New Art Examiner
State of Illinois Gallery
June/summer 1992

Questions As Model
Reclaiming the Symbol
by Clalre Wolf Krantz

Evil.  A word gone out of fashion, along with its religious underpinnings. Yet its shadow remains with us. Amorphous and ill defined, our sense of what is right and wrong shapes our lives on a global as well as an individual level. Paradoxically, any attempt to confront evil on a level beyond one's own immediate experience, one's cultural or religious bias, is so cognitively and emotionally problematic that the complexities are either stripped to simplistic polar choices or avoided altogether. In this context, Edith Altman's recent multimedia installation, "Reclaiming the Symbol/The Art of Memory," at the State of Illinois Gallery in Chicago, initiated an important dialogue around related issues that shape our lives and our society. "Reclaiming the Symbol" is a product of Altman's investigations over the last ten years of morality in relationship to nations and individuals. Yet, while her show raised broader philosophical and artistic issues, it was also rooted in how these issues are played out by individuals in the course of their everyday lives.
Using the theme of the Holocaust as a paradigm for evil, Altman wove together the related subthemes of societies' use of symbols and of artistic creativity which seem as relevant today as when they became apparent 50 years ago. Incorporating visual and textual, aesthetic and didactic elements, she confronts all manner of symbolizing processes to discuss the theoretically value-free and slippery nature of symbols and their ability to assume any assigned attributes. Even while dissecting the nature and function of such loaded symbols as the swastika, Altman actively engages in their manipulation to address a related set of questions about how societies allow evil events to occur, what connections exist between art and morality, and finally, on a more personal level, to express her feelings associated with specific symbols used by the Nazis which have entered the public domain, as well as her desire to transcend the pain and terror of the past and promote healing.

Shifting between her own responses and more abstract, societal implications, Altman presented a dense, multifocal exhibit in order to do justice to complex questions, avoid simplistic solutions, and allow the viewer multiple choices of ways both to absorb the work and to integrate the major themes and their various subthemes. In doing so she not only raised her own questions, but provided a setting which encouraged others, such as whether one can universally define the nature of evil, to emerge. Altman herself sees good and evil existing in the world as aspects of the One (meaning God, or unity); consequently, she frames our responsibility in terms of making decisions about our relationship to these forces, and acting upon those decisions.

In order to more fully comprehend the underlying meaning of her investigations, one must understand some of the aspects of Altman' s personal background which shaped it. Relevant is the residual shame and terror from a childhood spent in Nazi Germany and the loss of some of her family, as well as her adult decision to become re-immersed in her Jewish heritage. For her, there was no possibility of a rational approach to the spiritual after the Holocaust; thus she began to study a mystical form of Judaism known as Kabbalah. This form of Judaism seeks truth through individual revelation and intuitive reflection, as well as emphasizing a mystical interpretation of biblical texts over the more common rational process. In the Kabbalistic view, words function on the surface to reveal sensual reality; but through complex symbolic systems, they seek to unlock underlying secrets in order to achieve a union with God and an ethical way of life.

In the first of the three galleries, the most coherent and powerful section, Altman effectively transformed historic references and symbolic elements associated with the Holocaust into a room of beauty and transcendence. The room was dominated by a giant, wall-mounted, gold swastika, with arms rotating counterclockwise, and its mirror image--the more familiar Nazi black cross whose arms point clockwise--rested on the floor. Spiraling in the center of the gold swastika was a Hebrew text, which roughly translates: "everything contains its opposite; it is up to us to transform the darkness into light." Gold squares filled the negative spaces on the floor, painted with triangles and written phrases which refer to Haman, a biblical Persian official who tried to exterminate the Jews during the fifth century BCE. The triangles in this case are curious representations of evil; they resemble Hamentashen, pastries eaten every year during the festival of Purim, when this story of destruction and redemption is recalled. (In a personal conversation, Altman referred to one way of transforming the past as ingesting, digesting, and eliminating as waste.)

Throughout the installation, Altman's choice of colors and materials functioned aesthetically, historically, and symbolically. In this room, lined up in front of the swastikas were six chemical beakers containing earth, white kosher salt, and red, blue, green, and gold-colored granules to help transform the negative energy into a positive force. Placed on the left side of the gold swastika were 45 small paintings of alternative representations of swastikas; the number 45 is derived from Kabbalistic numerology. The numbers have symbolic meanings, and each has a letter equivalent; for instance A=1. Composed into words, the letter-numbers are added into new equivalencies and new meanings. Altman uses multiples of the number nine, which is used in various combinations to construct the swastika, and stands, in different combinations, for transformation, life, and the name of God (YHVH). Finally, 18 panels documenting some of the historical antecedents of the swastika image could be seen on the right side of the same wall. The other walls of this room had similarly dense installations, each revealing elements of the events of the Holocaust in combination with references to the past or present. The triangle reappeared in the "Star Wall" as detached elements of the Star of David to represent insignia used by the Nazis to identify various categories of prisoners in the concentration camps. Made of twigs and rope, the triangles ironically symbolized the natural elements found in the forests surrounding the death camps and, conversely, the organic aspects of life and certain materials used in Jewish ritual. Finally, the twigs were reassembled on top of a Star of David and sprayed gold, transforming the yellow star from its shamed past location on the yellow armbands worn by the Jews to a glowing, sun-like object.

Another wall, painted red, presented black and-white texts Altman gathered from different sources over the past five years which elucidate the history, definition, and arbitrary nature of symbols, and how they are used to form, unify, and control groups of people. Visually riveting, it reverberated off the adjacent swastika wall. While its red, black, and white colors emphasized the seductive power of aesthetics, they simultaneously retained their horrific historical force as the colors of the Nazi flag, thus providing the ground for accompanying texts and symbolization and how it is used. In the texts, as everywhere, Altman emphasizes her orientation as an artist and a Jew; by using the first person, she presents her own background and experience. Yet, when she names other groups of people who have been victimized in recent years, such as Blacks, communists, and homosexuals, her lists imply the widespread extent and variety of suffering rather than suggesting logical relationships between victims or a hierarchy of suffering.

The least visually compelling of the four walls contained some of the most suggestive material and set the tone for the rest of the exhibit. Using a strategy similar to Pat Ward Williams's Accused, Blowtorch, Padlock, Altman displayed photographs of concentration camp prisoners, of the camps' ovens, fences, and gates, bordered by texts asking, "How can these photos exist?" "Who took these pictures?" Her open-ended, rhetorical questions are deeply rooted in ancient methods of Jewish study. Multiple and even dualistic or conflicting meanings were clearly inherent in each grouping, implying hidden shades of meaning rather than easily framed, direct answers. Altman's inquiries into how her concentration camp photographs first came into being examine the position of the photographer in terms of power and desire; as victim, as not-so-innocent bystander, or as perpetrator. "How can such pictures exist?" can also mean: What kind of society produced these conditions? What kind of people cooperated in building such a society, such structures? Who ran them?

Here, my own ruminations extended Altman's implied ones into a more global sphere: Who defines good and evil? How do we police it? Who cares about it? When these questions are limited to a particular time and place--that of Nazi Germany--one set of answers is possible. The photographs exist because, for the Nazis, the death camps may not have been evil. Their victims were never considered to be fully human, and therefore not worthy of protection from harm.

Moreover, the Nazis defined "good" in a different set of terms, such as economic wellbeing, state power, and purity from contamination by people separated out as being different; among them, Jews, homosexuals, and dissidents. But these questions have even more important, more difficult, and more abstract implications. One can ask if the protection of human life has ever been a universal condition of morality. Whose life must be protected: A young, black man? A six-day-old fetus? Or its mother? Do we kill some people (Iraqis) to protect others (Kuwaitis or Kurds)? Altman's purpose is to provoke questions, to extend her historical data into present-day situations, and in doing so to initiate change. Her questions wrench themselves from the walls of the gallery and multiply, piling layer upon layer, as we move from grouping to grouping, from room to room. Frustrating in their ultimate unanswerability, the asking is essential to the promotion of continual re-evaluation, which Altman seeks to provoke.

The next room shifted to the paradoxical nature and use of artistic creativity in society. A compendium of jangling voices, images, and ideas, the different elements in this room investigated various aspects of the word "imagination," and its societal grounding. If, for instance, one considers art to be a civilizing and humanizing factor in society, good art supposedly makes better people, and therefore a more humane society. However, even as pre-war Germany attained unparalleled heights of philosophical and cultural achievement, it was also a monstrous society. Some of the most anguished and perplexed questioning of the value of art in the twentieth century has stemmed from this paradox, and no consensual answers have emerged.

The most successful displays in this room were the wall-hung photographs and texts questioning different processes and uses for art. One cross-shaped piece juxtaposed photographs of a signpost for the town of Dachau, its adjacent concentration camp, and a reproduction of a landscape painting by Hitler. Superimposed texts by Altman labeled the piece "The Paradox of Creativity," and pointed out that an artist colony existed in Dachau. Other texts describing artist's use of perspective in drawing refer superficially to a mechanical way of depicting so-called reality. On a deeper level, they allude to the human ability to focus and choose what is seen, and to what is revealed in a work of art. Other drawings of schematized eyes, ears, and noses which presumably see, hear and smell nothing, culminate in a mouth which does not speak. These drawings imply that art and language are associated with empowerment and choice. Further, a nearby text, "They needed a language of resistance," suggested that without language, resistance is impossible. Art, represented in the first room as a language of transformation and healing, was expanded in the second to one of power, control, and resistance.

In this room were also paintings of personal symbols depicting Altman's memories as devices to question what we should remember, and for what purpose. Often, small paintings bear the weight of a child's scattered visions: a truck with a red cross, a zeppelin floating in English skies during bombing attacks, a Nazi armband and the Nazi cross. In several places were lists of less visible victims of the war, such as the Armenians, who may not be remembered in the United States.
Dispersed around the floor were freestanding constructions made of unstained wood and covered with text or accompanied by signs. Less clear and less evocative, some of them connect ideas of the artist and the prisoner, creativity and murder through the concept of work. A giant carpenter's right angle diagraming numbers of families murdered, and artists' work benches labeled with the infamous Arbeit Mach Frei," or "Work Makes One Free," ironically symbolized the positive valence given to work by the Nazis, and their cynical elevation of work camps to a moral plane. In combination with other constructions, such as outsized children's blocks, Altman extended her associations of creativity, work, and murder to children. Two curious, cartoon-like cutouts of goats confronting one another while standing on artists' palettes covered with lists of victimized peoples could only be deciphered with the help of the accompanying catalogue. The goats symbolize a rite during Yom Kippur in which a goat "assumes and bears away the sins of the people," thus exemplifying Altman's association of artists, victimization, and religious redemption.
While Altman intended the multiplicity of these images, texts, and structures to be unstable and open-ended, and justifiably aimed at a profusion of ideas and meanings to undermine any one true meaning, for me, this room was more confusing than evocative. Although each element has specific meanings for Altman (the most obvious example being the goats), these meanings are obscure to most. Unlike the golden swastika in the previous room, which rose from its mirror image "buried" on the floor into a creative and transformative glow, the symbols in this room were often heavy-handed and didactic, distracting and unclear.

However, while this room remained problematic, Altman raised legitimate questions regarding the relationship of art to morality, recognizing that these questions have been discussed before, and with no definitive answer forthcoming. Her aim in questioning is to elicit more questioning, to understand that suppression of thought and expression results in massive and unjust victimization of those who lie outside the center, and that one weapon against any attempts toward conformity lies in public displays of multiplicity, instability, and openness to new expressions of ideas.

The final gallery, "And they loved music more than people," extended Altman's investigation of society's paradoxical relationship to creativity into a specific discussion of its disassociation from human freedom during the Nazi era. In order to make further connections between creative expression and its abuses, Altman asked artists for their own stories about misuses of creative energy, illuminating her father's recollection of witnessing, when he was a prisoner at Buchenwald, some artists being allowed to live as long as they provided entertainment for their captors. On a shelf she placed xeroxed postcards from artists who responded to her letter asking for their participation in this section of the show. Surprised that others shared in the experience, I responded with a personal story which I had, until that time, considered unique. I wrote about how a cousin survived a concentration camp because he was a philosopher and could provide intellectual stimulation for the Commandant, a former university professor.

Another section of this room featured photographs of prisoners playing the violin in a camp and of Germans enjoying music, adjacent to various musical artifacts and a tape recording playing a Viennese waltz. Providing a foil to this assembly of art-as-grisly-entertainment was a life-size model of one bunk bed complex and a photograph of prisoners jammed in it. Having recently visited a cleaned-up version of a rebuild dormitory at Dachau, I found Altman's version far more compelling. At Dachau, surrounded by peaceful countryside and a prosperous town, the beautifully reconstructed and stained wood bunks conveyed little of their lived reality to me. There, the few wmpty, spotless remains of the camp buildings and the new, modern, memorial chapel serving snacks to the tourists bore little relationship to the photographs and moving in the camp's museum. Altman's battleship-gray painted bunk bed was another matter, providing a culmination to this exhausting exhibit.

The dense materiality of the show reverberated, not only with the multiple layers of Altman's personal history, but with the viewers' own variegated experiences as well. Posted captions, videotape, and a catalogue provided insight into some of Altman' s intentions and more hermetic meanings. In contrast to the usual glossy art-world publication, the catalogue, with an interview by Mary Jane Jacob, was beautifully conceived as another symbolic and informational document in the show. Taking the form of an eight-page newspaper, its design and headline "Kunst Arbeit" (artwork), lettered in a black and red Gothic typeface, immediately brings to mind Nazi publications. The newsprint stock furthers this association, but also recalls the paper used by artists for sketching. In the interview, Altman clearly stakes out her philosophical and religious position; viewers must clarify their own positions in relationship to this material. What is important to Altman is the ensuing dialogue from different positions, a desire that also motivated the gallery's sponsorship of a panel discussion which amplified and explored different aspects of symbolization and their relationship to evil.

This exhibit was the largest and most complex of Altman's installations and performances addressing similar themes. Simpler works of the 1980s incorporated general mysticism and Kabbalistic alchemy and numerology into rich formal paintings and drawings. Obsessive markings and geometric precision characterized Altman's wish to visually and spatially document the passage of time, and her passionate determination to make of her time on earth a life of truth and beauty.

In 1983 Altman's father died, and in 1984 she traveled to the concentration camp at Buchenwald to symbolically confront the painful residue of her father' s temporary imprisonment there and the loss of much of her family. Her effort to remember and document earlier wounds in order to transform scars into the stuff of empowerment became the subject of subsequent installations and performances. A version of the swastika room was shown in Rockford, Illinois, where Altman spent time talking about the work to various community groups. Another installation exhibited in both Chicago and Berlin featured a gold-painted pup tent and various documents referring to her journey to Buchenwald and to life's transformations, to both physical places and emotional sites. Particularly in Berlin, her audience came from disparate, often conflicting backgrounds, and the tent became a place of interaction as Altman invited visitors into the tiny space to talk about their reactions to the installation. Many of the responses were highly emotional. People said that they could not fact the past and could not construct a future. Altman realized for the first time that she was not representative of all of the victims of the Holocaust; while she can look at her family's photo albums, many of these young people cannot. They said that they stand on sand; they have no real structure to their lives.

Although Altman raised no new questions in regard to the Holocaust and its implications for the artist, her installation added a new dimension and visibility to what should be an ongoing dialogue. Creating a powerful visual and emotional impact, the installation added up to more than its many parts, draining one's cognitive and emotional energy. A show with this kind of emotional power has the advantage of forcing people to engage material that they are either unaware of or refuse to confront, as is evidenced by the amount of attention the show has received. Dr. Morris Fred, director of the Spertus Museum in Chicago, remarked upon visiting the installation that it is easy to make people cry about the Holocaust; it's not so easy to make them think about it. Surprisingly, Altman says that many people don't know much about these events or care to; it's not their issue. On the other hand, the presentation of such issues can lead to people closing down on their feelings. One viewer, while talking about her desire to avoid stirring up old emotions, was unable to experience the emotional content of the show, characterizing it as merely "intellectual." It is this dismissal and denial that Altman attempts to circumvent by taking charge of fear and shame so that these emotions cannot tempt us to bury the past and thus prevent us from continuing to reexamine history in light of the present and vice versa.

Perhaps the greatest danger of such an emotionally and intellectually confrontational show is underlined by the controversy surrounding it. Almost a year before the exhibit opened, a few well-meaning people on the Illinois State Museum's advisory board objected to the swastika image as being troublesome and inflammatory. Misunderstanding Altman's intentions, they were concerned that the show would be offensive to Jews, and protested its exhibition at a state-sponsored gallery. Ironically, Jews, representative of the very group of people who have historically suffered from censorship to the point of almost being censored out of existence, were among those advocating the censorship of the problematic images. Advocacy of artistic freedom by such art world figures as Debora Duez Donato, curator of the Altman exhibition, then Museum of Contemporary Art Chief Curator Bruce Gunther, and WBEZ radio critic Victoria Lautman called public attention to the issue. This difficult situation was eventually diffused through negotiations between Kent Smith, director for art of the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. The protesters, and state officials, and the wchibit opened without further upset.

This incident provides an example of how unclear boundaries between good and evil create a situation in which victims and censors can change places. Across the country, incidents involving private citizens as well as legislators-in the perceived interests of morality--are emasculating art production in the United States, either through straightforward censorship or more circuitous funding cutbacks. In the guise of economic necessity, difficult and complex issues are shunted from public view as support for the arts is pushed into the private sphere, where it can be controlled more easily. The prolonged controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts comes immediately to mind, but the recent cutbacks proposed by Illinois Governor Jim Edgar fall into a similar category. His current attempts to close the State of Illinois galleries in Chicago and Lockport and denude the Illinois Arts Council budget will engender a limited monetary gain to the state, but represent an opportunity to get rid of a forum in which troublesome questioning of public policy can take place.

These controversies highlight one shortcoming of Altman's exhibit. Her desire to elucidate the arbitrariness and slipperiness of language and symbolization does not extend to the problems of demarcating morality itself. It is easy to finger mass human destruction as evil, and religious freedom as good, but most of life consists of setting boundaries around much more amorphous material. Although Altman's religious convictions ground her sense of morality, "Reclaiming the Symbol" did not address how one might negotiate conflicts between differing religious or secular groups. Upholding life is important, but whose life? Altman opposes censorship and enumerates many groups who have been oppressed, yet what does one do if a black rap group or a politician advocates bigotry toward Jews or proposes the burning and looting of Korean immigrants' businesses? Moral parameters must ultimately be discussed and negotiated, not naturalized, between groups of equals.

Within the work, however, Altman claims a moral dimension rooted in a religious background that constructs a concept of human beings as embedded in the social milieu, in a life-affirming relationship with each other and with God. Its basis in a close attention to texts and ritual actions lends strong cognitive, ethical, and spiritual components to work concerned with contemporary social and political themes. Claiming neither objectivity nor hyper subjectivity, Altman states who she is and expresses her point of view, maintaining that "the artist can only take responsibility for making art."

Ultimately, Altman's enlarging a swastika to nine feet and painting it gold does not erase the horror of Holocaust. Nor does it lead to further enlightenment regarding what to do about the evil that surrounds us. But Altman does provide a model for confronting painful issues, examining their different aspects, and refusing easy answers. Thus, by using symbols and ritualistic practices from both her secular and religious milieu, she spins a web of interlocking and multiplying cords, tying tradition to the present so as to transform thoughts and feelings to substance and a collection of objects into a deepening cognitive and emotional understanding of significant issues.