The Writing on the Wall was a temporary site-specific installation created by the American artist Shimon Attie in Berlin during 1991–92. Attie had moved to Berlin in 1991, shortly after completing his MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute, and developed the project in response to the absence of visible traces of Berlin's prewar Jewish communities. Unsettled by what he experienced as a ghostly presence, Attie went in search of archival images of the Jewish community that had thrived in Berlin before the Holocaust. Combing through various private and public archives, Attie discovered photographs of daily Jewish life in the Scheunenviertel district, an area that became part of the former East Berlin. By the 1920s, this section was home to large numbers of Eastern European Jews (Ostjuden) who had fled persecution in Poland and Russia. The Ostjuden were largely working class, and still unassimilated in contrast to their more prosperous and established German Jewish counterparts. Because of this, the Ostjuden were more “visible” to an American artist seeking archival traces of Jewish life.
With the archival images in hand, Attie went in search of the original sites depicted in the photographs and projected the black and white historical images, in life size, onto the same locations (with some exceptions). He then photographed the resulting scene. This public art installation was temporary and carried no warning or explanation: Passersby simply encountered it as they walked down the street and into the space of the projections. Attie's photographs of the installations are more than simple documentation; taken with a large-format camera using long exposures that remove viewers and passersby, they show empty street scenes whose color and contrast is enhanced with filters. These “art photographs,” as Attie calls them, were exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe and were published in English and German editions along with photographs from related projects developed by Attie in several European cities between 1991 and 1994.
Although Attie has produced several major projects during the years since his relatively low-tech, low-budget installation in the Scheunenviertel, he remains most known for the images from “The Writing on the Wall,” which have graced posters for academic conferences on Holocaust Studies and appeared on the cover of books such as James Young's influential 2000 study At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Culture. Part of the power of these images derives from the fact that Attie does not attempt to represent the destruction itself but instead points to what has been lost. These images, evoking an unresolved past haunting our present, have captivated many of those concerned with the ethical imperatives and dilemmas of representing mass violence and genocide. As one who shares those concerns, I looked forward to reading Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics, the first book-length study of Attie's work.
In this book, Peter Muir grounds his analysis in Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Muir proposes a dialectical approach to demonstrate that Attie's images are “illustrative” of Benjamin's notion of “secular consciousness” or “redemption” (2). The author notes in his introduction that the book was inspired by a dream he had during his first visit to Berlin to participate in the Walter Benjamin Festival, in 2006. In fact the book, much like a dream, conveys a sense of resonance between various objects and ideas but fails to cohere into a clear narrative or line of analysis. This is not to say that a successful study must resolve all the issues it addresses; I find that the most interesting writing explicitly acknowledges its own provisional form, but does so with careful attention to the dilemmas that animate it.
This book's troubles start with the title, whose vagueness is indicative of the author's muddled treatment of his topic. The précis on the inside jacket does not help to clarify things: “Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics's presiding metaphor is that of loss—the central problem that the book addresses is that of forgetting.” How then might this book contribute to the vast literature on Holocaust history, memory, and aesthetics? How does loss function metaphorically? How does Muir situate the problem of forgetting? Unfortunately these questions were not much clearer by the end of the book than they were at the beginning.
Muir rehearses many of the familiar analyses of “The Writing on the Wall” previously articulated with greater clarity and nuance by James Young, Jeanne Wolf Bernstein, Michelle Friedman, and Berel Lang. Dora Apel, who included a chapter on Attie's “European Projects” in her insightful 2002 book Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing is not mentioned here. Also absent is an explicit recognition that while concerns about the singularity of the Holocaust and the ethical perils of aestheticization have not disappeared, the debates about Holocaust representation have been greatly expanded over the past fifteen years. Emphasis has shifted to questions concerning the transmission of history and memory by and for those whose encounter with the Holocaust will necessarily be mediated by representations. In response to Art Spiegelman's Maus and other contemporary works of art that make explicit the ethical and aesthetic dilemmas of representation, a range of new terminology has been proposed: James Young has suggested the model of “received history” to describe an approach that combines the events of the past with the story of their representation in the present; Marianne Hirsch characterizes the experience of the post-Holocaust artist in terms of “post-memory”; while Dora Apel offers “secondary witnessing” and Ernst van Alphen draws attention to the strategies by which contemporary artists combine “historical” and “imaginative” modes to produce “Holocaust effects.” Significantly, all of these approaches share what Young, following historian Saul Friedländer, calls an “antiredemptory aesthetics”: an approach that refuses resolution or complete understanding.
Why then does Muir turn to Benjamin's language of redemption? Granted, Benjamin's concept of redemption, like many of his other concepts, differs significantly from traditional usage in that it emphasizes a process that can never be completed. To some extent, Muir's project functions as a translation of previous readings of Attie's work into Benjaminian language. After alerting the reader to the ethical dangers of artistic response to the Holocaust (framed in the terms of “absolutism” and “relativism”), Muir concludes that “when taken on balance, Attie is right in his approach to this uncertainty by his advocating a relativist response … the moral and aesthetic risks exemplified above are worthwhile” (50–51).
Muir proposes analyzing the images from “The Writing on the Wall” as an “index or habitation for history” (3). Although he draws on semiotic theory at various points in the book, he never really clarifies what is meant by an “index or habitation.” His argument would benefit from a greater familiarity with the expanded vocabulary of Holocaust aesthetics. I am thinking of Michael Rothberg's book Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000). Rothberg proposes a distinction between the conventional semiotic status of the index, which according to Peirce issues from and confirms the presence of the referent, and its function in traumatic circumstances where the index instead indicates the referent's necessary absence. Thus “traumatic realism” describes an aesthetic strategy that simultaneously draws on and undermines the conventions of realism, producing a subversive performance of realism. Although Muir may have something like this in mind, the reliance on a Benjaminian vocabulary limits his analysis.
Muir's main formal trope in analyzing the images from “The Writing on the Wall” is the palimpsest. This trope is not new: Andreas Huyssen's book Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (2003) situated the palimpsest as the “major trope that ties together divergent artistic and media practices, constituting complex forms that generate public memory.” But Muir also wants to situate Attie's work within a discourse of postmodern aesthetics, so he investigates how these installations function as “sculptural objects.” He devotes a chapter to distinguishing between a postmodern aesthetic that emphasizes contingency and site-specificity (as articulated by Robert Smithson) and a formalist aesthetic that champions the autonomy and symbolic function of modernist art (as articulated by Michael Fried, following Clement Greenberg). Muir's larger objective here is to map Benjamin's distinction between symbol and allegory onto the discourses of modernist/formalist and postmodern aesthetics so as to situate Attie's strategies of site-specificity and theatricality firmly on the side of a Benjaminian allegory—now “The Writing on the Wall” is also a Trauerspiel. To date, most writing on Attie's work has positioned it primarily within discourses of Holocaust representation and memory rather than, as is welcome in Muir's work, in relation to discourses of contemporary art. But Muir's analysis of Attie would benefit from attention to the history of the reception of Benjamin's work as what Diarmuid Costello calls “a resource for theorizing postmodernism in art,” in other words to the historicity of his own scholarly practice.
Muir does not provide an overview or contextualization of the “Theses on the Concept of History,” making this a book particularly confusing for readers unfamiliar with Walter Benjamin's writings. Strangely, the inclusion of photographs taken by Muir in 2009 of the locations where Attie's images were projected in 1991–92 could be interpreted as a gesture to Benjamin's own critical approach to history-as-image. These photographs are depicted alongside Attie's own photographs of his projections, and they dramatize the contrast between the decay Attie encountered in the Scheunenviertel in 1991 and the further erasures of history accomplished by gentrification and urban renewal in the decades following German reunification. Unfortunately, Muir does not take up this provocative line of analysis in the book.
Walter Benjamin produced some of the twentieth century's most evocative and compelling insights into the power of visual images. His writings are famously opaque and do not easily lend themselves to straightforward theoretical application. Precisely because of this indeterminacy, Benjamin's ideas have been engaged in many original and persuasive rereadings and reinterpretations in contemporary visual and cultural theory. Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall signals the need for a careful study of Benjamin's legacy and implications for postmodern art, and especially for questions of public memory and its politics. And, equally, for a significant monograph on Shimon Attie's artistic career, which remains long overdue.
