Content:

Introduction | Scream and Silence | Between Man and People | The Quite Voice of Art | Strzemiński's Friends | The Architect of Memory | An After Generation | Through the Body Towards... | Dead Serious Toys | Pink Glasses? | Fascinating Fascism | A Consequent Reopening of Wounds | The Desert of the Obscure | Hypertextual Story | Female Intimacy | After Hansen

Rafał Jakubowicz, "Arbeitsdisziplin" courtesy of the artist

It seems that the problem of the possibility of the further existence and functioning of art in the Western world, experienced in an unprecedented way by the genocide of the European Jewry during the Second World War, is one of the most essential issues both in art historical reflection and in philosophy of the second half of the 20th century. For the Polish society, war was a traumatic experience and as such it has become a very important element of the quest for identity for numerous generations of artists. In 1947, Tadeusz Kantor noted:

"Decisive year. Decisions become radical. The only hitherto legitimate image of the human being disappeared. [...] it was the time of war and of the 'masters of the world' that made me, and many others, loose trust in the former image of exquisite shape, of a species superior to all others".¹

This article will be devoted to diverse strategies of Holocaust representation in visual arts, with a particular attention paid to projects of a few artist which, I claim, are especially significant for this discussion.



Polish artists - those born before the war, those who survived the Shoah and its witnesses alike - produced several works pointing to both the presence of war trauma and the impossibility to represent it by means of traditional imagery. Nevertheless, art did not dissolve into silence, nor did culture disappear by the mid 20th century. Attempts at the artistic representation of reality and at overcoming both the lack of Holocaust iconography and the decline of mimetic representation have not vanished. What Eleonora Jedlińska² and many other authors call "the end of man" was taken up by many artists and in many ways, although - let us put it directly - it has not at all been the only subject of postwar art. It is not easy to give priority to one manner of depicting this historical phenomenon, and it seems obvious that particular generations of viewers and artists favoured different tendencies. The tone which seemed to be dominant for quite a long time was serious meditation connected with lamentation and the limiting of means of visual expression, on the one hand, and screaming associated with the imperative to testify, on the other. War experience gave birth to a conflict between the desire to tell the truth, to testify, and the awareness of the unsuitability of traditional visual conventions as well as of the insufficiency of the hitherto existing language of art.

"Cień człowieka / A Shadow of a man"	"Uwięziony / Imprisoned"
Zbigniew Dłubak, series "Wojna / War" courtesy of the Museum of Art in Łódź, photo: Piotr Tomczyk

After the war it seemed that on the terrifying phenomenon of dehumanised mass death, one could either scream or cease to speak. One intriguing example of such a silent witness is Zbigniew Dłubak - an inmate of Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps in 1944/45, who organised his first art exhibition together with Marian Bogusz and "Zbynek" Segal on a pallet in a camp barrack. In his postwar practice, however, one will not find any trace of the camp or war experience at all. With all due respect for the witness and his memory, one could feel tempted to think whether his attitude is not affected by a repression of matters which proved too monstrous and inhuman to be given any articulated form. The silence of such an important personage on the Polish postwar art scene, as Dłubak himself, and, what is more, a silence so literal, seems extremely telling.³ Surely, it is not the only example of such an attitude.

A reaction of a completely different character was the testimony of the mass murder of the Jews of Lviv by Jonasz Stern, expressed in a 1945 linocut series and in "Wyniszczenie / Extermination", a series that appeared twenty years later. Destructs - as Stern's works have often been called - became a reply to the history of his survival that seemed beyond any understanding. The artist had been arrested and on the way to Bełżec extermination camp he escaped from the transport. He returned to the ghetto, where he was caught again and moved to the camp in Janowiec, where in turn, he lived through a mass execution without even being wounded. He recalled this experience in the work "Dół / Pit" (1964). Feliks Nussbaum, a Warsaw Jew, who died together with his wife in Birkenau in 1944, created several works which are a chronicle of the long hours of fear in the face of denunciation, deportation, imprisonment and death. In his "Autoportret z żydowskim dowodem tożsamości / Self Portrait with Jewish Identity Card" (c. 1943) or "Autoportret przy sztaludze / Self Portrait at the Easel" (1943), the artist evoked classic patterns of Renaissance portraiture in order to juxtapose them with the horrifying sings of present oppression and horror. The oeuvre of the Nowy Sącz Jew Marian S. Marian, an inmate of Auschwitz, who left Poland three years after the end of the war, to spend the rest of his life in the West, is coarse, almost tactile, full of prisoners in striped uniforms, of perpetrators, and finally, of humans changing into animals. Such works as "Bez tytułu / Untitled" (1955) or "Postać z oślimi uszami / Personage with Donkey Ears" (1962) are evidence of an obsessive following of phantasms towards the horrifying truth of an individual experience. Another artist haunted by a similar obsession was Samuel Bak. Among his most renowned paintings are a group of coffin portraits entitled "Rodzina / Family" (1974), "Ojciec i syn albo ofiara Izaaka / Father and Son or the Sacrifice of Izaac", "Ghetto", and "Tablice prawa z lat siedemdziesiątych / The Tablet of Law from the 1970s". Between new figuration, surrealism and lyrical abstraction, those victims and witnesses of the Holocaust strived to express the truth of their extraordinary experience. They strived to dignify death in camps (although it was not the rule for the whole of artistic practice of this generation), they turned either towards realism, evoking traditional symbols of Judaism and Christianity, or they created extremely subjective images.

"Nagrobek / Gravestone"	"Popiersie / Bust"
"Nagrobek kobieciarza / A gravestone of a womanizer"	"Nagrobek na zielonym tle / A gravestone on a green background"
Andrzej Wróblewski, series "Nagrobki / Gravestones" courtesy of Marta Wróblewska

The theme of the Holocaust recurred in the works of the artists such as: Marek Oberländer, Bronisław Wojciech Linke - the author of "Kamienie krzyczą / Stones Scream", Xawery Dunikowski (Auschwitz inmate) - the author of "Boże Narodzenie w Oświęcimiu w 1944 roku / Christmas in Auschwitz in 1944", Teresa Żarnower, or Władysław Strzemiński - who shall be discussed later on. Artistic representations of war and Holocaust appeared also in the succeeding decades. At the end of the 40s, Andrzej Wróblewski painted his deeply moving "Rozstrzelania / Executions" series, and later in the 50s - the period preceding his tragic death - he once again decided to deal with issues of war and the end of human life. He created at that time works that featured human characters without any individual traits, reduced to monochromatic spots, as if they were shades consumed by the background ("Cień Hiroszimy / The Shadow of Hiroshima", 1957). The 50s also saw the creation of "Ekshumowany / Exhumed", "Trudny wiek / Difficult Age" or "Pierwsza miłość / First Love" by Alina Szapocznikow - who survived the ghetto in Pabianice and Łódź, and later, Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt camps. The artist juxtaposed the memory of the real with experiencing on one's own body the process of passing identified with degradation. Among the artists depicting the Holocaust there was also Józef Szajna, whose camp experience marked his work both artistic and theatrical. As a member of the resistance, the artist was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. He devoted his work to the analysis of the human condition in the world after Auschwitz under the rule of death, for the representation of which only the aesthetics of garbage seemed possible and adequate.

In the 60s, the pioneers of Polish video art also referred to the issue of the Holocaust: Tadeusz Makarczyński in the first Polish found-footage film entitled "Życie jest piękne / Life Is Beautiful" and Józef Robakowski in "6 000 000".

"Pierwsza miłość / First love"	"Trudny wiek / Difficult age"
Alina Szapocznikow courtesy of the Museum of Art in Łódź, photo: Piotr Tomczyk

In relation to the artistic practice of Szapocznikow, the oeuvre of Magdalena Abakanowicz lies as if on the other extreme, for it is par excellence universal in character: in such cycles as "Plecy / Backs" (1976-1982), "Tłum / The Crowd" (1985-87) or "Ragazzi" (1990-92) an individual is never presented on his/her own: bodies - in groups, faces - in crowds. Her hunched, undistinguishable, as if hurt figures - the inhabitants of the world after Auschwitz - are disabled, inhuman, deprived of identity; marked with a scar, with loneliness and abandonment.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, "Klatka / Cage" 1981 courtesy of the Museum of Art in Łódź photo: Piotr Tomczyk

"Some of the sculptor's figures seem as if they were capable of any kind of cruelty - of stoning the infidel, robbing or denouncing a neighbour, of operating a gas chamber"⁴, writes Michael Brenson.

Abakanowicz's work is sometimes treated as a constant returning to the cruelties and base behaviour people held against each other, to history aiming at atrophy and sinking into mindless violence. The artist's works from the 70s and 80s are claimed to be an expression of the impossibility to narrate any experience at all. By creating silent, lonely figures, at the same time completely deprived of individuality - similar to the Holocaust victims, but taken out of this particular context - the artist takes part in this unique artistic discussion.



In Polish art critique one can observe attitudes for which a good illustration is provided by the statement of art historian and critic, Krystyna Czerni, who claimed in an essay in "Art from Poland 1945-1996" that in comparison with literature, the visual arts did not meet the challenge of the crisis of culture and representation after the Second World War.⁵ Some of the artists mentioned above exposed their artistic impotence, they turned towards the solemn poetics of silence, others sanctified the Shoah as a theme, concentrating, at the same time, on remembrance and tribute for the victims. This characteristics surely does not exhaust the spectrum of all artistic attitudes. It only points to a more general situation, which emerged in the aftermath of the historical trauma. In relation to Czerni's words and as if against them, I would now like to devote some more attention to two artists, belonging to that generation, whose artistic (and ethical) stances seem ground breaking, original and crucial for the history of Polish art, even though not yet thoroughly discussed.



What seems the most crucial in the context of Władysław Strzemiński's series of collages entitled "Moim przyjaciołom Żydom / To My Friends, the Jews" (1945)⁶, is the tension between the victim and the witness of his/her tragedy; a witness forced to passive participation. Moreover, the witness is an artist who is not used to being passive and whose work is not left uninfluenced by the events either observed or experienced. This series is treated here as a kind of "artistic document" created by a mature artist, educated and intellectually formed before the war. This oxymoronic phrase - "artistic document" seems to be very adequate for this particular work, what shall be argued later.

The Second World War, which Strzemiński spent in Lodz, witnessing mass deportations, executions, and other cruelties of the occupant, coincided with the crisis of the Avant-garde paradigm (Cubism, Purism, Neoplasticism) which had shaped Strzeminski artistic attitude. In the 20s and 30s, the artist was advocate of the autonomy of art, and the right to "laboratory clean" artistic experiments. During the occupation, however, he created a few cycles of drawings depicting the horror of war ("Białoruś Zachodnia / Western Belarus", "Deportacje / Deportations", "Wojna domowa / Civil War", "Twarze, pejzaże i martwe natury / Faces, Landscapes and Still Lives", "Tanie jak błoto / Cheap as Mud", "Ręce, które nie z nami / Hands That Are Not With Us"). The above series, together with the "Jewish series" for which they provided a source material, were treated by art historians and critics as essential for the artist's oeuvre.⁷ They are exceptional, because rooted in a particular historical moment; they are documents of a time, the artist's reaction to the current political and cultural situation. "To My Friends, the Jews" consists of ten collages on white, grey or brown paper: the artist's war drawings, at times deformed or placed differently on the sheet, combined with documentary photographs depicting ghetto scenes, transports, concentration and death camps. Each collage was given a separate, metaphoric and sometimes extremely extended title (ex. "Śladem istnienia stóp, które wydeptały / Tracing the Existence of the Feet That Trod"; "Oskarżam zbrodnię Kaina i grzech Chama / I Accuse the Crime of Cain and Ham's Sin"; "Lepka plama zbrodni / Sticky Stain of Crime"; "Puste piszczele krematoriów / Empty Shinbones of Crematoria").

The very title of the series juxtaposes an individual experience (pointed at by the phrase "my friends") with the mass murder of the Jews. This juxtaposition of intimacy and the anonymity of mass murder becomes very telling here. The scale of the experience depersonalises not only victims but also witnesses. As Marek Zaleski stated:

"One does not have to repeat that the anonymous and mass character of death - and related to this, the dehumanisation of its representations - is a basic difficulty facing intellectual and artistic reflection on the Holocaust."⁸

Strzemiński does not allude in an unambiguous way to the issue of Polish-Jewish relations. He touches upon this problem from an individual perspective. What appears/arises here is the notion of a very specific kind of obligation of the witness towards the victims. He has to testify, provide an evidence, and remember. By means of his very intimate dedication, Strzemiński announces in a way that he stands to his duty towards the dead.

Władysław Strzemiński, "Moim przyjaciołom Żydom / To My Friends, the Jews" courtesy of the National Museum in Krakow

"To My Friends, the Jews" is one of the first (artistic) gestures proving that in the face of the Shoah one could not remain indifferent. Strzemiński meets this challenge immediately. His reaction is direct, the monument he builds – one of the first. The verbal layer of the series (the titles) harmonises with its visual layer, it complements and reflects it at the same time. Metonymic images of legs, feet, hands, eye sockets, shinbones and veins render on the verbal, poetic level the extent of the destruction of a human being in the era of the Holocaust. At the same time they echo the photographic and film representations of the heaps of bones or starved corpses already known to the public. These photos were drawn over with, as Andrzej Turowski puts it, "empty contours of nonexistence": meandering lines creating organic, amorphous shapes; running nowhere and contouring nothing. The language used in these titles works in a similar way: it contours, but names nothing; instead of signifying, it misleads. Strzemiński renders not only the violence of language, but also its emptiness and disability.

This cycle is an example of art aiming at saving humanity in the world of genocide. Its documentary value does not diminish its artistic value. Quite contrarily, it strengthens it and gives it a completely new dimension. By making his collages, the artist juxtaposed document and abstraction. He showed, at the same time, how documented reality enters the realm of artistic reality. Strzemiński drew on the pre-war tradition of photomontage, which allowed him for the clash of two poetics - the delicate line of a drawing and the barefaced exactness of a photograph. These photographs scar both the artist and his art, literally as well as metaphorically. "To My Friends, the Jews" provides an evidence of this scar, stigma, or wound.

Therefore, it seems hard to agree with Doreet Le Vitte-Harten who claims that artists who testified created bad art. It was not because they were bad artists, but because the event they tried to represent was unprecedented and lacked iconography. They failed, striving to relieve the pain with the use of beauty.⁹ Art dealing with the Holocaust should be perceived, in my opinion, rather in the context of memory and a certain critical project, than that of beauty. Strzemiński, but also other artists stemming from the avant-garde tradition participated in the discussion on memory and art, which was characterised by Turowski in the following way:

"...Holocaust memory is a monstrous paradigm of contemporary civilisation. This paradigm enters art as a project critical of its own culture. It is a critique of the society which defers/postpones catastrophe to the future"¹⁰;

it is stripping art bare, exposing the crisis of avant-garde thought. At the same time, it appears that the documentary and the artistic cannot remain separate. The tension which is the effect of this lack of separation is a matter of artistic, but above all, moral responsibility; the responsibility of a human being obliged to answer that immense emptiness left by those who "are not with us."



Another example I would like to discuss here is a project of a monument for the former Nazi Concentration Camp in Auschwitz by Oskar Hansen and his team (Zofia Hansen, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Julian Pałka).¹¹ Although this essay concentrates neither on monuments nor museums, I decided to devote some space to the reflection on Hansen's unaccomplished project which seems to me precursory and extremely important for the discussion at stake. As a monument, the architect proposed a black asphalt road (width 70 meters, length 1000 meters) crossing diagonally the grounds of the former concentration camp. The road would evade the main gate, leading among the remains of barracks, foundations, chimneys and fences, and end near the crematoria. The grounds of the camp were supposed to be left untouched, not rebuilt, and, with the passing years, to grow over with grass and weed. Hansen's project annexed the space of the camp, interfering with it only slightly.¹²

"Pomnik "Droga" / Monument-the Road", International Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Competition, 1958; authors: Oskar Hansen, Zofia Hansen, Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz, Edmund Kupiecki, Julian Pałka, Lechosław Rosiński Layout, model, photographic documentation: Oskar Hansen's Archive, family property, Museum of Academy of Fine Arts's trust.

The project was based on the avant-garde theory of "open form".¹³ It totally rejected the idea of the figurative monument in favour of the inclusion of space within the artistic object, the inclusion of time and the experience of a changing human perception. It was an uncompromising attempt at reformulating the idea of the public monument. This gesture opened a debate on the decline of monumental representation as a dominant form of public remembrance - a debate which is usually situated within the Western context. The dismissal of this project was related to the fact that former inmates of the camp could not identify their memory and experience with such a negative, abstract concept. Hansen's project, though unaccomplished - writes Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius - had an immense influence on the thinking on the character of public monuments in Poland.¹⁴ Its subversive character - according to the author - decentralises well-known oppositions and proves that in the East, the reflection on the ontology of the modern monument with the idea of pure negativity as a demand of the new sculpture, emerged independently of the conceptualisation of the "expanded field" of postmodern sculpture, which took place in the West in the 70s.

This project, unlike many others at that time, faced the problem of the lack of Holocaust imagery, the crisis of representation, and the difficulties in rendering this unprecedented crime against humanity. Piotr Piotrowski finds Hansen the unquestioned pioneer of the consciousness of that time. This architect, according to Piotrowski, took up the challenge of searching for the means adequate for the event. The author claims, at the same time, that the winning and finally realised project was based on most conventional ideas, such as the victims' heroism and the emplotment of history. Hansen, on the other hand, stressed the need to respect the exceptional experience of the victims. The project, which entered the competition in Auschwitz was one of the first counter-monuments which according to James E. Young are painfully self-conscious spaces of remembrance.¹⁵ Such a counter-monument is a reaction to a deep crisis of representation, which was appearing after all great traumatic events of the 20th century. Hansen wanted to leave Auschwitz to its victims and survivors, and to the visitors years and decades later, he wanted to leave the possibility of experiencing the past, unmediated by either political, ideological, museum or didactic discourse. Such a freedom turned out to be unacceptable at that time. It can be assumed that Hansen was conscious of the destructive force of mounumentalisation and mythologisation, falsifying any individual experience.

Both Strzemiński and Hansen, though in a totally different way and on totally different grounds, expressed great sensitivity and artistic intelligence. They created total projects, grasping the whole spectrum of issues related to the problem of Holocaust representation and its place in consciousness, memory, art and artistic reflection.



The generation of artists born after the war has transgressed the boundaries of art set by previous generations. Time distance has allowed for a more critical look, expanding the field of interest, and concentrating not only on victims but also on perpetrators. In the 90s, as Stephen C. Feinstein¹⁶ observed, the model of mourning and remembrance in art became exhausted and there emerged a kind of turn from sanctification towards deconstruction and innovation. At present, artists seem to have an urge to constantly reconstruct the past, recall and reinterpret it and its representations for the benefit of contemporaneity. It does not mean, however, that it is the only strategy. Still, the art of remembrance's modest tone is being produced. On the other extreme, there is an art, which could be perceived as "critical art" which, according to Piotr Piotrowski, is an artistic activity whose aim is to expose the social, political and ideological mechanisms ruling the viewers' world, including visual culture; an activity oriented at demythologisation, and the questioning of what at first sight might seem obvious.¹⁷ It is an art that questions the viewer's automatic mode of perception and thinking, exposing (some of) the hidden structures and relations, in which one not always consciously exists. These artists abandon solemnity and the poetics of silence in favour of interdisciplinary artistic practice; this practice is narrative, polyphonic, metaphoric, enigmatic and ambiguous. At the same time, the artists in question try to overcome the binary opposition of sanctification and de-sanctification which could appear in the process of Holocaust representation. Their attitude could be perceived as a kind of self-consciousness which forces one to ceaselessly refer the Holocaust to the context of its current (re)presentation, taking into account the fragmentary and contradictory character of this event and the difficulty in gaining valid knowledge of the past.¹⁸

Mirosław Bałka, "Mydlany korytarz / Soap Corridor" "0,1x190x1307", 1995, soap; photo: Anna Pietrzak-Bartoś courtesy of the Zachęta National Gallery of Art

One of the signs of the change described by Feinstein, was an exhibition entitled Where is Abel, Thy Brother? (curator: Anda Rottenberg), which was held in 1996 in the Zachęta National Gallery in Warsaw.¹⁹ The aim of this presentation was to pose questions to what extent art could (and should) deal with the problem of evil, totalitarianism, cruelty and pain. The questions faced by the artists born several years after the war were surely concentrated on contemporaneity and the place of history in it. In other words, where in culture and civilisation there is a place for violence and its memory, and what is the role of the artist in all of that? Artists born after the war belong to a formation which was described by historians as "the second generation". They do not have any direct memory of the war events or of the Holocaust. The memory of this generation Marianne Hirsch named post-memory, James E. Young - "memory of the memory of the witnesses" producing a "vicarious past", Nadine Fresco - "absent memory" or a "hole in memory", and Henri Raczymow - mémoire trouée or "shot memory". Post-memory remains an unfinished and ephemeral process defined by Hirsch as a very specific form of memory, which especially takes into consideration its relationship with its objects - always mediated not by recollections, but by the artefacts of the work of imagination and artistic creation.²⁰ This does not mean that memory as such is not mediated, only that it is more directly connected with the past. Post-memory is characteristic of the experience of those who grew up in a world dominated by narrations referring to the time before their birth. Their "late" histories are dominated by the histories of the former generations, shaped by traumatic events which can be neither understood not recreated. Although the term "post-memory" applies mainly to the children of the Holocaust survivors, it can be useful to interpret other, similar cases, as well. It is a memory of images (this seems essential in the context of visual arts) and narratives. The Holocaust trauma provides a constant emotional and intellectual challenge for these artists.

This art, though brought to life several years after the Holocaust, is capable of posing important questions to the culture of the post-Holocaust world which had not been posed before neither by science nor history or sociology. It seems obvious in this context that the problem of references to the Holocaust is not dependant on national identity or personal involvement in the war events. In other words, nobody has a licence to represent the Holocaust. From an ethical point of view, as Eleonora Jedlińska writes, the relation to the Holocaust is not a matter of artistic, but of moral choice. Christian Boltanski's words express the feeling of the second generation quite literally: "my art is not about camps, but after camps. Western reality has changed under the influence of the Holocaust. Nothing can be thought of without taking this fact into consideration". The artists discussed below took this fact into consideration. Among the young generation of Polish artists working in different media, the theme of the Holocaust re-emerges in many different ways.

Mirosław Bałka, "Winterreise - Bambi" 2003 - detail

Mirosław Bałka, "Winterreise - Staw / Lake" 2003 - detail and general view (first presentation in Museum of Art, Hachinohe, Japan, 2003) courtesy of Mirosław Bałka and Gladstone Gallery, New York

The dramatic directness of the first generation experience has been replaced by the individual experience of trace, memory and the remnants of the destroyed world. The art of Mirosław Bałka is rooted in a deep and attentive reflection on the present time. His artistic language is modest, quite, minimalist, reduced to the simplest suggestion, his oeuvre - filled with an intimate atmosphere, sensibility, nostalgia and spirituality. "Soap Corridor" (1993), presented first on the Venice Biennial and then on the exhibition "Where is Abel, Thy Brother?", is an installation in which dominates the strong smell of grey soap. Walking through this corridor evokes on the one hand childhood recollections of intimate, everyday washing, and the horror relating to the barbarity and threatening rationality of the Nazi death industry, on the other. "After Auschwitz" almost every experience, including such an innocent event as washing, becomes stained with one of the most cruel crimes of the 20th century. Bałka participates in the collective memory by building from the remnants his own history and mythology. Such titles of his works as "Bitte", "Die Rampe", "Ordnung", or "Ruhe" allude to the ambiguity of language; the objects he makes - to a specific contamination of reality; the contamination with violence and terror. Bałka's sculptures embody a past, in which a human body and life left its trace. One of the artist's recent works entitled "Winterreise" (2003) is a result of a few-hour long winter trip of the artist to Birkenau. It consists of three videos: "Staw / Lake", "Bambi 1" and "Bambi 2". They depict a pond, which served the Nazis as a place of disposal of the ashes of the cremated victims, and a few wandering deer, approaching the barbed wire surrounding the camp. The projections of these videos were accompanied by the sounds of Schubert's songs from the "Winterreise" cycle and by objects - slowly moving, flat circles on which the artist had placed empty plates. This work presented the contemporaneity of this threatening place. It is becoming more and more "normal", quite, one could even say, it is getting prettier. In a former death camp there grow trees, it is snowing, the deer wander in the search for food. It is calm and silent. The whole scene was registered by the artist with a hand camera and that is why it becomes a shaking, trembling image. The latter points even more to the dissonance of the situation: today's "normality" of the empty death camp is horrendous.



"Lego. Concentration Camp" (1996) by Zbigniew Libera does not suit the strategy of sanctifying historical experience. Quite contrarily, it aims at exposing the mechanisms of the present.

"It would be difficult to miss the critical potential of this work, which does not deal with the shades of history, but with all that we are constantly facing. An image of a Lego set serving to build a concentration camp provokes numerous questions on the consequences of the mindless banality of evil, the capability of culture to normalise it, the capability of the market to make business on it" - said Bożena Czubak in a conversation with the artist.²¹

Zbigniew Libera, "Lego. Obóz koncentracyjny / Lego. Concentration camp" courtesy of Raster gallery

For Libera, just like for many other contemporary artists, the returning history provides a source of reflection on the condition of humanity. The artist created "Lego. Concentration Camp" using more or less exclusively original blocks of the Danish toy manufacturer. He built particular constructions and then photographed them. This work caused a lot of controversies and objections among those who dismissed it as a peculiar representation which would not help to understand the Holocaust, and accused it of being simply a provocative and scandalous work of art. In my opinion, however, the question should rather concentrate on whether there exists a type of representation which would be appropriate and adequate for the depiction of the Holocaust experience at all. Libera's case is just one example of the possibility to overcome the boundaries which guard the to some extent untouchable and sacred subject. What is more, the choice of means, made by the artist, allowed him to initiate a game between low and high cultures, between what is historical and contemporary, between the language and the metalanguage of art.

Toys and the notion of play in the art dealing with the Holocaust (Libera's and others') were discussed thoroughly by Dutch scholar Ernst van Alphen.²² Although toys are associated with childhood, lack of knowledge and naivete, they can also serve as a tool of artistic manipulation and overcome the distinction between the serious and the playful. What is more, they operate in a reality different from that of mimetic art. Lego blocks encourage to play, to transgress oneself, to become someone else, they inspire imagination. Although Libera's blocks, being a museum exhibit, are not intended to be played with, everything that could happen during such a potential play we are able to imagine. A person playing with these sets builds a concentration camp and, by doing so, assumes the role of the perpetrator. On the one hand, this is a threatening perspective, on the other, however, it provides a very interesting comment on both the Holocaust times and the post-modern civilisation. To a certain point, the work seems to follow the intuitions of writers and philosophers describing Western civilisation after Auschwitz. According to Zygmunt Bauman, for example, the most threatening lesson of the Holocaust and what we found out about its executioners, was not the suspicion that it could have happened to us, but that we could have done the same.²³ Libera's work exposes not only the mechanisms of modernity or post-modernity, but also - as a part of a larger cycle entitled "Urządzenia korekcyjne / Corrective Devices" - the mechanisms of educational systems, and, what might be the most crucial, of repressing and controlling Holocaust education and its concept of memory, but also the moral and political correctness of contemporary art as such.

Zbigniew Libera, "Mieszkańcy / Inhabitants" courtesy of Raster Gallery

In a photograph entitled "Mieszkańcy / Inhabitants" from the "Pozytytwy / Positives" series (2004), Libera drew on the convention of staged photography. A few reportage and historical photographs, representations of the traumatic history of the 20th century, well apparent in our collective memory, became the object of manipulation, of contemporary re-staging. "Inhabitants" refers to one of the best known and iconic representations of concentration camp inmates. The protagonists of Libera's photograph, contrarily to the protagonists of the original, smile, are a healthy-looking, happy bunch of people. Similarly, they are dressed in striped uniforms, however, this time these are simply pyjamas, and the barbed wire has been replaced by innocent strings with rambling ivy. By doing so, the artist points to the following mechanism of culture: images of tragedy and catastrophes such as the Holocaust became in a sense domesticated, their primal power melted. Our everyday dealing with images of violence made them an integral part of our visual experience, and history, with its traumatic burden, is dissolving in an ever less differentiated stream of images. Various representations distanced this unimaginable trauma of the real, which stands behind the signs people use to communicate with each other. The artist questions the fantasy of the inviolability and immunity of a certain kind of narrative the history of the second half of the 20th century is. This history, combined with popular culture, will reappear in Libera's work once again, in a project realised together with writer Darek Foks, entitled "Co robi łączniczka / What Does the Liaison Do" (2005), which deals with the memory of the Warsaw uprising.

Piotr Uklański, "Naziści / The Nazis" Johny Wesh in "Odkupienie / Redemption" 1970 courtesy of Zachęta Gallery

Piotr Uklański and Maciej Toporowicz, in their works, presented together with "Lego. Concentration Camp" within the exhibition entitled "Mirroring Evil. Nazi Imagery Recent Art", organised at the Jewish Museum in New York, raise issues of Holocaust memory and Nazi representations in relation to the media and mass culture. The latter, according to Saul Friedlander²⁴ play a more important role in shaping Holocaust memory, at least in the Western context, than literature, documents or historical research. Uklanski's installation entitled "The Nazis" (1998) is an impressive (the whole work includes over 160 objects) collection of photographic portraits of popular actors in Nazi outfits, starring in films set in the period of the Second World War. The artist chose images of well-known actors, almost the top of the international film entertainment. He used film stills or photos prepared for advertising campaigns. The role of the artist was limited to the choice and composition of the images, while the idea itself seems quite simple. As Piotr Piotrowski noticed:

"By showing the faces of attractive actors, the artists wanted to stress the fact that popular culture blurs the boundaries between good and evil. Seducing the viewer with its attractiveness, it disarms the memory of the crime and neutralises the horror of fascism."²⁵

Maciej Toporowicz, "Obsession" courtesy of the artist

A similar problem recurs in Maciej Toporowicz's video work "Eternity" (1991). Exploiting the poetics of advertisement, the artist points to the power it has in seducing the viewer-consumer with the use of signs and symbols alluding to the Nazi visual poetics. Toporowicz combines fragments of Nazi era propaganda films, such as those by Leni Riefenstahl, with postwar films whose directors alluded to this poetics, such as Pasolini's "Salo" or Cavani's "The Night Porter", and with Calvin Klein advertising films. By doing so, he referred to the phenomenon of "fascinating fascism" so thoroughly elaborated upon by Susan Sontag. The writer described the dangerous consequences of the fascination with fascist aesthetics of corporal perfection combined with control, dependence, ecstasy and pain.²⁶

Artur Żmijewski, "Nasz śpiewnik / Our Songbook", format DVD, master S-VHS, 11', 2003 courtesy of the artist and the Foksal Gallery Foundation

In a consequent and detailed manner, Artur Żmijewski's work concentrates on issues of memory, postwar trauma and Polish post-Holocaust culture. His artistic proposal, though ambiguous at times, seems quite coherent. It provokes controversy not only about issues of representation as such, but also inter-human relationships in general. History, understood here as an experience of repressed trauma which demands a situation in which it will be able to return, emerges in Żmijewski's work in as violent a way, as corporeality does. The artist seems conscious of the fact that in order to fully understand and experience the present, one needs to work through the past, in a close relation to which the present had been shaped. What is interesting in this context, are both our perception of the past and our attitude towards it, but also how it influences our perception of the world, and how it produces the myths which organise our cultural reality. The above issues are brought about by such video works as: "Pielgrzymka / Pilgrimage" (2003), "Itzik" (2003), "Lisa" (2003), "Zeppelintribüne" (2002), "Berek / The Game of Tag" (1999), "Our Songbook" (2003) and "80064" (2004).²⁷ For Żmijewski, memory and histories "locked" in people and places are the objects of fascination, and, at the same time, they become a challenge. His artistic practice could be well summed up by the words of Polish-Jewish writer Henryk Grynberg, who wrote about himself:

"I go to visit neither countries nor seas, but people. Especially, if there is a painful story in them, which cannot be born [...]. I do not do it for them, but for myself, because it is me who speaks through these stories. Not by commentary but by identification with their fate."

The dominant theme of the works of Rafał Jakubowicz from 2002-2004 is Holocaust history and memory. His most interesting pieces include "Seuchensperrgebiet" (2002), "Arbeitsdisziplin" (2002) and "Pływalnia" ("Swimming Pool") (2003). The latter concentrates on searching for the meanings of architecture, on the return of repressed, forgotten history. In Poznań, on April 4th, 2003, Jakubowicz organised his artistic action in the municipal swimming pool on Wroniecka Street. He projected on the façade of the building an inscription in Hebrew: בך׳נת־שחײה. It took place on the 60th anniversary of the day when, during the German occupation, the building of the Synagogue had been changed into a swimming pool, which it has remained until the present day. Jakubowicz, writes Jaromir Jedliński, is testing the possibilities of being an involved observer, a viewer, who participates in what is common.²⁸ The artist begins with checking whether there is anything common left, and then he examines the limits of indifference, of the escape from reality, and, what is more, from freedom. For his sensitivity to the signs of reality and to language's lack of innocence, he is indebted to Mirosław Bałka and Luc Tuymans – both artists dealing with collective and individual memory.

Rafał Jakubowicz, "Pływalnia / Swimming Pool" courtesy of the artist

Jakubowicz opens public space onto painful and difficult problems, and suggests the need for working them through, for the refreshing of memory. He causes discomfort - writes Jedliński - as if warning against an epidemic of amnesia and blissful peace. It seems that the artist understood the lesson of Krzysztof Wodiczko:

"[...] today, art is an element in a complex puzzle of power and freedom discourse which takes place in the space of the city. Silence would simply mean the acceptance of the disappearing of public space, that is, of democracy, as that space would transform into a private space of rulers and owners."

Rafał Jakubowicz, "Seuchensperrgebiet" courtesy of the artist

According to Jedliński, Jakubowicz mends this space, in consequence mending collective memory.

Another inheritor of Luc Tuymans' painterly imagination, Wilhelm Sasnal, in 2002, for the exhibition "Zawody malarskie" ("Painterly Competition") painted on the wall of Bielska BWA Gallery a fragment of Art Spiegelman's graphic novel "Maus" - Sasnal removed the drawings and left back only the texts alluding to the war experience of the Jews in Bielsko-Biała. He presented the re-made 157th page of the book, in which Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, denounced to the Gestapo, are walking through the streets of Bielsko-Biała, where there was their family textile factory. Firstly, the painting was supposed to be placed on the wall of the Technical Museum which is located in a former factory (in "Maus" it is the Spiegelman factory). Unfortunately, the artist and the organisers were refused. Finally therefore, it was placed on the back wall of the gallery's building which stands in the place of the Synagogue destroyed by the Nazis.

Wilhelm Sasnal, "Maus" 2001, mural, Bielska BWA Gallery, Bielsko-Biała "Zawody malarskie" / "Painterly Competition" from the series "Bielska Jesien", curator: Adam Szymczyk courtesy of the Bielska BWA Gallery and the artist

In 2003, on the exhibition entitled "Pokaż ręce. Chodź bliżej. Patrz." ("Show Me Your Hands. Come Closer. Watch.") in the Foksal Gallery Foundation in Warsaw, Sasnal presented works on various themes, such as modern sacral architecture in Poland, 'stage diving' during a rock concert, a character from Art Spiegelman's "Maus", a landscape illustrating Tadeusz Borowski's prose, the lights of a graveyard at night. The title of the exhibition is a dialogue taken from one of Borowski's short stories, that Sasnal had previously used in a comic strip. The exhibition was regarded as a statement on the debate on Holocaust representation, or rather, the impossibility of a direct depicting of the event. It dealt with both the reconciliation with the past and living in a "deadly setting", but it was also of a critical character - it touched upon the problem of the catholic indifference towards the past. The artist formulated a demand for Holocaust memory, for a kind of settling accounts with the past.

"these issues are invariably difficult - wrote the critic Bogusław Deptuła - and there are no simple solutions for them, Sasnals' paintings being just one of the attempts. However, they become an important part of the dialogue on our past and present".²⁹

"Auschwitz II Birkenau (24 08 2004)"	"Majdanek (02 07 2003)"	"Sobibór (04 07 2003)"
Elżbieta Janicka, "Miejsce nieparzyste / Odd Places" courtesy of the artist and Atlas Sztuki gallery

"Miejsce nieparzyste / Odd Places" (2005) is a series of large format photographs of Elżbieta Janicka, at the same time minimal in form and very elaborate. The photographs depict air (in Poland we breathe differently - says the artist), and the recordings accompanying the presentation are those of the sound of silence. Both air and silence were recorded in the former death camps of Auschwitz II Birkenau, Kulmhof am Ner, Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka. The artist poses a question: is that what we see air or traces of the murdered wiped out of memory? Separately, Janicka presents sets of numbers, illustrating the scale of the crime: for example, "Oświęcim 1100000 (1 000 000), Chełmno 310 000 (300 000)", the numbers in brackets stand for Jewish victims. The inscription reading 'AGFA' on the frame of each photo in a way involuntarily points to the problem of co-responsibility (during the Second World War, AGFA was part of I.G. Farben concern which produced among other things, Zyklon B used in gas chambers). These photographs and recordings, though seemingly empty, are full of senses. The title of the series was taken from the infamous tradition of the "bench ghetto" during which the administration of the Warsaw University placed in Jewish students' record books a stamp saying "place in the odd benches", discriminating them by sending them to separate seats. Death camps became for the Jews such an "odd place", this time however, fatal and most cruel.

"Maja Gordon jedzie do Chorzowa / Maya Gordon goes to Chorzów"	"Dotleniacz / Oxygenerator"	"Literatura patriotyczna / Patriotic Literature"
Joanna Rajkowska photos courtesy of the artist

Joanna Rajkowska's project "Dotleniacz / Oxygenerator" (2006) is a pond, which is supposed to be situated on Grzybowski Square, within the former Warsaw Ghetto. The artist wants to let some fresh air, some oxygen into this space overfilled with meanings: to create a neutral, separate place which could be treated as a kind of asylum in the chaotic urban landscape. On the one hand, it would allow to forget about everything, on the other, to concentrate on what is pulsating in this particular place - the living, though buried under the ground, neighbours' history. Another installation entitled "Literatura patriotyczna / Patriotic Literature" depicts anti-Semitic publications, bought in the patriotic book store Antique located under the catholic church on Grzybowski Square, spread all over a couch. These books, however, differ from the originals. The text was printed on their pages backwards, as if reflected in a mirror. This project plays with stereotypes, it inverts the relation of anti-Semitism and its critique. The video entitled "Maja Gordon jedzie do Chorzowa / Maya Gordon Goes to Chorzow" is a record of a 58-year-old Jewish woman's trip to Poland, where she was born. It is a trip in search of the past but at the same time, an image of the impossibility of return. The protagonist succeeds neither in finding her house nor in getting to learn the truth about herself. The artist strips bare the illusion of finding the truth, the true version of what had happened, and what so forcefully influenced what is. She exposes the fear in the face of leaving the conventional forms of memory trapped in anecdotes and family myths. Rajkowska grasps the dynamics of these processes. She places a mirror, or a pond's surface, in front of a viewer and encourages him/her to look inside, to discover him/herself.



An artistic group - Katarzyna Krakowiak, Dr Muto and Łukasz Szalankiewicz - created a fictive hypertextual object entitled "Ashaver 220" (www.ashaver220.net/) (2006), consisting of fragments of narratives, sounds, and images, which reveal the wiped out memory of the Warsaw Ghetto. The project includes artistic objects placed within the city space, photographs, documents and a collection of recordings of witness testimonies and recollections. The Ghetto functions here as if on two levels: it is a state of mind separated from the dark past and a space in the centre of the capital. The aim of the artists was to awaken memory, to enter into its most repressed parts. The Mobile phone is in this project the medium through which a viewer/participant communicates with the past. He/she leaves the gallery's space and enters the city's space becoming in this way both a virtual and a real wanderer. Depending on where the viewer with a phone is in the space of the former ghetto, that has been divided into appropriate fragments of a few hundreds of square meters, he/she receives fragments of hypertext ascribed to these fragments of space. In this way, a relation between the past and the present is being established, and a non-linear, obscure narrative begins to build up. In consequence it should lead to the deconstruction of the process of the historical mythologisation. Moreover, the participant should get a feeling of oppression and entrapment in history, and then of liberation which accompanies the coming to terms with memory. As the artists claim, an inspiration for this project was provided, among others, by the history of the lost parts of Emanuel Ringelblum's Archive.

Krystiana Robb-Narbutt, "Księga pamięci / The Book of Memory", photo: Katarina Stoltz

Ewa Kuryluk, "Tabuś", photo: Katarina Stoltz

Since 2005, the program of the annual festival Singer's Warsaw has included exhibitions on Próżna Street of artists, whose works deal with issues of absence, memory and the Holocaust. Among the artists featured was Krystiana Robb-Narbutt who presented an installation entitled "Księga pamięci / The Book of Memory" (2005) - a story of a contact with past generations established on the basis of remains of conversations, recollections, photographs, newspapers and books. For the artist, this was also a bridge to the past. The imperative of remembrance is present in her work in a very particular way. It is constitutive of "Fuga pamięci / Memory Fugue" - an installation consisting of seven glass cases in which the artist collected various objects: a toy-carriage, teddy-bears, sugar, etc. These objects refer to dead relatives, while the captions suggest their fate: "A Train Rose took", "Toys, with which the twins could have played." The installation was accompanied by a quotation from Paul Celan: "I know it is not true we lived".

The voice of Krystiana Robb-Narbutt is exceptionally individual and intimate, just like the voice of Ewa Kuryluk, the author of an installation entitled "Tabuś". In a room on the second floor of an old, grey house on Próżna Street, the author placed enlarged photographs of herself and her brother playing with a skipping rope and a wheel, both painted yellow, and a text:

"A street in Amsterdam
Anna Frank holding a skipping rope and her friend holding a wheel.
On the other side
Auschwitz-Birkenau:
Women and kids on the way to the crematorium.
Copies of newspaper photos
found by me
in Mum's things after her death.
Only then I understood
what she meant by saying:
'You had the same wheel
as Anna's friend.
And Peter had the same a skipping rope'."

By evoking her mother's story, Ewa Kuryluk told the history of the tragic fate of murdered and saved families. Every year, both the organisers of the festival and of the exhibitions repeat - we strive at saving memory.



Almost half of a century after Oskar Hansen's project for the Auschwitz monument was dismissed, Jarosław Kozakiewicz's project won the competition for the "Park of the Nations' Reconciliation" which is supposed to be situated near the museum of the former camp in Auschwitz. The park will not be yet another museum, but a place for contemplation and quietening both for the visitors and the inhabitants of Oświęcim. Kozakiewicz - named by one of the critics a "sensitive reformer of space"³⁰ - proposed a project which denies the idea of a commemorative monument. The artist remains in respect for the past, not allowing it at the same time, to dominate the present. Two sides of the river Sola will be connected by the "ghost bridge", reminding an extended Moebius strip, and symbolising the passage from life to death. Kozakiewicz employed in his project many universal symbols, which are supposed to create a message beyond national and religious codes.

Jarosław Kozakiewicz, "Most duchów / The Bridge of ghosts" project for the "Park of the Nations' Reconciliation" courtesy of the artist

The works discussed above can be treated, on the one hand, as a part of the critical discourse on memory producing counter-narratives, on the other, however, as a part of the discourse following the remembrance imperative, recreating and regaining histories. This artistic discourse, though so heterogeneous, finds its reference point on the international art scene, in what is considered nowadays a canon of contemporary art. I think here of artists such as Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, Hans Haacke, Gerhard Richter, Christian Boltanski, Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, but also of the representatives of "the second generation" such as Christine Borland, Frédéric Brenner, Rudolf Herz, Roee Rosen, Tom Sachs, Alan Schechner, Vera Frenkel, James Friedman, Matthew Girson, Erich Hartmann, Mikael Levin, Pier Marton, Rachel Schreiber, Susan Silas, Marina Vainshtein, Jeffrey Wolin. The visual sphere of official discourse, embodied by the visible signs of memory - monuments and museums - is not meaningless for Polish artists taking up the challenge of Holocaust representation. They allude to it either directly or indirectly. In this country, the recollections of the war horror, historical politics and manipulations, pathos and heroism, the rule of the Romantic paradigm, everyday life - all of these have a very specific status: they shape collective memory, which is the source of a lasting national battle.

Author: Katarzyna Bojarska.

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Notes

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