All memory must, by definition, be personal and subjective. Yes, there are facts on the ground. Specific events occurred at specific junctures of the universal timeline. But how do we view them? Indeed, how do we remember them?
One might argue that there are learned historians who have documented developments for us so we can read about them and try to reconstruct them in our mind’s eye. And if we do this within an academic framework, that can involve lots of delving and analyzing, and even interpretation. But, naturally, any account of things that happened in the past, either before we were born or which we simply did not experience or witness ourselves, must involve some complementary and somewhat extraneous input.
That comes into the purview of the “With Blind Steps” exhibition that opened July 19 at the Mamuta Art and Research Center, on the ground floor of Hansen House, and is due to run through to September 26.
The exhibitors make up a veritable who’s who of front-grid envelope-pushing creators, mostly from Israel. All had something of value to say about formative episodes in our collective and/or personal backdrop in the 1970s.
“That is when video art really began in Israel,” explains curator Judith Lenglart.
This isn’t any old blast from the past. This is a premeditated effort to revisit some of the deepest-seated shake-ups the Jewish people ever endured.
“This exhibition is an attempt to display things in which I engage, in research and writing,” French-born Lenglart notes.
She is currently working her way through her doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. “I address the major issue of the representation of the trauma of the Holocaust, in Israeli video art dating back to the 1970s through to the present day.”
Combing through history
Lenglart certainly did her homework for the Mamuta run-out, including visiting some of the artists on their homesteads, such as 73-year-old Haim Maor, who lives near Beersheba, and Dov Or Ner, one of the fearless pioneers of Israeli performance art, who died a few months ago at the age of 97. She also trolled archives around the world “in order to gather something through video art – artists, with or without a connection to the Holocaust.”
The 1970s was when Israeli and Jewish video artists from other parts of the world began to consider the memory of the Holocaust in earnest. Some of the results of those endeavors are now deftly positioned around the Mamuta display spaces, with short films, videos, and photographs from a decade during which performance, body art, and video art emerged here.
“Experimenting within these media, young artists explored new ways of relating to time and space, and to the performativity of memory by invoking the past in the here and now,” says Lenglart, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors from Hungary.
The wave of interest in the Holocaust among members of the local artist community, and their sometimes highly personal treatment of the emotive and evocative raw material, were not always received with wider enthusiasm. The curator got to grips with that, too. “After I looked at a lot of archival material, I understood that in the 1970s, they started to engage in the memory of the Holocaust through video art, in a very subversive way.”
Back farther
That much is glaringly evident from some of the exhibits which, in fact, include compelling works from the 1960s, too.
One such is In Thy Blood, Live, created by Brazilian-born seminal Israeli documentary filmmaker David Perlov in 1961. The black-and-white footage shows the interior of the Chamber of the Holocaust on Mount Zion, the forerunner of Yad Vashem. It is a simple remembrance space with plaques commemorating some of the Jewish communities decimated during World War II with weeping Holocaust survivors of all ages – we see a tattooed number on one youngish woman’s forearm – lighting candles in memory of their murdered loved ones.
The documentation and perpetuation of the victims’ time on terra firma were seen as something to be urgently addressed just a decade and a half or so after the Nazi regime was finally toppled. As the narrator intones: “There are those who want to forget but cannot. There are those who forget, for it is the way of the world to forget. And people will come tomorrow who did not know and will not know.”
Perlov incorporates easily understandable symbol hooks, such as candles with flickering flames doggedly dripping wax, and hands with fingers outstretched sifting pebbles and earth to simplistically but compellingly convey the idea of digging into our annals to keep the history alive. But patriotism and national pride soon spring into action from the ashes of the Holocaust as the hands delicately place a sapling in the earth, looking to regenerate and sustain Jewish life against all odds.
Candles comprise a recurring motif in several of the works, such as a short experimental piece of celluloid called We Shall Never Die made by Alina and Yoram Gross, who later immigrated to Australia and became a pillar of the animation industry Down Under.
The Gross work employs stop-motion photography to convey the march of time as burning candles bleed wax, and it conjures up images of concentration camps by superimposing stripes, which one immediately associates with inmates’ dress, on towering wax posts. That sentiment is underscored by the introduction of barbed wire and the sound of stomping soldiers’ boots.
It is a trifle naive – one should bear in mind this was made over half a century ago in a fledgling Israeli filmmaking sector – but it makes its historical point in succinct style.
Focus and framing are basic components of photography, and they feature in the aesthetic front line in a number of the exhibits.
The brace of outsized prints by 80-something Polish-born multidisciplinary artist Joshua Neustein, a longtime resident of New York, takes us straight into the photographic collective memory of Holocaust imagery.
The 1969 photographs taken, in situ, of the Boots installation created by Neustein and fellow octogenarians American printmaker and painter Georgette Batlle and New York-born Israeli conceptual artist Gerry Marx at Artists’ House in Jerusalem impart something of the scale of Nazi barbarism through cascades of footwear flooding, as it were, through the interior of the building.
Stripped down
Body art is often viewed as one of the more provocative forms of artistic expression, incorporating an often challenging property of the erotic, as well as stripping the subject naked – physically and emotionally.
Gideon Gechtman does that with aplomb in a six-and-a-half minute video from 1975 called Exposure. The title fits the corporeal and emotive bill, as we see the naked artist gradually being relieved of all his body hair. It is, of course, a highly personal document, and the intimacy element intensifies in light of the health issues Gechtman grappled with and the fact that the video documented the reenactment of the procedure Gechtman underwent a few months earlier prior to a heart operation. That must have been a difficult experience for the artist, but he seems to endure it with equanimity.
There is also a cathartic aspect to shaving or having a haircut, and, as the curator notes: “The reconstruction of the visual documentation of the artist’s performance challenges the various uses of visual archives – erasure, refabrication, fictionalization – in the writing of history.”
Personal processing
That is a cardinal issue in all matters relating to the recording and presentation of history whereby the historian-chronicler inescapably filters the facts through his or her own cerebral and emotional prism, however well informed he or she may be. The same, of course, applies to our collective and individual “memories” of the Holocaust.
As a member of the second generation, I could possibly claim some kind of hereditary recollection of the atrocities my grandparents, uncle, and aunt suffered in Auschwitz. But that would involve taking a trip into the subconscious, and in any case I could not provide empirical collateral for that supposition.
The processing and proffering of history are part and parcel of the format of a number of works in the exhibition, alluded to in the show title. Gechtman, in fact, had to recreate the hair removal process from still shots, as the original video was lost. Other exhibits, such as Boots, place the original image within an additional frame or two. That imparts the revisiting and refashioning core of the historical event and the narrative that ensues.
There is a reprise of the stripes-lines feature of the Gross film in a clutch of monochrome prints by Maor, with nudity-vulnerability once again a central element. The use of black masking tape to encircle a kneeling unseeing naked man, and affixed to his thighs, Lenglart observes, is primarily down to matters of form.
“He told me that at the time, in 1975, he took a great interest in the relationship between parallel geometric lines, and circular shapes, and the shapes of the organic human body.”
I note that the figure of the kneeling man with his head covered and hands tied behind his back also piques imagery from the Six Day War and Yom Kippur War, which were largely snapped in black-and-white. “That comes from the artist’s experience as a combat paramedic during the Yom Kippur War,” says Lenglart.
Maor’s Touching Drawing video, made four years later, also takes us into the tactility of the body and of the plastic arts, and the disturbing invasion of one’s private space.
That could also be said to apply to Maor’s Blindness 1 video from 1979, as we see a pair of hands exploring a young person’s face. This is a biographical work, with a Holocaust reference, that harks back to the artist’s recollection of the caresses of his blind Polish-born grandfather, who lost his eyesight after being beaten by a Nazi soldier.
Dov Or Ner, as was his wont, takes us deep into experiential, existential territory with his 1979 The Last Supper performance at Ha’Kibbutz gallery in Tel Aviv. The work fuses time and space, life and death, as well as pagan and contemporary ritual as Or Ner explores the outer limits of art and the reactions of bystanders as they witness violence. The Holocaust clearly comes into view there.
Stitched Hands, by Polish-born artist Yocheved Weinfeld, 77, looks at suffering and healing as an elemental part of life, while Avraham Eilat’s 1971 Run 16 mm. film offers one of the few colorful items in the exhibition. The meticulously edited short includes recycled footage of a man running in a park, but evidently not getting very far. There is, of course, a somewhat paranoid aspect to the scenes, which can be viewed from the other end of the corridor that traverses the display spaces.
Light – “or” in Hebrew – and the absence thereof are a leitmotif of the collection, intriguingly referenced in the names of some of the artists, such as Haim Maor and Dov Or Ner, as well as the recurring candlelight. That may not be just serendipitous.
“Remembering is also a matter of seeing,” posits Lenglart. “You need to shed light on the darkness.”
That patently goes for where we are at right now, too.■
For more information: mamuta.org
