Israeli Holocaust Memorial Strategies at Yad Vashem: From Silence to Recognition Author(s): Natasha Goldman Source: Art Journal, Vol. 65, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 102-122 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068468 Accessed: 01-11-2015 01:18 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and College Art Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 89.179.117.36 on Sun, 01 Nov 2015 01:18:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 3 This content downloaded from 89.179.117.36 on Sun, 01 Nov 2015 01:18:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Moshe Safdie,Transport Memorial, 1995, Yad is site Vashem the living of Israeli national Holocaust memory, where every railway car, metal, wood, and concrete. of Israelis adds another memorial to an The Collection of the Yad Vashem Art Museum, generation evolving landscape. Jerusalem. ? Moshe Safdie; memorials installed from until the late are either or minim (Artwork photo 1953 1970s figurai graph by Michal R?nnen Safdie) alist in and on style focus the fighters, heroes, and martyrs of the Holocaust. Those installed since in to or the 1980s, contrast, tend be conceptual installation oriented, often employing- visual strategies of absence and disorientation?what one call are may postmodern approaches?and dedi Natasha Goldman cated to the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. This traces at essay the development of memorials in to Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem relation changes in Israeli attitudes toward the Holocaust, survivors, and their traumas: from silence and shame to even atYad Vashem: understanding and Strategies ' is to sympathy. At stake the potential for memorials From Silence to a framework for trauma in visual form.2 Recognition provide Thp ^tartina nninf of this srnHv is the work of E. whose research on James Young, Holocaust memorials practically has made the a of within art subject unique category study the intersecting disciplines of and history, literature, Jewish studies, Holocaust studies.3 If Young examines theories of memory and collective memory to elucidate the ways in which Holocaust memorials current ideas about the then it is embody past, suggested trauma set are to here that opens up another of questions that vital the commis sioning, building, and viewing of Holocaust memorials. This to a in essay therefore contributes larger literature of "trauma studies" and the intersection of trauma and art in Most general theory particular.4 recently, Bennett contributes a transformative to trauma studies in Jill analysis elucidating the between the work of art viewer as one relationship and the that produces 1.The differences between the early and late "affect." She claims that "trauma related art is not communicative. It often memorials might be seen as a transformation transactive, from modern to postmodern touches but it does not communicate the approaches. My us, 'secret' of personal experience. Affect argument is not, however, about a history of is within and a work, and it be an audi style, and wantI to avoid a too-easy parallel produced through might experienced by between the of trauma in the ence to the work." The viewer neither trau development public coming gains knowledge of the actual sphere and a perhaps too-easy delineation matic event nor identifies with the victim. An emotional or link is made between the modern and the postmodern. Jean conceptual between the viewer and a of one Fran?ois Lyotard argues that the postmodern is work art, which foregrounds the ultimate impos a formulation that remains "always already" there, a viewer to trauma sibility of experiencing anything close lived and its aftereffects.5 highly influential. See Lyotard, The Postmodern This in is a Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian conceptual engagement, turn, only possible when there is poten Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota tial listener. Bennett invokes notion Gayatri Spivak's of the politics of resistance Press, 1984). or not must one one must 2. Dalia Manor writes that while "much has been liberation: only speak, but be heard.6 Dori Laub theo published about the Holocaust, about its impact rizes such a that the act of or to narratives position, explaining reading listening on Israel, and about art that deals with trauma ... of extreme human is an ethical choice, tolerance of nonlinear on the subject of Israeli art and the Holocaust pain requiring little has been added there an to very [since 1995]... narration, silence, and inability communicate.7 have been very few in Israeli art developments I with and overlap diverge from Bennett's of engagement with and its relationship to the Holocaust." See Manor, politics "From to works art about trauma. is a Rejection Recognition: IsraeliArt and of Enabling her explanation of conceptual engage the inAbsence/Presence: Critical Holocaust," ment a and viewer. are between work the Bennett's examples articulated, how Essays in the Artistic Memory of the Holocaust, within a frame where trauma can be ed. Stephen C. Feinstein (Syracuse: Syracuse ever, vocalized?her discussion of the films University Press, 2005), 317. of the South African Truth and Reconciliation are a Agreement good example of 3. James E. Young, ed., The Art of Memory: this. Sometimes trauma does not have a in which it can be articulated. Holocaust Memorial Museums inHistory (Munich space Signifi and New York: and the Jewish cant in the case of Israel and Yad Vashem was the absence Prestel-Verlag complete of willing Museum, 1994); James E. Young, At Memory's listeners, in the first several decades after the nation's for Israeli Edge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); founding, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Holocaust victims of trauma. 103 art journal This content downloaded from 89.179.117.36 on Sun, 01 Nov 2015 01:18:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions is not a at My analysis teleology of Holocaust memorials Yad Vashem, which would that in a imply Israeli attitudes toward the Holocaust have developed is as an positive and unproblematic way. Rather, my point that understanding of trauma in a to evolved the political, historical, and medical fields, way talk about trauma that had in emerged repercussions the visual field of memorial-making. Discourse trauma in certain at about has been facilitated only places certain times? not in aims to and Israel until the late 1980s. This study map the slow engage ment trauma?in with the language of visual form?in the production of memorials at Yad Vashem. One way that a new awareness of trauma resonates at I is via a in is Yad Vashem, argue, representation of absence, which, turn, closely to art. linked psychoanalytic practice and postmodern Psychoanalysts Dori Laub and Daniel Podell suggest that trauma is best the an a in understood by metaphor of empty space, hole the psyche.8 The that not the it?is a on the to recognition of space?and filling of step way and in the normal world. In recent Western healing functioning years Europe and the United States have witnessed a surge in the construction of Holocaust memorials that utilize empty spaces, voids, and disorientation, all motifs that fulfill Laub and Podell s description of psychological trauma. Horst Hoheisel's Ashcrott Brunnen (Kassel, 1987), for instance, and Jochen and Esther Gerz's Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, Monument Fascism are both exam 1993); and Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust against (Hamburg Harburg, 1986-93) early Indiana In (Bloomington: University, 1988). ples. architecture, Daniel Libeskind employs the aesthetics of empty spaces 4. My dissertation, "Missing Absence: Trauma and and disorientation in his Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001). Most recently, the National Memorials to the Holocaust (University of Rochester, 2002)," analyzes the many proposed New York City 9/11 Memorial "Reflecting Absence" embodies what to trauma trauma approaches and studies, includ sees as an this author reluctantly overcodification of the aesthetics of absence ing those by Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and identification with victims that often the viewer from Dori Laub, Robert J. Lifton, and others. Ifocus on exculpates imagining JillBennett here for her very new contribution to at same both the space of perpetration and the space of victimization the time. the field in terms of viewership. See Bennett, As Bennett out, it is an out?to take a moral Empathie Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary points always easy?and easy way Art Stanford Press, a (Stanford: University 2005). position and identify with the victim.9 To negotiate one's difference from 5. For the cited term and passage, see Bennett, 5 notion is a far more difficult task. and 6. For the "conceptual link," see 4. Mark comes close to this assessment in It no is an art. Godfrey sug is accident that each of the above example of postmodern that a work of art can one's gesting "question Victor art Burgin 's essay "The Absence of Presence" defends Conceptual against own role as a post-Holocaust subject, as one in responsible in relation to the cause of such Greenbergian modernism and the revival of painting the late 1970s and early See "Barnett Newman's despair." Godfrey, For art is vital its inter 1980s.