“The Artist as Secondary Witness"

The Introduction to Dora Apel’s Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witness

As I read Dora Apel’s introduction to her book(3-8) concerning art of secondary witness, that is, art coming from people who were not direct survivors of the Holocaust, I am struck by what I call the repetitions of patterns of three among the critics. Here’s what I mean by that. Various scholars offer a pair of opposing views by which to investigate the Holocaust. Within a gap or abyss or contradiction separating these comes a suggestion of a third way combining the other two in some paradoxical fashion. This mediated alternative often serves as the place art becomes possible.

For instance, according to Apel, Roger Simon examines ways to preserve remembrance of traumatic history. His first strategy focuses on “strategic practice,” a sociopolitical strategy that looks toward a better future and a sense of never-again with an emphasis to learn to live with and to deal with loss despite proof of continuing genocides around the world. The opposing pedagogical strategy, “difficult return,” recognizing that horrors continue, intends to “bring the dead into presence,” which often leads obsessively to despair. The third way, which often works through art, realizes that meaning changes over time. The telling and retelling of the story and the story of the story become the focus. We have a work like Maus, that moves into the abyss that exists in the lives of both Art Spiegelman and his father, a Holocaust survivor, as the author draws and writes their personal stories to preserve memory.

Also according to Apel, Michael Rothberg offers two mutually exclusive strategies. A realist view presumes the Holocaust is knowable and can be translated into a “familiar mimetic universe”; the antirealist analysis refuses any sense of knowability in terms of representation. Again, we find a third strategy that Rothberg calls “traumatic realism,” which may help bridge the gap between the irreconcilable strategies, again by employing a sense of chronological time through the use of ordinary and extraordinary elements to retell the story while bringing into play “contemporary conditions of the telling.”

As I read these and other strategies I am struck with a non-pedagogical insight. Although I am capable of considerable detachment and can follow along with scholarly paradigms, my personal viewpoint comes as maker, not critic. I have a sense that the scholars themselves in this introduction come close to the place of abyss, into the idea of paradox, right at the fulcrum of much of art-making itself whether triggered by the Holocaust or by something else.

Art often, not always, comes from obsession and traumatic remembrance. I turn to a favorite artist, Louise Bourgeois, now 98 years old. In a book of writings and interviews, “Destruction of the Father Reconstruction of the Father,” she talks about the role of the unconscious. “There is something very special in being able to sublimate your unconscious, and something very painful in the access to it. But there is no escape from it”(164). My sense is that this is the third way that these scholars are accessing. Often the key is to reside in the heart of paradox, in the inescapable struggle and pain to make art and to understand anything about the nature of personal and artistic reality, where events such as the Holocaust are both knowable and unknowable, rational and horrific in the unconscious mind. Secondary witnesses as artists often do not choose their points of entry or even their responses. We come to their work and enter into the abyss with them. In the strategic paradigms that Apel presents us, the scholars come along, too, into that place.