AbstrAction And
the holocAust
By Mark Godfrey
Yale University Press, $55/£35 (hardcover)
Mark Godfrey’s sedulously researched and
elegantly argued study of the place of the
Holocaust in abstract art – it’s precisely the status
The case of Frank Stella’s Polish Village series
of that ‘in’ that is at issue – is an empirical response
(1970–3) is instructive. The series presents clear
to two dominant (if contested) philosophical
visual analogues with photographs of prewar
attitudes to the Nazi death camps. In the wake
wooden synagogues, but Rosalind Krauss, among
of Theodor Adorno’s warning, in 1949, that it was
others, never paused to wonder why each painting
‘barbaric’ to write poetry after Auschwitz, and
was named after a Polish village, preferring Carl
Jean-François Lyotard’s later positing a certain
Andre’s certainty that ‘Frank Stella’s paintings are
unrepresentability to the event, it has become
not symbolic’. In their rejection of symbolism,
too common to assert a distinction between
such judgments inadvertently denied abstraction
abstract (even sublime) silence with respect to
any sort of historical purchase at all.
the Holocaust, on the one hand, and archival,
Symbolism and representation, of course,
avowedly mnemonic artworks on the other. The
were just what some people wanted from
choice is not, as Godfrey shows, between Paul
post-Holocaust art, and here again ambiguous
Celan and Christian Boltanski; rather, abstraction
abstraction was treated with suspicion. Louis I.
is its own kind of memorial.
Kahn’s 1967 proposal for a Memorial to the six
For sure, postwar Modernism seems in
Million Jewish Martyrs in New York’s Battery Park,
certain cases not even to have broached the
originally conceived as nine massive glass boxes,
possibility of an eloquent silence about the
was derided as overly laconic, just as the four
recent past. Clement Greenberg could write
artists included in the United States Holocaust
in the Jewish journal commentary that it was
Memorial Museum – Joel Shapiro, Richard Serra,
‘time that we all began to make a real effort to
Ellsworth Kelly and Sol LeWitt – seemed to
digest the fact of Auschwitz psychologically’,
some unable to engage with adjacent historical
and yet persist in corralling Jewish American
artefacts, never mind reality. Chief among
abstract artists away from history entirely. In a
Godfrey’s achievements – and the book is also
careful reading of Morris Louis’s charred Journal:
an essential record of how such works came to be
Firewritten paintings (1951), Godfrey shows this
commissioned and interpreted – is to show how
widespread evacuation of historical reference in
abstract artists invented structures of thought,
action. Michael Fried, for example, commended
feeling and experience that were at odds with
Louis for ‘not getting into his paintings in the
both sacral silence and optimistic archivalism.
wrong way’ – even as the artist explicitly referred
He does this most convincingly in his
the blackened, scrawled canvases back to Nazi
detailed descriptions of the physical and temporal
book-burnings.
demands made by the works in question. Whether
What these modernists most feared was
it is the layered, indexical structure of Peter
not exactly the possibility of representation as
Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
such – which was simply ruled out of court – so
europe (2005) in Berlin, or the photographic grid of
much as the kitsch prospect of overt symbolism.
Susan Hiller’s J. street Project (2002–5), Godfrey
insists that abstraction, like history, is readable, and
nowhere reducible to silence, spectacle or symbol.
brian dillon
DEC_books 2-4indd.indd 147 6/11/07 13:21:56
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