Hornstein, Shelley, Laura Levitt, and Laurence
J. Silberstein, eds. New York: New York University Press, 2003. 256 pp.,
$20.00 (USD). ISBN: 0-8147-9226-8.
[1] Scholars talk about the “future” of the
Holocaust to remind us that its meaning is still being shaped by
the culture in which we live. How we express this inexpressible
horror is enmeshed in the construction of the past located in our
personal and collective identities. One could cite any number
of current examples that examine the “future” of
the Holocaust, but Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the
Holocaust is one of the most incisive and provocative books
to emerge in recent years.
[2] As part of the “New Perspectives on Jewish Studies” series,
Impossible Images serves as a departure from previous volumes,
shifting its focus from historical and literary representations
to visual representations. In the introduction, editors
Shelley Hornstein, Laura Levitt, and Laurence J. Silberstein
contextualize this shift by arguing that the Holocaust confounds
attempts to represent any part of it; and yet, as time goes by,
historical moments still demand all-embracing visual markers. Focusing
on the asking of questions rather than on the receipt of answers,
the editors situate the eleven essays as cross-disciplinary conversations. They
seek to push the boundaries of historical representation and
the Holocaust, found in Saul Friedlander’s Probing the
Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (1992),
as well as extend the arguments, raised by Ziva Amishai-Maisels
in After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary
Art (1995), surrounding contemporary art on the Holocaust.
[3] Given its scope, such a contribution must of necessity be collaborative; Impossible
Imagesevolved out of a conference (“Representing the
Holocaust: Practices, Products, Projections”) held
at Lehigh University in May 2000. Informed by contemporary
critical perspectives, international contributors deftly examine
various art forms, including architecture, photography, monuments,
museums, and even toys. In approach and in visual/archival
research, all of the essays traverse many disciplinary boundaries
in order to engage, critique, and transgress some of the greatest
taboos of Holocaust discourse in Israeli society: linking the
Holocaust with the Israeli-Arab conflict; employing the humour,
play, and irony of the Holocaust; and shifting the gaze from
the victim to the victimizer. Another unifying thread in
this volume—though ultimately less compelling—concerns
Israeli national identity and the Holocaust, and the ways in
which the Holocaust informs contemporary Jewish identity in Western
Europe, Canada, and the United States. In addition to eleven
essays, the book also features a selection of twenty colour plates
by artists Alice Lok Cahana, Judy Chicago, Debbie Teicholz, and
Mindy Weisel, who also participated in the conference.
[4] At its core, Impossible Images illuminates the question
of “license”: Who is qualified to speak about
the Holocaust? The visual arts proffer a way to keep
this question open; in line with postmodern and post-Zionist thought,
these essays demonstrate that art is no longer perceived as monolithic. Its
voice has split into a multiplicity of personal, conflicted, and
contradictory voices. Together, this book offers a polyphony
of voices that go beyond formalist subversion of generic categories
and which indeed shift the terrain of the debate onto the cultural
conditions, possibilities, and constraints of Holocaust representation. Thus
they displace the frequently prescriptive epistemologies and ontologies
set by Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, and Berel Lang which asserted
that, “after Auschwitz,” poetry and fiction are impossible.
[5] As is typical of edited volumes, the arguments developed in
the book are fragmented. The essays that examine the taboo of identification
are particularly strong, as evidenced by Tami Katz-Freiman. Undoubtedly,
the ideas that are expressed in Impossible Images are immensely
significant and deeply consequential, but by their nature—and
because the contributors are writing about artists whose working
patterns and practices are still evolving—those ideas are
not always fully formed. The contributors know this, and at
times their doubts seem manifest in their prose. Nonetheless,
because of this subject, their ideas allow much wider consideration.
Admittedly, some of these can be aligned with contemporary poststructuralist
thought, but many may inspire discussion of wider issues relating
to imagery, imagination, and memory when joined hip-and-thigh to
received perceptions, when representation is at stake.
[6] The struggles over the meaning and forms of Holocaust art described
in Impossible Images raise broader questions for critics,
artists, historians, and curators alike: Does the pairing of the
Holocaust and visual culture cause a suspension, perhaps a permanent
one in the postmodern era, of the Kantian formulation of the meaning
of beauty and its relationship to the aesthetic? Where does
judgment lie if not in the aesthetic? What is made visible and what
is concealed by specific kinds of artistic production? Adi Ophir
and Oren Baruch Stier offer an engaging dialogic moment about these
questions surrounding the political effects of representational
practices, commodity production, and symbolic ownership. Another
highlight of this volume is Julian Bonder’s insightful essay
on his own attempt to build a place of memory at Clark University
and the controversy that entailed. Indeed, this contestation
remains central to considerations of visual culture and the Holocaust,
if only because the issue of response, or reception, lies at the
core of the visual images that represent or reenact the events and
of the buildings that house the material artifacts of the events.
[7] Impossible Images provides a valuable overview of various
ways in which the Holocaust has been visually represented, received,
and/or rejected, choosing to engage in contesting Holocaust production
and meaning rather than ignore its power in popular imagination.
In an age of memorial proliferation in American popular culture,
the Holocaust has a new legitimacy that no longer smacks of kitsch
and anachronism, as this book powerfully documents via scholarly
research alongside various productions of artwork. Taken together,
they are reflective of the many roads art “after Auschwitz” might
travel in order to answer these questions, as well as the challenge
(or futility) of defining the “future” of the Holocaust.
Jennifer A. Scott
Ohio University
Athens, Ohio
Jennifer.a.scott.1@ohio.edu
