Openings: Omer Fast - showings of video installations by Omer Fast - Critical Essay

ArtForum, Sept, 2003 by Jennifer Allen

The notion of the witness--in its historical weight and complexity--figures predominantly in Fast's most recent work, Spielberg's List, 2003, which debuted at Postmasters last spring. Giving a voice to another silent presence in film, Fast traveled to Krakow and interviewed Polish extras who played Jews and Nazis in Steven Spielberg's 1993 Schindler's List. In the two-channel installation, it becomes clear that the extras witnessed not only the film but also the real atrocity. As Fast combines their testimonies with scenes from the film, the set, and the city, history itself begins to stammer with visual slips of the tongue. A woman describes the "selection" process, at pains to explain why she was picked to play a Jewish prisoner; the street corner where the selection took place becomes a strange historical monument, at once banal and grotesque. An elderly man remembers looking at the work camp on his walks, but we're not sure if it's the real camp, which still exists as a ruin, or the film set, which Spielberg left behind. Again, it's not a question of fakes and reals; rather, the act of looking--whether at a camp or at the movies--creates its own history, accumulative, constitutive, forgetful, repressive. Exploring the cottage industry that serves American tourists who come to see the set, Fast demonstrates that Schindler's List has as much drawing power as the event it portrays. Here, Fast's layers of looking add up to a disturbing conclusion: The gaze can even repress the site of genocide and turn it into something magical, sublime. An extra puts it best. After describing the brutality of the counterfeit camp, she sighs, "These are beautiful scenes for me."

In this ongoing series, writers are invited to introduce the work of artists at the beginning of their careers.

Jennifer Alien is an art writer based in Berlin.