Artist Statement
On the Re'eh Series and. Its Making¹by Irwin Icemen
Re'eh! in Hebrew means "See!"
I think of these Re'eh collages, the group of them, as a monument to the victims of the Holocaust.
But from the start, each work arose unintentionally and fit no prescribed program. The making of the Series came about in this way . . .
During the winter of 1980, in my distress over the conflict then escalating around the world, I took to working again in my old basement studio, a small, cramped room where many of my early works had been made. I found it enormously comforting to be there, picking through the heaps of paper that I had collected during the 70's in Europe and in New York. But I no longer know exactly how or why I began fiddling with that paper. Perhaps I had gone down to get a screwdriver or, more likely, to crowd into the old studio certain small iron sculptures that I had composed but had not welded. Anyway, I probably began to play idly with some scraps that caught my attention. That's enough to set the process going, after which I get to work more seriously. I clearly remember rushing out at one point to fetch my favorite paper-handling tweezers from the main studio, then rushing back to arrange a makeshift work space with a slab of wood across two cinderblocks for table and another cinderblock for chair. At first, I picked through various trays crammed with paper; then, in a frenzy of impatience, I poured the contents of others onto that impromptu table. Thus off and working in a white heat² I hardly minded the cramped quarters, and time - the world even - vanished also in my concentration on those vagrant scraps of color.
What work arose first I cannot say, whether Arkhe or one called Black Telos or Im Lager the first of the Re'eh Series. Whichever, as soon as I had made Im Lager³, no, even as I was working on it and I went about it no differently than the way I make any collage, that is, without a preconceived image in mind - I knew that it had to do with the Holocaust, knew it with immediacy. Those stripes! And that shape with its broken Hebrew word! Torah scroll, tombstone? At once, the stripes that were worn in the camps and a scroll whose script is entombed in the same stripes! What else if not both the camps and the world that the camps destroyed!
The collage that lay on the rickety table that wintry night shook me. For one, those referential images violated my own cherished dictum that a collage-of-my-kind should stand for itself and only itself, be a presentation and not a representation. More profoundly moving was the fact that it concerned the Holocaust. I realized that others must follow, though not precisely how many whether ten, twelve, or eighteen - but that eventually I would complete a group that taken together could stand as a monument to the victims. Some days later, after making the second, The Inconsolable, I knew this for a certainty and I accepted the task in all its gravity, responsibility, and hazard. The horror of the Holocaust, its incomprehensibility, the terrible ordeal of its victims, would occupy an undercurrent of my imagination over the time that would be needed to bring the group to completion. Given the way I work, that could take years, and did. I accepted also that this work would push against the grain of my own practice, for I would have to make collages given to theme and reference that otherwise I would unquestionably reject. In any case, I resolved to continue working in my usual way, striving always for a collage-of-my-kind and, as it happened, the works that resulted assimilated reference to the nonrepresentational mode.
Over the five-and-a-half years that it took to complete the Re'eh Series, I worked on each one much as I did the first, without plan, without obvious design or necessary thematic content. Almost all emerged as I was making other collages, of the kind that refer to nothing beyond themselves. But after having made several I began to recognize rather quickly the initiation of a new work or that one was in progress. But I don't think I can adequately articulate what cued that recognition. Palette certainly played a role, yet not a primary one. Mine was a somber palette throughout, one restricted to blacks, whites, grays, and certain browns. I knew early on that color would be inappropriate for a collage of this Series, knew it without deliberation much as I know the feel of my right hand without having to think about it. Color would be inconsonant to the nightmarish world that was the Holocaust, would sentimentalize and prettify. Where I deliberately introduce a tatter of color, as in The Three Graces, it serves to reinforce the starkness: the spots of yellow on those desiccated figures call to mind the yellow Star of David that marked a person as a Jew - and so for annihilation - in the Nazi world.
But palette alone could hardly have served as cue that a Re'eh collage was in the making. I've made many collages before, after, and during the making of the Re'eh Series - using a similarly restricted palette. So much so, in fact, that I could mount a sizable exhibit of works entirely in black, white, and gray, exclusive of the Re'eh Series. Such an exhibit would indeed be instructive: similar to the latter in color range and tone, it nevertheless would be strikingly different in feel, in meaning, in visual thrust. These, too, were the touchstones of recognition and contributed to the unity of the Series beyond that of palette, a coherence that emerged in its making, or, rather, evolved over the course of the process.
The beginning of any work of mine is invariably non-directive, with no intent other than to make a new collage. As I work along, the many choices - the flux of selection and the shaping of the material - cumulatively assert direction for the particular work in progress. In the special case of the Re eh collages, that direction was guided in addition by an iconography and symbolism, implicit and non-programmatic, that also emerged or evolved, and this integrally, over the making of the Series. What I strove for was a synthesis - feeling, thought, and vision hopefully one.
To illustrate what I've been describing, here's how I came to make the collage called Ten Is One . . .
Back in '83, on the last day of that year, I began to fidget with paper that I had collected in Northern Italy seven weeks earlier. I had recently finished the composition of . . . and by Gun and of Panathenaic 807985, and the paper that I was now drawn to was, as in those works, mainly black, white, gray. I remember that I expressly didn't want to make another Re'eh collage, that I began working prompted by another impulse entirely, namely, to make a work I could give to a brother of mine. But as I worked, the blacks and whites, their patterning and shapes, began to evoke the idea of people in prayer shawls huddled together. Yielding to the emerging image, I became more deliberate and composed the collage of ten pieces of paper each differing as to its configuration of black or white or of stripes. Why ten? Because ten adults constitute a minyon, the quorum necessary for congregational prayer; and, while remaining abstract, I organized this collage to evoke the sense of such a huddled quorum when seen from behind. Moreover, it is said that whenever such a minyon convenes, it in effect stands for all of the people, and that exactly - all of the people - was the target of the Final Solution. Thematically, the "all" implicit here in the minyon, as elsewhere in the Series, is made explicit in another work, Alle! Nowhere else is a complete word spelled out - broken words4 everywhere, and what of humankind when words shatter? - except for the word kol found in this collage. Kol is the Hebrew word for "all" with alle, of course, being the cognate in German and in Yiddish. In Alle!, the complete word, in its isolation, opposes the fragmented letters and broken words that occur in that work and recur through the Series.
Not a haphazard iconography, this intermeshing of themes, yet one that burgeoned without forethought. Which in itself shouldn't be perplexing since a collage comes out of my living, is a distillate but not a translation of it, however much it swings free of me afterward, deriving significance on its own terms. Im lager didn't emerge from a vacuum but from a consciousness sensitized by certain events, certain feelings, certain significances. After it and the next one, I was primed to perceive in whatever I was doing, even in my searches for paper5, the potential for another work of this special kind. And yet, I never started a work session saying today I will begin one of those. Even when picking out whites and blacks to work with, I could never know beforehand that a Re'eh collage would result. The process of making, despite the innumerable analyses about it, remains - thank goodness - a mystery!
For my works other than those of the Re'eh Series, title and collage are perpendicular one to the other, the name being extrinsic and serving as a tag of identity while remaining visually nonspecific. But the title Im Lager functions differently, being integral to the work of that name. Without avoiding visual connotation, here, as across the whole Series, title serves as cue to the universe of the collage, the concentrationary universe. That hellish world is evoked allusively by the scraps of reference, half effaced and only obliquely suggesting that terrible, ungraspable reality, the reign of death monstrously conceived and rationally executed, referred to now as the Holocaust.
I thought I had come to the end of the Series when the tenth or minyon collage, Ten Is One, was finished. Then, over a year later, while messing around one day with a heap of scrappings, bits of tar and tiny paper fragments taken from a work that I was preparing for exhibit, Unto Dust materialized. Upon that I knew the Series to be complete. What, after all, could follow?
The Re'eh Series is always exhibited alone, in its own space separated from all other art. This holds even when the Series is shown concurrently with other work of mine at the same museum. Either a room is provided for it alone or a walled enclosure built for it in the gallery. A space is thus delineated distinct from the quotidian; there the Re'eh collages set the ambience.
Let the visitor experience what he or she may.
Look! Witness! Remember!
Durham, North Carolina
November 1989
NOTES ON ESSAY
1 This essay rests upon a previous one, "I & K: The Second Dialogue," which appeared in the catalogue In Plain View: The Collages of Irwin Kremen. Memphis, Tennessee: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, 198. It revises the latter in form while eliminating some but adding and expanding other material.
2 See ibid, p. 8, for a discussion of this "state."
3 The full title includes the word Re eh which precedes Im Lager, as shown in the checklist to this catalogue. The same is so for the titles of all the works of this Series.
4 The title of a collage in this Series.
5 The papers bearing Hebrew letters weren't collected with the Re'eh Series in mind, but for a different purpose entirely, in August 1979 on a search of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn; thus before the making of Im Lager by eight months.