Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory.

by Ernst van Alphen Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997 233 pp./$49.50 (hb)

The nature of history, the practice of historicization and the processes of memory pose special problems for postmodern thought. While postmodern and poststructuralist thought have often been simply characterized as negating history, they can actually be seen as deeply engaged with the question of how to understand our relationship to the past. Particularly central to late twentieth-century thought are the questions of how we remember and what is rendered as history amid an understanding of the role played by the image in mediating memory and history. Documentary photographs, family photographs, television and film images and the personal expression inherent in painting, photography and installation are forms through which we mediate our histories, both personal and cultural.

If modernism believed the image of the past to be a trace of reality, a form through which the past could be reexperienced and memories relived, postmodernism allows no such easy reverie. The relationship of images to the past has become problematic and the role of the image in producing memory and allowing for forgetting is central to this shift. The origin of this change toward an ironic view of the past and its representations can be seen to have been given its most symptomatic invocation in two primary texts: Theodor Adorno's famous statement that "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"(l) and Roland Barthes's analysis of the image in Camera Lucida as both shock and death, in which he asks "Is History not simply that time when we were not born?"(2) Adorno's statement, with its implication that the horror of the Holocaust made aesthetic representation deeply problematic, has haunted theoretical work about the conflict of memory and history and of fact and fiction in relationship to the Holocaust. Barthes influenced a broad range of work on the role of the photograph in depicting and producing the past as a means to deconstruct identity and as counter-memory.

Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory, Andrea Liss's Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust and Ernst van Alphen's Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory each offer complex and useful new ways to understand our desire for and mediation of memory and history. Indeed, all three authors arrive at the conclusion that traditional forms of history will not provide an understanding of the past. Instead, they embrace nontraditional, formerly delegitimated forms such as autobiography, visual arts, personal and family photographs and historical comic books as means to examine past experiences and retell history. While Liss and van Alphen examine the relationship of the documentary and the artistic, or to use van Alphen's term, the "imaginary," specifically relating to the Holocaust, Hirsch is concerned with the role of family pictures in the construction of individual and familial identity and as a means through which the past, including the traumatic events of the Holocaust, is negotiated, framed and reframed.

Hirsch uses the term "postmemory" as a means to understand the complexities not only of the memories of the children of survivors, but the process of cultural memory itself. She argues that postmemory is related to issues of the diaspora and temporal and spatial exile; it is an essential means to understanding memory precisely because it is

distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation. . . . Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.

Postmemory is about the continuation of memory and its regeneration in those for whom memories are experienced once or twice removed. Liss, who also employs the term, uses it to refer to "the artists' distance from the events as well as their relation to the fallout of the experiences." It could be said that these authors see artistic engagements of postmemory as offering compelling means to reexamine not only the ways in which the past is understood, represented and mediated, but to reconsider the past itself.

While the question of the incommunicability of modern experience and representation was often posed by modernism, albeit with the assumption that such communication and representation were still possible goals, the Holocaust as an event forced a dramatic shift in notions of what is representable and communicable. Walter Benjamin wrote mournfully of the effects of the mechanical terror of World War I on the capacity to tell stories or to render an experience communicable precisely because of the profound change that war caused in the European experience of modernity - from one of optimism to one of terror and destruction.(3) Yet it is the Holocaust that has been largely understood in western thought as the primary event for which representation is always inadequate or impossible. This has been debated extensively, in particular its relationship to other traumatic events and genocides of the twentieth century, yet it seems clear that the horror of this event, with its industrialization of death, marks a shift in the Euro-American world view, one that can be characterized as a questioning of modernist tenets precisely because of the inconceivable nature of its death and destruction. Hence the Holocaust has been seen as a topic too volatile, too sacred and too unimaginable, its representations subject to stringent moral codes. How then can we interpret the immense outpouring of works in literature, art and popular culture that have attempted to make sense of this event, of the brutality, the obliteration of whole communities, the bureaucratization of death and the capacity to survive? How can we deal with Adorno's statement that after Auschwitz it is barbaric to continue writing poetry? One could read it as profoundly disabling in that it renders all attempts at interpretation of the Holocaust as suspicious. Yet one can also see how this statement forced an examination of the question of representation in general and helped lead to a quest for new, non-modernist forms of engagement with history and memory.

In Caught by History, van Alphen rereads Adorno's statement as an objection not to representation, but to the potential "transfiguration" or aestheticization of the event through representation. He argues that Adorno's objection was not to all artistic representation or expression, but to those images or artworks that could be seen as forms of aesthetic pleasure or redemption. According to van Alphen, Adorno's statement has been used to affirm a dichotomy that Adorno himself would not have embraced: the distinction between historical and imaginative discourses of the Holocaust. The suspicion of artistic expression of the Holocaust, prompted by Adorno, upheld a tyranny of positivist historical practice, demanding fact where it could not be established, denigrating fiction, requiring empiricism and dismissing aesthetics as a falsifying practice. Van Alphen intervenes into this paradigm of Holocaust representation, in its opposition of the historical and the imaginative, by proposing the concept of the "Holocaust effect." He uses this term in contrast to Holocaust representation to describe works that allow readers/viewers to experience a certain aspect of the Holocaust. History, he argues, is experienced precisely through the imaginative (in art and literature). For van Alphen,

In such moments the Holocaust is not re-presented, but rather presented or reenacted. . . . Our access to this past is no longer mediated by the account of a witness or a narrator, or by the eye of a photographer. We will not respond to a re-presentation of the historical event, but to a presentation or performance of it. Our response, therefore, will be direct or firsthand in a different way.

One individual who van Alphen believes accomplishes this is the Dutch artist Armando who has dedicated his life to creating a metaphorical engagement with World War II. Living in self-imposed exile in Germany since the 1970s, in his words "surrounded by the enemy," Armando has made it his project to enact the state of "being not-at-home." This performance of exile is the most striking aspect of Armando's work, precisely because its intent is not to discover a truth about the past but is instead a means of engaging with its elusiveness. Armando focuses on performing an "amazement" at the experience of the outsider, a performance of the "condition of the speaking-subject-unable-to-know." As van Alphen writes, "Armando does not understand the past in the moments of astonishment in exile - on the contrary; but he does keep alive the effect the past has on him. This reenactment of astonishment is a way of talking back to the past, an effort at keeping in touch."

Van Alphen is thus making the argument that the Holocaust can be understood and experienced only in forms that are essentially nonrepresentational. Along similar lines, Liss suggests in Trespassing through Shadows that the Holocaust as an event questions many of the capacities of the photograph - to represent or bear witness, to act as a site of mourning or to provide a history lesson. Like van Alphen, she argues that the Holocaust forced an important rethinking of the experience of representation and the mediation of the past in the present. She focuses on the definition of the documentary photograph as one that "involves a transactional exchange between the subject and the photographer," stating emphatically that "to call photographs depicting events, moments, and lives ruined by Nazi crimes in the Holocaust 'documentary' is a misnomer of catastrophic proportions." Yet at the same time she argues that postmodern engagements with photography "lead to an acknowledgment of the indispensability of the unheeded documentary photographs as well as the formulation of necessary new questions about their contemporary employment." For Liss the Holocaust disrupts the traditional notion of the role of the documentary photograph that declared them artifacts of witnessing precisely because of the violent and traumatic nature of these images. Situating her analysis in the broader context of theoretical criticisms of the documentary as a social practice, she makes an argument for new forms of engagement with documentary images that will "keep the memory and the trauma at once approachable and unmasterable."

Three contemporary works that engage the trauma and historical dilemma of the Holocaust are considered pivotal in these books, significant both in their departure from and questioning of previous representational forms and in their self-conscious interpretation of history: the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the comic books Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History (1986) and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began (1991) by Art Spiegelman and the artwork of Christian Boltanski. Each can be said, in van Alphen's terms, to provide a "Holocaust effect" through unconventional forms of representation.

In its innovative architecture and creation of a particular trajectory through the history of the Holocaust that forecloses traditional practices of museum visitation, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in Washington, D.C. in 1993, incorporates many postmodern strategies of representing the past. While documentary images form a central aspect of the museum's telling of history, there are two forms in which they are exhibited in unusual ways - identity cards and the "Tower of Faces" Of these two, the identity cards form the more radical departure from traditional museum practice and also the more problematic. Liss discusses the impetus of the identity card project, in which each visitor upon arrival to the museum is "invited to register" for an identity card of someone who experienced the Holocaust. Each card displays a photograph and a brief description of the person's life. The initial plan was to have visitors receive a card for someone who correlated with their own age and gender, but the card project became less specific as the museum was overwhelmed with many more visitors than anticipated. Liss points out that the identity card project's replication of the Nazi activity of cataloging individuals was a deliberate strategy on the part of the museum to subject the visitor to an experience of the war rather than to "sanitize" history. As a strategy to establish empathy with the victims of the Holocaust, both those who died and those who survived, the identity card project asks museum viewers to step into a role and imagine themselves within someone else's life and, oftentimes, death. At the same time, Liss points out, the cards are potentially problematic because the viewer is asked to assume a "mock adoption" of the victimhood of another rather than to consider themselves as possible victims. She writes, "The current manipulation and presence of these images both reanimate and haunt the past lives of the people pictured. The photographs and the identity cards unintentionally yet translucently perform that lack of response as mute and potent witnesses."

While all of the images of the Holocaust carry with them the ironic reinscription of the present on the past - that is, our capacity to read the weight of this particular historical event upon them - it is the images of the lives that were so violently disrupted or destroyed by these political events that carry a particular poignancy. The prior innocence of these images - family pictures, snapshots and images of everyday life - takes on a deeply ironic meaning when read in the context of how those lives and that innocence were destroyed. The "Tower of Faces" comprised of over 1000 photographs of the daily life between 1890-1941 of former residents of a small shtetl town of Ejszyski in what is now Lithuania, accomplishes this most effectively. Visitors first pass through the tower space on a glass bridge that keeps them somewhat distant from the images. They return to the "Tower of Faces" on a lower floor after having toured the museum's displays about the extermination of the Jews and being informed that the entire town of Ejszyski was destroyed in September 1941 - there were no survivors. (The photographs were collected after the war by Yaffa Eliach, who, along with a few others in her family, had previously gone into hiding.) At this point, viewers must read the photographs as images of loss. As Hirsch states, "The Tower of Faces brings out most forcefully photography's connection to death, and thus the power of photographs as media of mourning." Precisely because visitors are asked to return to a time of prior innocence, they experience a more profound sense of loss than that provided by the most graphic and painful images of the Holocaust. As Liss writes,

Unlike the identity card project, which gets caught between performing as a pastiche history lesson and as a device for mourning, the similarly doubled obligation of the Tower of Faces acknowledges the riddled (im)possibility of mourning itself. . . . The hovering photographs in the Tower of Faces challenge the viewer's sense of precarious involvement in the terror and stage the entire apparatus to perform more as a fluctuating memorial rather than as a stable and self-assured monument.

Thus, the "Tower of Faces" images remind us of the compelling aspect of the documentary image: its capacity to hold in time a moment now lost, irrevocably destroyed and irretrievable.

Among the contemporary artists who have attempted to tackle the problem of Holocaust representation, Boltanski has been the most innovative and controversial. It is a testimony to his influence and impact as an artist that all three of these authors discuss his work. Liss quotes the director of the Holocaust Museum as stating emphatically that the museum "is not a Boltanski" - a "Boltanski" being a work in which history is both deception and obsession, simultaneously kitsch and deeply profound. More than any other artist, Boltanski represents van Alphen's concept of the "Holocaust effect" in which it is precisely the indirect reference to the Holocaust trauma that establishes its impact. The artist both affirms and denies the omnipresence of the Holocaust in his work; as he states,"My work is not about xxxxxxx it is after xxxxxxx."(4)

Boltanski's work takes the signifiers of the Holocaust - faded photographs, archival boxes, piles of clothing and shoes - and replicates them as a means of reflecting on the way in which this event haunts Euro-American culture. Boltanski can be seen as both a primary subject of postmemory and a central figure through whom the postmodern engagement with the past is realized. As Hirsch points out, Boltanski's personal history makes this focus of his work seem inevitable: he was born to a Catholic mother and a Polish Jewish father on the day that Paris was liberated; his parents had spent the occupation of the war hiding in their Paris home; and his middle name is Liberte. Boltanski's work is primarily focused on a manipulation and reconfiguration of the documentary photograph, establishing the ways in which the photograph, as a signifier of the past, can be reconfigured as a floating signifier. As Hirsch writes, "Boltanski signals more clearly the gap between memory and postmemory, the difficult access to that world, and the complex suspicion that surrounds photography's documentary claims in a postmodern and post-Holocaust world. Boltanski's early work, marked by this suspicion, is devoted to uncoupling any uncomplicated connection between photography and 'truth.'" In his "detective" work of deciphering history, Hirsch points out, Boltanski is actually interested in issues of collective identity and anonymity rather than a rediscovery of the individual.

In one of Boltanski's works, Altar to Lycee Chases (1986-88), he took a photograph of the graduating class of a private Jewish high school in Vienna. Rephotographing each image individually, he enlarged the faces of the students until each became a blur, a haunting image of dark eye sockets and a mouth. The photographs are exhibited on stacks of rusty biscuit tins, each lit by a desk lamp whose harsh light evokes both an interrogation and the glare of historical analysis. All that is known about these children is that they were students at Lycee Chases in Vienna in 1931; it is presumed that few of them, if any, survived the Holocaust. Van Alphen writes,

the remaining picture has no correspondence with a present reality: the faces of the children as they appear in the photograph have disappeared. This disappearance is acted out in extreme close-ups. We now see not the realistic illusion of a living subjectivity, as the standard view of photography and of the portrait would have it, but empty, blinded faces. And blinding is a figurative way of objectifying or even killing a person.

This work, according to van Alphen, produces a Holocaust effect by reenacting its effect, in emptying out the subjectivity of a people as a stage in the process of genocide. Thus his work is not about retrieving the identities of the lost children of Lycee Chases, but rather of demonstrating the process of their loss of self and their ultimate destruction.

Many of Boltanski's works address the question of the archive and in particular the fetishizing of the artifact in the Holocaust archive by both the Nazis and Holocaust historians. These works, most of which refer only obliquely to the Holocaust itself, confront viewers with a set of associations derived from the act of cataloging - boxes, drawers, lists, piles of belongings. In many of these works, the effect of the archive has little to do with the actual "archival" material. In a series of installations entitled "Inventories" (1973-74) Boltanski presented the belongings of an arbitrary selection of individuals - a few pieces of furniture, etc., which he then later admitted he had borrowed from friends - and in Reserve: Detective III (1987) he presented cardboard boxes printed with the faces of individuals who had been featured in the French tabloid Detective. It was implied that the boxes contained information about the individuals, but, as van Alphen points out, they were not archives, only their effect. In Canada (1988), Boltanski hung dense piles of clothes from the gallery walls in a reference to the term "Canada" used by prisoners at Auschwitz to refer to the barracks where the belongings of those most likely to have been killed in the gas chambers were kept - a term that Liss explains also referred to the pilfering of those belongings by prisoners for bartering and their mythic construction of Canada as a site of North American prosperity. In Reserve (1989) the artist placed clothing on the floor so that visitors would have to walk over it. Of this work, he stated, "People had to walk over them. For the spectators it was a very painful thing to do because you sank into them and it was like walking on bodies. So I turned them all into murderers. There was also a certain pleasure in walking on all that clothing, which they felt, so they were completely implicated in it."(5)

The role of Boltanski as trickster is evidenced here. His work is, according to Hirsch, "devoted to uncoupling any complicated connection between photography and 'truth.'" Among the three authors the most criticism of Boltanski comes from Liss, who sees his work as duping critics and deploying kitsch (because of the potentially easy sentimentality of his work) even as it intervenes in important ways into the question of Holocaust representation. He is presented by van Alphen as both a "deadly historian" in his work of archiving and cataloging and a "revivifying artist" whose work in such pieces as Shadows (1984) and Candles (1986) uses projections of films that stand for the dead as a means to bring the dead back to their "full, living presence." It is precisely the duality of the roles he deliberately constructs for himself that makes his work emblematic of a new form of historical engagement.

If Boltanski can be seen as a self-conscious manipulator, whose work is nonetheless a profound engagement with the effects of the past within the present, Spiegelman can be seen as a postmodernist of another sort, deeply self-conscious and self-reflexive, simultaneously cynical and emotional. All three of these books situate Spiegelman as an artist who has forever changed the codes of Holocaust testimony. He is, like Boltanski, an artist of postmemory, whose work has aided in rethinking the project of historical representation.

Maus and Maus II, Spiegelman's now famous comic books about his father Vladek's experience of the Holocaust, opened the question of Holocaust representation into a broader public arena than the work of Boltanski, winning the Pulitzer Prize and becoming an international best-seller. Depicting the Jews as mice, Poles as pigs and Germans as cats, Maus is a work that so radically departs from expected forms of representation that the risk it took was immense. The story, told in comic book fashion, is mediated by Spiegelman's rendering of his difficult relationship with his father at the time he was writing the book and his deeply ambivalent representation of Vladek as a survivor who is insensitive, miserly and racist. Hence, the tragic narrative of Vladek's survival of the Nazi invasion of Poland and of Auschwitz, the story of his reuniting with Art's mother Anja, the loss of their son Richieu during the war and Anja's subsequent suicide, is constantly interrupted by Spiegelman's mediation of his father, his expressions of anger and frustration - in effect, his refusal as a child of a survivor to treat his father and his story in unambiguous terms.

Hirsch's analysis of Maus as an example of postmemory demonstrates the ways in which Spiegelman's book fulfills the postmodern rethinking of history as defined by all three authors. Hirsch concentrates specifically on Maus's visual integration of actual family photographs into the comic book narrative as a means of disrupting the narrative. Family Frames explicitly discusses the means by which photographs were used after the war to signal both loss and survival. Many of these images are of family members who have been lost and hence operate as talismans of the absent. In Maus, Hirsch notes, Spiegelman uses a photograph of Richieu, the brother he never knew, as a means of disrupting the role of the photographic talisman. The photograph, which opens the dedication of the second volume of Maus, had been a fixture in Spiegelman's childhood home: "They didn't need photos of me in my room, I was alive! The photo never threw tantrums or got in any kind of trouble . . . It was an ideal kid, and I was a pain in the ass. I couldn't compete" Hirsch writes, "The photograph signifies death and loss, even while, as a kind of 'fetish object,' it disavows loss. The parents keep it in their bedroom to live with; Art competes with it..." At the same time, the image is recontextualized in Maus so that it can no longer be read in an unmediated fashion as merely a statement of prior innocence. It also forms, as Hirsch and Liss note, a closure in the story, as on the final page Vladek mistakenly calls Art "Richieu" as he tiredly gets into bed, allowing in a certain sense for Richieu's role to be coded as one between loss and survival.

In Family Frames the family pictures of the Holocaust function both as memory devices and as particular postwar announcements. Hirsch describes how some Holocaust survivors keep photographs of spouses and children killed in the war on their mantelpiece and relates stories of families who mailed photographs after the war to relatives living as refugees in South America as a means of announcing they were still alive. In Maus this particular role of the image is most startlingly realized in a photograph of Vladek taken shortly after he emerged from the camps. In the photograph, taken in a portrait studio for "souvenir" images, Vladek formally poses in a neatly pressed camp uniform. This identity performance of a camp inmate, Hirsch notes, is particularly disturbing and calls into question the very basis of the documentary Holocaust photograph. Hirsch writes,

This photograph both is documentary evidence (Vladek was in Auschwitz) and isn't (the picture was taken in a souvenir shop). This picture may look like a documentary photograph of the inmate - it may have the appearance of authenticity - but it is merely, and admittedly, a simulation, a dress-up game....Breaking the frame, looking intently at the viewer/reader, Vladek's picture dangerously relativizes the identity of the survivor. As listeners of his testimony, as viewers of Art's translation and transmission of that testimony, we are invited to imagine ourselves inside that picture.

As such, Maus achieves a kind of reversal of the animated and the photographic. As Liss notes, "In Maus, the entire realm of representation is turned upside down or, rather, inside out. Indeed, the comic book format maintaining the structure of Maus stands in for what documentary photographs usually narrate." Hence, Maus succeeds ironically in making the comic book animals more authentic than the disruptive insertion of the staged, performative photograph.

The question of survivor testimony, identity and witnessing is central to Holocaust representation, and Maus succeeds in its animation in both affirming and questioning any simple authenticity of survivor's "tales." Much of this derives from Spiegelman's ambivalent portrayal of his father, and in particular the painful and embarrassing interactions he experiences as the child of a survivor - when Vladek insists on returning half-filled boxes of groceries to the store so as not to waste the food, or when he throws away Art's favorite coat because he thinks it's shabby. The reader/viewer is always aware that the story they are reading is one mediated through the son and one that would not have been told without him. Yet in Holocaust representation the voice of the survivor remains the most important form of testimony, one by which all testimony is elevated to the role of calling on the world to witness injustice. Van Alphen notes that of the genres of representation of the Holocaust those that are "based on the act of testimony are the most highly valued," and among those the diary is particularly important. He describes the work of Charlotte Salomon. Her painted life history entitled Leben oder Theater? (Life or Theater?) (1941-43) is an example of "autobiography as resistance to history." Salomon, who died at Auschwitz at the age of 26, created a complex work with over 700 paintings combined with text and musical quotations. Made after several of the members of her family had committed suicide, it is a stunning meditation on questions of the gendered aspects of survival and life. Just before she was deported Salomon lived with her grandfather whom she had to resist both emotionally and sexually. Van Alphen writes that "her work is a way of fighting history - her family history and political history both."

It seems crucial that many of these representations of history are explicitly about family relationships and the mediation of memory through familial conflict. This topic of the family photograph and the kinds of familial gazes and subjectivities it embodies form the broader scope of Family Frames, which addresses a range of family images in addition to its discussion of family pictures in relation to the Holocaust. Hirsch uses Barthes's Camera Lucida as her point of departure precisely because of the ways in which Barthes hinges his analysis of the photograph on a discussion of family images, in particular an image of his mother, the one image he does not offer in the book. Hirsch writes,

This is the familial story we can read in Barthes's description - the mother's death and the son's mourning, his anticipation of his own death, the multiple and mutual looks through which mother and son are constituted as subjects in relation to each other. Family is structured by desires and disappointment, love and loss. Photographs, as the only material traces of an irrecoverable past, derive their power and their important cultural role from their embeddedness in the fundamental rites of family life, the rites Barthes performs in Camera Lucida and buttresses with his fundamental belief in photographic reference.

Barthes's influential and much debated theorization of the photograph as an emblem of mortality and death can thus be seen as one that he arrived at through the family photograph and autobiography. Hirsch explicitly deploys autobiography in Family Frames as a theoretical means of deciphering the familial subjectivity of these images. In her analysis of the circulation of family pictures and of artwork concerned with the meaning of family, she stages each chapter through a personal frame, enacting within the structure of her complex book a series of snapshots and a self-reflexive gaze that forms, as she states, "an album in itself." This sometimes borders on the deeply personal, in ways that some readers may find uncomfortable, but that is exactly the point, in a certain sense, of this book's ambition; it attempts to interfere with the alleged distance of theoretical criticism through autobiographical strategies.

The family is the center of volatile political debates and the central focus of psychoanalytic theory that Hirsch deploys extensively in her analysis. The tension between documentary and aesthetics, between the photograph as memory and as evidence, is particularly complex in family photographs. Hirsch argues that the look of the familial gaze offers a specific kind of subjectivity:

The familial look, then, is not the look of a subject looking at an object, but a mutual look of a subject looking at an object who is a subject looking (back) at an object. Within the family, as I look I am always also looked at, seen, scrutinized, surveyed, monitored. Familial subjectivity is constructed relationally, and in these relations I am always both self and other(ed), both speaking and looking subject and spoken and looked at object: I am subjected and objectified.

Hirsch focuses in many ways on the central dilemma of the photograph in its capacity both to reveal and to conceal, particularly in terms of familial relationships. She looks at a range of artistic engagements with family pictures, including works by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Sally Mann, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Lorie Novak, Cindy Sherman, Jo Spence and Carrie Mae Weems as well as literary texts by Marguerite Duras, Jamaica Kincaid, Sue Miller and others. From Sherman and Lacoue-Labarthe's performative investigations of the self and Spence's visual autobiography to Weems's "Kitchen Table" series, these works offer a range of deconstructive approaches to the role of the photographic subject. Among these, Meatyard's are particularly disturbing, both in their horrific enactment of the codes of a typical family album and in the subjects' refusal of photographic identity. Made at the end of his life and published posthumously in 1974, his Family Album of Lucybelle Crater consists of photographs in which everyone is wearing a grotesque mask. Framed around the fiction of another family, one that refers to a story by Flannery O'Connor, this album is both a mockery of the family album form and the poses of families within them, a haunting testimony to its impact. These images of friends and family, orchestrated by Meatyard when he knew he was dying, offer a provocative commentary on the relationship of the photograph to death, a direct challenge to Barthes. As Hirsch writes,

The album mocks the search for "lineage" that Barthes in Camera Lucida highlights as an element of reading family photographs ... Familiality is made grotesque, surreal, comic, yet the every day quality of the poses, the shabby informal clothes and the subtle tenderness of some of the gestures, do suggest that beneath the excessive performance of convention there may be stories of affiliation or conflict that the masks, and the conventions of family photography, will not reveal.

In her chapter on "maternal exposures" Hirsch focuses on the specifically maternal gaze and its importance in psychoanalytic theory as central to the child's subject-formation. Hirsch sees Mann's controversial images of her children in provocative, performative and confrontational poses as indicative of the social taboos that result from this emphasis on the maternal look. Mann's images offer a literalization, according to Hirsch, of the visual process through which subjectivity is installed. They trouble the viewer both in their visualization of the power of the maternal gaze and in their depiction of children in roles that defy social codes of innocence before the camera. Hirsch sees these images, like many of the other images she analyzes, as revealing the "family's unconscious optical relationships."

In Hayhook (1989), Mann created an image of the family sitting on a porch, in the middle of which is her daughter Jessie's overexposed naked figure hanging from a hay hook. The picture is shocking, both in its exposure of Jessie and in the inability in the final image of anyone in the family to see her. "What complicated unconscious optics are operating here?," Hirsch asks. "Is Mann revealing the exposure and vulnerability of childhood in a world of uncaring and self-involved adults? Or is she revealing her own fears, projected onto Jessie's taut body, fears of her own exposure as her images hang, like her daughter, from hooks amid uninvolved spectators?" Here the photograph is both a mechanism that offers insight into family dynamics or, as in the case of Meatyard, the means to deconstruct it simultaneously as a lens and a mask.

In the framework of familial looking and postmemory suggested by Hirsch and the analyses by Liss and van Alphen of the artworks through which the Holocaust has effect, we can ultimately see the means by which strategic autobiography forms a primary aspect of a postmodern anti-reckoning with the past. Each of these authors engages the self-referential aspects of the works they analyze and their own texts as a means of identifying both the necessity of addressing representation, particularly Holocaust representation, in a nondistanced mode and as a means of critiquing the illusion of objectivity of the detached pose. Van Alphen closes his book with a discussion of the house in which he lives in Amsterdam, a house designed and built by Jewish architect Harry Elte. Elte lived in the house from 1928 to 1943, when he and his wife were deported to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt. Van Alphen uses his experience of this house and its inscribed memories to reflect on the relationship of the sublime and the uncanny, specifically in terms of memory and history. According to Sigmund Freud, the uncanny is not simply the strange or foreign but the well-known and familiar that is experienced as unfamiliar precisely because it has been repressed. Van Alphen states that living in a house designed by someone who died in the Holocaust evokes in him uncanny feelings at the same time that the house itself is an example of the sublime. He states, "the experience of uncanniness can be overcome, I believe, when sublimity is allowed to happen. The possibility of sublime experience emerges through the dialectic between private and public, personal and collective" This process happens in part through the establishment of the house as a memorial, a testimony to the past, to loss and to the sublime. It is thus the establishment of art as a memorial, one that demands constant reflection and introspection, one that refuses, like Armando's "keeping in touch" to merely bury the dead.

In many ways all three of these books ultimately affirm the importance of memory as the means through which reworkings, engagements and confrontations with the past can take place. It is precisely in the controversies and tensions, in the conflicting stories and multiplicity of voices, in the desire to both deconstruct and question, that the past can be sustained and witnessed within the present.

NOTES

1. Theodor W. Adorno, "Cultural Criticism and Society" in Prisms, Samuel and Shierry Weber, trans. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981), p. 34.

2. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 64. This line opens the introduction of Marianne Hirsch's Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory.

3. Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations, Harry Zohn, trans. (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 83-109.

4. Christian Boltanski quoted in "Christian, Carrion, Clown, and Jew; Christian Boltanski Interviewed by Georgia March, Revised by Christian Boltanski" in Reconstruction (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 1990). As quoted in Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature, and Theory, p. 93.

5. Christian Boltanski as quoted in Andrea Liss, Trespassing through Shadows: Memory, Photography & the Holocaust, p. 80.

MARITA STURKEN is assistant professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (1997) and, with Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (forthcoming from Oxford University Press).