A Scream

A Scream/A Repitition/A Transformation

"...perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence, it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems." Theodor Adorno1

"Murder is human...genocide is not." Gideon Hausner2

In his essay, "Trivializing Memory," Elie Wiesel posits the fundamental questions that confront artists, writers and filmmakers who try to capture an understanding of the Holocaust, and by inference, other genocidal events in the twentieth century. In describing the Holocaust as a survivor, Wiesel suggests that it represented a universe "parallel to creation," a negative reality which not only made the civilized person into the muselmander, but also "defeated culture; later it defeated art, because just as no one could imagine Auschwitz before Auschwitz, no one could now retell Auschwitz after Auschwitz."3

Wiesel's concern over what he calls "the victory of the executioner" and humanity's greatest defeat is real. Not only Wiesel, but others like Theodor Adorno, Jean Amery, and Primo Levi have suggested that there exists a wall which the non-survivor can never surmount, and which art, in any form, can never conceptualize. But are such comments representative of a fear of art? Will attempts by artists to comprehend the Holocaust and other genocides in a visual fashion suggest contradictory messages? Can the artist, especially one who was not "there" stumble upon some essential truth that even the survivor may have missed? Is it dangerous for art and artists to stimulate the imagination when it comes to a subject like the Holocaust because the limits have been surpassed by the event itself? If one of the central problems of the Holocaust is memory, Geoffrey Hartman has astutely noted that "it will require both scholarship and art to defeat an encroaching anti-memory."4

Saul Friedlander has suggested that examining memory and reinterpreting the past through representation allow one to see hidden forms and new levels of discourse, and also to try to exorcise the evil of this past. He has also warned, however, of "an aesthetic frisson, created by the opposition between the harmony of kitsch and the constant evocation of themes and death and destruction..."5 And while Nazism has disappeared and other genocides, such as in Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia seem to be at least "suspended," it still represents an obsession for the contemporary imagination. Hartman has commented further that "the role of art remains mysterious" and art must be on guard to avoid the cliché and estranged, "insofar as its symbols become trite and ritualistic rather than realizing." 6

Yet, it is a perfectly human thing to indulge in art, even art that involves violent and grotesque subjects. Murray Edelman has suggested that political art have a cardinal role in civil society, supplying the basis for political discourse and clarifying other complex issues, which may fade from common memory:

Art should be recognized as a major and integral part of the transaction that engenders social behavior...Works of art generate the ideas about leadership, bravery, cowardice, altruism, dangers, authority, and fantasies about the future that people typically assume to be reflections of their own observations and reasoning.7

While it seems easy to suggest that both art and films have a bias and involve degrees of misrepresentation, it may also be observed that even stories told by survivors distort the past. Each memoir of the Lager, for example, portrays both common and abnormal experiences. While everything may be the truth, what is capable of being conveyed in a long-term sense is more a question and a problem. Holocaust museums occasionally have to deal with issues of inauthenticity in terms of how they tell the story and interpret materials.8 Omer Bartov suggests that Holocaust museums present a specific problem for the viewer:

And having been "there" (in the museum, not the past it represents), we now think we know, because we saw and felt it, and on the basis of that "knowledge" we can also reevaluate, or reconfirm, our perceptions of our own society, and of ourselves.9

The contemporary world's exceptional focus on politics and rights for minorities, with the lurking fear of brutalization close to the surface of society, has produced a substantial number of art exhibitions that deal with subjects focused around feminism, AIDS, homosexuality, Black consciousness, the Holocaust, and the genocide in Bosnia. Japanese-Americans have produced exhibits reflecting on responses to World War II internment in American detention camps. Installation art has served as a particularly responsive bridge between the artistic community and political issues. Virtual exhibitions exist on the World Wide Web. These shows, however, may not solve the question of permanence and full comprehension. They may provide instead, an emotional stimulus to the imagination that may be lacking in a documentary rendition motivated entirely by historical scholarship. They may also provide models of action and most significantly, force viewers to reconsider or reconstruct their belief systems toward a particular issue. The often disharmonious and contradictory nature of artistic production may stand in contrast to some coldly rational and highly accurate scholarly treatises, which despite their scholarship and "truth," may fall short of conveying understanding. Edelman has noted that "art can also emancipate the mind from stereotypes, prejudices and narrow horizons."10

This, in essence, is a good part of the reason for Absence/Presence: The Artistic Memory of the Holocaust and Genocide. This exhibit represents an attempt to provide multiple artistic renderings of genocidal-type suffering in many national communities. In conceptualizing the exhibition, the word Holocaust has been used in the narrow sense as a "burnt offering," which became the metaphor to describe the methodology of the German destruction of European Jewry, while the Roma and Sinti Gypsies developed their own descriptive word, porrajmos. The word genocide, invented in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, has moved beyond its original racially-based definition to a wider format as now understood by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Article 2: killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children to another group. In a retroactive sense, the UN Convention can apply to events that led to the destruction of Native American peoples in the Western Hemisphere, what David Stannard has called American Holocaust,11 the Armenian Genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks in 1915, the obliteration of Aboriginal and Tasmanian native cultures in Australia and events that have occurred in the world since 1945: massive killings of Pakistanis and Indians after the 1946 partition of India, the genocide in Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge from 1975-1979, the Burundi Genocide of 1972, Rwanda in 1997, and Bosnia in the mid-1990s.

However, the subject of genocide, both politically and artistically, has its own "slippery slope." Just as the word "Holocaust" has been misused to describe misfortunes of groups in political engagements where the intent was not total destruction, or in controversial legal and private questions such as "the holocaust of the unborn" as used by the right to life movement, the word "genocide" can also be misused, and hence misrepresented. Steven Burg has warned not to politicize genocide, nor to "allow the determination of genocide to politicize and distort the nature of scholarship itself."13 He affirms that intent to exterminate the target people is an essential part of the definition, while the phrase "in whole or in part" from the United Nations document allows a wider "threshold and clearly suggests that small-scale acts of the type therein might qualify as genocide."14

In a certain sense, Absence/Presence has attempted to adhere to a limited definition of genocide, and not to include events that may have been horrible, but were not genocidal. Chief among those issues missing is Afro-American slavery, whose history provided countless examples of mass killing in the passage from Africa to the New World and harsh conditions for slaves. But at the same time, slaves were chattels, valued property, whose life was important to the owner. Reproduction was an important part of slavery, and as we now know, even esteemed American presidents such as Jefferson had offspring from slave women. As a comparison, during the Holocaust, slave laborers lasted an average of three months on diets of less than 800 calories a day.

What Absence/Presence does include is an array of artists from several countries and different national origins who have chosen, through their own intellectual processes, to focus on the memory of genocidal events and the Holocaust. The exhibition must be viewed as an experiment, in particular, to examine if art, whether as a scream or through the sorrow of memory, can evoke commonalities and discourse. Only then may transformation or healing be possible. To use an old parable from the Kabbala, the mystical texts of Judaism: at the time of the creation of the world the evil forces were so great that the vessels containing them were broken and the evil escaped. After the penetration of evil into the world, a possible purpose for artistic expression is tikkun olam, a Hebrew phrase for "healing" or "repair of the world."

But how should the process be manifest? In 1992 artists in Sarajevo arranged a response to genocide in Bosnia, in the bombed out Obala Gallery. In this respect it was unique, as it was art being created under conditions of bombardment and genocide, and was exported to outside audiences as the events continued. In a certain sense, this represented the surrealism of the modern world, where technology allows outsiders to become part of the artistic event, almost in the same way as audiences watch evening news on television and become witnesses to genocide while eating dinner. Included in the exhibit were paintings, sculpture and installations which recalled the recent atrocities committed within eyesight of the gallery. The United Nations facilitated the movement of the art out of Sarajevo.

The Obala gallery in Sarajevo had moved into a new building in April, 1992, which was destroyed by Serb artillery fire on May 9. As Jamey Gambrell has explained, "Witnesses to Existence grew out of a series of homages to the destroyed new space. Gallery director Mirsad Purivata invited a group of Sarajevan artists (all men) to install one-day solo shows in the ruined gallery."15 In April 1993, a group show was held. The building's position offered some protection from sniper fire, but the landscape remained surreal for such an exhibition. Srdan Vuletic made a movie of spectators attending the exhibition under the most compelling circumstances. In a very real sense, the building itself became undifferentiated from the artwork because of its partial destruction. That is to say, an architectural victim reflected some of the angst found in the artwork.

The artistic works represented in the show went well beyond painting and were particularly strong in the area of installation art. It has been pointed out that the works produced for Obala were unique from an artistic point of view: "The art works were dictated by the conditions of life in besieged Sarajevo, where there is no electricity, no heat, little food and certainly no art materials."16 In a certain sense, comparisons could be easily drawn to conditions in the camps where Holocaust victims painted under distressing conditions, their supply of art materials available only because of part of the official business of the camp in producing propaganda. Sarajevo might be compared to a ghetto or concentration camp, given the conditions of the siege. However, the art works constructed for this exhibit contained no overt references to the nationality or religion of victims or perpetrators. The spaces created were extremely sophisticated in their deconstructions and mirrored some of the best works by installation artists in the west dealing with charged political themes. References to war and suffering were found in the works, but were not so obvious in ways so often associated with witness art. Among the works exhibited were Sanjin Jukic's anti-video, Sarajevo Ghetto Spectacle. A video projection, it featured a sign spelling "SARAJEVO," as an analogy to the famous "HOLLYWOOD" in the hills over that section of Los Angeles. Zoran Bogdanovic's Memory of People, was a strip of photographs, eight inches high and several feet long with the title stenciled over the photos from obituaries, and Edo Numankadic's conceptual piece based on an artist's palette and studio, entitled War Trails.17

In Absence/Presence there is a range of artistic response from the contemplative memory oriented landscape paintings of Joyce Lyon to Zbigniew Libera's Lego Concentration Camp and Maciej Toporowicz's photographs and video entitled Obsession and Escape. In between are a wide variety of works in different mediums which suggest war, memory and artistic process. Robert Barsamian, for example, represents that second and third generation of Armenian Americans who heard about the Armenian Genocide from their grandparents and who has created an inspiring installation, Road to Aleppo. This conceptual space suggests the absence of both a people and land because of the Genocide of 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turks, and also a strong presence of that culture and people, and the persistence of memory. Barsamian has related that one of his fondest memories as a child was the image of his grandmother and her friends crocheting lace and telling stories. From this childhood image, he developed a style of drawing over lace, adding images from Armenian photo albums and folklore.

Many artists in this exhibition focus on the Holocaust, and this bias is no accident because of the resonance of that event, as well as the fact that it has become "Americanized" in our culture and educational system. Within this framework, Arnold Trachtman and Sid Chafetz deal with the perpetrators of mass murder. What did they look like? How do evil and even the demonic appear before our eyes? The answers may be disconcerting.

Both Trachtman and Chafetz, students of history, find the evil in the corporate backdrop to the Third Reich, as well as in the banality of the leaders. With Trachtman, the art has a heavy political content in the tradition of George Grosz and John Heartfield's collages, while the color is evocative of Andy Warhol's pop-art works. Chafetz's Perpetrators appear not different from a group of "most wanted" criminals in a post office. Are these works art or political statements resembling propaganda? Trachtman's work contains a painterly aesthetic and deals with issues in an unambiguous way. Chafetz's work recalls the tradition of broadsides and criminal court artists. Lest the message be unclear, many top Nazis were convicted at Nuremberg, but almost all of the corporate criminals, including Bayer, Volkswagen, Daimler Benz, I.G. Farben, and others, received jail terms that were shortened due to the outbreak of the Cold War.

A less complex, but a beautiful memory painting is Henry Koerner's My Parents II, done in 1946. Koerner fled Vienna after Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938) for the United States, and eventually returned as a soldier in the American army. The parental figures in this representation are walking away on separate paths through an autumnal forest. The mounds in the center suggest graves, while the forest, as in Lyon work, becomes a place where death occurred for hundreds of thousands of victims in mass shootings. However, there is even a higher layer of metaphor, which is movingly described by his by his son, Joseph Leo Koerner:

...the parents walk on paths before the painter. Parting is proper here not only for its evocation of death, which is palpable in the autumnal scene, with its mounds like burial heaps, and with its fallen leaves (in Homer's phrase), "like the generation of men." Parting is also appropriate for the witness it gives to the camps in which the parents died, where on their arrival, husbands and wives, young and old, those to be killed and those to labor to death, were divided by the wave of a hand.18

The physical geography is not invented. It represents, in fact, a real path in the woods near Vienna. But the painting is incomplete without hope. That hope is manifest in the left foreground, in a small woman's locket showing photos of children, which dangles from a branch that still possesses a few leaves, but whose left branch has been sawed off.

Ben Shahn, Vesna Kittelson, Judith Liberman, Joyce Lyon and Daisy Brand all deal with the same question in a slightly different way, more oriented toward questions of how we remember. Shahn's Warsaw, 1943, is a lament for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and a testament to the most well known act of Jewish resistance to the Nazi-inspired destruction. Shahn, however, links it to earlier acts of cruelty against the Jews by including the text of a martyrology prayer used in the Yom Kippur service to commemorate the ten rabbis killed by the Romans. Kittelson, of Croatian background, reflects on events in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and two years later, the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the results was the breakup of Yugoslavia was genocide in Bosnia. Kittelson attempts to understand this wanton destruction in her paintings and installations Vukovar, War Garden, The Revenge of Memory and Massacre of the Civilian Population of Timisoara. Underlying her works are important questions about civilization, contemporary culture, and what precipitates neighbors killing neighbors. Judith Liberman's approach to varying topics about the Holocaust is unique because of her mediumsewn wall hangings. The immense size of these works suggests the size of the subject, while the delicacy needed to sew the designs is suggestive of the difficulties of understanding the events. Among the works shown in Absence/Presence is Gypsies, Too, commemorating the destruction of the Roma and Sinti peoples by the Third Reich, the only other destruction that was racially based during the Holocaust.

Howard Oransky is also concerned with the enormity of it: also with the question of how to represent it. In Will These Bones Live, the artist has constructed a huge triptych in the form of an altar. But this is no altar of redemption, rather the opposite. The title comes from Ezekiel 37:3 in the Hebrew Bible, a section that explains the resurrection of the Israelites killed in battle: "Behold, I will open your graves, and I will cause you to come up out of your graves, O my people, and I will bring you to the land of Israel." Oransky's other works focus on the language and careers of the perpetrators, with use of texts to suggest the manipulation of language used during the Holocaust. Roy Strassberg's Holocaust Bone Structures evoke both images of bones and trains, thus mirroring the theme raised by Oransky and others. On the surface, Strassberg's ceramic structures may seem literal. In fact, they are not, as a close inspection indicates they are laden with symbolism and footnotes about victimization and destruction processes. Daisy Brand, the only Holocaust survivor represented in this exhibition, also uses ceramics as her medium to create a softer but nevertheless fearful form of expression. Her wall sculptures, usually fired on the edges with pinkish and grayish colors, contain within darker memories of her deportation and survival. Joyce Lyon, a child of survivors, uses landscape as a metaphor for hidden and incomplete lives and histories, as well as a reference to the fact that both killing and resistance took place in forests. I Heard There Were Forests II and Mass Grave in the Glogow Woods II, both oil stick paintings suggest the mystery and hidden history that can be evoked by a walk in a Polish forest. The absence of family and a lost people need not be evoked only by scenes of corpses. A forest, even in New York or Minnesota, can evoke memory and history. But Lyon is interested in process as well. Her installation includes poems and framed texts indicating her process of discovery, and its ultimate form, an artist's book called Conversations with Rzeszow.

Toporowicz deals with some of the less visible aspects of how the civilized society of Germany became genocidal. His photography and film possess a different aesthetic edge. Using some of the familiar sculptural images of Arno Breker, whose work became the basis for the image of the Nazi "super-race" during the 1930s, with its obsession with the human body in an almost pornographic way, the artist subverts both the historical imagery and at the same time links it with some of the carefully planned graphic design and advertising used by Calvin Klein and photographer Bruce Weber. The imposition of the words "OBSESSION," "ETERNITY" and "ESCAPE" over Breker's images as well as over images of the debris from victims found at Auschwitz provides an innovative critique of contemporary advertising's purposeful use of well-known Nazi techniques. An accompanying film, shot crudely from ads and off of television, juxtaposes film images from Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia, sculptures by Breker, Scheibe, Kolbe, and Thorak, cuts of contemporary pornography, with Kate Moss and other Calvin Klein models. Toporowicz, who knows authoritarian regimes well from his youth in Poland and as both a member of Solidarity and a political refugee in the United States, has said: "You must understand (that) the national socialism campaign in Germany was the most successful advertising campaign ever. Hitler was able to convince 80 million people. Imagine how good he was. Don't you think (Calvin Klein) unconsciously tapped the same source?"19

In a similar way, Zbigniew Libera asks the question "from where did the Holocaust and contemporary genocide originate?" His suggestion is not from the usual center of accusations such as guns, but mundane toys of a material culture that surrounds us. The Lego Concentration Camp is a seven-box set, in an edition of three, done initially with some support from Lego Group of Copenhagen, which was later rescinded. This is one of the artist's "Correcting Devices" designed as art works, but "meant to illustrate the gap between the ideal world marketed to children and the real one created by adults." Most of the concentration camp pictured could be made from ordinary Lego products. The Lego box in this case is merely instructive. During May 1997, Libera was invited to display his other pop art pieces in the Polish pavillion at the Venice Biennale, but was asked by Jan Stanislaw Wojciechowski, the curator, not to bring Lego.20 He wound up withdrawing from the exhibition.

At a December, 1997 academic conference in Brussels, Libera's work caused a storm of protest when it was shown in a seminar debating the question of "how to keep the discourse on the Holocaust alive?" Many in the audience thought the artistic item was "real" and in mass production by Lego. Holocaust survivors in the audience stood up and told the artist to "go back to Poland." However, responses in support of the artist, indicated that Hitler was once a would-be art student at the Vienna Academy whose application was rejected. Once in power, Hitler and the Nazi hierarchy had an obsession with Aryan art, and a fanatical desire to rid Germany, and perhaps the world of "degenerate art, " and ultimately "degenerate people," those who did not fit the new Aryan racial aesthetic of the Reich. Libera's response to all of this was to affirm that his work "is neither anti-Semitic nor irreverent, but a provocation about child rearing, social norms and the cultural cacophony that the free market has brought to formerly Communist Eastern Europe."21

A second "Correcting Device" by Libera, Eroica, is four box set of toy soldier-sized female figures. They are based on classical models of slaves, or as women seen in paintings such as Poussin's Rape of the Sabine Women. They are a reminder that in the 1990s no toy soldier set is complete without the inclusion of women, who have become the special targets of victimization in genocidal settings such as Bosnia, where rape camps have been well-documented by The Hague War Crimes Tribunals. Such is the fashion of "heroic" actions of armies in genocidal and even less violent encounters where women are victims. The title of the work is also suggestive of other cultural references. "Eroica" is the title of Ludwig Von Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, in E-Flat. While the title perhaps suggests "erotic" or "eros," the title page of the score reads "Heroic Symphony composed to celebrate the memory of a great man," the reference being to Napoleon Bonaparte, who had defeated the Austrians at Austerlitz by the time the symphony was completed.22 The second and very slow movement of the "Eroica" is "Marcia Funebre" ("Funeral March"), appropriate also for Napoleonic Europe as well as the later twentieth century. It was the Napoleonic campaign in Spain that inspired Goya's Disasters of War. Thus, in this case, a seemingly simple and pop-art theme is actually an art work with many disguises, not at all about the Holocaust, but having a lot to do with genocide.

Melissa Gould, on the other hand, has provided an installation, From Adler to Zylber, which is an indication of a research process as well as an artistic endeavor. Gould discovered a deportation list of Jews from Paris from 1942, which included the names of a grandparent. Using that list, the artist matched the names with illustrations from pre-1933 German children's books and dictionaries. The thirty-six illustrations take on a frightening character once the images are linked with the results we know from our historically inspired knowledge of the Holocaust. Each print, based on a photo copying process, is ringed with a black band, suggesting a death notice. But the size is important, 36 inches x 36 inches, recalling the Hebrew number and letter "Chai" ("18" and "Life") multiplied times two, as a form of redemption and transformation. These are works that avoid the clichés of representation and pose interesting questions about the roots of prejudice and near-total destruction. Ultimately it can be understood as an obituary on walls, with a motif of mourning absence. Gould's installation is also a comment on German culture and the "creation of the other" through visual representation in children's educational texts.

Barbara Loftus's eight-minute-long film, The Confiscation of Porcelain, based on a previous exhibition and ongoing research by the British artist, represents another side of genocide, which is now at the top of the news-the seizure of the victims' property. Loftus's mother related to her the events of 1938 when the Nazi Brownshirts seized the family's porcelain collection. This was not an event of breaking and heavy looting. Quite the opposite, as the German intruders took each piece and carefully wrapped it before taking it to its new home. But as the world now dwells on the disposition of banking assets from Switzerland, France, and other countries, as well as return of looted art works, Loftus returns us to the side of genocide which was more visible in Germany than countries under occupation, but nevertheless was a prelude to greater victimization.

Three other short films are included in Absence/Presence. Seth Kramer's Untitled was executed at Tyler School of the Arts in Philadelphia. He decided to devise a project of counting "something" in order to understand what the number "six million" meant. The project focused eventually on counting grains of rice and placing those counted in jars. The film, originally shown in the Jewish Museum's exhibition, Too Jewish?, shows the process. But it is not merely counting. Everything in the film impels the viewer toward thinking about numbers, beginning with a countdown of the New Year's clock in Times Square. In an artful way, Kramer also introduces oblique questions, including one from the TV game show Jeopardy as well as a scene from Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. In the end, his goal of counting to six million in a single year fails, but there is nonetheless an intense understanding of his obsession. Jeremy Newman, on the other hand, has produced two short (each less than four minutes) 8mm digitized films, Synagogues on Fire and Agnus Dei. ("The Lamb of God") The first film shows quickly the hypnotizing power of the charismatic leader, like Hitler and its effects. The second, suggests the uniqueness of Jewish persecution but ends with recognition that there were Christian victims of the Nazi era as well. An ending image of the Pieta affirms the Jewishness of Jesus, thus the compelling and often forgotten linkage between Judaism and Christianity, and raises the critical question posed by philosopher Emil Fackenheim: ""Where would Jesus of Nazareth have been in Nazi-occupied Europe?" 23

More mysterious is Arie Galles's vision of the Holocaustan aerial perspective. His suite of large charcoal drawings, Fourteen Stations with poetry by Jerome Rothenberg, is both a lamentation and an outraged scream at the fact that these drawings, based upon wartime photographs taken by both Germans and the Allies, could exist. The aerial perspective is especially interesting, as our own photographically-based memories of the camps come from ground-level. The view of Bergen-Belsen, one of the worst camps at the time of its liberation in April 1945, provides the viewer with a strange geometry, and certainly something abnormal in the landscape, clearly visible only from the air. Outside the perimeter of the fence is a vision of a skull caused by natural erosion along a tree line.

Galles's work is a lamentation series as well as a suite with Christological symbolism from "Stations of the Cross." As part of the artistic process, Galles rendered the works in charcoal and partially erased his drawing several times in order to enhance shading as well as other aspects, thus making each work unique and not a mere copy of a photograph. Embedded within each work is the text of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, which extols the greatness of God and never mentions death itself. As the medium is charcoal, the artist, in a real sense, is working with ashes, what the victims became. But if Galles's drawing suggests a lamentation, Rothenberg's poems return us to a scream, as in the second stanza of Bergen-Belsen:

Artists involved with the Holocaust usually confess some of the problems they have encountered in dealing with its representation. Many cease their work entirely after much experimentation. Others continue, sometimes, as in Galles's case, with a marvelous aesthetic breakthrough, even though he admits, "under no condition can art express the Holocaust." The fear of failure, however strong, is worse, for "to withdraw art from confronting this horror...is to assign victory to its perpetrators."25

Genocide has also erupted in Africa. In addition to other forms of human tragedy because of post-colonial regimes, tribal and political wars and famine, genocide appeared in Rwanda and Burundi, first in 1972 and again in 1988 and 1996. At times, this killing, with Hutus killing Tutsis (and sometimes vice-versa), came not at the hands of an organized and highly efficient bureaucratic killing machine, but with regular and irregular army units, as well as neighbors killing neighbors. Radio broadcasts helped incite the carnage, which had roots back to the colonial period, perhaps earlier. Representations in the arts of these events are difficult to find. The photographic record shows more, as in Cambodia. Selma Waldman's work speaks to the issues of genocide in general, as well as events in Africa, in particular. Significant for her involvement in human rights causes, Waldman spent time as a student reading Albert Camus, visiting Germany, and is now focused on events in both Africa and Bosnia. For her, "there is nothing created by the death camp artists which can be called 'unacceptable.'" Her art, with its themes of brutality that echo the work of Leon Golub, is displayed frequently in Germany and South Africa, with titles like Brotbruder from the series Das Ringen um Brot,"Killing Fields, Grief is the Gravity of the Earth., Skelani Stalker II , and The Altars of Fear: Naked/Aggression. Her work is suggestive of the multitude of human issues confronting Africa, including genocide.

It may be easier to speak about genocide, and represent it when it occurs on other shores. But the genocide of Native Americans occurred in the Western Hemisphere, in North America, and even in Minnesota. Hachiva Edgar Heap of Birds's installation, Building Minnesota, and paintings of Francis Yellow may be interpreted as a form of Native American "correcting devices," to use Libera's phrase. A factual appraisal of the events relating to the removal of the American Indians from Eastern states, ultimately to reservations on the Great Plains and beyond took on genocidal characteristics, which many say continue. Many of the means of removal appeared the same as Jewish "resettlement" by the Germans, although the ideological hatred was worked out less systematically. However, the Jeffersonian idea of "merciless Indian savages," as described in the American Declaration of Independence, may have indeed been one of the contributing factors to identifying the "other" as a sub-human and become the basis for seizure of lands and deportations. Indeed, almost every tribe has their own story: the Seminoles, for example, were deported from Florida in railroad boxcars, with many dying en route to the West.

Heap of Birds's Building Minnesota is a monument, once displayed near the Mississippi River, to those hanged by the United States Government on orders signed by Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson. This was a response to the Santee Sioux Uprising of 1862. The executions of the 38 Santees who tried to defend their land and culture was carried out in Mankato, Minnesota on December 26, 1862. Yellow's This Is Me is a self-portrait as both warrior and painter, set against a field of words used to describe the fate of Native Americans. Aside from boarding schools where native languages were extinguished, they are not so different from language use in the Third Reich. Last Stand is a color-charged, almost lyrical, "rewriting" of The Battle of the Little Big Horn. This and other works by other Native American artists suggest there is a fundamental problem in American History, popular culture and memory, which has yet to be sorted out. The heroes for Americans of European ancestry are not necessarily the heroes for Native and Afro-Americans. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slaveholders. It was under the administration of Andrew Jackson that the Indian Removal Acts began. Lincoln freed the slaves but gave orders for the hangings depicted in Heap of Birds' Building Minnesota. While General Custer is a slightly eroded hero symbolizing American conquest of the Great Plains, he is a villain for natives. This is not only a question for artists, but also one for history books and public monuments.

Yellow's Last Stand also raises the well-known issue of stereotyping Indians as names for sports teams in high schools, universities and professional teams. With a form of black humor, Yellow uses stickers from the Cleveland Indians baseball team as faces for all the Indians attacking, and eventually killing Custer. The Indians from the stickers seem remarkably jovial, compared to the nineteenth century image of a sub-human enemy. Yet, as with the fate of European Jewry, Native Americans, once removed and resettled, had their images co-opted by "the victors." In Europe today, Jewish Theater and Klezmer bands exist without Jews being in them. Synagogues in small towns absent of Jews have become historical monuments. In the United States, images of happy Indians abound in Cleveland, while in Atlanta, even a former President of the United States was seen on television making the "tomahawk chop" of the Atlanta Braves. The "cigar-store Indian" may be gone, but other relics of domination remain. Thus, both Yellow's and Heap of Birds's artistic visions bring home the reality: it did not all happen "over there."

When Heap of Birds's monument was installed outdoors in Minneapolis, it was placed behind a fence that warned against the Mississippi River's pollution. The placement was clearly an allusion to the ecological issues connected with the industrial revolution and spread of civilization. As that civilization spread, not only have "marginal" peoples been removed or eradicated, but the earth has suffered as well. Heap of Birds' honoring of his ancestors thus has within it a critique of the treatment of the earth, which raises the issue beyond genocide. The spirituality of Yellow's poetry is a reminder of a religious base and worldview that now seems to be eroded in the technological age.

So, what is the answer? Can art tell the story? Can art heal? The answer to both questions may be a qualified "yes." However, it may be possible that art's role is more to remind us of the possibilities of other forms of knowledge as the real way of knowing what humanity has the capacity to do and achieve. In Absence/Presence, there is the image of the curse, the negative, the depraved, the cynical. Also the memory of what was lost in genocide through the ages, as well as the reminder that we have to deal constantly with that memory. Is there a possibility that art can heal the world? Possibly, if we are able to heed the advise of Rabbi Irving Greenberg: "...the cloud of smoke of the bodies by day and the pillar of fire of the crematoria by night may yet guide humanity to a goal and a day when human beings are attached to each other; have so much shared each other's pain, and have purified and criticized themselves, that never again will a Holocaust be possible." 26

Stephen C. Feinstein
Director, Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
University of Minnesota

1 Theodor Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society," in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Sherry Weber (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1981), p.34 and Negative Dialectics (1966), translated by E.B. Ashton (New York, Seabury Press, 1973), p.362.

2 Gideon Hausner, Prosecutor in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, from interview WPBH Video, The Hunter and the Hunted (PBS), 1981.

3 Elie Wiesel, "Trivializing Memory," in From the Kingdom of Memory (New York, Schocken Books/Summit Books, 1990), p.166.

4 Geoffrey H. Hartman, "Darkness Visible," in Geoffrey H. Hartman (ed.), Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory. (Cambridge, MA.,Blackwell, 1994), p. 10.

5 Saul Friedlander, Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1993), p.18.

6 Hartman, Op. Cit., p.19.

7 Murray Edelman, From Art to Politics (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 2-3.

8 Omer Bartov, Murder In Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation. (New York, Oxford University Press.1996) p.169.

9 Omer Bartov, Ibid., p.179.

10 Edelman, Op. Cit., p. 12.

11 See David E. Stannard, American Holocaust. (New York. Oxford University Press, 1992)

12 One of the more recent and comprehensive books on the subject is by Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny (eds.), Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views (New York, Garland, 1997).

13 Steven L. Burg, "Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina?," in Ibid., p. 424.

14 Ibid., p.425.

15 Jamey Gambrell, "Sarajevo: Art in Extremis," in Art in America, May 1994, p.101.

16 Ibid, p.102.

17 For information on this exhibition, see Jamey Gambrell, "Sarajevo: Art in Extremis," in Art in America, May 1994, p.101.

18 Joseph Leo Koerner, Die unheimliche Heimat ("Uncanny Home"): Henry Koerner, 1915-1991. Vienna. Osterreichische Galerie Belvedere. 1997.

19 Maciej Toporowicz, "Obsession-Street Posting Action," March-May, 1994. Artist's statement.

20 Dean E. Murphy, "An Artist's Volatile Toy Story," Los Angeles Times, May 19, 1997. n.p.

21 Libera as quoted in Ibid.

22 "Sinfonia Eroica, composita per festeggiare la mammoria de un grand Uuomo," as indicated in notes for Ludwig von Beethoven's Symphony No. 3, in E-Flat. RCA Victor LP Album 1042, Commemorative Edition, Toscanini Tour, 1950.

23 Emil L. Fackenheim. To Mend the World (New York, Schocken, 1982), p.280. Newman's film asserts at the end: "The Nazis killed six-million Jews and seven-million Christians." The Simon Wiesenthal Center uses a figure of six-million Jews and five-million non-Jewish victims. A problem with using the word "Christian" is that it presumes the victim died for the faith, which was probably not the case, with the exception of priests who spoke out in their churches.

24 "Bergen Belsen" from Fourteen Stations.

25 Arie Galles, Fourteen Stations . Artist's Statement. 1997.

26 Irving Greenberg, "Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire," in John K. Roth and Michael Berenbaum (eds). Holocaust: Religious and Philosophical Implications (New York, Paragon House, 1989), p.341.