At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. - book review

Criticism, Spring, 2001 by Alison Landsberg

At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture by James E. Young. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 248. $35.00 cloth.

James E. Young's latest work, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture, marks a shift in his critical gaze from the literary and historical realm to that of art and architecture. However, the issues at stake here--the challenge of memory in the face of catastrophe, the precariousness of Holocaust memory in particular, the politics involved in memorial acts--are familiar terrain for Young. In this book, he explores Holocaust memory as it is being articulated both by a younger generation of artists and architects--those who have only a vicarious relationship to the event itself--and in an "antiredemptory age." In the first part of the book, one chapter each is devoted to Art Spiegelman, David Levinthal, and Shimon Attie, three American artists. In each case, Young considers how the artist came to know about the Holocaust, and how that knowledge shaped his life and work. These artists face a double challenge. First, they must find a way to articulate memories of a catastrophic event through which they did not live but which has come to be real to them through a range of narratives, including films, photos, histories, novels, poems, plays and survivor testimonies. Second, they must conceive of and design a memorial act that is anti-redemptive, that resists at all moments the aestheticization of the Holocaust. The second half of the book explores such acts of anti-redemptive countermemory in Germany, where the struggle to contend with Holocaust memory is particularly vexing. The works of the artists and architects he considers actively resist traditional monumental forms; they provoke rather than console. Horst Hoheisel, Micha Ullman, Rachel Whiteread, Renata Stih, Frieder Schnock, Jochen Gerz, and others have struggled to challenge and in some ways reinvent the monumental form itself, producing what Young refers to as the "countermonument." The final two chapters of the book examine the obstacles, both aesthetic and political, to Daniel Libeskind's construction of The Jewish Museum Extension to the Berlin Museum, and to Peter Eisenman's design for a Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, respectively. Through these local analyses, Young explores both what form vicarious memory of the Holocaust takes, and whether it is "possible to enshrine an antimemorial impulse in monumental forms" (10).

The American artists considered in the first part of the book hail from a generation temporally and geographically removed from the Holocaust. Apart from Spiegelman's Maus, the projects Young analyzes have not received widespread public attention; part of the significance of Young's book is that it further disseminates these lesser known, but crucially important memory acts. Young finds that what ultimately gets memorialized in these artworks is not only the event, what happened, but its transmission, how it was passed down to the artists. Furthermore, inherent in these projects is an ambivalence towards the "entire memory enterprise" (35). David Levinthal's work highlights the extent to which his memory of the Holocaust has been mediated; he photographs toy soldiers which he has posed in accordance with the Holocaust images handed down to him. His 1977 piece, Hitler Moves East, a collaboration with Garry Trudeau, attempted to narrate Operation Barbarossa. As Young describes it, "instead of using images directly drawn from archival sources, they created their own `archival' images by photographing Levinthal's toys in carefully staged war scenarios" (48). Importantly, each image they constructed was inspired by remembered images and photographs. By blurring the images they were able to create the effect of movement and action. In his 1994-96 piece Mein Kampf, Levinthal took oversized Polaroid photographs of Nazi toy soldiers and their figurine victims, which he had painstakingly posed. Young focuses on a particular image of a woman "cradling a child" and "whirling away" from a Nazi bullet; Levinthal's image is borrowed from a well known, disturbing photograph taken by an S.S. photographer on the Eastern Front. As Young points out, Levinthal is reminding us that "his images are of other images" (54). In this economy of images, Young writes, "the Nazi photograph has itself become part of the iconic currency of the Holocaust" (54). Levinthal's photographs, several of which are beautifully reproduced for Young's volume, articulate both the horror and exploitation of the confrontation between Nazis and Jews, as well as Levinthal's own "hypermediated reality of the Holocaust" (45).

What Young sees in Sites Unseen, Shimon Attie's European installations between 1991 and 1996, is a deliberate attempt to repeople a decimated landscape. This is one of several Attie projects Young explores. For Attie, Young writes, "memory of a site's past does not emanate from within a place but is more likely the projection of the mind's eye onto a given site. Without the historical consciousness of visitors, these sites remain essentially indifferent to their pasts, altogether amnesiac. They `know' only what we know, `remember' only what we remember" (62). Those like Shimon Attie who know the history (and who are willing to remember it) walk through the streets of Berlin seeing ghosts of the absent Jews. For the many others who do not see the ghosts, whose minds do not project images of a population eradicated, Attie's installation, Writing on the Wall, Berlin, made them visible. He quite literally projected archival photographs of "a now-lost Jewish past onto otherwise forgetful sites" (64). While the installation itself with the projection of life-size photographs only lasted for a short time, Attie hopes that his images will continue to haunt the sites. Photographs of the installations, several of which are reproduced in Young's book, are meant to serve the same function and to expand the reach of his project beyond those who witnessed the installations in situ. Attie's attempt to reinscribe a trace of Jewish life where it was eradicated by the Holocaust is reminiscent of Claude Lanzmann's project in the film Shoah. Attie, like Lanzmann, was troubled by the absolute absence of traces of previous Jewish existence in the places where they lived; each artist attempted to return a trace, to name those that were obliterated. By describing Attie's work and including photographs of the installations, Young further extends the artist's project, increasing the number of people who will be haunted by the images--images that will help to restore a piece of history both forgotten and repressed.