|
|
October 31, 2003
Humanity of the victims
Barbara Shilo's exhibit at the VHEC finds new ways to teach about
the Holocaust.
PAT JOHNSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
Lines of desperate people, armbands identifying them as Jews, trudge
with a few possessions along the sides of a road in Barbara Shilo's
painting "Deportation to Annihilation." From a centrepoint
of the village, the lines of people march off to the left and to
the right, while the viewer, standing in the nearly vacant middle
with a couple of Nazi guards, cannot help but feel both isolated
and integrated into the plight of the people marching from their
familiar into an unknown future beyond the confines of the painting's
frame.
The image is one of a remarkable series currently on exhibit at
the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre by Shilo, a California
painter who was born in Germany but escaped the crisis in Europe
when anti-Semitism was rising, but had not yet reached its genocidal
climax.
Painting not from memory, but from documentary photographs held
by the archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Shilo's impressions
have an explicitly didactic intention. Art is not always improved
by such agendas, but Shilo's travelling exhibit, titled Silent Voices
Speak: Remembering the Holocaust, is a deeply affecting series,
largely because Shilo's style explicitly involves the viewer. The
artist achieves this involvement not merely through the depiction
of horrors, but through more subtle methods that may be particularly
effective to generations raised on television. Hundreds of eyes
look out at the viewer from the canvases in the exhibit, not pleadingly
nor desperately, in most cases, but merely with resignation.
Though it is a testament to the irreversible disaster of the Holocaust,
the exhibit does leave a viewer with a sense that one can help.
Shilo makes the point, in the literature accompanying the exhibit,
that her sole intent was chronicling and teaching the Holocaust.
As such, she enforces the view that realistic depictions of the
Nazi terror regime are an important way to ensure that events are
not forgotten, so not repeated.
But, since she is not herself a survivor of the camps, why not allow
the photographs in the archives to tell the story?
Shilo brings viewers into her images in an uncanny, disturbing way.
Some of her paintings bear close resemblance to the photographic
images on which they are based, but she has added color, which is
jarring in itself, since the photos we see of the era are almost
always black and white. By introducing color, the artist adds immediacy,
since color is both the way we see the world and the way we receive
our news now, be it on television or the Internet or in full-color
magazines or newspapers. Though the images are old and sadly familiar,
the added color gives a new perspective. Moreover, Shilo cuts out
and raises some of the people in her paintings, adding a three-dimensionality
to the depictions, which acts to bring the subjects even closer
to the viewer.
But these are not merely touched-up photos, either. Shilo has a
gifted sense for depicting the humanity of Nazism's victims. Whether
a mass of people in the lines of forced marches, the faces of children
behind barbed wire or the indescribable look on a woman facing a
firing squad, Shilo is scrupulous in maintaining the individuality
of her subjects. The exhibit is an explicit attempt to educate about
the Holocaust and, according to the artist, not an effort to view
the Shoah through personal experiences. This is a dangerous path
for an artist, risking the further dehumanizing of the individual
victims, yet Shilo deftly succeeds where she could very easily have
failed, by using her exceptional ability to link her subjects of
the past with her viewers of the present.
An example is "Auschwitz – Selected for the Gas Chamber,"
which is a nine-panelled painting of a crowded scene in the woods,
where women and children in the foreground, and men in the rear,
apprehensively await their fate. In the second frame, the men begin
to disappear and by the third are completely gone, along with some
of the children and women. As the images progress, there are just
three left, a woman and two children, then just a frightened girl,
then no people at all, just an abandoned sack and blanket which,
by the last frame, have disappeared, leaving no trace that any people
had been there at all.
One of the most ghastly paintings is "Conclusion to the 'Final
Solution,' " a vertical triptych with German soldiers and a
Christian clergyman united in a Nazi salute, below which lines of
striped uniformed inmates look down on fallen comrades who, in statement
on the fluidity of life and death in the camps, have fallen over
the division from the second frame into the third, which is a mass
grave.
A remarkable juxtaposition after liberation is depicted by the two
paintings "Funeral Procession After Liberation" and "Do
You Know Me?" In the former, an endless line of coffins is
carried by those left alive, suggesting that the experiences of
the camps did not end at liberation. The people in the coffins died
after they were freed, of diseases that an end to tyranny couldn't
cure. For those carrying the dead, one can only imagine the long
road to something resembling normalcy. Yet, in the latter painting,
a resilience is suggested, in the face of a young girl holding a
sign with her name. These photos were commonplace after the war,
as millions of European faces were sent around the world to find
any living relatives to reunite. The pretty, well-dressed child
smiles bright-eyed at the camera, belying no hint of what she's
been through.
There have been hundreds if not thousands of similar exhibits in
which photos or paintings of the Holocaust experience are meant
to inform and emote. Shilo's is one that succeeds with exceptional
effect at humanizing the destruction, not of six million, but of
one, plus one, plus one....
Silent Voices Speak: Remembering the Holocaust continues at the
Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre, downstairs at the Jewish Community
Centre of Greater Vancouver, 950 West 41st Ave., until Dec. 12.
Pat Johnson is a native Vancouverite, a journalist and
commentator.
^TOP
|
|
