“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.

"Ukraine's Got Talent"

The other day my mother sent one of those pop culture emails making the rounds. This one showed a young woman Kseniya Simonova, who recently won the finals in a TV program named Ukraine’s Got Talent, something of an American Idol knock-off. The woman created sand paintings on a large light-table that featured scenes from German invasion of Ukraine [USSR] during World War II. While it may not be correct to consider this invasion part of the Holocaust, one in four people living in Ukraine at the time of what they locally called the Great Patriotic War died. Watching the video, analyzing its circumstances, and reflecting on its merits either as a work of art or as a moment of witness may prove useful as I move ahead exploring questions to ask concerning ways that art and poetry contribute to the conversation concerning the Holocaust itself.

Here’s what happens in the images Simonova creates in sand. First, a couple in love sits on a bench. The war planes come, he disappears, a tear stains the woman’s cheek, a baby arrives. The chaos of war returns, the woman receives news he is dead. Then we see the face of an old woman, more tears on cheeks and, based on varying interpretations, we next see either Ukraine’s "Monument to an Unknown Soldier" [Sailor] or a marker on the man’s grave. The final scene shows the woman looking out a window with her young child. The image of a sailor, hands pressed against the glass, looks in.

In the video, people in the audience cry. The judges cry. People receiving this online email cry as they watch the beautiful woman in a nunlike black dress choreograph this sand painting that looks almost like an animation. She obviously has talent as an artist and as a performer. The prize, varying by accounts of the contest, ranges from $75,000 to $125,000 US.

As I watched the video, I felt discomfort about the whole experience. Let me try to analyze what I think was going on with the production as a whole and then to separate out my own reaction. At the time that Kseniya Simonova appeared on the reality show in September of 2009, the country was in the middle of what the Guardian.co.uk spoke of as a “fraught presidential election campaign …underway ahead of a vote in January 2010 and a deepening financial crisis.” This video also had much in common with the viral video with the unlikely winner on a sister program Britain’s Got Talent, singer Susan Boyle. The reality show platform requires the winner to be an unlikely candidate to win, Susan Boyle because of her appearance, Simonova because she paints in sand. A dream may be part of the equation. Susan Boyle wants to be a star. Simonova presents a world rocked with war with hope of catharsis, perhaps through having a child. Her images of destruction replaced by those of healing seem powerful. One of the most important aspects of both comes from their dependence on a public vote. People choose the winners based, often enough, on emotional response, not on artistic merit. Both are part of a global franchise called Got Talent. The word franchise signals the selling of goods and services.

I felt grateful to Simonova and to Ukraine’s Got Talent as I watched. I began a list of questions that I feel a work of art, of witness, needs to address. All of these felt lacking in the video I saw. First, I want to see something authentic, real, earned. The images in the sand painting were generic and sentimental. How easy to draw the tear in the eye as the lover goes to war. How obvious the baby in the early moments of the piece, the small child later. I had no sense of whose story this was. Or to what purpose beyond the winning of the contest did the creation of the sand painting lend itself. I am a huge believer in art for art’s sake. Yet, if a work considers itself political, then how and what does it argue. Intent should go beyond the simplistic “War is bad” statement this piece makes. Also I want accuracy. As I surfed the Web concerning the video, I discovered the town portrayed was actually in Romania at the beginning of World War II, not Ukraine. I want to feel that there is a sense of layering, that there is more to discover in the piece, that everything is not right there on the surface and obvious. Perhaps most important for this to be art, I want to feel that the artist herself has put something at risk. I want to feel a sense of danger in the art itself, that the artist has gone way inside to a place of personal discovery. Then, maybe I’ll be able to feel something, too.

"Fascinating Fascism"

In 1975, The New York Review of Books published this review by author and literary theorist Susan Sontag about a new book of photographs by Leni Riefenstahl, the director of the Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. The new volume, The Last of the Nuba, takes a look at the people of southern Sudan. Rather than examining the photographs first, Sontag discusses Riefenstahl’s biography as presented on the book jacket and an introduction to the book, both “full of disquieting lies.” In the essay itself and in letters to the editor that follow there is much back and forth concerning the facts of Riefenstahl’s life and career that for the most part have not been resolved today. Much of what-did-she-know, who-did-she-know, and when-did-she-know-it is still debated today.

Instead of engaging in those questions and in the possibility of Riefenstahl’s rehabilitation, I am personally more drawn to examining Sontag’s description of a fascist aesthetic. While the Nuba photos portray an aboriginal society dedicated to ritualistic wrestling, Sontag sees various preoccupations in the Nuba photos that work in a continuum from Triumph of the Will. Both sets of images deal with domination and submission within the context of spectacle.

The above image could as well have been taken from Riefenstahl’s work during the Nazi era if not for the race of the wrestlers. We see here domination, submission, and ritual spectacle on the part of the tribal group amassed for the matches. Sontag further defines this fascist aesthetic in part as “the ideal of life as art [and] the cult of beauty."

In this kind of analysis lies Sontag’s strength. She wraps huge ideas into each component. How else to look at the Third Reich if not as a saga of domination and submission? Many would argue that the stakes were never higher. Whether the domination had to do with territory or the conquering of individual human spirit, the Nazis’ aim was total victory. With the movement into country after country until the Germans occupied most of Europe and North Africa, Hitler’s forces seemed insatiable. On a personal or human level, anyone who was different from the Aryan ideal had to flee or submit completely to the Nazi authority which lead to loss of rights, imprisonment, and death. These persecuted people included the mentally retarded, homosexuals, political opponents, and Gypsies, as well as Jews.

Eric Rentschler, in his book, The Ministry of Illusion speaks to Sontag’s next point that top Nazis held to the ideal of life as art: “If the Nazis were movie mad, then the Third Reich was movie made”(1). Ample evidence exists that much of the orchestration and scheduling of the Nuremberg Rallies coordinated with their filming. Rentschler points out that Goebbels successfully used various media to accomplish such ends: film, of course, celebrations, light shows, rallies, and mass extravaganzas filled with “flags, uniforms, and emblems.” Many of the leaders lived lives surrounded by the documentation remained at the heart of the Nazi aesthetic with the intent that these materials would live, along with the regime, for a thousand years.

Sontag is correct that the cult of beauty is central to both Riefenstahl’s work and to the fascist aesthetic. Whatever else critics say about the films, their visual content seems undeniable. Her sense of mise-en-scène, which refers to everything that appears before the camera, the equivalent of scopic regime in photography, is impeccable. Whether she shows men wrestling or repetitions of form seen in workers marching, inherent beauty remains an essential element. When Riefenstahl shows Aryan faces along a parade route, we have a clear picture of this alliance of beauty in art and in the racial beauty prized by the National Socialists.

So, what to make of all this? When I ask myself about my own sense of Riefenstahl’s images, whether of the Nuba tribe or of her films, and about Sontag’s assessment in terms of defining them, I don’t seem to make much progress. I first saw Triumph of the Will in 1985. I still remember where I was personally and the way the airplane came in through the clouds, how Riefenstahl created Hitler as a god, the crowds of people enthralled, beyond thought, a vast machine of people ready to do whatever the regime required. If the filming of that was beautiful, if the destruction that came from the domination and submission of peoples was nearly absolute, if this was a world complete at that moment, I still cannot lose the sense of horror that always accompanies the work. This is work I cannot come to terms with. Sontag helps me analyze elements of that work. The horror I feel has nothing to do with analyis.