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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 our

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 make-

up 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

5 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.

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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.

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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 non-

identity 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. 11 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. 3-64; 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. 16 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, co-

operation, 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.

17 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.

18 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.

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

19

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.

20 C. Townsend, Art and Death, I.B. Taurus, London and New York 2008, pp. 105-

117.

20

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,

21

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.

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

22

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.

23

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.

24

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

25

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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