Melancholic History: Memory, Loss and Visualization in the Works of Shimon Attie

Melancholic History: Memory, Loss and Visualization in the Works of Shimon Attie

Monica Turci

Shimon Attie’s work is concerned with the erasures of history within public space. In his installation pieces, Attie has explored how personal and collective

memory

embedded

within

public

spaces

bears

upon

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understanding of history, place, and identity. In these projects he gives visual form to both personal and collective memories by re-introducing traces of histories of marginalized and forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. In many respects Attie’s art might be broadly seen as a response to the issue of historical aphasia, to the fading of history and the oblivion of memory, and as such recalls Michel de Certeau’s famous description of historiography as

«treatment for absence».1 The relation between past and

present, most particularly of how the present is always involved in dealing with its unseen past – sometimes suppressing it and yet always indelibly marked by its traces – is a theme that defines all of Attie’s projects.2 These have dealt with issues of commemoration of catastrophic events such as the Holocaust, or the Aberfan disaster in Wales, in which a landslide of muddy coal waste demolished Pantglas Junior School (the only school in the region) and neighboring houses, 1

M. de Certeau, L'absent de l'histoire (1973); English translation The Writing of History, Columbia University Press, New York 1988, p. 54.

2 For a useful overview of Attie’s work see J. Young, At Memory’s Edge, Yale University Press, New Haven and London 2000, pp. 62-89 and his introduction to S. Attie, Sites Unseen, Verve Editions, Burlington Vermont 1998, pp. 10-17.

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killing over 144 people, including 116 children – virtually the entire child population of the village. More generally Attie’s projects are about issues of exile, displacement, dispossession and the histories of the diverse ethnic makeup in his native United States of America. In all his work there is a question of visibility to be addressed; the making visible of what is often marginalized or even erased from the contemporary consciousness, but which is nevertheless inherent in the histories of the public spaces that form the setting of Attie’s installations. A making visible also of the recognition of public space as a site of cultural investment, contestation, power and historical articulation; in short, as Attie has described his work, a «peeling back [of] the wallpaper of today to reveal the histories buried underneath»3. This palimpsestic approach to the visualization of history points to the montage or layering quality of Attie’s installations, in which ghostly traces of black and white images projected onto architectural surfaces create elisions of the borders of what is present and what is phantasmatic, what is actual and representational. The resulting works invite the viewer to observe spaces that through the artist’s intervention have become indeterminate, heterotopical and alterior 4. For the most part in Attie’s early career, this was achieved through the temporal juxtaposition of archival images or film footage from the past onto the pre-given contemporary landscape; here present and past do not so much confront each other as merge and bleed into each other in a complex convolution of being and non-being. These works were installed over a predefined duration to create arresting images of ephemerality, 3

Quoted in D. Desai, J. Hamlin and R. Mattson , History as Art, Art as History: Art and Social Studies Education, Routledge, New York and London 2010, p. 52.

4 On Foucault’s notion of the heterotopical see M. Foucault, Des espaces autres (1984); English translation Of Other Spaces, in «Diacritics», Spring 1986, 16 (1), pp. 22–27.

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which Attie then recorded either by photographing or filming. Thus the work itself exists in a multiplicity of forms: part event, part temporary installation and part enduring photographic record. These installations often draw the viewer into the historical experience of loss, or rather the dialectical relationship between historical presence and absence, mourning and recollection, destruction and redemption, memory and oblivion.

Attie, a Jewish American, was born in Los Angeles in 1957 but lived in Europe for seven years before settling in New York in 1997. This period of exile in Europe has been cited by the artist himself as formative to the development of his work. Particularly, the five years he spent living in Berlin – once the intellectual capital of Germany where the rich cultural and historical lineage of German Jewry had been almost entirely destroyed – were the founding moment for the course his art was to take. This historical oblivion and, more generally, the plight of the Jews under the Third Reich was the subject of much of his early work. His much discussed Trains: Dresden (1993) and The Writing on the Wall, Berlin, a project completed over the period of two years between 1991-1993 in the Scheunenviertel district probed the occluded histories of sites associated with the persecution of German Jews by the Nazi regime. In the Berlin project, Attie used archival photographs of the Berlin’s old Jewish community and projected these images onto the ethnically cleansed neighborhood streets of Alexanderplatz in east Berlin, and the façades of houses and shops where the Ost-Juden had once lived before their property was confiscated and appropriated by supposedly ‘racially pure’ German citizens 5. In Trains: Dresden, he projected

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On the Scheunenviertel works, see P. Muir, Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall.

History, Memory, Aesthetics, Ashgate, London 2010 and M. A. Bernstein and E. 3

archival photographs of victims of the Holocaust onto the trains and architecture of Dresden train station (the rafters of the station, walls, tracks and the side and roofs of the trains), from which many Jews began their long journey into exile or to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps.

In his very illuminating study Peter Muir’s discusses Attie’s work through Walter Benjamin’s texts Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) and Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On The Concept of History)6 drawing attention on its redemptive, melancholic and transpositional aspect. With its placing history’s catastrophe (Benjamin’s history as ruin) under the sign of art’s lyricism and in terms of the secular resurrectional qualities of photography – whose poignant record snatches images of the past out of time and creates an archive that preserves the historical image of the objects and simultaneously makes them into memento mori, melancholic sites of loss, decay and death – Attie’s art constructs installations that create a dialectic between the recovery of the past and the recognition of its loss, problematizing our understanding of history and the knowledge that it produces 7.

Leiser, The Writing on the Wall - Projections in Berlin’s Jewish Quarter: Shimon Attie – Photographs and Installations, Edition Braus, Heidelberg 1994. See also E. Barrish, Shimon Attie’s The Writing on the Wall, MA diss., Hunter College CUNY 2006 and M. J. Bushnik, Between Memory and History: Shimon Attie’s Art of Remembrance, MA diss., University of Illinois 2010, pp. 8-38.

6 W. Benjamin, Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (1928); English translation The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Verso, London and New York 1998; W. Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940); English translation On the Concept of History, in H. Arendt (ed), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Fontana, London 1973. See also Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (1931); English translation A Small History of Photography, in M. W. Jennings et al. (eds), Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Belknap Press, Cambridge MA. 2000.

7 Muir also raises the question of post-memory in relation to Attie’s Scheunenviertel works. On this see P. Muir, Shimon Attie’s The Writing on the Wall , cit., pp. 37-54; D. Apel, Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2002, p. 57; M. 4

For Muir, Attie’s work is profoundly allegorical in the sense accorded it by Walter Benjamin of a reading whose meaning is other than what is immediately present and marked by «an accumulation and idea of endless extension», by the act of doubling and reading of one text through another, by «remembrance, memory, post-memory, the palimpsests of time and place» 8. Thus, Muir writes, allegory is the means through which a certain transfiguration and redemption of the ruins of the historical past is enacted: Such works as Attie’s tend towards the undoing of stable images; they proceed to disassemble the evidence of the world […] In effect, this is a process of simultaneous erosion and accumulation, of sedimentation, of piling up, of the endless extension of history, materials and meanings, an intensification of apparently stable continuities and provides an open space for materialist, secular interpretation and eventual transfiguration: the production of the space of redemption 9.

It is through the irreducible and negational qualities of its form – its nonidentity in Adorno’s terms – rather than merely its literal subject matter, that Attie’s work produces such an effect, expressing through the allegorical function of its form «the fluid social and political forces that inevitably bring death, destruction, vilification, and the betrayal and loss of hope (the perspective of [Benjamin’s] Angelus Novus). Thus like the Trauerspiel, [Attie’s] work is a form of mourning for all the human victims of rationalization, exploitation,

Hirsch, Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory, in «The Yale Journal of Criticism», Spring 2001, 14(1), pp. 5-38 and M. A. Friedman, Haunted by Memory: American Jewish Transformations, in S. Hornstein, L. Levitt and L. J. Silberstein (eds), Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the Holocaust, New York University Press, New York 2003.

8 P. Muir, Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall, cit., p. 145.

9 Ivi, pp. 145-146.

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objectification and regimentation»10. Thus, in placing such tragic events under the sign of art’s lyricism, Attie’s work «might provide some degree of atonement for lost time, for the violence done to history, memory nature and humanity»11.

Yet, as this atonement is not something that can act to bring closure to history’s violence, mourning tends to align itself to a persistent melancholy.

In this respect Attie’s projections in the Scheunenviertel, drawing on the archive to recover images of the old Jewish way of life, re-insert that lost world into the visual field of the present from which they had been occluded. In this way they bring to light knowledge of catastrophe both unforeseen at the time when the images were taken, and, subsequently, in the passing of time, forgotten 12.

Attie’s use of photographic light projections acted as potent imaginary

revisitations of history’s revenants, uncovering the city’s repressed historical unconscious. These projected photographs recovered from the archive’s folds of time expose an optical unconsciousness. In projecting these untimely images of the past onto the present, Attie initialized a new temporal and historical configuration in which narratives hitherto unrealized (un-thought) can be drawn together into a palimpsest, producing «meaning(s) unimaginable at the time of

10

Ivi, p. 145.

Ivi, p. 146.

12 On Attie’s uses of archival photographs, see M. J. Bushnik, Between Memory and History, cit., pp. 12-13. In relation to the broader questions about the theory and practice of the use of archival material and the issues about history it raises, see J. Derrida, Mal d'Archive: Une Impression Freudienne (1995); English translation Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago Ill 1998; A. Sekula, The Body and the Archive, in «October», Winter 1996, 39, pp. 364; G. Agamben Quel che resta di Auschwitz: L'archivio e il testimone; English translation Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books, New York 2002; A. Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Duke University Press, Durham N.C. 2006.

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its writing» 13. This melancholic issue of history and art’s role has remained – albeit with different degrees of emphasis – central to Attie’s art despite the considerable differences in the kinds of work he has produced and commissions he has undertaken.

In the remainder of this paper I want to focus on three projects by Attie – one closely related to the Scheunenviertel projections and two later ones that show him working in different media – in order to show how his work’s treatment of historical trauma and memory has evolved as he has taken on the challenges different kinds of public work commission have posed. Firstly, his Portraits of Exile, Copenhagen, an installation that took place over the course of June–July 1995 commissioned by the Danish government as part of the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Copenhagen from the Nazis, which again dealt with the theme of displacement and Jewish history during the Second World War. Secondly, Between Dreams and History (Spring 1998) that explored the realities and mythologies of American immigration in the ethnically diverse area of New York’s Lower East Side, a work two years in the making that involved researching the sites and communal history of the area. This project was undertaken in partnership with Creative Time, an organization working with contemporary public art projects and in conjunction with the city’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum. Lastly, The Attraction of Onlookers: Aberfan - an Anatomy of a Welsh Village (2006) was commissioned to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the tragic events at Aberfan. While demonstrating core formal and thematic continuities that focus on the question of giving contemporary visual form to themes of memory, historical events and the experience of migration, I 13

P. Muir, Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall, cit., p. 148.

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will argue that these works show subtle but distinctive lines of development about how to visualize micro, marginalized and erased histories in a way that brings together the relationship between personal and collective memory through a process of understanding history that involves intervening into public spaces and creating a dialogue with communities.

The Writing on the Wall and Trains, Dresden had been critical interventions into public spaces inflected by the new German historicism of the holocaust that had sought to address the limits placed on the full account of those events in the immediate post-Second World War era, and specifically to resurrect, if only temporarily through photographic representational means, what had been ethnically cleansed of those cities. The subject matter of Portraits of Exile and Between Dreams and History were, by contrast, in their simplest sense commemorative, ceremonial and celebratory, posing a different – if related – set of questions about the representation of forgotten events, the gaps between history and memory, the diasporic and the micro-histories of peoples and places.

Portraits of Exile commemorated the extraordinary and heroic rescue of almost the entire Danish Jewish population, by sending them into exile across the waters to Sweden and thereby out of the clutches of Nazi hands. This temporary installation was sited in the Borsgraven canal at the sea port of Copenhagen, using a submerged row of nine light boxes 1.8 metres by 1.5 metres positioned 9.1 metres apart and 0.9 metres below the surface that projected backlit transparencies of photographic images of Jewish exiles onto the surface of the water. As with The Writing on the Wall, for this project Attie sought out archival photographic material. With the exception of one light box situated in the middle of the sequence, each photographic image was either of a Danish Jew rescued

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from the dangers posed by the imminent Nazi invasion, or of a contemporary refugee living in Denmark. Each image was superimposed with a different sign of exile, such as a sea map, a Jewish star, a fishing boat and a commercial freighter.

The exception to this was a single light box that comprised solely of an image of a sea map charting the waters between Denmark and Sweden. The image on water alluded specifically to the transportation of Danish Jews to safety in neighbouring Sweden 14.

The impression of the work had much to do with the way Attie’s choice of the place resonated in relation to, on the one hand, specific, national and historical events and, on the other, broader, timeless and more universal issues and meanings. The sea is deeply embedded in Denmark’s memorial culture and the sea port has been an integral part of its historical and cultural consciousness.

The ancient sea port has also been an emblematic and enduring symbol of this country’s economic prosperity and historical identity and integral to the status of Copenhagen as the country’s capital. The sea itself is a poignant metaphor of longing, memory, birth, hope, love and endurance, but also displacement, destruction and loss. In the west, since antiquity, the perpetual motion of the sea waters has always been indelibly associated with temporality, desire and becoming, a metaphor for the vital forces of life, but also of death. As the location for the work, water conveys the ephemerality of the past, of time flowing relentlessly on, and of its continual fluctuations. Ethereal, ghostly, unstable, continually shifting in the fluctuating patterns of light and the play of water on the surface, the luminous photographs of exiles and their symbols acquire a hauntingly mysterious quality, as random fragments of images of exiles past and 14

See J. Young, At Memory’s Edge, cit., p. 26.

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present that seem to emerge from the very depths of the sea itself. The slow rippling of the waves billowed the illuminated photographic images of the light boxes as though they were emitting breath. This subterranean quality of the work deepens its metaphorical suggestions, presenting an image of history itself as submerged, but always potentially breaking through into the present. The image of the floating photographic portraits with their cryptic signs staring back at the viewer implies both history facing the present from the depths of the past and the displacements of the present.

As in previous cases, Attie sought to make his intervention into the space the work was situated in one that would involve almost seamless fit of form and content to the surroundings, while creating an alienation effect of the uncanny and dislocation. The effect of coming upon the work for the first time would be one of the familiar made strange and the strange made familiar, as the viewer apprehended the oblique and only partially visible images and signs of the light boxes, which only gradually yielded meaning and intelligibility through a process of arrested attention, reflection and questioning. Deferral of meaning, uncertainty and unanticipation have, as aforementioned, been hallmarks of the style of Attie’s work and an integral part of how he has sought to arrest the viewer’s attention and to resist his work’s immediate consumption – the obliqueness of the work demanding extended reflective engagement.

Contemporary artists intervening into public spaces have of course had to think through their response to a public sphere increasingly dominated by consumerism. The large billboards and advertisements of branded corporations and multinationals function in a not dissimilar way to old monuments in erasing difference, cultivating bland consensus, disseminating lifestyle ideologies and

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presenting commodities as providing instant gratification. The slow unfolding of Attie’s work, its ethereality and cryptic quality seem designed to contest that mode of immediacy. The impression of uncannyness this produces is likely to gradually give way to a recognition of the tension between the work’s potent force for generating metaphorical suggestions and the materiality of the faces that unflinchingly stare back out of the water, making the viewer as much the object of the gaze as the subject in possession of the gaze. But to come to terms with the problematic of Attie’s commemorative work, we also need to understand the context of debates about public art this work emerged out of.

Portraits of Exile, like The Writing on the Wall and Trains reflected a critical historical turn in contemporary art, demonstrating both a re-invigoration of site specific art and a conception of commemorative and memorial art projects, to which Attie’s art has made a significant contribution. In part this reflects a broader shift within the direction of contemporary art, its modes of engagement with historical discourses and dialogue with the public. Attie has worked in an era when modernist notions of aesthetic autonomy, the marginalisation and commodification of art have been the focus of critical attention. The emerging tradition Attie’s works has arisen out of is one that from the late 1960s has seen many artists moving away from the production of art that could be easily assimilated within an ever enlarging global market as commodities, and expressed a desire to work outside the confines of the traditional institutional spaces in which art is customarily shown, such as the gallery and the museum, in order to reach out to audiences who felt excluded from such sites. This critique of the consumption, isolation and fetishisation of art within the contexts of the gallery and museum led to the reinvigoration of

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public art that had previously been widely seen as moribund. Land art and Conceptualism – in particular those forms of Conceptualism associated with installation – have encouraged artists to produce work in public spaces. In the era of modernism, land art had become a marginalized area of artistic production primarily associated with older forms of monumental and memorial art that had been discredited as authoritarian; the latter were seen as an emanation of the vested interests of political administrations imposing on public space the face of political power. Traditional memorials had generally celebrated the aspirations, heroism and triumphs of the nation State over those of other cultures. The typical form of the monument – symbolic, elevated, larger than life, soaring upward – embodies this transcendence. The inadequacy of the language of public monuments in commemorating tragic events such as the holocaust, or in dealing with the histories of ethnic minorities and marginalized communities has led contemporary artists to seek new forms of commemorative art and alternative contexts for, and ways of addressing the public. Thus artists attempting to work against the grain of traditional commemorative art and the forms of history that provide its underpinning have had to produce works that counter such traditions both formally and conceptually.

This reinvigoration of public art and the critical consciousness that spurred it has gone hand in hand with a more discursive, agitational and also confrontational approach by artists intervening in public spaces, a wish to avoid both the invisibility of traditional public art and the often ‘hermetic’ and ‘private’ quality of modernist variants of it, which often seem simply displaced or re-sited from the gallery to the street. In contrast to the civic role of earlier public art in achieving consensus and consolidating shared values, a more recent one has

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taken as one of its abiding themes its role as a mediation point, creating ambivalent, sceptical even strongly conflictual relationships with dominant value systems. This art has become increasingly engaged with public spaces as sites of differential histories, intervening into spaces to give expression not to uniform values, but difference – most notably ethnic, class, gender and sexual difference.

It has explicitly rejected the hierarchical authority of traditional art with its heroic rhetoric of the traditional monument, but also the aesthetic autonomy of modernism, using new media and radical formal strategies to establish the basis of new modes of intercession within public spaces and of representation that allow for dialogue and interface with the public, sometimes with unpredictable and abrasive results. For example, the ghostly projections of The Writing on the Wall drew angry and perplexed responses from some residents of the buildings the photographs of the Ost-Juden were projected on.

As this suggests, the contestation of history in Attie’s work has involved not simply the projection of photographic fragments of the past onto the present to create complexly stratified temporal traces that resist history’s aphasia, but also an examination of the way public art critically interfaces with its audience and historical myth. In other words, this form of art not only addresses the issue of historical oblivion or forgetting, but also the reification of the past into abiding political myths. The Neighbor Next Door, a work Attie made during December 1996 as part of The Sites Unseen series involved the projection of filmic footage of Nazi parades onto the pavement of Prinsengracht, a canal street in Amsterdam, from discrete apertures of the windows of three houses where Jews were hidden.

In this way it recreated for the viewer something of the fearful scenes of the Nazi presence Jews had daily witnessed clandestinely from their windows. The

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houses chosen included the one where Anne Frank lived in hiding during the occupation. Frank herself has become a symbol of Dutch resistance and the protection of indigenous Jews. Yet, Frank was both protected but ultimately betrayed by Dutch citizens and Attie’s work serves to bring both facts to light and to re-surface a less mythical and more ambivalent history in which Denmark was caught in a web of neutrality, resistance and collaboration. Beyond this Attie intended Portraits of Exile to connect to broader contemporary issue of both legal and illegal immigration, an increasingly sensitive political topic in the Netherlands, most particularly in relation to the estimated one hundred thousand immigrants illegally living in the country. Midway in the row of images of exiles Attie placed the portraits of two Bosnian Moslem refugees, a turbaned man and a woman overlaid with the image of the Flotel Europa, anchored in an adjacent canal 1.6 kilometres away, a floating hotel ship then harbouring refugees awaiting decisions about their appeal for political asylum. These were followed by portraits of a Yugoslavian man and woman, overlaid with a sea map and passport entry stamp respectively. This inclusion of more contemporary reminders of refugee migration endowed the work with a more critical and ambivalent set of meanings, combining genuine commemoration of Denmark’s history with another more ‘untimely meditation’ on the muddied waters of the fraught subject of how Europe handles its present day refugee crises, and, in particular, of the double standards of its attitude to Bosnian immigrants.

Attie grouped his early work between 1991-96 as a series entitled, Sites Unseen, implying therefore they constituted a coherent and defined corpus.

Despite the continuing concerns with memory, history and space, his later work shows important differences. Some of these differences are technical, reflecting

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changing methods and processes of working. Despite its often simple appearance, the increasing technological complexity and intermedial nature of Attie work required collaborations with groups of assistants and this perhaps encouraged him to experiment in a more collaborative fashion. Attie’s later projects also show the influence of some of the German artists working in the public arena and whose work Attie would have encountered in Germany, particularly that of Jochen Gerz. Gerz has developed sophisticated ways of engaging the public in the process of conceptualizing and realizing his public commissions, often involving local communities in discussions about the form and underlying ethical, aesthetic and historical issues that a particular commission posed. The participatory aesthetics of Gerz proved highly influential in the 1990s in shaping a more creative and participatory dialogue between artists and the communities living in the vicinity of his public works as well as in the adoption of a critical approach to monuments and memorials, resulting in what James Young has called «counter monuments»15. Gerz’s own Denkmals often incorporated answers in response to questions posed to residents and participants involved in the projects undertaken into the form of the work made for them 16.

While continuing the critical intervention and historical themes of earlier work, Between Dreams and History, set in New York’s Lower East Side and completed over a two-year period between 1996-1998, shows subtle and evolving changes. From the 1820’s, the Lower East Side has became a portal for 15

Ivi, p. 12.

J. Kear, ‘Spectres of the Past, Inhabitations of the Present’: Jochen Gerz’s and the problem of Commemoration, in V. Fortunati and E. Lamberti (eds), Memories and Representations of War: The Case of World War I and World War II, Rodopi, Amsterdam 2009, pp. 33-49.

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immigration into America that has attracted a diverse ethnic mix of Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Hispanic, Asian, Latino and as such has been a symbol of the complex ethnic make-up of America itself, reflecting the co-existence, cooperation, but also racial tensions present in the United States. For this project, commissioned by Creative Time, Attie attempted to provide a visual record of the area’s diverse ethnic mix drawing on memories, childhood songs, nursery rhymes, poems, dreams, hopes and wishes of the local residents. While in earlier works Attie had used documentary photographs that in his installations became factual documents and at the same time a surviving pieces of the past resurrected in the present, for this project for the first time Attie mainly used text, exploring both the content and formal graphic possibilities of written materials. The Writing on the Wall had by its title and by the inclusion of found graffiti on the sites he chose for his projections, already implied Attie’s interest in the relation between the visual and the textual. Attie went to some lengths to ensure that the graffiti were clearly visible in the photographs he made as a record of the projections. Indeed, as Young has pointed out, Attie’s initial works ultimately derive from the ancient and enduring tradition of Jewish commemorative writing – the Yizkor Bikher (memorial books) – that constituted the first memorials of the Holocaust 17. More significantly, Between Dreams and History displayed a shift in Attie’s way of conceptualising his installations, involving a more inclusive and open approach than his earlier pieces, one which involved the input of the community for which the work was made, rather than an autonomous work presented to, or simply imposed on those communities.

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See J. Young, At Memory’s Edge, cit., p. 140 and P. Muir, Shimon Attie’s Writing on the Wall, cit., pp. 144-145.

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After an extensive period of researching of the architecture, layout and historical development of the area, Attie asked approximately 75 residents, mainly (though not exclusively) older residents of different ethnic backgrounds to provide him with their memories of the neighborhood, their relations with other immigrant groups, their childhood memories, hopes, aspirations and even disappointments.

He then had them handwrite their replies in their native language. Fragments of the respondents’ texts in both the original language and in translation, accompanied by select personal information of the respondent, were then projected with neon lasers onto façades of buildings and streets, each fragment mimetically reproducing the personal style of the particular respondent’s handwriting. In a lecture at Syracuse University, Attie spoke of how the neon lit sentences, rippling across several buildings were intended to imitate how memory functions, emanating like a «ghostly writing out of thin air» that was neither static, nor fixed nor complete, as if, to use another linguistic metaphor, speech was ushering from the very façades of the Manhattan residents’ buildings» 18.

As in many of Gerz’s commissions, Between Dreams and History involved an educational programme of discussions, talks and supplementary interactive projects working with the community on themes picked up in the work. Attie has subsequently described this work in the following terms.

From their dreams and histories has emerged a communal poetry in which neighborhood residents serve as their own witnesses. I chose to project the texts directly onto the architecture to reanimate buildings with the written recollections. I wanted the lasers to write out texts in real time, letter by letter, mirroring how memories ebb and flow.

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S. Attie, Sites Unseen (lecture presented at Syracuse University, February 7, 2012).

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It is my hope that this ghostly nighttime writing--whether in English, Spanish, Chinese, Yiddish, or Hebrew--can help to soften the divisions between us by tapping into our collective imagination during a few short autumn weeks 19.

Such aspirations reflect Attie’s evolving attitudes to the form in which an artist can intervene into public space in a more interactive fashion and point to an approach to making work that reflect personal, subjective and even private experience in the public domain. While Between Dreams and History extended Attie’s interest in heterotopical spaces – in this instance to spaces where the relation between private and public are conjoined – it also showed him moving away from the kinds of larger more impersonal historical narratives and tragic events that had preoccupied him to date. Between Dreams and History addressed more discrete, particularised, quotidian histories associated with migration and spatial displacement in the context of European and American history. It therefore marked a change in the historical materials Attie worked with, incorporating more explicitly than before elements of subjective, personal experience, imagination, childhood recollections and dreams that revealed a more expanded form of social historical approach in this work. Here Attie no longer commemorated the past as an object of loss, but rather the fragility of the living memory of migrants. Moreover, if earlier projects had made use of existing archives to create dialectical mediations of time, Between Dreams and History created its own archive, a fragmentary, heterogeneous and decentred one.

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S. Attie, statement for Between Dreams and History, http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/1998/BetweenDreams/between/art ist_stuff.html, accessed January 30, 2016.

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The Manhattan commission consolidated a growing recognition for Attie of the possibilities of working in conjunction with institutional and museological contexts and communities. The inclusion of the public in the creation of Between Dreams and History was to inform his later commissions, most notably in conceptualising the problems of creating work that would commemorate the Aberfan disaster. This project was to prove an important departure in Attie’s work initiating a series of multichannel intermedial immersive installations projecting high definition images onto large screens; in this case a five channel immersive installation with screens measuring 9 feet long by 16 feet wide and measuring 85 feet long in total. Projected onto those screens were a series of images of contemporary Aberfan residents, who appeared in rows of single or multiple figures in various permutations of scale and distribution 20. Each of the approximately forty villagers was shown holding a ‘statuary’ pose on an unseen revolving platform set against a stark pinpoint lit black ground, thus abandoning the important role a given architectural environment had played in the conception of Attie’s previous projects. In this work, installed at the National Gallery in Cardiff, void replaced architectural edifice and the artificial theatre of the immersive space with its dramatic lighting replaced the dialectical character of Attie’s intervention into pre-given, everyday public spaces. This work also marked Attie’s experimentation in adding sound to his installations: a minimal piano soundtrack specially commissioned for the project accompanied the revolving figures. The result was a far more theatrical piece than his work to date.

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C. Townsend, Art and Death, I.B. Taurus, London and New York 2008, pp. 105117.

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Attie’s previous work, as Muir has remarked, had largely been redemptive, making use of the indexical nature of historical photographic archives to produce an effect of returning history’s repressed contents to consciousness resisting the destructive force of historical oblivion through the photographs attestation of that which once existed. The illuminated photographic fragment or archival film footage was used to make visible what was in history but became invisible in the present, whether through the layered projection of flat black and white photographic materials onto a contemporary actual architecture, or through the projection of film footage onto the street.

These dialectical effects, of flat black and white images on colourful three dimensional features of the landscape, or of the illusory surface movement of the image had been key to the effect of what Attie has called the ‘reanimation’ of the photographic image of the past. That is to say that the image presented not merely as a representation of the past, but a shard of time that had momentarily given back in the present. It was also through these means that Attie achieved a productive tension within his work. This ‘restitution’ in its visible artifice simultaneously pointed to the ruptures between the image and the present, even as it temporarily sutured the two together. The photographic trace of the vestiges of the past as encoded in the photograph (or photogram) always remained a ghostly presence, a revenant, but a visible presence nevertheless, one whose revisitation of the past was disruptive of the imagined unity of the temporality of the present, revealing, that is to say, the hidden histories as immanent within the contemporary.

Yet, in The Attraction of Onlookers, the historical events that the work commemorates are paradoxically signified through their total absence,

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remaining entirely uncommented on, and literally invisible, unrepresented in the work itself. The focus instead is on the presence of the contemporary villagers.

As with Between Dreams and History, Attie took a more collaborative approach to the project, moving to Aberfan for three months in order to experience the village and be able to informally enter into discussions with local residents before deciding what form his work would take. Previously Attie’s projects had a broadly documentary character, making extensive use of archives; The Attraction of Onlookers expressly rejected this approach, opposing any literal or overt reference to the disaster. Attie sought to turn attention away from the Aberfan tragedy by focusing on the feelings of the villagers of being trapped inside the narrative of those events of forty years earlier. The intrusiveness of the media in the immediate aftermath of those events, the loss of privacy during a period of grief, combined with the way subsequently Aberfan came to be defined by the disaster that beset it, constituted, as Attie has referred to it, a double trauma: the trauma of the actual deaths of the children and adults and the trauma of never being able to move beyond the perception of being known by the world’s press as the village that lost a generation of its children, forever historically fixed in the world’s gaze by its tragic past.

Attie has described his project in the following terms: My aim was to create a body of images that competes with and upends the historical archive of existing imagery and that complicates the conversation about a place such as Aberfan […] I wanted the piece to confound our expectations and projections onto what it means to be a “victim” or a “survivor,” and to resist easy interpretation and sentimentality 21.

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Shimon Attie, The Traffic Warden, in «Art Daily», http://artdaily.com/news/27606/The-Attraction-of-Onlookers--Aberfan---anAnatomy-of-a-Welsh-Village#, accessed January 30, 2016.

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And later added: What I tried to do was to create an artwork that would show the village in a way that it’s never been seen before, because they’re sick and tired of only being connected to the disaster […] I took as my working method ‘what does it take to make a welsh village? What’s iconic for every welsh village?’ And in fact it’s the personages of those villages. Every welsh village has a boxer, a fish and chip man, an ex coal miner and so on 22.

Attie’s aim was to give Aberfan the right to «its place among the cultural tropes of other Welsh villages»23. These tropes predominantly focused on figures identifiable by their labour or occupation, such as the house painter, the bartender, the immigrant shop keeper, the traffic warden, the waitress etc., but also included an array of other figures defined by aspiration, leisure or activity, such as the dancer or the singer, or by social institution, such as the family or the mayor. In one exclusive moment, the stillness of the tableaux is broken by the light of a flashbulb as one of the children in the family grouping presses the button on the camera around his neck. The poses each of the figures held were intended to convey the essence of their social and cultural role in the community. The effect of seeing these figures frozen but in motion, lit in a chiaroscuro reminiscent of Seventeenth century Baroque painting, is a curiously hybrid one, combining the pathos, drama and gravitas of high art portraiture and tableaux vivant, with a lower key, more sociological scrutiny of the quotidian. One might question Attie’s success in representing the villagers in a way they had never been represented before; it is surely paradoxical to claim that treating the villagers by their iconicity could achieve more than exchanging one kind of historical reification for another. That is to say treating them as 22

B. Miller, Shimon Attie's Portraits Of Aberfan At National Museum Cardiff, in «Culture 24», December 5 2008, http://www.culture24.org.uk/art/art62868, accessed January 30, 2016 23 Ibid.

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icons has the consequence of denying them their lived particularity, locking the villagers back into the narrow framework of cultural and national stereotypes.

Nevertheless, Attie’s broader intention was to shift the perception of the village from its past to its present. Though literally unrepresented, the trauma of Aberfan permeates the work, evoked through the way the metaphorical form of the installation evokes reflection on the dialectical opposition of presence and void, movement and fixity, illumination and darkness.

For Freud, trauma, marked by the subject’s unpreparedness for the traumatic event, is both characterised by the impossibility of the subject in giving coherent narrative expression to those events and by a compulsion to repeat or re-enact the trauma, often in veiled form. Both factors seem germane to this work; the continual fade outs of the screens images of the Aberfan villagers into blackness and their repetition and re-enactment, the contrast between the frozen form of the statuesque poses of the villagers and the repetitive motion of the invisible platforms on which they are poised, the impression of vulnerable exposure of the figures in the highly illuminated ‘fishbowl’ effect of the installation, all play a role in conveying an ambience in which the absent, the unsaid, the unrepresented trauma and its repetitions preside over the work. As Attie has remarked: «I was trying to reflect a moving stillness – they’re holding still but they’re moving, which is part of what trauma does […] We freeze but the forces of life keep moving » 24.

The paradoxical nature of The Attraction of Onlookers lies in the way its aim of freeing Aberfan from its historical reification as a result of the tragic events of 1966 ends up precisely dramatizing the inability for this village to 24

Ibid.

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move beyond its trauma. The conscious appearance of The Attraction of Onlookers focused on the contemporary present conceals within itself the unconscious trauma of the past that lies invisible beneath the surface of the work and demands repetition and re-enactment. Representation of the present becomes the furtive conduit of the articulation of an inescapable, if invisible, past.

In this respect, though the Aberfan project marks a significant departure in Attie’s thinking about how his work engages with visualising historical memory, it also shares much in common with his earlier work on the theme of the immanence of the past, memory’s revenants and the melancholy of historical knowledge. The imagery of the multi-channel installation of Aberfan retains something of the allegorical quality of the Scheunenviertel projections in its accumulation and piling up of bodies that resists narrativization and whose singularity and repetition seems only intelligible when read in relation to something absent from the scene presented. As Attie has undertaken commemorative commissions that have led him away from the mourning, melancholy and memorialisation found in his earlier work, or sought to ameliorate these qualities, as in the Aberfan project, these have continued to reassert themselves like stubborn revenants from the past. This is true for the way memory is dematerialized, fragmented and ephemeral in its conception in Between Dreams and History, and it is true also for the way the redemptive aspirations of The Attraction of Onlookers seems blocked by the way the villagers are locked into the dark theatre of trauma in which they interminably revolve.

The force of these works seems ultimately to derive from the deeper impulses that informed Attie’s earliest work in Berlin. Melancholy, memory, death and

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destruction continue to persist as inescapable traces despite the very different kinds of commission, media, intentions and methods Attie has worked with.

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