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Persistence of Memory
Art in America, June, 2000 by Norman L. Kleeblatt
By means of dramatic on-site projections of archival photographs and written documents, Shimon Attie calls attention to "buried histories" obscured by the passage of time.
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For more than two decades, the art of history painting has been rearing its head--a revival evident more often than not, however, in mediums other than painting. The photographic projections of Shimon Attie, recently the subject of a midcareer survey at the Boston ICA, fall squarely into this category. Attie is best known for his years-long exploration of the legacy of World War II and the Holocaust; the crux of the ICA exhibition was formed by photographs, video installations and light-box pieces documenting these projects. Like many other artists in the wake of Marcel Broodthaers, Attie is first and foremost an artist-anthropologist, a practitioner who digs into archives and then reconfigures his nonartistic source material into complicated art works. In doing so, he seeks to unearth a buried history for Jews in much the same way that Fred Wilson does for African-Americans. Moving through the show, visitors could also see Attie's increasing involvement in a process of self-discovery, as he uses images from the recent past to explore his own history--communal, political and personal.
Born and raised in Los Angeles--a "now" town, an urban center that is a historical to its core--Attie initially studied psychology, but his interest in art and photography propelled him to art school at San Francisco State University. Immediately after completing his MFA in 1991, he moved to Berlin, exchanging the light of sunny California for what he calls "the dark morbidity of Berlin." His obsession with the Holocaust since boyhood led him to a city that would wake him up, and he likens his self-imposed Wanderjahre to having "a bucket of cold water thrown at your face every morning."(1)
The early 1990s was a time of drastic change for this German metropolis, a period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the long-divided city was reinstated as the capital of a unified Germany. Especially in the former East Berlin, it was a city still filled with ruins. Attie also entered a country that was increasingly willing to confront its anguished history. In West Germany, art relating to Nazism, the events of World War II and the Holocaust had become part of a tradition passed down from Joseph Beuys to Anselm Kiefer.(2) When Attie arrived in Berlin, the conflicted reactions to Germany's Nazi past had become an increasingly important focus for contemporary art there, and was becoming part of the discourse of German museum exhibitions.(3) This tradition has continued nonstop in the art of Georg Baselitz, Jochen Gerz, Wolfgang Flatz, Rosemarie Trockel and Katharina Sieverding, among others.
German artists often proved willing to deal with their own country's sordid histories and mythologies. But Attie, an American Jew, was curious about the buried history of Germany's lost Jews. In particular, his focus was on the lives of ordinary citizens, not on emblematic figures such as Kiefer's Shulamith or the anonymous annihilation that is the concern of much Holocaust-related art. Thus, Attie's subject matter filled a void in German art. His first major project, titled "The Writing on the Wall" (1991-93), attracted much attention in Germany as well as in the U.S., France and Great Britain. In the first instance of what would become his modus operandi, he scoured archives for photographs of Berlin's Jewish past, and then, in actions lasting one or two nights, projected the images back onto the generic urban architecture in the neighborhoods where they had originated. The eerie streets of Berlin now served as Attie's studio. The confrontation between the physicality of the contemporary present and the immateriality of the projected photographic past forms the key element of Attie's collagelike practice.
"The Writing on the Wall" concentrated on images of Jewish life in Berlin's Scheuenenviertel, the old neighborhood where the city's immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe had lived from the late 19th century until World War II. In his essay in the book accompanying the exhibition, James E. Young, author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, eloquently observes that Attie uses projection to reanimate the memory of specific individuals and places that no longer exist, hoping that "once seen, these projections will always haunt these sites by haunting those who have seen his projections."(4) Domestic images become dramatic in these settings. One projection shows two Jewish urchins crouched on a stoop. The historical photograph of these two boys projected onto the doorway of an abandoned Berlin building calls attention to the harsh realities of today's cityscape. A construction scaffold sits next to the empty building, and next to it is a mound of dirt. Both the scaffold and the heap of fresh earth suggest new construction is in progress--an intimation that excavation and rebuilding will further bury Berlin's past. Through the projected black-and-white image--which becomes further removed and exaggerated in the color photograph that is both the documentation and the end product of Attie's site work--we are propelled into a dream state. Conjuring memory and history, the work evokes tragedy.
