Art after Auschwitz : Towards an art of indirect witnessing.
Doris Salcedo is a Columbian artist living and working in Bogota whose work concerns memory and suffering. Salcedo's work has been called "the art of the witness; the art of the secondary witness to be precise, the witness to lives and life stories forever scarred by the experience of violence...” (96)
Andreas Huyssen. Unland: The Orphan's Tunic in Basualdo et al
W.G.Sebald, says Doris Salcedo, "poses a question about how to form a language in which terrible experiences, experiences capable of paralysing the power of articulation, could be expressed in art." It is no coincidence that Salcedo refers to W.G.Sebald, whose approach to memorializing the Holocaust in his novel Austerlitz is distinctly indirect, analogous to the way many of us have learnt about it : through layers of narratives, through witnessing the testimonies of survivors.
The question of whether it is possible to represent the Holocaust and its reverberations has concerned artists, film makers and writers for more than half a century. Ivonne Pini (2) describes how Salcedo's work manages to transcend a number of the binaries which plague art makers, addressing both the past and the present, memory and experience, aesthetics and politics, survivors and perpetrators : "(her) art as a condensed experience, one with profound historical meaning, in which the story of each protagonist of an act of violence mixes with those of other members of the community. Aesthetics and politics join together to develop an ethical conscience that not only operates in the restricted space of the original investigation but also affects survivors of collective suffering.”
My paper seeks to contextualize Doris Salcedo's work within a larger framework of the representation of indirect witnessing traumatic events in images by situating the approach taken by Salcedo in relation to two examples of Holocaust representation in other mediums, namely cinema (Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah) and photography/text (Serge Klarsfeld book French Children of the Holocaust). Each of these have significant similarities in their approaches to trauma suffered by others, characterized by avoiding the use of images of atrocities themselves; by "assuming responsibility towards the bereaved" in Salcedo's words, (1) and by going beyond describing specific instances of catastrophe.
(1) Basualdo, Carlos, Nancy Princenthal, and Andreas Huyssen. Doris Salcedo. Phaidon Press Ltd, 2000.
(2) Interview with Charles Merewether (in Basualdo et al 2000 p145)
(3) Pini, Ivonne. Doris Salcedo Shibboleth. ArtNexus No. 68 - Dec 2007 http://www.artnexus.com/NewsDetail/19240 Accessed 26.10.08
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The paper was published as part of the Cumulus09 proceedings. Download it from the website here.