Art Chicago
May 13, 2004

Edith Altman, lecture
by Claire Wolf Krantz

For the roughly 40 years of her career, Edith Altman has focused mainly on two questions: how can her art address and express her spiritual and mystical orientations to her life, and how can this commitment to the spiritual be the guiding factor in addressing the secular condition of the world.

Slide 1, sculpture           
From the beginning, her work has been highly experimental and conceptual. In the mid 1960s she constructed do-it-yourself sculptures, creating minimal forms that were sliced horizontally, enabling the viewers to arrange new shapes for themselves.

Slide 2 performance, body
During the feminist ferment of the 1970s, Altman explored ideas about the body and feminist empowerment, concerns which remain with her today. For these works she engaged in performances, experimented with sound, and created installations using video, photography, texts, drawing, and sculpture.

Slide 3, pellon drawing
By the 1980s she began to study basic physics and all sorts of mystical teachings, including the Kabala. She began studying with a Chabad, a Hasidic study group, and eventually immersed herself in Hasidic Judaism.
Her works of the 80s included drawings on pellon or masonite which involved counting, a reference to time, to math, physics, and nature. The squares in these pieces are embodiments of space; the repetitive marks, like the indicators on a clock, demarcate time passing. The overall shapes of these pieces refer to concepts of the Kabala, while the white automatic writing sitting on top of the grid refers to the unconscious.

Slide 4. Performance, pellon
Here, Edith added performance to her drawing by dancing in front of it with her shadow and documenting it with photos. The conceptual complexity of these pieces is indicative of all of Altman’s work.

Slide 5, Swastika
Later in the 1980s Altman’s work shifted to the question of evil and the Holocaust, the work for which she is most known, and which is related to her own background. Born in Altenberg, East Germany, she is a survivor of the Holocaust: during the 1930s her father was imprisoned in Buchenwald and later released. When she was 9 years old, after the notorious Krystallnacht her family left Altenberg.
Stemming from these personal experiences, she began to explore how and why evil occurs, what part implicates language and symbols, and what to do about transforming evil into a power for good in the world. She poses the problem, “Because we live in a world with good and evil, we have to question,’ Where is God?” Her way of dealing with such questions include personal study and engagement in religious practices, creating installations that are informational and somehow transformative, and creating interactive performances in which dialogue is encouraged among formerly antagonistic groups of people.

Although I was familiar with her earlier work, I became acquainted with Edith in 1986, when I saw and wrote a long article about her giant installation encompassing 3 spaces of the gallery in the State of Illinois building. Using the Holocaust an example of the epitome of evil, she documented many of its horrors using her repertoire of objects, text, drawing, and photographs. The title, Reclaiming the Symbol, characterizes her interest in how language, bodily gestures, and symbols are used and manipulated for a variety of purposes, both good and evil. In my opinion, this attention to the manipulative power of language is particularly relevant today, when both our government and the terrorists are using language to manipulate public opinion.

I don’t have the time to discuss all of this complex work, but I’ll talk about 3 major sections. The swastika shown in this slide was an amazing piece, embodying all the elements Altman was dealing with at this time. The shining gold swastika, which was huge, facing left, is a symbol of creation and other positive attributes, which are found in many cultures. Its mirror opposite, the black swastika on the floor, was the symbol of Hitler’s Germany, and the Nazi appropriation of a life-informing symbol to one of power and death. 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." Edith showed the two swastikas as a balancing act. Like the kabalistic alchemist, she lined up In front of the black swastika chemical beakers containing earth, white kosher salt, and red, blue, green, and gold-colored pigments to symbolically transform the negative energy into a positive force.

Slide 6, triangles
Another wall of this room contained an array of triangles, detached elements of the Star of David to represent insignia used by the Nazis to identify various categories of prisoners in the concentration camps. The triangles in this case are curious representations of evil; they resemble Hamentashen, pastries eaten every year during the festival of Purim, when the story of Esther is told, a story of the attempted destruction of the Jews and their redemption.

Slide 7, music 
In another gallery, which Edith titled "And they loved music more than people," Altman extended her investigation into the Nazi’s paradoxical relationship to creativity into a specific discussion of its disassociation from human freedom. In one section of this room she placed photographs of prisoners playing the violin in a camp, escorting other prisoners on their way to the gas chambers. The prisoners’ music was also used to entertain the Nazis. Nearby in the room were a violin, a tape recording playing a Viennese waltz, and a life-size model of one bunk bed complex with a photograph of prisoners jammed in it.

Slide 8, video Spertus
In a later installation for an exhibit at the Spertus Museum exploring the relationships between Blacks and Jews in Chicago, Edith focused on the interactive ability of language to promote change. One element contained a videotaped documentation of her project that brought together some schoolchildren enrolled at the Cabrini Green elementary school with the school connected to her Chabad. The children, in a series of interviews, discussed their stereotypes of Blacks and Jews. Subsequently they were brought together to mingle and play, resulting in their forgetting their stereotypes and accepting each other as people. The video taped during these sessions is now shown in schools.

Slide 9 Retrospective, Altenberg,
 Last year, Edith had a retrospective exhibit with a catalogue at the Lindenau museum in Altenberg, Germany. This was actually a 3-year project in which she worked with schoolchildren and their teachers to enhance their understanding of what had happened in their town and to reach towards reconciliation. In 2001, using available documentation that identified the houses in town that had been occupied by Jews before their banishment and extermination, the students and teachers researched what had happened to these families. The school administration also showed the students a horrifying film about the atrocities that had occurred there. The students then responded to the information, which was largely unknown, by creating imaginative projects to help them work through the new information, which had been largely unknown to them, and accompanying emotions. They made poems, paintings and sculptures and wrote letters to the dead. These works were later included in Altman’s installation at Buchenwald, which opened simultaneously with her museum retrospective.

Slide 10, Buchenwald

An important part of Edith’s project at Buchenwald was her use of almonds, the shape referring to a bone in peoples’ skulls that doesn’t burn, bones which have been found scattered all over the camps.  To symbolize the 6 million Jews annihilated by the Nazis, Altman piled 6 million almonds in the corner of a barracks that had housed prisoners. Jars were placed in front of the pile of almonds and visitors were invited to place almonds in the jars, symbolically counting each lost person as an individual. In front of the gate she placed an almond tree growing in a bucket, and next to that she placed a sign referring to a city in the Bible called Luz, or Almonds, in which the Angel of Death had no power. Nearby, she displayed the schoolchildren’s artworks. With this installation, Altman implies that the energy of an individual’s life doesn’t die -- it is transformed into other forms of life.

Slide 11, installation at Gallery 312
Invited by Gallery 312 this year to create a mini retrospective installation as part of a group show, Altman designed a rocket, made of metal, into which she inserted a video monitor showing slides of many of her works. Here, again, she is conflating the power of art to symbolically offset the power of evil, currently the war in Iraq with its airborne power. 

Finally, I will show you an excerpt from a short video made in 2001 exemplifying many of Edith’s concerns from the past 40 years.

Slide 12, Video, flying
Here, Edith is muffled, shrouded, laden with the restrictions that life brings. She talks about it as symbolizing the experience of an immigrant who is feared, who looks different, who tries to run from the hostility of her neighbors, and who struggles to overcome these difficulties. Her propeller symbolizes her attempt to fly, to be free, but as she struggles uphill, she manages to move forward, neither flying nor falling, slowly but inexorably, metaphorically enacting what it means to live a life in the full knowledge of its opposite, of the interconnections of life and death.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.