. The reaction of society to
the radical, nuance exposure of post-war art and politics eventually lead to the destruction
of conservative hegemony in France and latter Europe. The rupture of society to radical ideas and the confrontation of the second-generation to the survivor generation allotted a reification of Holocaust-based imagery. Christian Boltanski’s exposure to the radical, sociopolitical state of the 1960s in France and his status as a postmemory, second- generation survivor allotted him the ammunition to confront his familial and cultural heritage through his visual oeuvres.
This thesis has also examined the role of the archive in relation to Boltanski’s postmemory work in the 1980s. The archive serves as the primary media choice for
Boltanski as it continuously changes according to temporal space. Postmemories continuously reproduce through the constant construction of the archive, remaining in flux through experiences and confrontation. Boltanski lives as a victim of his Jewish 124
legacy and a product of the post-Beuys, radical reunification of post-war, mnemonic art.
Boltanski’s status within the postmemory paradigm of the second-generation allotted him
the space to react and unify his familial past culminating in the construction of the
mnemonic archive. His work in Monuments, Archives, and Les Lycee Chases oscillate
between the space of the original site of trauma and the nuance space of the postmemory
archive. Accordingly, the space of Boltanski’s works never impede on the sacred space
of survivor memory. Boltanski’s installations tread around the memory of the survivor,
organizing a new space of remembrance based on the experience of the second -
generations.
Boltanski’s work with postmemory during the 1980s provided a source of inspiration
for later artists working within the post-Holocaust era. His work captured the angst of
post-generation artists confronting the trauma of the Holocaust in the decades after.
Artists from the 1980s and 1990s working with the postmemory memorial sought to
create a forum for a collective dialogue concerning the trauma of the Holocaust. Micha
Ullman’s 1996 memorial to the Nazi book burning entitled, Bibliotek utilizes the concept
of absence through presence to expound the trauma associated with cultural suppression
of “degenerate” texts during the Third Reich [figure 42].285 The clear glass panel
suspended over an empty void in the town square of Bebelplatz, Berlin cuts through the
cobblestone to reveal an empty room with empty bookshelves.286 The absence of the
books symbolizes the memory void of Jews whose lives changed under the restrictions of
the Nazis. The only archive remains embedded in the collective memory of witnesses
whom experienced the expulsion of Jewish and intellectual goods.
285 Young, At Memory’s Edge, 140; 142. 286 Ibid., 107. 125
Jochen Gerz’s Place of the Invisible Memorial, 1997 incorporates blocks of
cobblestone appropriated from city squares in Saarbrucken, Germany [figure 43].287
Students from Gerz’s studio course at the Saarbrucken School of Fine Arts engraved each
of the 2,126 stones with names of former Jewish cemeteries, lost, destroyed, or
abandoned during and after the war [figure 44].288 Similar to autonomous faces in
Boltanski the Monuments, Archives, and Le Lycee Chases series, the stones represent a collective experience through traumatic loss. The students of Gerz’s class represent the
postmemory generations working out of the primary memory of the survivor generation.
In addition to the reprisal of postmemory in the years after the Holocaust, the task of
future generations to continue the trend of remembering and forgetting, memorializing
and celebrating, remains imperative. Though Boltanski continues to reinterpret and
reorganize his installations, the process of continuing the postmemory paradigm lies in
the proceeding third and fourth-generations of survivors and witnesses. As argued
throughout this thesis, to elude death allots the space of memory to permanently exist. In
typical Boltanski form, the space of postmemory will live on through the act of
remembering and collecting, evading the inevitable fate of death and continuing the
legacy of the survivor.
287 Ibid., 142. 288 Ibid., 142. 126
Figure 42: Micha Ullman, Bibliotek, 1996
127
Figure 43: Jochen Gerz, Place of the Invisible Memorial, 1997
Figure 44: Jochen Gerz, cobblestone detail from Place of the Invisible Memorial, 1997
128
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APPENDIX A: “TODESFUGE” BY PAUL CELAN (ORIGINAL GERMAN TEXT)
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken sie abends wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts wir trinken und trinken wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete er schreibt es und tritt vor das Haus und es blitzen die Sterne er pfeift seine Rüden herbei er pfeift seine Juden hervor läßt schaufeln ein Grab in der Erde er befiehlt uns spielt auf nun zum Tanz
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich morgens und mittags wir trinken dich abends wir trinken und trinken Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith wir schaufeln ein Grab in den Lüften da liegt man nicht eng
Er ruft stecht tiefer ins Erdreich ihr einen ihr andern singet und spielt er greift nach dem Eisen im Gurt er schwingts seine Augen sind blau stecht tiefer die Spaten ihr einen ihr andern spielt weiter zum Tanz auf
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich mittags und morgens wir trinken dich abends wir trinken und trinken ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith er spielt mit den Schlangen Er ruft spielt süßer den Tod der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland er ruft streicht dunkler die Geigen dann steigt ihr als Rauch in die Luft dann habt ihr ein Grab in den Wolken da liegt man nicht eng
Schwarze Milch der Frühe wir trinken dich nachts wir trinken dich mittags der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland wir trinken dich abends und morgens wir trinken und trinken der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland sein Auge ist blau er trifft dich mit bleierner Kugel er trifft dich genau ein Mann wohnt im Haus dein goldenes Haar Margarete er hetzt seine Rüden auf uns er schenkt uns ein Grab in der Luft er spielt mit den Schlangen und träumet der Tod ist ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete dein aschenes Haar Sulamith