A Visual Archaeology Through Drawing
Why do I keep going back to sites of Holocaust memory and how might it be possible for me to use drawing as a tool to excavate a past personally unlived? Foucault describes his approach to writing history as archaeology, where discursive traces of the past are investigated in order to write a ‘history of the present’. This expresses a desire to link with something beyond ourselves. The extent to which my identification with the victims, through the writing of Primo Levi, (1989) Paul Celan, (2002) and Robert Desnos (2005), will also be examined as I formulate my visual responses. My research will test subject and practice, investigating the relationship between both.
My research is timely, in an era of Holocaust history without living survivors. What does this history mean for me and for who I am? Is it only through the mediation of art that a response to such events can be articulated, making marks and gestures to evoke something that isn’t there anymore? In Figuring it Out (2003) Colin Renfrew makes a case for the parallel visions of artists and archeologists in how they both excavate meaning. Lambros Malafouris (2013) who like Renfrew adopts a cross-disciplinary approach to further understand the intertwining of the mind with the material world, writes of a ‘hypostatic approach’ where the substance, essence, or underlying realities of ‘things’ are as important in the excavation process as the ‘objects’ themselves. I will be using drawing as my means of archaeology. A further intertwining.
The first phase of my research will be situated in relation to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, because for him ‘perception’ as an expressive and creative concept is intimately linked with artistic practice. I will focus on his ideas of space, sensing and the body as they appear in the Phenomenology of Perception (2012) and I will ask what these ideas mean for my relationship to sites of Holocaust memory, being as I am, both subject and object. ‘Touch and touched’. (Merleau-Ponty p98 on double sensations.) This will mirror the hypostatic approach of (Malafouris) and operate at the intersection of existence and essence (Merleau-Ponty p130). Victoria Grace-Walden asks the same fundamental question in her PhD study, ‘how do I relate to the tragic past of a place of holocaust memory’.
Architect and author Christian Norberg-Schultz writing on Architectural Phenomenology asks how placeness should be determined and how meanings present in a given environment can be uncovered. I will do this making visual and literary responses on site and through work developed later. These intuitive, gestural and contemplative drawings will build a resource that will be later scanned, layered and erased. New meaning will be excavated and revealed in this way, interpolated in images of the place and of myself. I will produce notebooks and journals using a range of different tools and media. Each approach yielding a different aspect and nuance, further testing the integrity of the materials. This work will culminate in an exposition, setting forth a body of investigative research explaining my findings.
Merleau-Ponty describes the ‘intertwining’ of subjective experience and objective existence as a ‘chiasm’, suggesting that subjectivity arises from the space ‘in-between’ these bodies of experience. I intend to investigate this gap through writing and the ‘happening’ of drawing and how it begins to define me. Drawing in this way becomes an event and connects with perfomative possibilities where the ‘Space of Encounter’ can perhaps become defined in a more multi-sensorial way.
Christian Boltanski in “The Missing House,” 1990 on Grosshamburger Strasse, Berlin, a memorial space dedicated to ‘absence’ and German artist Daniel Blaufuks in his struggle to understand the reality of the Terezin concentration camp, reckoning with what he calls “the colour of memory” are two examples of artists in the field who are interrogating this ‘gap’ between the subjective and the objective.
Visual responses made at the Plaszow site (visits specified on my timeline) and those responses made later, will afford me the opportunity to reflect on the dynamic of absence and presence. Both are contingent on what I don’t and cannot know. The concept of ‘the Emergent Subject’ is then central to my methodology, where narratives form from the resonances between materials, ideas, objects and subject.
In ‘On Not Knowing, How Artists Think, Rachel Jones emphasizes how this state of not knowing is “what makes us think, ask questions, and seek to understand”. In the early stages of my research, I will also examine the morphology / structure of my own drawing as my primary tool of expression in making a visual response.
The locus of my research is the site of the Plaszow concentration camp, chosen for the following reasons;
• It is distinctive from Auschwitz due to the scarcity of the original camp infrastructure remaining.
• It is a road much less travelled. Whilst tourism exists it is by comparison, relatively uncontaminated.
• It is arterially connected to Kraków and the Podgorze Ghetto in particular.
In archaeology, it is possible to identify interventions that leave visible traces in the landscape revealing what is buried and because Jewish Halacha law forbids actual excavation, it becomes necessary to read and interpret the landscape in this way. My research will develop in year 3 to respond similarly to the landscape as a site where ‘placeness’ has been obscured and can only be located (intuited) through trace. The archaeology of these spaces become then a meta-narrative for the excavation of personal meaning and identity and begins to provide a framework to answer my principal question of “why (do) I keep returning to this place”?
Jean-Luc Nancy (2013) has said that “Drawing is the gesture of a desire that remains in excess of all knowledge”, meaning perhaps that at best, it is a response to an instinct, a stimulus that is outside of our conscious and predetermined world, only becoming tangible once it is formed. Here the reckoning begins