Abstract
Contemporary conceptual art is one of the ‘texts’ which is now shaping the memory of the Holocaust, and, by extension impacting our culture’s social awareness of genocide, both past and present. The attempted genocide of European Jewry has been a continuing theme in Christian Boltanski’s installation art. Boltanski, one of France’s most eminent visual artists, addresses the myriad challenges inherent in representing the Holocaust through art and finds a middle path between abstraction and graphic representational depiction. Through a reworking of documentary photographs, Boltanski offers an original artistic response to the catastrophe of the Holocaust — working both within and outside traditional paradigms of Holocaust art and Holocaust historiography. As witnesses to the Holocaust, these documentary photographs are situated between the demands of historical meticulousness and the more lithe needs of Holocaust remembrance.1 However, the distinction made between historical representation and the artistic re-representation of historical events becomes more opaque in Boltanski’s work.2 Boltanski’s unique appropriations and reconfigurations of images of perpetrators, victims and bystanders of the Holocaust raise questions and offer insights into current aesthetic, moral and historical debates regarding the nature and identity of the victims, the indifference of the bystanders, and the motivations of the Second World War’s genocidal killers. Boltanski’s art fluctuates between the particular and the general as he engages viewers in pondering the fact of mass death in the 20th century.
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Notes
Andrea Liss, Trespassing Through Shadows: Memory, Photography, and the Holocaust (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p.xiii.
Saul Friedlander, ‘Introduction’, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’ (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard UP, 1992), p.3.
Theodor Adorno, ‘Engagement’, in Rolf Tiedeman (ed.), Notes to Literature, tr. Sherry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp.125–7.
A long list of sources can be cited including historical analyses and philosopher’s reflections. For a discussion of how the Holocaust is remembered in Holocaust memorials see James Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1993), p. 1;
Alvin Rosenfeld, The Americanization of the Holocaust (The University of Michigan, 1995), p.3. Rosenfeld indicates that ‘Historical memory in popular culture is determined chiefly by popular forms of representation.’
James Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1990), pp.16–17.
Lynn Gumpert, ‘The Life and Death of Christian Boltanski’, in Howard Singerman (ed.), Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), p.53.
Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), p.99.
Tamar Garb, ‘Tamar Garb in Conversation With Christian Boltanski’, in Didier Semin, Tamar Garb and Donald Kuspit (eds.), Christian Boltanski (London: Phaidon, 1997), p.23.
Dori Laub and Marjorie Allard, ‘History, Memory and Truth: Defining the Place of the Survivor’, in Michael Berenbaum, and Abraham J. Peck (eds.), The Holocaust and History: the Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press in Association With the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1998), p.801.
Linda Weintraub. ‘Christian Boltanski’, in Art on the Edge and Over (Litchfield Connecticut: Art Insights, 1996), p.156.
Jennifer Flay (ed.), Christian Boltanski Catalogue, Books, Printed Matter, Ephemera 1966–1991 (Köln: Verlag, 1992), p. 167.
Leni Yahil, The Holocaust. The Fate of European Jewry (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990), pp.139, 294.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Doubleday, 1989), pp.14–15.
Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the jews”, tr. Andreas Michel and Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p.27.
David Roskies, Against the Apocalypse: Jewish Responses to Catastrophe in Modern Jewish Culture (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 1984), p.7.
Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York: Vintage Books, 1983), vxi.
Sybil Milton, ‘Images of the Holocaust — Part 1’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1.1 (1986): 27.
Pierre Haidu, ‘The Dialectics of Unspeakability: Language, Silence, and the Narratives of Desubjectification’, in Saul Friedlander (ed.), Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard UP, 1992), p.296.
See Christian Boltanski, Classe Terminale du Lycée Chases, 1931: Castelgasse-Vienne (Dusseldorf: Kunstverein für die Rhineland und Westfalen, 1987). The supplementary catalogues which accompanied the Chases and Purim installations included information about the source material.
Vicki Goldberg, ‘A Builder of Monuments: Christian Boltanski’s Artful Emotion’, American Photographer (April 1989): 49. See also Ernst van Alphen, Caught By History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997), p.106. van Alphen charges that ‘By representing these people as (almost) dead, Boltanski foregrounds the idea that photographs have no referent; and by representing these human beings in the “Nazi mode”, that is, without identifying features he negates the “presence” in the portrait of an individual. All the portraits are exchangeable: the portrayed have become anonymous. Likewise, they all evoke absence: not only absence of a referent outside the image, but absence of presence within the image as well.’
Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, p.163. This also stands in contrast to the language of the historian, which, to a greater or lesser extent, keeps an emotional distance from the subject. Saul Friedlander compares this style of language to the ‘detached position of an administrator of extermination.’ Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, tr. Thomas Weyr (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 1993), pp.91–2.
See Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieu de Mémoire’, tr. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26 (1989): 13.
James Young, ‘Memory and Counter-Memory: Towards A Social Aesthetic of Holocaust Memorials’, in Monica Bohm-Duchen (ed.), After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (London: Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Sunderland in Association with Lund Humphries Publishers Limited, 1995), p.83.
Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1987), p.46.
Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992), p.36.
ibid., p.71; Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (London: Little, Brown and Co., 1996), p.222.
translated from the German ‘Schöne Zeiten’ see Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen and Volker Riess (eds.), ‘The Good Old Days’: The Holocaust as Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (New York: Konecky and Konecky, 1988) pp.xix–xxi.
Raul Hilberg, Perpetrators, Victims, Bystanders: The Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 195.
Didier Semin, ‘Boltanski: From the Impossible Life to the Exemplary Life’, in Didier Semin, Tamar Garb and Donald Kuspit (eds.), Christian Boltanski (London: Phaidon, 1997), p.85.
Primo Levi, ‘The Memory of the Offense’, in Roger Gottlieb (ed.), Thinking the Unthinkable: Meanings of the Holocaust (Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press, 1990), p.405.
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Shapiro, C.R. (2001). Obliquely Shown Crimes. In: Roth, J.K., Maxwell, E., Levy, M., Whitworth, W. (eds) Remembering for the Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-66019-3_196
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