Survival in Auschwitz

I have just finished Primo Levi's memoir of his year in the notorious death camp (or as he calls it, the "Lager"). Unlike my usual encounters with the Holocaust, which have been primarily visual (film, photographs), I do not feel that overwhelming wave of horror, that shame of our species, that fear and revulsion. Instead of crushing emotion, I feel hollow, without real thought or imagination - as if someone had come along and swept out all the clutter, or silenced a clamoring crowd. I do not know how to react to this tale of Sig.Levi's, which he tells with a careful dignity that is both inspiring and unnerving.

I did have initial reactions to the opening of the story. The questions were the usual suspects. Would I have rallied against the Nazis? Would I have informed on my neighbor? Would I have taken in an escapee? Would I have pled the cause in other nations? And then, would I have escaped or survived? Most of these hypotheticals, in which one's judges one's own moral conviction and courage in a historical context are ridiculous. I cannot know myself in that way as I have experienced nothing remotely similar to the Final Solution. Furthermore, the questions form an escapist's arsenal in his/her battle against self-damnation. "As there is no such situation," I say in my deep recesses, "I clearly cannot judge myself." But there are situations of a different kind that demand my attention and action, and I might make a small difference if I set myself to those tasks rather than wondering what I would do if the world fell apart (although I know all the chicken littles in the US think that it already has, as if someone patting them down at the airport means that they must live in fear and suspicion the rest of their days). These questions, to which I'm accustomed, fell away as the book progressed.

Then I conducted the next rigorous internal interrogation (which never results in taking action by the way) about how I can live with my consumerism, my outlandish materialism, my petty complaints, my generous store of self-pity when there has been such monstrous suffering. When there currently is so much monstrous suffering. Am I not like the German people in 1939, standing by while the world becomes an ever-more dangerous and inhumane place? In these inquiries, I am never courageous enough to challenge the status quo, to answer the problems I observe in my home land every day. I somehow feel responsible for the planet's yawning expanse of despair and pain. "Perhaps," I say to myself, "if you lived less well, if you worked tirelessly for an NGO, or better yet, if you to had a share in their plight, you would be a better person (and therefore be relieved of guilt)."

Among the many lessons of "Survival in Auschwitz," the most surprising was the admonition to observe and cherish always the fruits of freedom. At one point in the retelling, Levi says, "If from inside the Lager, a message could have seeped out to free men it would have been this: take care not to suffer in your own homes what is inflicted on us here." It has occured to me that I am incessantly disappointed with the bounty of my life because I have never taken notice, always taken for granted my limitless freedom and for the most part, good fortune. My classes in Judaism often instructed that rituals devoted to appreciation of every activity, every normal moment of one's life have some interaction with happiness. I have only just now understood begun to understand those teachings.

During the narrative, Levi emphasizes the greatest crime perpetrated on the men who survived Auschwitz was the diminution or complete robbery of their humanity. He indicates that some found solace and redemption in mundane but civilized behaviors, like polishing their shoes or cleaning their faces, even though such observances never obtained the ordinary objective. During his initiation to the camp, another inmate advises, "...that precisely because the Lager was a great machine to reduce us to beasts, we must not become beasts; that even in this place one can survive...and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization." And though Levi says near the conclusion of the book, "We lay in a world of death and phantoms. The last trace of civilization had vanished around us and inside us. The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat," I believe that Levi survived the camps because he kept the scaffolding of civilization in place around him. More importantly, he was able to recount the silent massacre of a million stories like his own, which feat he would not have accomplished had he lost himself as a man.

The real weight of the book is in the particular way in which Levi bears witness. Through Levi I have journeyed into the extermination camps as a victim rather than an observer. In doing so, Levi has allowed me to share his burden and relieve mine. I have lived his story in a small way and thereby achieved his purpose in writing. I will not forget the forgotten. By remembering vicariously, I help to undo the temporary victory of The Lager - I retake the souls of men extinguished while they were living.

Living at The Whitney

Joan Mitchell isn’t the only major exhibit at The Whitney – there’s also Michel Rovner’s “The Space Between,” a photography exhibit, a grouping of Oldenburg drawings, and of course the permanent collection of the museum (which is about to expand to previously unthinkable dimensions according to the The New York Times).

Lightning unfortunately did not strike (with the writing illumination) until after I had swept through the “Visions from America: Photographs from the Whitney Museum of American Art 1940-2001” and the “Claus Oldenburg Drawings” exhibits. Consequently, I don’t have much to say on these exhibits (insert sigh of relief from audience). The Oldenburg exhibit – so who knew the guy could actually draw those giant hamburgers and safety pins? In “Visions,” the photographs are sketchy – some are exquisite, others humdrum. Many of the earlier photographs seem less staged and more interested in catching emotion or the sudden perfection of light hitting New York City street puddles. I must warn the next visitor to this exhibit – there is a shockingly realistic photo of a decapitated obese man. The image has not left me, no matter how many times I’ve requested its speedy departure (particularly during meals).

I won’t spoil the newly available tour de force on audio (free!) with ruminations on the permanent collection. But I’d like to relay some of the quotes I heard related to a few of the paintings (with just an iota of my own commentary):

“Early Sunday Morning” by Edward Hopper – a critic says that the work displays the “desolate inner landscape of America.” And again of Hopper (The Whitney is Hopper’s designated repository), another artist said, “Hopper could create mood through color and shape alone.” I suppose this factored heavily in his usual omissions of human faces and bodies in what are ultimately very human settings. For Hopper, I think, absence speaks volumes.

Color must “stir up an exquisite sensation,” said Oscar Bluemner, in describing what he did with heavy black lines dominated by stark yellow, white and red in “A Situation in Yellow.” His red skies are both ominous and darkly luxurious; his screaming yellows imply tantalizing fear; his thudding outlines play like the cymbal crash in Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” He seems to be creating, at least in the Whitney’s abbreviated collection of his work, a space in which passion and cruelty, abyss and typhoon commingle.

The last exhibit I encountered at The Whitney was by far not the least. Michel Rovnerin, in “The Space Between,” clearly has risen above her many peers who use multimedia without craft or concept. She oscillates between film and stills, harnessing the power of technological form to create provocative content, rather than relying on the innovation of form only.

She filmed many of her subjects in the vast expanses of dusty surfaces in Israel and Eastern Europe, then extracted stills from the scenes and altered the stills with chromographic plates, inkjet, or screening. In “Untitled” 2002 (looped footage of people walking in a line, tiled vertically – like a view of of ten moving sidewalks, one atop the other), she projects animation as the kind of hopelessness, futility and perhaps even resignation that mark post-modern culture.

The Whitney’s commentary says of Rovner’s work, as displayed in “Force,” "Red Field,” and “Blur,” that her isolated figures against hazy, empty backdrops indicate a kind “primal behavior” where everyone is “struggling against wind and sand.” Her fantastic piece titled “Mutual Interest” finds the same desert behaviors in modern warfare. In this work, two screens converge in the corner of a small dark room and a short film plays with a soundtrack alternating between sounds of bombing and birds chirping. The black-and-white film splices together footage of silhouettes of migratory birds falling and flapping furiously with clips of old B-52’s. The effect was mesmerizing.

The Whitney’s Introduction to “Space Between” reads, “Michal Rovner has spent the past two decades making art that probes the boundaries between different levels of reality – between presence and absence, ambiguity and fact.” For me, her work, in carrying such an exploration, is both jarring and meditative. Too bad they didn’t give me her book instead of Joan Mitchell’s.

Looking for Meaning at The Whitney

As opposed to my lightning speed “see by osmosis” method of moving through museum exhibits, I decided to slow myself down with a pen. Last Saturday at the Whitney I was suddenly possessed with the notion of filling my weblog with high art, critical thinking, and elegant composition. So I think I’ve got a handle on the first….

According to the Whitney’s press release, “Showcasing both Mitchell’s distinctive brand of Abstract Expressionism and her fierce dedication to her art, the fifty-nine paintings reflect her struggles and the artistic triumphs she achieved in an era when men dominated American vanguard art. “ The Whitney makes Joan Mitchell out as some kind of feminist painter heroine - a modern-day Joan of Arc promulgating the succession of the American Abstract Expressionists to the throne. Her paintings seemed hardly heroic and what innovations in style she promoted, she generally appropriated from Rothko, DeKooning, and Pollock (also known as stealing when the appropriated parts are greater than the synthetic whole). Nonetheless, I found her middle period (the 70’s) more enticing and generally more skilled and sophisticated.

The exhibit’s main entrance houses “Cross Section of a Bridge.” Brushstrokes are reminiscent of DeKooning’s Woman I, though the coloration is more along the lines of Kandinsky (not one of my faves). I did like the small shapes of washed color asymmetrically placed in the bottom right corner. The right hallway leads off into her early period, which is a miasma of brightly colored swathes with lots of white peeking through. I found these painting almost wholly without content, aesthetic or otherwise (and Pollock is my favorite painter). The smaller ones during this period are much nicer, in my opinion, than the larger pieces – she takes greater care apparently when working with less canvas.

Continuing to the right (now probably directly behind the entrance hall), we encounter later works from the late 1960’s and early 70’s. She appears to have matured in her style – her color combinations are more surprising, less primary, and she incorporates shaping elements with Rothko-like squares of color and more objective outlining of forms. She is also texturizing more, giving the paint more life and movement.

“Salut Sally” circa 1970 is still sticking somewhat with your basic blues, greens, yellows, and reds but she comes up with something different. She cushions large blocks of color with intermittent fields of short, layered brushwork. Paint drips over matte gray under these combinations as if to indicate a falling away of color, a diminution of paint and painterliness. “La Ligne de La Rupture” is even more exciting. She’s more overt in her Rothko incorporations here but interrupts the color blocks with lines of texturized paint in yellow and white – the grouping creates a sharp but somehow subtle contrast. “Blue Territory” (1971) brings in muted and earthly colors and focuses mostly on using differently-sized rectangles. “Clearing” (1973”) is a very nice grand-scale work with doughnut-like shapes in lavender balancing dark squares across a mostly white field.

I really liked three paintings and found that they mostly redeemed the exhibit for me: “Wet Orange,” “La Vie en Rose,” and “Salut Tom.” “Wet Orange” (the name says it all) is a mammoth triptych that sort of resembles that paved surface of an ancient European alleyway, but with orange, maroon, and periwinkle stones rather than slate. She achieves variation in a balanced way by mingling thinner rectangles with larger squares and changing the direction of rectangles in key places; she also obscures sharp lines and color differences with blurred patches of short brushwork.

Rothko’s work must have heavily influenced “La Vie en Rose” and “Salut Tom.” She differentiates herself perhaps by using her messy signature marks in certain sections of the quadriptychs (say that 10 times fast). Both works are similar but with completely different color schemes. “La Vie en Rose” feels sort of desolate, alone, but in a feminine manner. “Salut Tom” is more like summer with its yellows and sky blue.

The last few rooms contain her later works (from 1980 to 92) some of which visually attracted me and others that harkened back to her first period. Like other artists of her generation, she seemed to regress to an immature style or was attempting to recapture her youth, depending I suppose on your point of view. In works like “Sunflowers” (1990-1) and “Untitled” (1992) she really plays fast and loose with paint, and not, in my opinion, to her advantage. I did like a couple of paintings from this era, including “L’Arbre de Phyllis” which fills the canvas with short brush strokes that form a fountain of green and yellow. From the early 80’s, I liked “Begonia” and “La Grande Vallee XIII” both of which are like American abstractions of Monet’s late works (which would make sense given her move to Paris in the 70’s).

All in all, the exhibit was enjoyable enough with a few remarkable canvases. I wouldn’t have bought the monograph but the Whitney gave it to me anyway (for membership). The paintings look better in the book than they did on the wall.

Stay tuned for another installment covering the other exhibits at The Whitney….

The Civic Virtues of Blogging

So I started reading "Republic.Com" by Cass Sunstien (who incidentally co-wrote the text on Constitutional Law I studied in law school). In the first 15 pages, I have found a way to disagree with virtually every aspect of his viewpoint (a reaction he would applaud for somehow proving his point). In the first place, I'm not sure how he's going to fashion an entire book out of this topic. The introductory chapter seems to have exhausted every amplification of what I see as the stuff of dinner conversations. More importantly perhaps, I reacted immediately to his singular point that auto-filtering and specialization of media will diminish our capacity to participate in democracy. He further concludes that if we do not participate in democracy in a certain essential manner, we may lose the very freedoms that enabled us to filter and narrow media in the first place.

En Guarde Monsieur Sunstien (I’m sure he is quaking):

1. The majority of people reading internet news does not personalize or heavily filter their news because it’s too much trouble. Most people spend a lot of time aimlessly drifting in the web universe, picking up tidbits here and there, but mostly losing the information. It’s as if the subway lets us off at the Sargasso Sea every morning.

Television is a different story perhaps. With the advent of every specialized channel imaginable and TiVO (all available for a king’s ransom), I suppose people could end up watching only one channel or absorbing one kind of material. I’m not sure about the viewer statistics on television but I generally watch a channel I’ve selected from the guide because that channel has something interesting. There’s no real filtering here, only selection from a large set options presented constantly. But when you get down to it, the pickings are real slim. I cannot imagine any single channel broadcasting stimulating and entertaining material for an intelligent person for more than a few hours at a time (if that).

2. Broadcast TV sucks now and has always sucked. The major broadcasters like CBS, FOX, and NBC, are forced to appeal to the alleged tastes of the nation. First of all, even if there was such a thing as “national taste,” broadcasters choose their material based on what will satisfy their advertisers, who have an image to maintain that does not necessarily reflect even the average aesthetic. Also, attempting to fit shows into a mode that will offend no-one but grab the attention of everyone makes for a simplistic and almost totalitarian programming regime. If viewers are switching from NBC to HBO and Showtime, it’s because many of us cannot tolerate the pandering to so-called family values – the inane plots, superficial themes, and depressingly sunny dispositions. We are particularly unenthusiastic about broadcast news. When local news and even CNN is not busying itself with reportage on a curing gingivitis and trendy diets or talking up rising violent crime statistics, they’re doing human interest stories and stirring the pot with reports of terrorism and child abductions.

If newspapers no longer sell like hotcakes all over America, television, not the internet, is the perpetrator. You can’t beat televised information with a stick – it’s a powerful, manipulative, and even coercive drug. The internet has nothing on TV; TV rules us with an iron fist. Television manufactures consent in a way that no amount of filtering can.

So in fact, these “general intermediaries” (Sunstien’s term for general interest publications and broadcast channels) will be our undoing if they continue on the tack they have initiated. In a savage hunt for “share” and ensuing rise in ad revenue, these intermediaries churn out the same meaningless dribble day after day to cater to the lowest common denominator. Broadcasters create in the mind of their viewers a monolithic sense of events and opinion. These general intermediaries choose what we will know, feel, and eventually, how we will vote. This is the heart and soul of a functioning democracy?

3. Filtering does not diminish but rather enhances the robust nature of our democracy (well about as robust as it can be with only 30% of citizens voting on any given elections). Weblogs in particular allow people to actively participate in publication of their own perspectives on recent information. What a weblogger finds interesting, he shares with others – talk about connection! Imagine a world in which we all have time to blog with vigor.

Proactive even creative interaction with information not only encourages bloggers to seek out challenging and intriguing headlines but invites bloggers to find more and better sources. Consider this scenario: when you first start blogging, you may notice that you’ve selected all front page items from the New York Times. This leads you to conclude is not a value-add to the community, because after all, the New York Times has already posted a front page and it probably looks better than yours does. So you go and find other, perhaps alternative media sources, like Salon.com, and happen upon news aggregators, like newsisfree.com, that blow your mind with all the different publications available. Now, in order to attract more visitors to your site, you provide bits from all over the place with thoughtful, insightful (you think) commentary. Now we have a little newspaper that has not only one voice (yours) or the voices of the reporters/editors of the New York Times, but potentially hundreds of diverse voices.

4. Blogging and bulletin boards enables users to reach out to one another bi-directionally. Mass media on the other hand is a one-way communication where a small, elite group of individuals perform the filtering for an enormous pool of recipients, who passively absorb (and generally either regurgitate or pass without notice). Weblogging is “Here’s the New York Times and my opinion about the New York Times” and in a network of blogs perhaps, a response from another blogger, “And here’s mine.” Media is not discursive; people create discussions. As the internet is a highly interactive and dynamic media, I see no better way to build a thriving democracy.

The Times, Washington Post, and even CBS news online should be grateful to bloggers. I probably only read The Times once a week before its online edition, and even online I only scanned the headlines. Now to build a more interesting weblog, I scour The Times, Salon, The Nation, and news aggregators for articles that piquq my interest. This phenomenal revolution for me occurred when I need to create a specialized newsfeed for a client site too. I found that as I sought out news on a particular topic, in that case non-profits, I was coming across a large and varied set of sources and events. I also found myself reading many articles and thinking critically about them because I needed to select certain items for the log. My act of filtering expanded, not shrank, my knowledge boundaries.

The Internet and general intermediaries can work together infinitely well. Before weblogs and RSS, these media monoliths decided what I needed to hear and how I would hear it. Now these intermediaries serve me and allow me to critically act on their information. I am BLOGGER – hear me roar!

Welcome to AI.

My name is Michelle. And I'm addicted to the internet. And to digital cable television. I should probably throw those Snackwell's Mint Chocolate cookies in there for good measure. Oh yeah, and I seem to have a problem with buying things I don't want or need and selling them six months later for less than a 1/10th of the original price on ebay.