Elżbieta Janicka: Odd Place

‘…when we see […] a railway station called Treblinka

or Sobibór, we initially react with the same

disbelief as if someone had informed us that

in some remote corner of the earth researchers had recently discovered

hell (or heaven).’

Frank Ankersmit, Remembering the Holocaust

Elżbieta Janicka’s artistic journeys to the ‘odd place’¹.

Reflections on the past, memory, time and identity

‘Beyond the melancholy of the eternal flow of things, the illusory present of Heraclitus, shines the tragedy of the universality of an indelible past which condemns every initiative to being merely a continuation.’

Emmanuel Lévinas, Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism, in Esprit, Paris 1934, translated into Polish by J. Migasiński

In the present we find means capable of erasing the past; the time of art is not symmetrical with the course of collective history; in the making of a work, the individual and personal often enter into a game with the universal. ‘Throughout the world, we call for the advent of the time of memory,’ writes Pierre Nora, whose celebrated collection of texts Lieux de mémoire awakened interest in the problems of memory, time and identity. The fundamental concept in the discourse surrounding these problems is the therapeutic function of memory. On the one hand, speaking the language of psychoanalysis, it turns towards mourning and working through; on the other, it invokes the post-structuralist debate about the sublime, the inexpressible and transgression, and topoi close to Walter Benjamin’s concepts of fragment, apocalypse and redemption (guilt, shame, expiation, reparation, forgiveness, solace, fulfilment, purification, and so forth). The presence of the past reveals itself in material traces that shape space, such as memorials and sites of commemoration, and in the wound that the past leaves in individual memory.

Traumatic memory, understood as a response to an extreme experience for which the Holocaust has become the symbol and point of reference, resides in the recollection of a nightmarish past, in the memory persisting in subsequent generations: those who repress that past and those who—aware of the impossibility of representing the Holocaust through the generally accepted conventions of historical research and the expressive means of literature, visual art and music—risk expressing the inexpressible. In 1992, Saul Friedlander published a collection of essays entitled Probing the Limits of Representation². In his introduction, he states that addressing subjects such as the Holocaust in literature or art encounters a boundary of representation that should not be crossed too readily. ‘In the case of the Holocaust there is, after all, a radical difference between historical reconstruction and interpretation. The accumulation of knowledge about this catastrophe does not go hand in hand with a better understanding of it’³.

*

Elżbieta Janicka’s (b. 1970) minimalist, ‘silent’ photographs bear the names of places or localities, each of which is simultaneously a name/sign of the extreme experience of the ‘generation of memory’: Majdanek (Majdanek): 360,000 (200,000), Bełżec (Bełżec): 600,000 (550,000), Sobibór (Sobibór): 250,000 (250,000), Treblinka II (Treblinka II): 900,000 (900,000), Kulmhof am Ner (Chełmno nad Nerem): 310,000 (300,000), Auschwitz II Birkenau (Oświęcim-Brzezinka): 1,100,000 (1,000,000). Beside the place names are documentary figures indicating the numbers of victims murdered in the death camps built by the Nazis; the numbers in parentheses, the artist tells us, refer to victims corresponding to the Nazis’ definition of ‘Jew’. The photographs depict air; they speak of what cannot be uttered or represented—they concern disappearance and the erasure of traces. The artist’s actions seek to prevent the sinister and ruinous amnesia that is beginning to overcome us, blurring the outline of the mark left upon our times by the events of the Holocaust⁴.

Janicka’s deceptively silent photographs depict the air above or in Majdanek, Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka—places where German extermination camps stood and where railway lines converged, bringing Jews from the furthest reaches of Europe. ‘…all of them, without exception,’ the artist says, ‘lie within the post-war borders of the country where I was born. Though no one asked my opinion.’ During the Second World War, Poland became the stage upon which murderers and their victims, Germans and Jews, met. We called it the Holocaust. Michael Steinlauf writes: ‘The Poles themselves, meanwhile, became its witnesses from beginning to end’⁵.

The photographs in the Odd Place exhibition may be read as a question about memory, about our responses to the Holocaust and about the effects of that collective, painful experience considered on psychological and ethical levels. The images presented by Janicka were recorded on photographic film made by the widely known company AGFA, a subsidiary of the I.G. Farben conglomerate (Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG). The conglomerate participated in transforming the German economy for the purposes of war. It donated millions of marks to the NSDAP and SS. From 1939 to 1945, it took over chemical plants in occupied countries. It employed 200,000 workers, half of whom were prisoners—including those of Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau—and forced labourers from occupied countries. Pharmacological preparations and toxic substances were tested on prisoners in Nazi camps, including Konzentrationslager Auschwitz-Birkenau. The company producing the familiar AGFA photographic film also manufactured Zyklon B through Degesch, an I.G. Farben subsidiary.

The artist’s commentary prepared for the Odd Place exhibition situates our reception of her work through historical memory, whose burden marks banal products in common use today with the ambiguity of their innocent purpose. Their operation in daily life conceals another, reluctantly revealed layer: an anxiety tormenting our consciousness and the unbearable feeling that they once played some obscure role, that their ‘colourful’ innocence camouflages an earlier history now being zealously erased…

The serene squares of large, ‘empty’ photographs (137 cm x 137 cm), outlined by the black frame of a world, country and place, are disturbed by captions and titles informing us that we are confronting a place which, to almost every Pole, speaks of something monstrous yet incomprehensible. We activate our sensitivity, knowledge and memory; through the photograph’s ‘pure’ frame, we try to see the density of the air the artist photographed. Janicka does not avoid stating unequivocally that the works presented in Odd Place (2003–2004) refer explicitly to the Holocaust—the more explicit the more enigmatic the image before us becomes. The titles and commentaries accompanying the image/photograph leave no doubt, yet they simultaneously place us within the memory of sites that we reconstruct historically and which demand an interpretation and understanding of their contemporary existence.

Each work presents the air above places whose names have, over the years, become exceptionally legible signs of memory. The camera, its lens directed towards the sky, recorded on AGFA photographic film an image of something that forms part of our faith and knowledge, telling us that to make a journey to Poland’s eastern regions, to ‘portray’ the air in Sobibór or Majdanek in 2003 or 2004, to enlarge the photographs to 137 cm x 137 cm, and to attempt to ‘gaze into’ an image of the sky separated from the earth by a boundless desert of human ashes is an actexpressing the need not to forget, continually to touch the wound left by the Holocaust that took place on this soil. Referring to Frank Ankersmit’s essay Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Melancholia⁶, we may say that through her art Elżbieta Janicka in a sense answers the need both to work through mourning and to remain in a state of melancholy that prevents the wound from healing. According to Ankersmit, who employs Freudian concepts in his reflections, mourning is in a sense a natural condition following the loss of someone close, inscribed within human existence; melancholy here represents a neurotic state of illness, an inability of wounds to heal. Janicka’s black-and-white photographs depicting emptiness are filled by living memory located in a single person, in that person’s experience, grief and pain. This remains so even when they concern collective, political or generational memory. Anticipating Freud, Nietzsche recognised this simple fact when he wrote: ‘Only that which never ceases to cause pain remains in memory.’

The artist is aware that the place names captioning the successive black-and-white photographs carry meanings laden with history and the immensity of the drama witnessed by those lands; one cannot free oneself from the past, which endures in individual and collective memory. In these places, the desire forhistorical and moral amnesia is simultaneously annihilated by the particular materiality of memory preserved in the trees, shrubs and grass growing there… Through the associations evoked by their names, they seem to operate as a Mausoleum of Memory⁷. They accumulate everything we know and have heard about the extermination camps; once again our feelings and knowledge of the Holocaust are brought close to that reality. The names of these particular places (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Treblinka…) function as an intervention into memories, associations, knowledge and so forth that already exist and anticipate those memories. ‘Without knowledge of the Holocaust, the Mausoleum of Memory would be merely a list of strange and foreign names,’ Frank Ankersmit writes when analysing the role of monuments dedicated to the victims of Nazi crimes⁸.

These places, today often abandoned by people, seem in their desolation and in the artist’s individual encounter with them to release the ‘breath’ of the events that occurred there. Individual, intimate memory and the ‘cry’ of a place combine into an image bearing witness to the suffering of the Other.

Drawing on Emmanuel Lévinas’s reflections concerning the ethical significance of language in relation to the Other, let us briefly try to show that the philosopher’s critique of aesthetics can provide a basis for considering the representation of the Holocaust in art. Lévinas’s work is devoted in its entirety to the problems of the Holocaust’s cruelty. His ethical theory is a challenge to violence: a challenge in the name of the Other. Ethics—that is, justice—is founded on overcoming aesthetics, Lévinas indicates⁹. In her essay Disappearing Traces, published in Literatura na Świecie in 2004, Dorota Głowacka argues that despite the objections the French philosopher raises against the intellectual paradigm of representability, especially against the visual arts, and despite his distrust of all attempts to represent otherness, it is precisely Lévinas’s ethical theory that opens possibilities for thinking aesthetics ‘otherwise’.¹⁰ Lévinas speaks of art created ‘for the Other’, in which the individual is responsible not only to the Other but also for the Other’s transgressions. ‘In relation to the Other, the individual therefore occupies the position of a hostage, taking upon himself the Other’s suffering and poverty as well as the burden of his transgressions’¹¹.

Artists who, in both their work and ethical stance, seek to meet the task of expressing the suffering of the Other—to make a work representing the destruction of life so that the past but remembered presence of those lives might be preserved—place themselves in the role of witness, although they were not eyewitnesses themselves but only people who transmit their knowledge and thereby preserve the memory of traumatic events. The generations that came after the Holocaust are obliged to remember. We ourselves, on our own responsibility and according to our own conscience, should build the Mausoleums of Memory invoked by Ankersmit.

Elżbieta Janicka’s apparently objective black-and-white photographs are inscribed in time and simultaneously torn from their spatial location; understood in this way, they must be read thoughtfully and patiently. Their meanings cannot be read on their outer surface as we habitually recognise unambiguously documentary photographs bearing a political or historical message. This complicates their reception. In relation to the presented work, viewers must rely on associated analogy, insight into themselves, and explanations or commentaries that may, but need not, be supplied by the artist (captions, titles). The artist nevertheless makes our task easier by naming the places where she photographed the air above them, while simultaneously disturbing the tranquillity with which we confront an image suggesting that it ‘means nothing’, that ‘nothing happened’.

By using the name of a place as the title of each photograph in the Odd Place exhibition, Janicka provoked in our reception an impulse to turn towards the category of the trace as a sign of the past and a source of our obligations towards it.

The six photographs presented at Atlas Sztuki in Łódź depict fragments of the reality of a place; through them, we face the question of the impossibility of an ethical relationship with the absent face of the Other. The artist locates viewers within the context of history (as a space of expiation), memory, time (the years 1939–1945 and 2003–2004) and identity (‘the former German Nazi extermination camps lie—without exception—within the post-war borders of the country where I was born’, to quote her once again).

Elżbieta Janicka moves within certain areas of memory that activate the processes of thought, space, temporality, matter and imagination; presence and absence in a complex, reciprocal relationship with their recipient. The very act of engagement, the viewer’s decision to enter the space of Odd Place, the indifferent, ascetic ‘beauty’ of Sound Chamber, seems to oppose the triumphalism of our civilisation as expressed in images transmitted by the media and through electronic dematerialisation in virtual space. The works shown in the Łódź exhibition refer unequivocally to problems of memory and absence. Memory—the central issue touched upon here by the artist—should be understood as a displacement of past and present. Through this process of working through—to invoke the psychoanalytic term once more—the artist preserves a trace, a testimony to the past. Through such actions, it can be experienced and read by the viewer; it may open vast areas of space-time, challenging viewers to move beyond the works’ material presence in the gallery and prompting them to enter into a dialogue with the temporal and historical dimensions inscribed within them.

*

Our conceptions of the Holocaust depend on how historians, writers and artists manage to bring the image or shadow of the Holocaust closer to present and future generations. This process faces the challenge of the alleged elusiveness of historical material, which would force silence or demand the development of entirely new forms of expression. The outstanding German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969), who settled in America after the war, was among the first to approach the problem outlined here from the perspective of the imagination’s debt to history, seeking poetic and metaphorical forms in which human contact with the suffering of Holocaust victims and the cruelty of the death inflicted upon them would not be neutralised through aestheticisation.

By journeying to places wounded by history and by the memory of the death camps built there by the Germans during the Second World War—places whose present inhabitants struggle with a distorted, still unassimilated perception of the crime they witnessed involuntarily—Elżbieta Janicka seems to cross the boundary, postulated by Adorno, of the need to seek appropriate poetic and metaphorical equivalents for the suffering of Holocaust victims. Making art so austere and minimalist while referring to matters as fundamental as the past, memory and identity, the artist creates a ‘space of working through’ the traumatic history saturating the air, clouds, wind carrying ash and dust, smoke, birdsong and the intensity of nature reborn after many years.

August 2006

*Dr Eleonora Jedlińska, art historian and assistant professor at the University of Łódź. Member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA).

1. ‘Odd place,’ Elżbieta Janicka writes, ‘is colloquial shorthand for “a place in the odd-numbered benches”. One of the many instruments of exclusion used on the European continent since the Middle Ages. A synonym for the “ghetto benches” established in 1937 by the majority of rectors of higher-education institutions in Poland—with the consent of the minister of religious affairs and public education—in response to a demand formulated in 1923 by the All-Polish Youth on behalf of Polish nationalist parties, organisations and circles. The administration of the University of Warsaw began marking student record books with two small rectangular stamps: “Place in the even-numbered benches”. “Place in the odd-numbered benches”.’

2. See S. Friedlander, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution”, ed. S. Friedlander, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992.
3. See E. Domańska, introduction to Pamięć, etyka, historia. Angloamerykańska teoria historiografii lat dziewięćdziesiątych, Poznań 2002, p. 18.

4. See Z. Amishai-Maisels, Depiction and Interpretation: The Influence of the Holocaust on Visual Arts, Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993.
5. M. C. Steinlauf, Bondage to the Dead: Poland and the Memory of the Holocaust, Syracuse University Press, 1997, p. IX.

6. F. Ankersmit, Remembering the Holocaust: Mourning and Melancholia, translated into Polish by A. Ajschtet, A. Kubis and J. Regulska, in Pamięć, etyka i historia, ed. E. Domańska, Poznań 2002, pp. 163–184.
7. See ibid., p. 173.
8. Ibid., p. 174.

9. See E. Lévinas, Totalité Infini, Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1961, p. 173.
10. See D. Głowacka, Znikające ślady: Emmanuel Lévinas, literackie świadectwo Idy Fink i sztuka Holocaustu, in Literatura na Świecie 2004, nos 1–2, pp. 105–125.
11. Ibid., p. 111.