Doris Salcedo - Fissures :

Exploring the public art(s) of memorialization

Johannes Klabbers
School of Visual and Performing Arts
Charles Sturt University

Keywords : Public Art, Memorials, Holocaust, Contemporary Art

Introduction
The question of how, and especially the problem of whether it is possible at
all, to create public memorials for political violence has been subject to
debate for the more than half a century which has passed since the end of
the Second World War. It is not difficult to find examples of public art and
memorials which commemorate political violence that seem inadequate,
hollow or contradictory. Referring to Holocaust art Inge Clendinnen describes
‘the inversion effect’ : "We expect the magic of art to intensify, transfigure
and elevate actuality. Touch the Holocaust and the flow is reversed. The
matter is so potent of itself that when art seeks to command it, it is art which
is rendered vacuous and drained of authority.” (Clendinnen, 1998, p. 185)

Fig. 1 Looking over the Memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe towards
the Tiergarten in Berlin, Germany. Panorama. Photographer : Chaosdna
(Licensed under Creative Commons)

This impotence is nowhere more evident, I would argue, than at the site of
what was one of the most eagerly anticipated monuments in history: the
Holocaust memorial in the capital of the Third Reich, which the German
Parliament decided in 1995 would be built. German artists Renata Stih and
Frieder Schnock came eleventh in the subsequent international competition
with their “anti-proposal” Bus Stop. Rather than a static monolith the artists
proposed that the site should be occupied by a bus stop and information
centre and that red busses with the sign denkmal (memorial) would depart
from here and travel all over Berlin taking visitors to various sites around the
city that relate to the holocaust. As Schnock said, "A giant monument has no
effect and ultimately becomes invisible. Giving people a way to visit the
authentic crime scenes would be far more effective. ( HYPERLINK
"http://wso.williams.edu/~mdeean/berlin/busstop.html"
http://wso.williams.edu/~mdeean/berlin/busstop.html accessed 7.9.09) The
competition was won by Christine Jackob-Marks who proposed a 100 square
meter concrete block 7 meters thick covering the entire site, inscribed with
the names of the victims, but it was discovered that there would not be
enough space to accommodate the full names, so it was decided that only
the given names of the victims would be included. However while the
government was prepared to fund the inscription of 500,000 names, public
subscriptions would be required to fund the other 4 million names. The
German chancellor Helmut Kohl, eventually vetoed the plan and another
competition was launched, which was won by renowned architect Peter
Eisenman.

Eisenman’s 25 million euro Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was

finally unveiled nearly ten years later and consisted of more than 2,711
concrete slabs, or stelae, of various heights on uneven ground. According to
the official City of Berlin website "The monument acts as the central site of
remembrance and commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust." and its
design "represents a radical confrontation with the traditional concept of a
monument, among other things because it does without any symbolism."
(http://www.berlin.de/stadt/en/denkmal.html accessed 12.9.09) Indeed
Eisenman himself referred to the site as a place of no meaning in the hope of
dispelling fears that he was trying to symbolize the deaths that took place
during the Holocaust, but there were complaints that Eisenman’s trademark
abstractness made it a monument that evoked no memories, into a
confrontation with the past. However one can read the uneven ground and
the imposing nature of the concrete pillars, apparently the same but actually
each is unique in its dimensions, as a kind of hyperreal system of order gone
wrong, and Eisenman alluded to this in his project proposal.

In 2003 a Swiss newspaper reported that Degussa, the German company

which had won the contract to cover the concrete pillars in a graffiti-proof
coating, was once a part of Degesch, the company that delivered Zyklon B to
the extermination camps. However in 2000 city officials in Vienna decided
not to put any anti-graffiti solution on Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library a
memorial to the 65,000 Austrian Jews who died in the Holocaust in Vienna,
"If someone sprays a swastika on it we can try to scrub it off, but a few
daubed swastikas would really make people think about what's happening in
their society." " Whiteread said. (The Guardian 26 October 2000) However as
with the Berlin memorial there was a reluctance to name names. Where
Eisenman fought to have no names on the memorial because he felt it would
turn it into a graveyard, indeed there is no indication anywhere of what is
being commemorated; in Vienna it was the names of the sites of
extermination which were omitted. According to the original proposal they
were to be inscribed on a glass base on which the memorial was to be
mounted.

Fig. 2 Rachel Whiteread Nameless Library. Photographer : Unknown

(Licensed under Creative Commons)

It is hardly surprising that artists and architects as are reluctant to tackle the
Holocaust since Adorno's radical pronouncement in 1947 that after Auschwitz
poetry is barbaric which is often interpreted as encompassing all creative
practices. But Adorno later returned to this statement to redefine its
emphasis, explaining that it was more a case of asking the question how
poetry and art could still be possible, and iterating the problem of
aestheticisation in the wake of the Holocaust. [1]

Doris Salcedo, a Columbian artist living and working in Bogota, has a history
of engaging with audiences through the installation of memorials in public
spaces commemorating specific events of politically motivated violence in her
native country. The materials used by Salcedo however are markedly
different from the slabs of concrete used in monuments such as those
designed by Eisenman and Whiteread in Berlin and Vienna and the granite
monoliths often encountered in conventional memorials the world over.
Salcedo’s works are often fragile and always temporal and ephemeral.

For example in 2007 when eleven members of the State Parliament of Valle
in Columbia were assassinated by FARC guerillas Salcedo organized an Act of
Mourning in the central square in Bogotá filling the entire square with 24,000
candles in a perfect grid, and in 2002 she created a work Noviembre 6 y 7
which commemorates the events of that date in 1985 when a terrorist group
staged a siege in the Palace of Justice which resulted in the death of over
100 people, including 11 Supreme Court Judges. Salcedo created a temporal
work which took place in the same timeframe as the events it
commemorated, gradually lowering empty wooden chairs, one for each
person killed or missing, down the walls of the new Palace of Justice built to
replace the original building which was destroyed during the siege.

In her more recent work Salcedo has looked increasingly beyond her own
national boundaries whilst addressing one aspect of the problem faced by
artists working with the theme of the Holocaust which Soshana Felman has
identified as the need for art to 'de-aestheticize' itself. (Felman & Laub,
1991, p. 33) Salcedo transcends a number of the binaries which face
practitioners in the design and construction of memorials to unspeakable acts
of violence, which I have called the art of indirect witnessing. [2] According
to Ivonne Pini, Salcedo's work develops an ‘ethical conscience’ which
addresses both the past and the present, memory and experience, aesthetics
and politics, survivors and perpetrators: "(Her) art is a condensed
experience, one with profound historical meaning, in which the story of each
protagonist of an act of violence, mixes with those of other members of the
community”. (Pini 2008)

Salcedo quotes the German writer W.G.Sebald, who "poses a question about
how to form a language in which terrible experiences, experiences capable of
paralysing the power of articulation, could be expressed in art." (Salcedo
2007) It is no coincidence that Salcedo refers to Sebald, whose indirect
approach to memorializing the Holocaust in his novel Austerlitz is analogous
to the way many of us have learnt about it : through layers of narratives,
through witnessing either directly or indirectly, the testimonies of survivors.
Austerlitz is one of the most interesting literary works about the Holocaust
that I have come across, and it is not a historical novel, it doesn't use the
word Holocaust or mention the 'horror' of the concentration camp. Sebald
believed that the crimes of the Nazis should not be uttered directly. [3]

In making Neither in 2004 Doris Salcedo too had tried to find a way to
address concentration camps - both historical ones and their contemporary
versions. “Neither is an indeterminate space, located beyond my powers to
articulate, to understand and measure the political structure in which we live.
Neither is a piece about uncertainty and ambiguity." (Borchardt-Hume, 2007,
p. 109) Crucially, Salcedo says she wants to "disassociate her work from the
way art has represented torture. Mostly it has been represented as a
spectacle, as something we can watch. The implication is that it cannot be
stopped and the inactivity of the onlookers underscores this impotence."
(ibid)

Fig. 3 Doris Salcedo Shibboleth 2007 Photograph: Tate Modern

Copyright : Tate Modern 2007

Doris Salcedo was the eighth artist to be invited to make a work for the Tate
Modern's Turbine Hall. Such an immense challenge would be every artist's
dream and every artist's nightmare. How do you address this cavernous
space that is both beyond the gallery and outside of it? Whilst not exactly a
public space, it must be traversed by all those who enter and exit the
museum, and its scale is such that the work must be made especially for it -
each being commissioned by a large multinational, Unilever.

Doris Salcedo intervened in this space, choosing to subtract from it rather

than bringing something into it. She brought about a fissure in the very floor
of the museum itself, exposing its fundament and creating a new space into
which, in a wondrous sleight of hand, she inserted a link fence, a motif she
first appropriated in 2004 in Neither, a work dealing with the issue of
historical and contemporary concentration camps.

Shibboleth refers to the title of a book by Jacques Derrida about Paul Celan,
Auschwitz survivor and poet. According to the O.E.D. Shibboleth refers to a
word or sound which a person is unable to pronounce correctly; a word used
as a test for detecting foreigners, or persons from another district, by their
pronunciation. In the Old Testament the Ephramites' inability to pronounce
the word Shibboleth led to 42,000 deaths.

This radical act of intervention in the architecture of an art institution was a

work about difference, a work about an unbridgeable gap. This was a work
about an abyss into which you were in danger of falling, by which you could
be swallowed up. For Doris Salcedo : “Shibboleth is a negative space: it
addresses the w(hole) in history that marks the bottomless difference that
separates whites from non-whites. The w(hole) in history that I am referring
to is the history of racism, which runs parallel to the history of modernity,
and its untold dark side.” (Salcedo, 2007, p. 65)

Fig 4. In the Turbine Hall Tate Modern December 2008 Photographer :

Johannes Klabbers. Copyright: The Author.

It would be a grave error to suggest that what remained in the Turbine Hill in
when the exhibition had ended and the concrete had been poured in, was
Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth because one of its essential elements, the links of
the fence, had been rendered invisible. However what remained, what
remains, is a trace, a definite unmistakable and undeniable shadow which
shows where Shibboleth was, and reminds us of its referent. As Ivonne Pini
had predicted in her review of Shibboleth in ArtNexus: “The transgression of
cracking the floor open will leave a trace: however the floor is filled, there
will be a scar, which will function as a memorial.” (Pini 2008)

No doubt at some future time the institution will cause this broken ground to
appear like a single smooth field again, but for now we can trace Doris
Salcedo's intent with our hands and our eyes and wander along its path, all
the while wondering whether in fact the museum also left intact the reminder
of the concentration camps which Salcedo placed inside the fissure and just
filled the gap with concrete, or whether the links of the fence had been
painstakingly picked out one by one.

In any case there are not many contemporary art works which have
managed to impress themselves so deeply into the very structure of the
building which houses the museum that a visitor from far away who arrives
long after its exhibition ended and another has been installed, is still able to
perceive the effect of the work on it, and is thus provoked to contemplate the
issues it raises. In this way Salcedo's work manages to be unique in the
history of art, and as such it exists in a different kind of space, which public
art works do not usually occupy. In view of the issue/s she is addressing in
her work, in which she seeks to intervene, it is a space that is entirely
appropriate. It is a critical space - but one which demands reverence and
trust, because it allows us to listen to voices which had been silenced and
words which had not uttered. [4]

Perhaps one of the reasons why Salcedo’s works succeed where others fail so
spectacularly is that they do not seek to 'command' or to understand, the
issues and events they memorialize. Shibboleth does not refer to any specific
instances of catastrophe, and connects with the issues it references only
indirectly. Yet this lack of a directness is not experienced like an absence,
like the lack of names on the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. Neither is
Shibboleth monumental in the way that a conventional monument such as
the Berlin Holocaust Memorial asserts its presence, rather it references
monumentality in the extent of its intervention in the architecture of the
building that houses it. Salcedo’s work is necessarily complex, intellectually
and emotionally, and demands a great deal from audiences, but it is an art of
indirect witnessing which achieves its affect not by leaving us in awe of the
scale of the object and/or the genius of its creator, but by means of her
approach to memorializing the trauma suffered by others, which is
characterized by assuming responsibility towards the bereaved. (Borchardt-
Hume, 2007, p. 1)

We cannot bring back the millions who lost their lives. We can remember
them, there can be a refusal of forgetting, but we can not contain their lives,
or the enormity of the crimes that ended them, in a text, or embody them in
a monument or house them in an institution. But for Adorno art has the
advantage of being able to work with irrationality, to preserve rather than
efface the contradictions of history and politics (Statler & Buckner, 2005, p.
8) and in 1962 Adorno wrote "it is now virtually in art alone that suffering
can still find a voice, consolation, without being immediately betrayed by it.
(...) it is to works of art that has fallen the burden of wordlessly asserting
what is barred to politics." (Arato, 1982, p. 313) Such was Adorno's
disillusion with politics as long ago as 1962 and I can't help but wonder what
he would have made of it almost half a century later.

The ultimate inextinguishable question then which haunts those of us who

are engaged in works of intervention and remembering, 'postmemory' as
Marianne Hirsch calls it, is how to make and design public art works that can
recapture the memorialisation function of monumentality, as Salcedo is able
to do by virtue of the impermanent qualities of the materials utilized her.
(Bal, p. 55) As Simon Wiesenthal told the crowd gathered at the unveiling of
Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust Memorial: “This monument shouldn't be
beautiful. It must hurt." (The Guardian, 26 October 2000)

As I hope I have demonstrated, there are examples of public art works such
as those by Doris Salcedo that sustain what Adorno called “the project of
establishing humankind's autonomy in the world, even after that project has
proven inherently contradictory.” (Statler & Buckner, 2005, p. 8) and as such
perhaps public art can contribute to a radically different view of thinking
about history, to use Adorno’s words, as "an unconscious form of
historiography, the memory of what has been vanquished or repressed,
perhaps an anticipation of what is possible." (Adorno 1970/1998)

Notes
[1] "The aesthetic principle of stylization makes an unthinkable fate appear
to have had some meaning." (Adorno
1962)

[2] Here I acknowledge my debt to Andreas Huyssen, who in writing about

an earlier work by Salcedo, speaks in terms of "the art of the witness; the art
of the secondary witness to be precise, the witness to lives and life stories
forever scarred by the experience of violence.” (Basualdo, Princenthal, &
Huyssen, 2000, p. 96)

[3] Sebald : “The only way in which one can approach these things, in my
view is obliquely, tangentially, by reference rather than by direct
confrontation.” (Schwartz, 2007, p. 80)

[4] In the words of the Tate Modern Curator of Modern and Contemporary
Art Achim Borchardt-Hume: “(But) this critical space is one that allows voices
and thoughts to be heard that hitherto were silenced or remained unspoken.
It is a space that demands trust and commitment, and that allows for going
beyond the intention of the original speaker.” (Borchardt-Hume, 2007, p. 17)
Images

Fig 1

Fig 2

Fig 3
Fig 4
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