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