פני הגזע והזיכרון מתוך הספרייה האסורה
The Faces of Race and Memory From The Forbidden Library
מיצב, HCAK - המרכז לאמנות עכשווית, האג, הולנד. אוצר: פיליפ פיטר. 1993
גלריה עירונית, כפר-סבא. אוצרת: אסנת הוכמן. 1994
גלריה לאמנות ע"ש אברהם ברון , אוניברסיטת בן גוריון בנגב. אוצר: פרופ' חיים פינקלשטיין 1994
"משואה", תל יצחק 1994
HCAK - The Hague Contemporary Art Center, Holland . Curator: Philip Peter. 1993
City Gallery, Kfar Saba Curator: Osnat Hochman. 1994
The Avraham Baron Art Gallery, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Curator: Prof. Haim Finkelstein 1994
"Massuha" – The institute for the study of the holocaust, kibbutz Tel Itzhak. 1994
Death in life, Life in death
On an installation by Haim Maor - by Philip Peters, Curator
The Holocaust does not occur very often as a subject in the visual arts. Possibly it is too outspoken (too literal, too figurative' possibly there is a taboo on it. Oddly enough, this is also the case in Israel. As far as I know, Haim Maor is the only Israeli artist who has dealt wit the Holocaust as (his only) theme for years.
This also applies to the work presented by the HCAK in May 1993 under the title of 'Faces Of Race And Memory from the Forbidden Library'. Maor himself is an exponent of the so-called 'second generation'; the Holocaust touches him personally.
This was a narrative work, in eight parts, geared to the accommodation available in the HCAK at that moment. At that time the HCAK consisted -of seven rooms: the ground floor and upper floor were each divided into three small rooms. The back part was undivided. In addition, Maor used the small office downstairs as the actual exhibition area for the purpose of Introducing the installation. For this occasion, the upper floor has been closed off in the front, so that a fixed walking direction was created: first through the office to the back part by way of the three downstairs rooms, and from there uppstairs to the three to the three upper rooms.
Finally, the 'observer had to cover the entire route in reverse direction in order to get to the front door.
Although the work is unmistakably to a great extent, this does not imply that in only dealt with Haim Maor or even the Holocaust.
The step-up first moved towards the theme, as it were, and then away from it. At first, the visitor was an observer of tragedy gradually unfolding before his eyes, at the end of the installation he had turned into a participant.
II
Since the installation has disappeared and this publication can only illustrate part of the work, a brief description follows:
I. PROLOGUE In the office there were two flag-like canvases. One of them looked like a color-blindness test, in which a five-figure number was only just to be discerned. The other one was composed of camouflage spots where with some difficulty the text I AM A JEW was to be read. These canvases introduced the mysteriousness of the theme, the atmosphere of taboo and shame it is surrounded with.
2. FORBIDDEN WORDS In the first downstairs room there were a number of sheets of paper on which words in neutral characters had been printed. These come from various areas of meaning. A few examples: HAIR, SHOWER, CAMP. Together, they formed an associative field, offering itself for interpretation. The common denominator was that all the words used occur in the vocabulary related to extermination camps.
The sheets with words were complemented by comparable sheets with pictograms, to which the same applied.
3. FORBIDDEN STORIES The second room contained a number of larger sheets of paper with a number of texts printed on them, the origin of which was to divided in two: part of them comprised ~' impressions of a biography of Haim Maor and his parents, another part consisted of comparable texts on a young German woman, Sanna, with her family, who has been 'on the wrong side' during the war. All this is completed by a number of photographs 'emphasizing the duel background of the texts. The portraist of the two protagonists, Haim and Sanna, were introduced on this spot. The number from the Prologue also appeared again here, tattooed on an arm. In the center of the room there was a table with color photographs under a glass top, comparable to those hanging on the walls. On the table stood a kitsch statuette of Biedermeier origin.
4. FACES OF RACE On walls facing each other, a number of photographs hung in three rows: on one side men, on the other Women. One of the man was Haim, one of the women was Sanna. The identity of the others remained unknown. It was likely that we had to do with Jews and Germans here, though it was not explicity stated witch group was where. Because of the division into men and woman, it could in all probability be supposed that both groups mixed, a first and significant indication of the eventual meaning of the work as a whole.
5. MORTUARY In the dimly lit back room twelve open coffines had been placed, part of them in rows, part of them half overlapping each other. The twelve lids hung on the walls portraits had been painted on them, to be compared to those in the photographs in the preceding room. Sometimes, as in the case of Haim and Sanna, the same people had been portrayed. Besides, a comparable (but this time horizontal) wooden panel, which was not part of a coffin, hung on the back wall. The number (which by this time the visitor must have been able to identify as Auschwitz number) also figured here. In Poland Haim's grandfather used to earn his living by making tombstones.
6. DISQUALIFIED SCROLLS All the upstairs rooms were relatively dark. In the first room from top to bottom, hung six unfolded parchment scrolls. (Somewhat blurred) slided of the heads of Haim and Sanna were projected on them. Such scrolls are actually meant for writing down the' Torah (the Law); consequently, they had been 'desecrated' as it were 'through these projections.
7. LIGHT NUMBER In the second upstairs room the only light came from behind a copper plate hanging to the wall, in which the contours of the Auschwitz number had been left open. For the rest, the room was empty.
8. ECHO CHAMBER In the last room a small cubicle had been built, open to one side; the three other walls were convered with mirrors. In the center a chair had been placed, strongly resembling 'the electric chair'. The room was lit by one single bulb. Over the chair a black crow was hanging, many times larger than life-size. Those who sat down on the chair could see themseleves infinitely reflected right and left.
This was the 'end' of the route. From here the visitor had to cover all the stages once again in reverse order.
III
The narrative structure of this work has a fragmentary character. Something is told, but in associative images from various fields of meaning and making use of a diversity of materials. Moreover, one might speak of a 'story within a story' or a story with several layers of meaning reflecting one another. Three layers are to be distingushed. In the first place, there is the unfolding narrative of the. Holocaust. Interwoven with it is the biography to two protagonists of the next generation: an Israeli man and a German woman. Finally, there is the experience of the observer, who automatically takes part in the story, increasingly becomes an 'accomplice' as the story proceeds, until at the end he is confronted with his own mirror image. Whereas at the start of the installation he could still take up the position of the more or less detached observer getting something dished up, at the end whole work turns out to have been about him, too. He is no longer just an observer, but has become a person involved. No perpetrator without a victim, no victim without a perpetrator. The two are united in the mirror room in the person of the visitor who, after a kaleidoscopic survey of perpetrators and victims, is all of a sudden treated to his own portrait. It can therefore be said that eventually the Holocaust is not the subject of this work, but at most a cause. Essentially, it deals with man in general, with man without a mask, with what is left when the veneer of 'civilization' is removed, and with the duality present in all of us.
IV
This is definitely a moralistic work of art, possibly not the most popular attitude in this day and age, but it Is an attitude which is meaningful and in a sense necessary in a period of newly surfacing racism and hatred of foreigners. At this very moment the warning character of the work unfortunately once again has a message which is related to society and culture in a general sence, as well as to topical, questionable tendencies and our own stand with respect to them, a message aimed at each human being separately, who Is both potential perpetrator and potential victim. On the strength of this awareness choices have to be, made; that Is man's responsibility in life: Wir haben es gewusst.
This work of Haim Maor deals with the human condition, on the basis of one of the most drastic and large-scale manifestations of it in world history, but it. also hints at the possibility of transcending it: the Jew and the German women, Haim and Sanna, are friends regardless of their respective family histories. Just so, the perpetrator and the victim in ourselves should also try to come to terms: then (and only then) history will not repeat itself anymore.
V
The Jewish culture is primarily a culture of words (and a culture of continuous commentary on words). This can particularly be traced back to the abundant quantity of texts, notably in the first passages of the work. In this connection it should be noted that a great deal has been lost in the English translation: Hebrew offers infinite possibilities for ambiguity, for three or even more layers of meaning, which are not to be expressed in another language.
The development of the work is from word to image or from word developing into image.
It is also a development from light to dark, and from object (the Holocaust) to subject (the observer), as well as, in reverse, from words and numbers to concrete objects with a metaphorical tension and from vague, verbal and visual allusions, by way of a variety of data, to oppressive clarity in a strongly economized design.
On the other hand, it is just as arguable to say that the work Is composed of a large number of sudden changes in style, that each stanza (each small roam) presents a design a entirely of its own, in other words: the work as a whole has been structured as a narrative, It is true, but the components of the narrative are no more than just fragments, like archaeological discoveries: their mutual relationship Is still to be found, the narrative will have to be filled in by the observer.
The leitmotif In the narrative can be construed on the basis of the recurring data: the Auschwitz number, the portrains of the protagonists as exemplary for 'all people', for 'man' in general. The number recurs in a variety of contexts and roles: first quasi neutral, as a series of figures, then as a tattoo on an arm, and consequently an Auschwitz number, and finally as luminous signal in an arrangement strongly verging on the sacral, almost as an image of devotion. But it is not an image devoted to the position of being a victim, as Is indicated by the subsequent and last room, the mirror room, where, after all, the observer meets himself as a potential perpetrator.
VI
The development from text to image and at the same time from light to dark is also to be interpreted as a transition from a consciously observing level to the realm of the participating unconscious. In a sense, it could be maintained that the nature of the communication does not essentially change and is already completely put forward in the prologue', subsequently returning in all sorts of varying forms. The difference then lies in the character of the formulation, which has been geared to the changing reactions of the observer: at first his reaction is cerebral, detached and combining, then associative, involved and introverted. The downstairs rooms are the domain of logic, deduction, ratio (the 'light part' of the brain, as it is put in Hebrew) and are therefore bathed in fluorescent light, In the upper rooms Irrationality Is predominant, metaphysics, experience (the 'dark part' of the brain) which is the reason why it is dark upstairs. Thinking man's control over obscure, unconscious process is disappearing in the course of the installation and the work leads the observer towards insight Into himself within the context of the historical parallel. It is true, the last stages of the work take place in relative darkness, on the other hand the materials used there are materials of light: a luminous object, projection reflection. In this way, there is light in darkness and at the same time darkness in light: the classical Romantic theme of 'Life in Death, Death in Life'. Moreover the development is a development from past to present: from remembrance of the Holocaust to awareness of the present moment.
VII
Once the end of the installation has been reached, the visitor will have to walk the same way back again in reverse direction, in order to get to the front door again. But the person who is faced with the starting point of this route back is no longer the same person as the one who entered the exhibition. Then he still had an open mind about the work and he started his walk as more or less detached observer. However, at the starting point of his return route he has undergone the experience of the work. The movements is now away from the here and now. Or rather: the here and now is experienced as a consequence of the past, of history.
A step can only be taken if a step has preceded it. The here and now in itself has no meaning, just as the life of a person without memory consists of a sequence of futile incidents.
If this installation of Haim Maor really 'teaches' us anything, it is: historical awareness. The visitor leaves the Installation in the awareness of his historical dimension.
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The Crumbling of Memory - Prof. Haim Finkelstein
Haim Maor's exhibition consists of an installation comprising seven stations along a route leading to a dead-end. In the end there is failure, or at least the growing awareness of the inevitability of failure. It Is the failure of memory-both personal and collectivein any sort of effort to reconstruct the most traumatic event in Jewish history in many generations-the Holocaust. Haim Maor, the son of Holocaust survivors, provides us with a first-hand testimony of this failure.
The artist leads us in a voyage of illumination - a meditation about the nature of images and imagemaking, and the mechanisms Involved in the reconstruction of memory. All this is enacted as a dramatic experience, a performance, in which we have a double role as players and observers. As we move along a prescribed itinerary, like actors through a theatrical space, we experience space itself and the things within it as vehicles for various emotions, as objects of empathy, while observing ourselves responding to them. In judging our own responses we stand to gain a truer perspective on ourselves.
Each station along our itinerary is a stage in this process of growing introspection. It starts with the Prologue, in a simple exercise in visual perception. Two "curtains" hang from horizontal poles-one dotted with appliquיs of small rounded pieces of fabric in various colors; the other, a military camouflage material to which were appliquיd letter forms made from the same material - which illustrated growing awareness of the co-existence of both a visible text and a hidden one. Hardly discernible in the first curtain is the five-digit number which was tattooed on the arm of the artist's father in Auschwitz-Birkenau; the other reveals the inscription I AM A JEW. Both invisible texts represent the mystery, forgetfulness, and denial associated with the "forbidden stories" of the Holocaust, taboo subjects which continue to exert their unacknowledged yet ubiquitous presence. But first come the "forbidden words" in the station bearing that title - everyday words in large-print format, framed and displayed in large clusters around the walls. It is a dictionary of words without definitions, apparently innocent words, each open to various meanings; however, placed together, these words form an associative field which is no longer that innocent. This is, indeed, a dictionary for Holocaust survivors, for whom the word "camp," for instance, has a totally different connotation from the one ascribed to it by others. This semantic shift works both ways; in the context of the Holocaust, innocent words were manipulated and made use of as the means for camouflaging the horrible meanings in fact denoted by them. In this defilement of language, the expression "final solution," for instance, replaced the more explicit "extermination." These sheets with words are complemented by similarly framed sheets with pictograms, where the innocent sign for a shower could also refer to the mechanics of extermination; where, for a graduate of the camps, a watch tower pictogram will have an altogether different meaning from the one affixed to it in the Zionist settlement lore.
Photographs and even memories may exhibit the same intentional, or unintentional, fallacy; but here, in the "forbidden stories" area, we already find ourselves in the domain of family histories and human destinies, treading upon the treacherous ground of national distinctions or racial stereotypes. The story of Haim Maor and his family, told in texts and photographs, is placed alongside the story of a young German woman, Sanna (Suzanna), and her family. Was her grandfather, who was a Wehrmacht officer, a Nazi? Is the black stain on his chest in his photograph the mark of a missing swastika? These musings which Haim Maor shares with us are no different from his observation that some of the people in Sanna's family album have "Jewish faces." As his blind grandfather told him, racism is a sickness of people who see with their eyes. In the Maor exhibition held in 1988 at the Israel Museum, kibbutz members and Germans appeared together in a group of mug shots of the kind made in the death camps, without being identified as belonging to one or the other group. The viewer's inclination to identify the persons by facial types and racial characteristics discloses the racist tendencies that exist, to a certain measure, in all of us.
This holds true for Maor's strategy here as well. Contrary to their allotted function as a means of fixing memory, photographs are thus revealed to be a very unreliable form of documentation. Photographs of people here and now, yellowing photographs from family albums, photographs taken in the death camps, staged photographs-all are placed on the same footing with no attempt to tell us what is what. Do they document a truth or do they give rise to a myth? Is the Jew in striped dress lying on a bunk in Birkenau Haim's father? And does it really matter if he isn't? The number tattooed on the arm of the father appears here again, this time in a photographic close-up. Can these digits, with their magical and incantatory power (as attested to by Haim's own memory of the attraction the number held for him) serve as an anchor, a fixed point, in these dizzying, shifting perspectives? The number reappears on a wooden panel above a painted portrait of the father; on a reproduction of a self-portrait by Van Gogh that uncannily resembles photographic images of death-camp inmates. Later, in the station entitled "Light Number," its contours are punctured into a copper plate affixed to the wall which encloses a light source. With light streaming through the open punctures, the digits are projected on the viewer's face and reflected by the copper plate; the viewer becomes thus fully identified with the number, and yet the number retains its elusive and mysterious quality.
The failure previously referred to lies in our inability to order and organize the memory of the Holocaust; this, because the Holocaust cannot really be remembered. No matter how much data and information we have accumulated, our efforts to grasp its totality are doomed; as doomed, indeed, as the despairing attempt to condense and summarize it all in one ultimate equation, a symbol, a world-embracing image-such as the "Light Number." "Ceci West pas une pipe," says the inscription found next to the picture of a pipe in one of Magritte's paintings. He is right; this is not a pipe, it is the image of a pipe. The Holocaust is grasped as an image; faced with a photograph, a document, a story, we say, "This is Auschwitz," believing that we see the real thing, when all we are able to perceive is an image. A film such as Schindler's List falls into this trap of making believe that it documents things as they "really happened." It adopts black-and-white photography as a mark of authenticity - indeed, it looks like newsreels and other film documents of the time - but all it does is imitate the images of the documentation of the Holocaust. The question whether things were really like that becomes puerile in the face of the enormity of the events that cannot be remembered. Haim Maor lays his cards on the table; he knows that the materials he makes use of can never stand for the Holocaust itself. These are merely Holocaust materials - memories, objects, mementos or make-believe mementos of the Holocaust-used by him as "found materials" or ready-made objects in the endeavor to make some sense of their source, an endeavor marked by his full awareness of the futility of this effort.
This is where the title "The Forbidden Library" gains its full meaning. The "library" refers to the idea of a repository of all the accumulated information regarding the Holocaust, of which the images and texts of the present exhibition form a part, minute though it might be (the table standing in the "Forbidden Stories" station with the photographs and reproductions lying under its glass top-as reproduced on the cover of the present publication-might be seen as a yet smaller version of this "library"). The word "forbidden" is used because of the "mind-forg'd manacles," to use the poet Blake's term, that may hamper us from fully confronting a forbidden subject. We find refuge in memory and knowledge, but where the ambition is to amass all the memory of the world, knowledge becomes totally diffused and blurred, and the library, like Borges's "Library of Babel," becomes identified with the world itself. "The certainty that everything has been written annuls us or makes phantoms of us," says Borges's narrator in the story. This also holds true where the desire is to remember everything, to remember a totality. The installation guides us toward the experience of the despairing attempt to constitute a whole from the fragments of memory, and the consequent overloading of memory that results in its crumbling. In the station of "The Faces of Memory," the coffin lids with the portraits painted on them, like the Faiyum funerary portraits, appear to have been toppled down from their placings around the walls. The portraits painted on wooden panels hung around the walls-reminiscent of medieval icons-become gradually blurred and fragmented, until they literally disappear from view. These become insubstantial projections in the following station entitled "Disqualified Scrolls," where the heads and full figures of Haim and Sanna are projected, blurred, on hanging parchment scrolls, "desecrating" with their presence the scrolls meant for the writing down of the Torah.
In this large portrait gallery, the "faces of memory" are brought together, randomly and with no formal identification, portraits of Jews and Germans, Haim's family, Sanna's family, friends or chance acquaintances. You, the viewer, could easily be one of these; you could be a victim or a perpetrator, as you come to realize when you finally confront yourself in the "Echo Chamber." In this last station, a small cubicle lit by a single light bulb, with a chair placed at its center and three of its walls covered with mirrors, the viewer finds himself confronted by a myriad of his own reflections on all sides. This is like a stage setting, and it is "as if" the viewer finds himself in a death camp with its electrified fence and lights, knowing well enough that it is only a make-believe situation. Yet, this is also where things are turned upside-down; we see ourselves reversed, inverted, and we come to realize the basic duality of this experience, with its extended series of reversals: male-female, victim-perpetrator, Jew-German, living-dead, light-dark. These are not perceived as contradictions, but as complementaries, the one being in the other, one deriving from the other, like the Chinese "Yin Yang" principle, with its complementaries representing the demand for an ultimate balance and harmony. Unlike the historical melodrama - a common form used to represent the Holocaust in film, literature or art - with its simplified conception of good and evil, and its clear-cut separation of moral responsibility, Haim Maor's exhibition presents a complex and demanding structure of thought. This is, perhaps, the key that might lead us out of this labyrinth of the exhibition, a maze extended over a chain of exhibitions created by Haim Maor, of which the present is only one link. Thus, materials are recycled from one exhibition to the next, not because he lacks for new materials, but because there is a demanding sense of continuity in which each object gains a new life and meaning, becomes weightier with memory and associations, becomes more intimately linked with the artist's efforts to come to terms with his traumas and demons, and with his own artistic efforts as a form of exorcism.
Thus in the failure of the exhibition lies, paradoxically, its success. In this humbling experience we come to realize that what we may often take for the "real thing" - a direct representation of the Holocaust - is just an image, one among many in a complex array of changing perspectives, and that no book or a movie, or even the most conscientiously researched historical effort, can ever hope to represent more than just an image. Thus, with the failure comes enlightenment and a sense of regained strength derived from the perception of the tragic complexity of our own humanity.