Women in Dark Times (30 page)

Restoring an earlier moment of industrial history is therefore first and foremost an act of recognition and a tribute. In 2011, Shalev-Gerz was resident at the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, home to a huge collection of documents, artworks and objects centred on design from 1880 to 1945, including many artefacts and photographs that illustrate labour and workers from the Great Depression, the Russian Revolution and the two World Wars – the epochs that run from Luxemburg to Marilyn Monroe, which is where this book begins. Why, Monroe lamented, did the moguls of Hollywood, with no backward glance at their workers, just cut and run with the money, leaving no monument or museums behind? (These workers, remember, were the audience she had most wanted to reach.)
5
Although Hollywood is not part of it, nonetheless, through its meticulous attention to labour, the Wolfsonian could be seen as at least partly repaying this debt. Before Shalev-Gerz, it had previously commissioned artists, but it had never received a request from an artist to access so fully its own collection. Immersing herself in the local community and the life of the museum, she invited participants to choose an etching or photograph, describe it in front of a camera and place it somewhere among the museum’s artefacts – also the products of human labour – and then comment on the thoughts it provoked. The curator of the exhibition notes the depth of her engagement with the staff and local people, how fully she becomes part of their world.
6
It is a particularly loving form of attention that Shalev-Gerz brings to the people with whom she works. She is the author of her work, but it is often collaborative, and therefore cannot simply be attributed to her alone (all the participants are named in the exhibitions, on the interpretative panels or commentaries and in the publications).

The final exhibition is a living archive. Alongside the photographs and etchings in their chosen settings is an audio presentation of recreated historical ‘voices’ and a two-channel video which shows the participants describing the work of art in one, and the camera lingering over the image in another. ‘I chose it’, comments the woman who picked a 1930 Lewis W. Hine photograph of a girl bottling hair tonic, ‘because it’s a young woman.’ ‘I have a conviction’, Hine wrote in a 1933 letter which accompanies the image, ‘that the design registered in the human face through years of life and work, is more vital for purposes of permanent record . . . than the geometric pattern of light and shadows that passes in the taking, and serves (so often) as photographic jazz.’
7
There is a type of purism here. As if, almost in defiance of his own craft, the photographer was above all intent on paring back the work of the image in order to seize the years of life and work etched into a face, even the face of a young woman, before they disappeared. Shalev-Gerz’s aim is to stimulate our curiosity. The participant who chose this photograph wants to know what is going on inside this young woman’s mind. ‘Does she realize what other choices she might have had if she lived in another time? Was this the only option for her? What made her go here and do this? Was it something she was required to do?’
8

In terms of the unspoken lives of women,
Describing Labor
is the perfect complement to
Sound Machine.
Like, or rather alongside the participants, we are being invited to delve back into the world of work, a world in which women, we are also being reminded, have played such a crucial role. If feminist historians have long paid attention to such women, they have far less frequently been seen as worthy artistic objects (or if they are they tend to be romanticised – their labour a part of nature into which their activity as women promptly dissolves). Without necessarily being conscious of so doing, Shalev-Gerz’s participants, when they home in on these pictures of women, are therefore rectifying a whole male-dominated tradition in the history of art. This involves reading the image for what might not at first seem obvious, spotting – for example – the barely discernible feminine undergarment on the back of a worker hunched in darkness over what seems to be a welding machine (the concentrated flash of light from the machine in the middle of the photograph illuminates nothing, simply underscores the surrounding dark): ‘Which means,’ the woman who chose this picture suggests, ‘it is not the man working at this horrendously difficult, powerful chore, but a woman. You expect her to be at a sewing machine, or at a sink, or in a domestic situation. I find that very moving.’
9
In another image, a woman worker, precisely this time at a Singer sewing machine, seems incongruously to be wearing a pearl necklace: ‘I don’t know of anybody who would really wear a pearl necklace to work on a daily basis.’ Perhaps it is a form of ‘empowerment’ (others might say ‘giving herself airs’); perhaps she is trying to ‘elevate herself’.
10
The form of dialogue instantiated by Shalev-Gerz does not therefore just reanimate the historical archive; it offers the women in the pictures another chance, allowing them for a second to defy the histories in which the photo so clearly embeds them, nudging them – along the lines of a desire discernible only in the barest detail – up the ladder of social life. ‘Was this the only option for her?’

Many of these pictures are war images, which is why women find themselves doing men’s work, seizing their femininity –undergarment, pearls – in the face of such ruthlessly undiscriminating toil. Many of course will be sacked when the war ends. For Rosa Luxemburg, it was a central tragedy of the First World War that the workers of the world on either side of the conflict, both male and female, were so easily and uncomplainingly recruited by the war machine (there is no nostalgia in this exhibition, these workers are not being idealised). One image is titled ‘Work for America!’ A bare-torso muscular, almost perfect, luminous male body, has one gloved hand resting on a huge sledgehammer, with bright red factory stacks belching blue smoke in the background, and serried ranks of soldiers barely discernible beneath his feet. The caption accompanying this image reminds us that on 17 April 1917, eleven days after America entered the War, the Committee of Public Information was established by Woodrow Wilson. Its aim, in the words of its director, was to arouse ‘the spiritual forces of the Nation’, and to stimulate the ‘war will of the people’ (that the people could be so stimulated or co-opted was Luxemburg’s bitter lament). The Division of Pictorial Publicity was central to the committee’s work. ‘It was not only’, he continues, ‘that America needed posters, but it needed
the best posters ever drawn.
’
11
Gradually, the male participant who chose this photograph understands why the man’s body is so unnaturally pale: ‘Red, white, and blue! And how could you miss it? This is about
patriotism
as well as power.’
12

Always Shalev-Gerz places herself on the other side of this history, this power. In this too she takes up her place alongside the other women of this book. One of the countries she most loves is Sweden, which has managed, miraculously as it might seem, never to identify as a nation with the European rhetoric of state.
White Out – Between Telling and Listening
of 2002 records the thoughts and memories of a woman raised in the traditional Saami minority community (more widely known as the Lapp people) now living in Stockholm, and then the same woman back in her birthplace listening to her own words (the two videos play simultaneously in the exhibition space). What first drew Shalev-Gerz to this story was the fact that the Saami do not have a word for war.
13
‘It cannot be denied,’ Torkel Tomasson wrote of the Lapp people in 1918, ‘that there is a degree of truth in what a prominent Swedish politician once said, that the culture of the Lapps, to a certain degree, stands higher than the predominant European culture, which as its fruit produces the World War.’
14
The words are part of a run of historical quotations which the Saami woman is seen responding to and reflecting on in the first video.
15
We are being taken back to 1918, to the heart of the first great European war which trails so many of the stories of this book. Most simply, Shalev-Gerz is telling us that this war – plus, as we will see, the even more destructive one to follow – is still with us. Like the other woman artists – Yael Bertana and Thérèse Oulton – whose portraits follow, she is reminding us that this history is not over. For each of them, it is a central premise of their art that there is more reckoning to be done.

Women, of course, are not innocent in relation to war. ‘Thus consciously she desired “our splendid Empire”,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her 1938 pamphlet
Three Guineas
, written under the threat of rising fascism, ‘unconsciously she desired our splendid war.’
16
No woman in this book, as should be clear by now, is interested in claiming innocence for herself. Another extract in
White Out
cites the magazine of the 1931 International Socialist Day of Women: ‘The indifference and the passive attitude of women is one of the foundations of the spreading and strength of militarism.’
17
This is a danger to which international socialist women were particularly alert, evoking in this case the legacy of Clara Zetkin, feminist socialist and Luxemburg’s closest political colleague and friend. Shalev-Gerz can include observations like these while also noting more simply that in Sweden – ‘this fantastic society of neutrality and the social welfare model’ – the cause of women is ‘far more advanced than anywhere else’.
18
Women are more likely to be emancipated in a culture that for 200 years has avoided war.

*

Like most of the women in this book, Esther Shalev-Gerz is a traveller (although she is perhaps the only one who rivals Luxemburg in just how far she has roamed). She was born in Lithuania in Vilnius in 1948, which, she points out, was occupied by Russia at the time and where none of what had happened during the war was verbalised (she is another child of silence). As well as bringing to the surface the forgotten history of others, she is therefore also the archivist of her own past. When she was nine, she went to Israel with her family, where she lived in Jerusalem for the next twenty-five years before moving to Paris where she works today. She also travels between languages: Lithuanian, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, German, English, French.
19
‘When I came to France,’ she has said, ‘I didn’t speak a word of French. And when I came to Israel, I couldn’t speak Hebrew, only Lithuanian, Russian and Jiddish [
sic
].’
20
The constant displacement has been for her a type of freedom. Marta Gili, who interviewed her for the 2010 retrospective of her work at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, describes her work as an art of the diaspora, as she migrates across borders, in search of the stories that make each of the disparate places where she works at once a home and not a home.
21
What she elicits from her speakers – and her ability to do this is one of the most striking things about her – is revelatory but also provisional: ‘visible, palp­able’ as she puts it and somehow ‘porous’ at one and the same time.
22
Something is always on the move. It is never in the name of a safely recovered and potentially re-frozen identity that she draws her stories from the myriad voices of the world. ‘I just move,’ she comments, ‘and don’t bother with who I am.’
23

Such vagrant, unsettled mobility tells a story (everything in the world of Shalev-Gerz tells a story). Her mother, she relates in a rare personal moment, hid in the forest during the Second World War for four years, between the ages of nine and fourteen. We are close to the world of Charlotte Salomon, whose end Shalev-Gerz’s mother, by means of a wild ingenuity and recklessness, managed to escape. Among other things, Shalev-Gerz’s work allows us to track the legacy of such stories (we might say this is the story behind the other myriad stories she tells). In 2005, after long years of resistance, she returned to Vilnius at the prompting of Rasa Antanaviciute of the Vilnius Arts Academy, with the backing of Pascal Hanse of the Vilnius French Cultural Centre who had been trying to persuade her to do so for many years. She was, writes Raminta Jūrėnaitė of the Arts Academy, ‘afraid she would be an alien in her own town’. (She refers to her as the ‘artistic nomad Esther Shalev-Gerz’.)
24
The resulting exhibition follows her attempt to trace her mother’s home in Alytus, meticulously recording the place where it had once stood. In fact the house was still standing but had been renumbered and can be seen uncannily out of focus in the background of the pictures that she took (she only found this out a day later). Photographs of Shalev-Gerz’s own childhood house in Vilnius are juxtaposed with images of the space in Alytus, alongside symbolic images of a forest. As if, in one and the same frame, you could make a record of history simultaneously slipping out of your grasp and etching itself on your mind: ‘The whole process of guessing, searching and doubting is documented in photography.’
25
Shalev-Gerz is another woman for whom hesitancy, finding a way to register the gaps in our personal and political histories, is an obligation and a principle.

The space in Alytus has another significance. The years in the forest had meant that there was a gap in her mother’s knowledge of the everyday – ‘those small everyday things’ – so crucial to what a mother gives to her child. ‘I realised’, Shalev-Gerz comments, ‘that she passed that on to me. I’ve found a way of working with that void.’
26
The mother passed on to her what she could not possess (you cannot possess a void). Perhaps that is why her work never seems proprietorial, but rather steeped in a profound but unsentimental respect. With the exception of one or two performance pieces, she never, as we have already seen, appears in her own works. It is this void, she suggests, that has allowed her to identify with – to get close to – things. ‘Things can declare themselves fully in that void. Then they leach out again.’
27
Remember Marion Milner, with reference to the same war, describing the psychological pre-conditions of painting: to get close to anything, you have to risk letting go both of the object and of yourself. We are at the opposite pole from the attempt to submit markets – to submit anything – to our control.