Call for papers for proposed session:
Association for Jewish Studies Conference

Dec. 18-20, 2005, Washington, D.C.

Centrifugal Forces: Problems and Issues in Holocaust Art

This session will examine the cultural, religious, intellectual, and ethical
anxieties which surround both the creation and reception of visual
representations of the Shoah in fine art, whether in painting, sculpture,
print, multimedia installation, artist's books, performance, comix, film,
and/or photography.

Echoing the Second Commandment prohibition on graven images, many scholars,
including T. W. Adorno, Saul Friedlander, Geoffrey Hartmann, Claude
Lanzmann, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others have described the
Holocaust as a singular Event, a complete historical, intellectual and
theological rupture with the past, including past modes of depiction. Does
the Holocaust possess an almost sacred ineffability which deflects any
representation of it? Lanzmann famously claimed: "The holocaust is unique
in that, with a circle of fire, it builds a border around itself, which one
cannot transgress, because a certain absolute kind of horror cannot be
conveyed." Conversely, other scholars such as Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi have
sought to combat the inward-turning motion of what she terms a "centripetal
imagination" of the Holocaust with a "centrifugal narrative" which "provides
an infinity of mobile points of departure and access." Ezrahi's Barthian
language proves particularly apt to describe art which seeks to
record/depict aspects of the Holocaust for different purposes and for
different audiences-survivors, witnesses/bystanders, perpetrators, and
second-and third-generation children of survivors.

Are depictions of the Holocaust necessarily an ethically corrupt practice
since the artist must adopt previously established-and therefore potentially
inauthentic-- pictorial conventions? Can-and should-the apocalyptic
incommensurability of the Shoah be re-presented for those who never
experienced the horror of the camps? Or do artists have an ethical and
moral responsibility to create images as a means to witness, mourn and
work-through the trauma of the Shoah? Are postmodern strategies of irony,
distanciation, fragmentation, appropriation, ambiguity, what Janet Wolff
terms an "art of indirection" most suitable to depictions of the Holocaust?

This session seeks three to four 20 minute papers which explore, from a
variety of disciplines and methodological perspectives, the problems and
concerns which artistic representation of the Holocaust incurs for
either/both creator and beholder. Papers might discuss the topics listed
below:

- whether nonrepresentational art/abstraction is better suited to the
depiction of the Shoah than more representational and/or narrative styles

- gender in Holocaust art, for instance in the work of Judy Chicago, Roee
Rosen, Ellen Rothenberg, Charlotte Salomon, and Nancy Spero

-an emphasis on haptic/tactile qualities as well as the solicitation of the
viewer's corporeal response in the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, Audrey
Flack, Gabrielle Rossmer, and Ellen Rothenberg

-artist as archivist in the work of Shimon Attie, Christian Boltanski,
Frederic Brenner, and Rudolf Herz

-memorials (such as those at Birkenau, Majdanek and Treblinka) and
"counter-memorials" to the Holocaust, like Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock's
Bus Stop-The Non-monument and Rachel Whiteread's Holocaust Memorial

-the proliferation of Holocaust art which combines word and image,
especially in the work of children of survivors; papers might discuss Alice
Lok Cahana, Terezin: Children's Poem, I Still Believe, Arie Galles'
Fourteen Stations, Morris Louis, Ben Shahn, Joan Snyder, and Jeffrey Wolin

-the mobilization by second and third generation artists of Marianne's
Hirsch's notion of "postmemory" and "identification-at-a distance;" artistic
and ethical concerns arising from the representation of an event/experience
to which the artist has no immediate access

- the role of Hollywood films like Judgement at Nuremburg, Schindler's List,
Life Is Beautiful, and Jakob the Liar in the creation of a popular
(American) (post)memory of the Holocaust

-the impact of institutions like the Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, D.C. and the Jewish Museum, Vienna and Berlin in embedding the
Holocaust in the landscape of national memory

-how-or should-artists avoid imbuing representations of the Holocaust with
aesthetic beauty whose enjoyment could potentially temper the art's
traumatic content; should art about the Holocaust always possess a didactic
and/or memorial content? Is Janet Wolff right in arguing for the role of
beauty in Holocaust representation?

-Jewish artist's appropriation of Christian symbols like the crucifix in
order to communicate Jewish suffering in the work of, for instance Marc
Chagall, Arie Galles, Aharon Gluska, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko

-the burden of memory and testimony in German art as encompassed in the
landscapes of Anselm Kiefer

-the emergence of the (concentration camp) landscape of torture and
extermination as body/character in the second-generation art of James
Friedman, Henning Langenheim, Simcha Shirman, Susan Silas, and Debbie
Teichholz

-the impact of the internet, for example, the newly unveiled website which
provides a virtual electronic tour of Auschwitz or Vera Frenkel's "Body
Missing" site

Please submit cv and 500 word abstract to nancygargoylefolk.com or mail to:
Nancy Nield Buchwald, 555 Evening St., Worthington OH 43085
by Tues., April 12, 2005.