Holocaust installation by Santiago Sierra
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Santiago Sierra is known for his provocative performances, which have included paying refugees from Chechenia to remain inside cardboardboxes, giving money to young Cubans for the priviledge of tattooing their backs, dying the hair of Africans blonde to make them look European, and spraying 10 Iraqis immigrant workers with insulating foam. But the Spanish artist provoked outrage among Jewish groups in Germany yesterday with his latest installation - a homemade gas chamber set up in a former synagogue.
The artist has parked six cars outside the synagogue and attached their exhaust pipes to the building using plastic tubes. It is then filled with deadly gas. Visitors are invited to go inside one by one wearing a gas mask, escorted by a firefighter. Before being allowed in, they have to sign a disclaimer stating they realise the room is full of carbon monoxide. The project opened to the public on Sunday, creating huge queues, and runs until the end of April.
Sierra says the installation - entitled 245 cubic metres - is a protest against the "banalisation of the Holocaust". However, Jewish leaders in Germany are furious. They described the installation in the Pulheim as "an abuse of artistic freedom". UPDATE: Officials in Pulheim have temporarily suspended the "art installation. Via trendbeheer < The Guardian. Images Netzeitung and The Guardian. Photo gallery in Der Spiegel. |
I'm a little torn about the displeasure of Jewish leaders over this exhibition. I understand that any reproduction of such heinous acts will not be welcome with open arms. Still, this performance seems to be a very poignant and powerful look into what so many Nazi victims went through. With so many holocaust survivors gone due to age, it is all the more important to keep the public aware of what happened.
Granted, this is easy for myself to say not being Jewish. For those who lived through it or had family members who lived through it, they don't need another reminder.
not only do i agree with you but i'm also relieved that the first comment i got for this post is yours. i thought at some point that maybe i should not allow comments on this story. when i post something like this i sometimes end up receiving many racist or obtuse comments and i always wonder how much i can censor them.
I also agree with PJ and I think that the amount of criticism that Sierra has to take right now is pure hypocrisy and just comes from the usual suspects that stand ready to comment on any artistic work related to the subject. Ralph Giordano is cited in Spiegel having said that it's no art at all and tasteless because it ridiculed "the constant fear of death" that he and his family along with all jews had to endure.
Well, if you go inside a room that's full of deadly gas, knowing that you'd die if you just took off the mask... It's very direct imagery that Sierra is employing here, but what would be closer to Giordano's sentiment than that? And much more impressive than the abstraction of history, I guess.
The project at once strikes me as immediately valuable yet somewhat irksome at the same time. Maybe that's not a bad thing in itself.
My main concern with it would not be on the grounds of possible offense through ridicule but rather that it runs the risk of trivialising the Holocaust by turning it into a banal fairground attraction with "huge queues" and all awaiting the thrill of a "ride o' death".
Still, overall I'd agree with Sascha that the powerful visceral nature of the act of being in the room lends integrity to the work. I question the symbolism of using cars though, is he making a modern ecological statement as well? If so this would be misplaced and undermine its worhiness.
CJ
just great. i did a project earlier this year with gasmasks,
suits, and tubes attached to the exhaust pipe of a running car...
Hey PJ,
How does this exactly show people "what so many Nazi victims went through"?
He's letting them wander around (one by one) with a gas mask in a big nice room full of gas (with a fireman holding their hand). And this is supposed to feel like, sitting in the back of a truck, with another 40 people, scared to death, without gas masks choking on gas?
I apologize for not seeing how this helps people understand what people went through during the Holocaust.
This "installation" just feels like questionable "art" for the sake of generating controversy. I don't see the artistic value in this, sorry.
- Rotem.
Any artistic attempt to deal with the Holocaust is bound to come up against those who believe that it still lies outside the realm of artistic representation. For what its worth, I disagree with that take but think this work adds rather than detracts from the banalisation it, one assumes, seeks to address.
It seems like the purpose of the piece is to create controversy. Just in this webpage there are conflicting views regarding it. It is still interesting, because it creates an environment in which people will certainly feel unfamiliar and in danger -out of their ordinary experiences. Still, to me, it seems like the theme is secondary.
In my opinion, the importance of this project lies in its historical reverberations. Sierra choses to offer an alternative to banal memorials that mark this tragic event, precisely because the holocaust is a recurring history. The 6 millions Jews that were killed for their belongings are mirrored in the our present. When entering this void one is faced with the immediacy of their own death - it does not try to create empathy for the victims. By making this a 'living' museum of death, we are provoked to face gross injustices at the hand of Capital in our own society. Nevertheless, possible failures of the 245 cubic metres project might be that by attemtpting to escape a trivialisation of the holocaust and a banality of memory, perhaps the form of the work overshoots this target and ends up turning the experience into a spectacle. Desik has a valid point in this regard. But, if you were to imagine the claustrophobia of a gas mask, also restricting one's vision, and again the immediacy of ones own breathing and the fragility of life. The experience of occupying that empty space would be (i imagine) a fearsome one and touch the individual. A trait that all good art should strive to bring to its audience.