Sociology Assignment: Week 15 Art Museums
Readings:
- Ernst van Alphen (“Deadly Historians: Boltanski’s Intervention in Holocaust Historiography,” 45-73)
- Lisa Saltzman (“Lost in Translation: Clement Greenberg, Anselm Kiefer,” and the Subject of History,” 74-88)
- James E. Young (“Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin,” 179-97) in Visual Culture and the Holocaust
Art in all modes of expression (paintings, music, dance, public monuments and architecture, photography, film, and so on) have been responding to the Holocaust and its events since the Nazis came to power in 1933 and continue to the present. All of these genres have been controversial for all of the reasons we have seen with memoirs, fiction, poetry, documentaries and films that use fiction, or graphic memoirs.
Answer the following questions below in 1 to 2 paragraph answers:
- Ernst van Alphen’s essay on the artist Christian Boltanski describes the “Holocaust-effect” of images, objects, archives, and words that evoke the Holocaust while reversing the norms of representation. In Boltanski’s work play on the viewer’s knowledge or memories of other Holocaust representation or actual history. Here the photographs do not show presence but absence, the class pictures of the artist and his classmates are taken to be photographs or Holocaust victims, the shelves or labelled cartons or the secondhand clothing are given different emotional power because they resemble familiar Holocaust documents or scenes. Select one or two ideas or photographs of Boltanski’s work. What do you think of his art and experiment, as an informed viewer?
- You read a selection of Paul Celan’s poetry a few weeks ago in Art from the Ashes. Lisa Saltzman’s essay focuses on different sorts of translation of his most anthologized and translated poem, “Death Fugue.” This is provided in full in the essay (75-76). She recounts the delay between the writing and the publication in the original German and then in the first English translation (1955). It was translated by someone who was the leading art critic writing about abstract expressionism (described in the opening paragraph). She recounts the context of the 1950s and Holocaust consciousness in America with such works as Anne Frank’s Diary. Then the influence of Celan’s poem returns to Germany in the 1980s during its own beginning of second-generation Holocaust consciousness. This is displayed by the paintings of Anselm Kiefer; he made dozens of large paintings based on Celan’s work, translating his poetry into thick, dark paintings with layers of materials such as straw, oil, tar, wood, barbed wire, and ashes. What is your response to these works starting with Celan’s poem and the translations across generations and arts? Sociology Assignment: Week 15 Art Museums
- We have frequently discussed the controversies involved with Holocaust monuments and museums, and the ways different countries have preserved or hidden sites such as death camps (Auschwitz, Warsaw Ghetto, etc.). James E. Young’s essay describes one of the most controversial and largest Holocaust museums and memorial projects of all, in Berlin, the former Nazi capital. The museum finally opened in 2001 (a year after Young’s essay was first published). What stands out for the most after you read the long history to build a Jewish museum in Berlin, the many changes because of time and politics, and the psychoanalytic notions of the “uncanny” (180), or that the design is based on broken lines, voids, and fragments? [You may be interested in viewing photographs of the museum online (the museum has now spread under the sidewalks and in the grounds for a block or more around the large building.]
