Faces of Race and Memory
Installation, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, 1988. Curator: Yigal Tzalmona
Haim Maor's work touches on an existential and cultural, and very Israeli nerve - a live-wire which charges the concept of Israeli identity and which connects between the Israeli and the Jewi s experience. The "new Israeli", the one who "is no longer Jewish but also no longer Hebrew", has begun in recent years to transmit, among other identity-distress-calls, messages of a new affinity with Jewish experience (and note all the recent pilgrimages made by the Israeli intelligentsia to Poland). Haim Maor, Israeli artist, kibbutz member and second-generation Holocaust survivor, gives expression to the anxieties and hopes that nourish this affinity.
The present exhibition, like previous ones by the same artist, is built as a consciousness-raising route and has a somewhat theatrical aspect. It operates in time - the viewer passes from one station to another up a dead-end way. At one of the first stations he encounters a group of photographs resembling police photos or mug-shots of the kind made in Nazi death camps. The nature of the photographs, their contexts and their functional arrangement imbue the series with an atmosphere of alienation, loss of human identity and even sadism. The viewer, passing among them, cannot avoid a comparative identification of the various facial types and their racial characteristics: some look Aryan, others Semitic; he becomes "a potential racist..." At the same time, as it is known that the faces belong both to Jewish kibbutz members and tc Germans, and that not all the Jews look "Semitic", he becomes aware of the falseness of identification by stereotype.
With a lingering sense of dissatisfaction, the viewer proceeds to the next station where he passes before a row of the same images painted on wooden boards. The further he advances along this route, the older and more worn the boards become and the more blurred and indistinct the figures painted on them. Here and there the number that was tatooed on his father's arm at Birkenau recurs.
The paintings operate on several levels of meaning and along different semantic axes: the blue colour of the backgrounds is reminiscent of the colour of the mizrah in Polish synagogues and is thus associated with a collective Jewish heritage, but it also brings to mind the "sublime" blue of royal portraits in German Renaissance painting. The portraits themselves connect both with the portraits of the dead painted on wooden-panels in FAIYUM, Egypt, in the first centuries, and with the paintings of the kings and nobility of the Renaissance or with Medieval icons of saints. Furthermore, all the paintings are at one and the same time also objects, at times magically imbued with the presence of the original. This creation of objects which exist in the context of both art and death is related to the arstist's own history -- his grandfather was a carver of tombstones in pre-war Poland.
These paintings, with their layers of meaning, do not function as aesthtic, seductive objets d'art, but as signifiers. Together with the photographic portraits they trace a signifying chain, they constitute a semantic crossroads at which the royal sublime encounters the rejected and the outcast, the beautiful meets the threatened and soiled, the Jew mettc the German, the victim the murderer, and life confronts death - to create a human totality that blends light and darkness.
The gradual blurring of the paintings also signifies memory, or rather, forgetfulness, the cancer that eats away at the past. The dregs and distortionS of memory, its fragmentation - this is the natural process which the HoloCuast survivor both yearns for and fears. "To remenber and to forget". And the final station is the isolated, mirror-enclosed cell, where the viewer at last finds himself. The game is over. His is the next portrait in line, but this time he is condemned to truth and reality.
Maor's work integrates the collective dimension with the personal and private expression. On the one hand it refers to basic Jewish and Israeli traumas (Holocaust and racism), and on the other it constitutes an act of private exorcism, a preoccupation with family myth and woth the world of fears endured by the son of a Holocaust survivor (the portraits of himself and his family members are a significant element in the present exhibition). Maor's work is based on a synthesis of significations, but the juncture of all the meanings and contexts is his private self.
A number of young Israeli artists have recently dealt with the Holocaust, but Maor is virtually alone in the consistency with which he treats this difficult subject. That is why it is important to show his work. It is neigher the demonization nor the ritualization of the Holocaust; it is clear-sighted. Maor presents racism as a component of humanity and sees the rationalistic approach together with an awareness of the given tragic complexity of the human "1"-- as saving solutions.
Yigal ZaLmona, Curator
February 1988
"The starting-point of all the stories I have told has been the dead. One does not become a teller of stories in order to gain fame. It is connected with a wound, with pain."
(Amos Oz)
"Four people were talking about pine trees. One defined them by species, class and variety. One spoke of their drawbacks in the lumber industry. One quoted poems about pine trees in various languages. One put down roots, sent forth branches and rustled."
(Dan Pagis, "Last Poems")
The Faces of Race and Memory
A mystic once said to me: "Something which is defined as 'mystical ceases to be so the moment it is known and understood."
My series "The Faces of Race and Memory" examines the convolutions of individual and collective memory, and the consious and emotional conceptual system connected with the term "race". It is an attempt to exorcise demons by deliberately defining and intensifying memories. In my work human portraits are juxtaposed and "catalogued" in the spectator's mind as "Jewish" or "Aryan". The pictures and photographs serve as a factor accelerating the externalization of the spectator's prejudices, and during the course of his or her comparative observation he or she becomes a "potential racist".
By means of my work I seek to examine the basic components of racism under the microscope of stereotypes, and to review prejudices. The germ which is enlarged under the microscope and identified by its "individual characteristics" shifts from being a mystical element to being the recognised and understandable symptom of a disease for which a remedy exists.
My work also seeks to clarify the process of remembering or forgetting. The holocaust and memories of it, forgetting, causing things to be forgotten and denial, distortion and misrepresentation, serve as an axis leading the associative system from the here and now to the past and back. Along this axis there are many points: race theory, anthropology, body language, criminal photography and drawing, sarcophagus art in Faiyum, pictures in synagogues, Christian icons and the culture of royal portraits. My pictures have drawn on all those and received new identifying marks. I seek complexity, and that which is revealed in a simple, encoded arrangement is in my view one of the basic compoents of the world. It is a complexity which contains complementary and combinatory dualism.
78446, the number which appears among the portraits, is the number which
was tattoed on the arm of my father, David Moscowitz, when he reached
Auschwitz-Eirkenau in 1942. For me that number symbolises all numbers, the
loss of human identity by the individual who forcibly or willingly becomes
subservient to a well-oiled, technocratic machine, as well as schools of
racism whose continuation is factories of death.
Constituting the whole from the fragments of memories. Is this a
picture of the world consisting of fragments of memories which were once
whole? Or is it perhaps an entire world created of fragments of memories
piled on remnants of memories?
Memory and man do not die, they disappear. But awareness gives energy to
those who remain, those who survive, those who hold on to the fragments.
They walk on towards the echo chamber.
Haim Maor
Givat haim Me'uhad
December 1987
I am neither an expert in art nor am I in the habit of writing articles of
psychological analysis in that sphere. But this exhibition by my friend Haim
Ma'or has a special significance for me, both on the professional psychological
level, as someone who treats the children of holocaust survivors, and on
the personal level, as someone who has been a party to the idea of the
exhibition, its development and its presentation to the public.
I was in close contact with Haim Ma'or as he contended with issues of essence
and content on the subject of racism, the construction of stereotypes and
prejudices, scapegoats, victim patterns, remembering and forgetting.
As an artist, he illustrated his questions and doubts with pencil and brush.
The process, which lasted approximately two years, comprised two attitude
levels, both apparent and concealed. One was an artisticintellectual examination,
while the other was a personal-cathartic process. In this emotional process
Haim Ma'or contended with the significance of the difficult trauma undergone
by his parents and with the conflict of a son born free to parents who had
lived through the absence of human freedom. Psychotherapists are in disagreement
as to whether the concept "second generation of the holocaust" has any validity.
Some of them regard it as a metaphor which helps to give a better understanding
of the emotional interaction between the generation of parents and that of
their children. Others point to genuine, shared behavioral characteristics
of the children of survivors.
One way or another, I have no doubt that the children of survivors have a
continual nees, almost an urge or an obsession, to establish contact with
the personal significance of the trauma of the holocaust for their parents,
and with the dual conflict of impotence - omnipotence (helpless victim or
heroic survivor). This need exists both in its cognitive aspect, in study,
research and explanation, and in the attempt to cope with the emotional
difficulty of identification and severance, as part of the natural maturation
processes. As a psychotherapist, i understand the need of the children of
holocaust survivors to hear what their parents went through and to want to
break down the barrier of silence in order to work through the burden and
excess responsibility they have taken upon themselves.
A similar phenomenon can be found among the children of Nazi families who
ask, examine and investigate, seeking to break down their parents' barrier
of silence and denial, out of a sense of collective guilt.
The way Haim Ma'or has chosen to deal with the personal significance of the
holocaust for him was, in my opinion, self-therapy, as it were, on the levels
of both understanding and experience.
Experiencing something means "settling an unfinished account," "completing
the form," (gestalt) and "as long as a gestalt is incomplete it will utilise
every means of attaining completion.' (Fritz Pens). Where the holocaust is
concerned this means legitimising-feelings of sadness, anger, alienation
and rejection vis-a-vis the surviving parents as well as those responsible
for the holocaust.
I regard this exhibition as evincing Haim Ma'or's psychological development
and maturity in coping with this subject, not merely by the cognitive means
which he has mastered but particularly by experiencing repressed emotions.
I remember how difficult it was for him to paint his father's portrait for
the first time, and his look of amazement when he first realized how the
picture has turned out; his emotions after painting his father's number or
when he attached the portraits to planks with railway sleepers and death
masks; his excitement and apprehension before going to Germany and his
psychological release when drawing the last pictures for this exhibition.
It was a sense of being rid of a heavy burden, of repressed energy which
had sought and egress.
This process constituted a significant stage in the transition from the position
of observer to internalisation and introspection. It seems to me that a similar
process is undergone by the spectators at the exhibition as they walk along
a planned course which leads them from the position of viewing photographs
and pictures to introspection, as they themselves become the "echo-chamber"
at the end of the route.
In his special way, suffused with intellect and symbolism, Haim Ma'or has
confronted us all, as human beings, with dilemmas and penetrating doubts,
pointing to the almost imperceptible ease with which the human brain catalogues,
connects, categonises and labels objects.
I found myself thinking about the scientific understanding of the human need
to employ this course of action in order to store information, is man able
to set limits? Can man rule without being tempted into prejudice?
I do not know if I have the answers to all the questions which bother me.
I have no doubt that Haim Ma'or's work has helped to focus and illuminate
them for me. His work has served as the additional stimulus, impelling me
to ask, explore and ponder the question of whether I an not also the son
of a holocaust survivor, whether we are not all the children of holocaust
survivors, in one form or another.
I remembered the Passover Seder and my grandfather reading the Hagadda: "Every
individual should regard himself as having left Egypt."
Yaron Ziv, M.A.
Psychologist and Psychotherapist
December, 1987
An Eye in a Plank
It might be the end of time. A single eye on a narrow plank. Wide open, as if straining to trap the ungraspable. What does it see which we do not yet see? Nothingness - everything.
We traveled together to a distant land. In Poland our friendship grew. There, of all places. In a dark and overcast foreign country. The first Israelis after generations, diving into the heart of loss and absence.
In the cemetery Haim Maor closed his eyes and caressed the gravestones with his fingertips. Gravestones like these had been chiseled by his blind grandfather in that place at another time. We dived into the seam. Or perhaps it would be more correct to say "beneath the seam." Poland is scorched and there are no Jews. From underneath lace curtain local eyes peeped at the returners. We were like their murky memories. The doubles of the others for a brief moment.
Haim Maor creates the game of simulating doubles. But this is no game. For a moment he substitutes the quick for the dead. Who would willingly agree to undergo a trial of this kind? Haim Maor volunteered. He also volunteered his family. They all become faces which he conjures up daily, from present-day reality. He takes the people around him as a random sample whose purpose is to hint to you that it could easily have been you too.
The point of departure is the immediate circle: father, mother, son, and the number in between them. A number which hovered like an eagle on the ceiling of the home. But the family stood firm, as much as it could. Then come the son's children and friends. Not only in this country but in Germany too. Haim Maor pulls the trial rope at both ends, not an easy test. He does not make the work of identification easy for you. You do not know who is who. It may be a random list of people, but it can be expanded to encompass all the branches of Adam who, for a long moment in history, lost the divine image.
Stealing the individual's face, robbing him of his identity, is perpetrated
by means of the camera, which produces standard black and white photographs.
Haim Maor obliges his circle of people to traverse the conveyor belt of the
condemned, like the "rogues gallery" filed on the wall, and only in space
is their innocence registered.
The march of faces continues across the planks of rough, industrial, unvarnished
and unembellished wood. The portraits are not in consecutive order or any
fixed pattern, and one does not know who belongs where. From all sides people
flow to one shining spot. On the level of drawing and color the physical
dimension fades. The figure divests itself of the weight of flesh, of the
burden of time and place. There are Germans and Israelis in the difficult
equation "people", as an unequivocal reminder of the face that the holocaust
was perpetrated by people on people.
In his basement, a fall-out shelter where there is no daylight, beneath the fertile expanses of a kibbutz, he envelops planks in paint. Paint is the escape hatch for complete isolation. By this the artist also joins the column of marchers, accompanies the large mass of nameless people who walked without obtaining compassion or kind ness. But no one here is really nameless. He knows each and every one. This is no fable, here reality is placed beneath the magnifying glass of memory. From the here and now he reconstructs what was lost, as it were possible to reconstruct it in any way. It is an act of despair. Will the wind drop? Will life's guilt feelings close the shutters of the house so that there is no possibility of penetrating that fortress? Is there any possibility at all for the magic ceremony of turning family and friends who are very much alive into reflections on the slope of disappearance? The soul disappeared long ago, after all. Only its reflection has been impressed on the plank. The profile of the plank is as thin as real people were then. In the cycle of life they will once again become the tree which produces the plank.
The plank is scarred. The paint cannot conceal cuts, holes and scars. There are nail-inflicted wounds on foreheads and at jugular arteries. A human being is such a fragile thing, and how banal it is to say that again... Only the warm sand of Faiyum preserved the corpses from the beginning of the first millennium. The wind scattered the burning ashes from the crematoria.
We also share in that farewell ceremony, after four decades, accompanying them without coffins or shrouds, and sealing the cycle of mourning which has not yet ended. Because we did not dare weep for them properly. We internalized the pain, substituting rituals and official memorial days for the scar. Beneath the invisible coffinlids the dead seek their mourning. That of the dream and the shout.
The number which was tattooed in the flesh also pushed life on by virtue of immense vitality, by the power of the return to the trivial and the banal. The family portraits, taken from the personal story of someone called Haim, are the impact of the daily routine which reinforced itself since it had no other alternative. To live, to live, out of to die, to diet At the end of the path the portraits fuse into one face. My own face is revealed in the echo chamber of reflections. It is I, who was the embodiment of others, who will be the embodiment of those to come after me. In the darkness, in complete isolation, you look at what other people say is you, a face you will never really see, and it is like a blow in the stomach. You dare not reject and classify people because you yourself are condemned to exile from the tempo of evermoving life. At the edges everything recombines. The end and the beginning are one and the same. The portraits are light-houses sending distress signals to the sky, disintegrating and recombining in a new form. Nose, mouth and eyes. By one flicker of an historic moment that could easily have been me. On the other side of the fence. Victim then-hangman then. From the pack of shuffled cards I must examine closely "who am I?" And reply: ecce homo. And not merely in its literal translation: "this is the man!" But, "this is man!"
If there is a being which our collective language terms "God", and if after that crevice he has not abandoned his step-image, it is also his Sisyphean duty to attain the lost image and save the portrait from the absence of features. It may be possible to salvage something only by means of the thin plank of memory. Everything comes down to one thin plank and the observing eye.
Navah Semel
November 1987