Women in Dark Times (31 page)

Shalev-Gerz is describing a process of creativity which never loses touch with the precarious moment out of which it was born. Nothing is ever completely captured. Nothing is being filled in. She is another artist who, again like Salomon, offers no transcendence or redemption – a 1996 survey of her work to date at the Municipal Museum of La Roche-sur-Yon in France was called
Irreparable
: ‘What has been done in the past,’ she replied to a question about the title, ‘can never be undone. You can choose to do something differently, you can choose to create.’
28
Things declare themselves then leach away again. The place of art, she suggests, is the place of ‘a certain kind of lostness’.
29
She is describing a paradox: a void which is generative but also stubborn and steadfast, never completely releasing its hold on the history to which it simultaneously gives voice. Listening to that voice, those voices – having us listen to them – is her craft.

In his article for the 2012 Lausanne retrospective of her work, critic Georges Didi-Huberman suggests, after the French poet Mallarmé, that her project is to evoke the ‘white anxieties of our history’.
30
The phrase wonderfully captures a theme that has run throughout this book, as each of its women trawls the history of her moment, public and private, bringing to the surface what is at once most troubling and germinal to who they are. As the translator notes, the French – ‘blancs soucis de notre histoire’ – is more or less untranslatable. ‘Blanc’ can mean white or blank or space, ‘souci’ concern, solicitude, care or worry. The phrase evokes the ambiguity of something glaringly empty – nothing left but a sheer void or blank – and, potentially, full; and a form of caring indistinguishable from the fear it is meant to soften and becalm. Like so many of the women in this book, Shalev-Gerz is loyal to her anxieties (the idea of blanking out fear would be the most terrifying prospect of all). Once again, we encounter a woman who is interested in what lies, however anguished, beneath the veneer of the official history. ‘Blancs soucis de notre histoire’ could also serve as another description of the unconscious: the blank, or rather seemingly blank, spaces of the mind where our most deeply hidden desires and fears are lodged. These are the noises off-stage – once again Freud’s ‘other scene’ – which Shalev-Gerz activates. It is because the clickings and whirrings of
Sound Machine
operate ‘below the conscious surface’, cultural and visual studies critic Nora Alter observes, that the exhibition is so effective in reanimating a bygone industrial landscape and forgotten past.
31
‘Soucier’, which is the verb form of ‘souci’, also means to agitate, to stir the depths: something, not always welcome, seeps through, like sulphur fumes infiltrating the cracks.
32
Shalev-Gerz is inventing an artistic machinery, a kind of audio-visual ropes and pulleys – sound loops, multiple videos, split screens, everything in harmony and at odds with itself – to capture the radical disunity of the mind and of the world (she is another respecter of dissonance). She never, she insists, works with only one form. The point is for the work, and the viewer, to experience something at odds or out of time with itself, the links forming and breaking as you move around the exhibition space. She is trying to capture what she calls the ‘as yet unknown’, to ‘surface it up’ within her work (which makes ‘to surface’ a transitive verb and brings her remarkably close to psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas’s description of psychoanalysis as eliciting ‘the unthought known’).
33
‘I work’, she says, ‘via mnemonics, obliteration, tracks, displacement.’
34
She is, I would suggest, one of the most important modern women artists of the unconscious. ‘I do work with my unconscious you know.’
35

*

Although Charlotte Salomon was a pre-Auschwitz painter – the supreme artist of the rise and grip of Nazism, but not of her own end – she is, as already mentioned, included in the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Israel where Shalev-Gerz was taken as a child. ‘State educational programmes’, she comments, ‘generally consider that the duty of memory means speaking of the persecution of the Jews all the way from Egypt to the Holocaust.’
36
Instead for her it was a place to meet friends. Out of that disjunction, which some might find jarring, the core principles of her project will emerge. ‘I have always found the two faces of that place surprising.’ ‘What interests me’, she continues, ‘is people, their words, their silences, their lives, their ways of resisting and getting through their history.’
37
The simplicity of this statement is deceptive. Shalev-Gerz is describing a passion which is also a refusal addressed to the authority of state (‘the duty of memory means speaking of the persecution of the Jews’).

Shalev-Gerz hardly ignores that persecution. Indeed in many ways she has made it her theme. In this she can truly be seen as Salomon’s artistic heir. Her 2004–2006 Buchenwald Memorial exhibition,
Menschendinge
, or
The Human Aspect of Objects
,
shows five people working at the memorial, an archaeologist, an historian, a restorer, the director of the memorial and a photographer who was also the curator for this project, talking about the found and discarded objects of Buchenwald – a ring, a hairclip – while holding and turning them in their hands. The objects, created and adapted by the inmates, demonstrate, she writes, their capacity ‘to resist the inhumane conditions imposed upon them’ (like Salomon painting against advancing terror, as we might say).
38
One of Shalev-Gerz’s unrealised projects,
Vis-à-Vis
of 2006, is a monument to the homosexuals murdered by the Nazis. Another completed work,
Judengang
(1997–2000), is based at the site of a condemned pathway skirting a nineteenth-century former Jewish cemetery which Jews were not allowed to access through the main entrance – in a video the local residents who use it as a backyard are invited to think of a use for this place appropriate to a history they are either unaware of or choose to ignore. But if she repeatedly evokes that history, it is always in the form of participation, never as the dead letter of the past. In
The Berlin Inquiry
, which was staged in 1998 at, among other venues, the People’s Theatre on Rosa Luxemburg Square, spectators were invited by the resident company of actors to recite passages from the testimonies given during the 1965 Auschwitz trials by victims, perpetrators, bystanders and judges. This system ‘made passive contemplation impossible and created a spoor for active memory in the permanently lit auditoria’.
39

If Shalev-Gerz activates the past, it is therefore always part of a demand for a new type of focus and attention. To this extent and often against all odds, she devotes herself to creating a new type of community – we could call these ‘communities of imagination’ – out of her art.
Does Your Image Reflect Me?
(2002) consists of a double portrait – Isabelle Choko, a Polish-Jewish woman from Lodz who spent the war in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, not far from Hanover; and Charlotte Fuchs, a German actress and anti-Nazi who had been a resident of the same city at the time. Charlotte Fuchs kept her door shut when someone on the stairs shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Whenever her husband was asked why he wasn’t in the Party, he would reply, ‘There must be other decent Germans too!’ Only because he was a famous German actor did he get away with it for a while (he was then killed as a soldier in the last days of the war although his wife was not notified of his death for three years). As she breastfed her first son, born in the first month of the war, he ‘would spit it all out and scream his head off’.
40
We are witnessing the ugly intensifier of the unborn babies of
Sound Machine.
Each of the women talks and then listens to the other by means of images on their television sets – Isabelle Choko as she tells her story, slowly and hesitantly, for the first time, is recording the history which Fuchs and her husband had resisted without success. They do not meet or enter the same space. Reconciliation is not the aim. Instead, the exhibition suggests, something transformative is taking place by mere dint of the fact that these two stories are, simultaneously and at a distance, being spoken and heard. As you watch and listen to the one telling their tale, something happens to you because something is happening to them. As if being asked to tell the story – ‘what story would you like to tell’ is the question with which Shalev-Gerz often begins – gives to the participants in her odyssey a type of permission: to open doors in their minds and their histories which they never knew were closed, of whose existence indeed they may not have been aware.

To this project, Shalev-Gerz’s artistic commitment is as total as it is delicate, cautious and self-aware. She treads carefully. She is nothing like Claude Lanzmann, in what is for me one of the most disturbing moments of his famous eight-hour 1985 film
Shoah
, when he insists – forces would not be too strong a word – that the survivor barber, Abraham Bomba, should remember, speak: ‘You have to do it. You know it.’ (even if Lanzmann does apologise.)
41
One of Shalev-Gerz’s most powerful exhibitions –
Between Listening and Telling: Last Witnesses, Auschwitz 1945
–
2005 –
mounted at the Hotel de Ville in Paris in 2005 was commissioned for the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. At winding, snake-like red tables, viewers can sit and listen to the testimonies of sixty camp survivors whom she had invited to talk of their experiences before, during and after internment. Once again many of them had never told their stories before. As you look at their faces and watch their often elegant, always thoughtful demeanour, you have a strange sense of ceremony or occasion, as much as grief. Perhaps they know that nobody will ever listen again (only one participant retracted his testimony because he had never told his story to anybody, not even his family). The recordings were not edited but are given in their entirety – the duration of each video corresponds to the duration of the filming, which lasted for between two and nine hours. ‘I decided’, she comments, ‘to create a face-to-face situation between witness and spectator.’ On the walls of the exhibition space, three vast screens show an identical video but with a time lapse of seven seconds, slowing down the film, capturing the moments of silence between the words, ‘opening up a different space-time, outside the logic of language, that of sensuous corporal memory’. She wanted, she explains, to portray the witnesses ‘through their silences’, to capture, between the question and the reply, ‘the fugitive moment where memory emerges . . . a moment both of letting go and of intense concentration can be read on these faces, because the past is being evoked in the present.’
42
These silences are not vacant, they are not failures of testimony, but rather ‘events in speech’, in Didi-Huberman’s phrase.
43
A type of full speech, in the sense of full to overflowing, this is speech which knows, at the fleeting moment it is grasped by consciousness, that it is too much. Annika Wik describes the time-lapsed video as recording the second before the story leaves the body.
44
You cannot be sure whether body or story will make it, if either is really there. She has placed herself on the borderline between unconscious and conscious, sentient, life. Remarkably – given the amount of discussion about whether the Holocaust can or should be spoken – Shalev-Gerz has managed to create a space which registers at one and the same time the necessity of the human voice and the impossibility of words.

What Shalev-Gerz is offering her participants and spectators can be understood as a form of emancipation – the democratic project is inscribed into the formal properties of her work. Moving into worlds that could not be more intensely private, she is also creating a public domain. Her work has been described as a
res publica
,
‘giving form to the common good’.
45
‘The difficulty of sharing a moment, of sharing it aloud,’ is, she states, ‘what we call democracy’.
46
This is the ‘prevailing pressure’, as she puts it, that runs through her art: ‘The effort to articulate persons, peoples, places, or moments that always elude articulation, not so as to demonstrate the limits of speech, but that a community might form around and through the act of seeing, saying and listening.’
47
One spectator, Gabriella Zerega, wrote to her after seeing her work of how she no longer felt ‘either trapped inside an enforced forgetfulness or permanently drowned in the horrors of the past, both equally deadly, but instead now part of the work of “living memory” from which life can unfold and recreate itself.’ What, we might ask, are the bleak options for those confronting a world that is beyond redemption and refuses to be named? ‘Faced with the unforgivable,’ Zerega continued, ‘your work opens up so many new perspectives: but with no place for shrinking away, endless repetition, forgetting or, worse, the spirit of vengeance.’
48
How do you conjure a history which can only rise to the surface with such force and rage that, as it does so, it is in danger of obliterating itself? Between revenge and forgetting, repetition and denial, Shalev-Gerz quietly – by listening, watching, recording – offers a new way of scanning the darkest moment of twentieth-century European history.