Women in Dark Times (32 page)

Above all, the participants in her projects are being granted a moment of reflection, of thinking which has also been our recurrent theme. French philosopher Jacques Rancière, who has written with enthusiasm several times on her work, has described this as ‘the movement of attentive thought calling for attention’.
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We are watching thought thinking about itself. Thus Shalev-Gerz places reflection, caught in its most painful and silently eloquent moments, at the heart of her work. This is how she seizes a future for which we, as her viewers, are being asked to take responsibility and in which we are being invited to participate. Likewise for Arendt, critical thought was the only basis for engagement in civic, political life. Remember too Luxemburg, crushed into her cell, bewailing the fact that her prison conditions were depriving her of the possibility of thinking (not perhaps the most obvious cause for complaint): ‘Enthusiasm combined with critical thought,’ she had declared, ‘what more could we want of ourselves!’
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These women are laying claim to a right. In their different ways, each one is asking the world to hold off its path of destruction for a split second, to gather its mental resources and pause for thought. Shalev-Gerz has described this as a form of trust – ‘trust in the other person’s intelligence’ – which is, she insists, the property of everyone.
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She is relying on what thinking, provided it is given the time and space, is capable of. ‘I know full well,’ insists one of the Auschwitz survivors, ‘that nobody lived these events in the same way. No one experienced the same thing. Faced with the enemy, you must hold your head high. That too is a bit of resistance.’
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‘Our support to each other was our speech. We had nothing else to give.’
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Nothing, in all of this, could be more at odds with the idea that we best pay tribute to history by casting its actors in the role of the victim: ‘I am always interested in survivors, the fact of their “living with it”, which for me has absolutely nothing to do with victimhood.’
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She is another woman for whom the idea of victimhood, so often invoked as a baseline for women, is a trap. It robs us of our participation in the polity. And it freezes history, stopping it blindly in its tracks.

If Shalev-Gerz takes us back to the moment of Charlotte Salomon – the repeated reference to Auschwitz, a mother hiding from the Nazis in the forest as the dark core of her work – her meticulous attention to sound and to voice can be seen as forging another link (she has described her work as giving the image voice).
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Both women orchestrate their work. It was of central importance in considering Salomon’s
Life? or Theatre?
that it straddled the two World Wars – the singing maestro Daberlohn was a survivor of the first. His project, and hers through him, was to give voice to the war dead (at one moment in the trenches he had experienced himself as a corpse). Rendered mute by the war, Alfred Wolfsohn, the character on whom Daberlohn was based, had been told he would only be able to recover his singing voice when he could bear to remember the screams of his dying comrades. The music of Salomon’s piece – her three-coloured ‘singspiel’ – was therefore, as we saw, an act of defiance and a type of cure, bringing a dead past to life. It was also her riposte to the Nazi silencing of the Jew. Remember her stepmother, the famous contralto Paula Lindberg, singing in the last concert broadcast from St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig in 1933 the night before the ban on public performances by Jews, while boy choristers wore swastika armbands. The musical component of her work allowed us, I suggested, uniquely to focus a question. What do we in fact mean, physically, sensuously – gutturally, as one might say – when, invoking historical trauma, we talk of reviving the voices of the past and allowing history to speak?

In her commitment to voice and sound, Shalev-Gerz gives another shape to this question, ushering it into its next phase. Her title
Between Telling and Listening
which she uses for two of her exhibitions – the Saami woman speaking and listening to herself, the Auschwitz survivors’ testimonies – is an ethical demand that she is making on her participants and viewers alike. The act of listening, so deeply structured into her exhibitions, makes us acutely conscious, not just of what can be spoken, but of how best to listen – both to the other and to oneself. This is why, as more than one commentator has pointed out, she has created an aesthetics of the ‘in-between’.
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This idea will also be crucial to the painting of Thérèse Oulton, the final portrait of this book. What should be the destiny, the home and the legacy, of such painfully elicited words? Where do they go after they have been spoken? (Testimony cannot be an end in itself.) Shalev-Gerz also sees herself as resisting an injunction to be mute which – again paradoxically – she locates at the heart of the museum culture where she carries out most of her work: ‘When you enter into a museum and see all the paintings, they do not talk. They are mute. Face to face with them, I am meant to be mute as well. This is one of the circumstances that led me to introduce language into my practice. Almost as an emergency.’ ‘I work with words and against words – against their control by others . . . People who manage to master words are the masters of worlds.’
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She is evoking another legacy of feminism, its central claim that the world is harmed, perhaps lethally, by those who believe that language, like women, as one might say, can be harnessed. ‘And if words have meaning,’ wrote Woolf in
Three Guineas
, ‘as words should perhaps have meaning, you will have to accept that meaning and do what you can to enforce it.’
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Shalev-Gerz knows that keeping the world open to a better future will depend radically on how we use words: ‘The answer must not exhaust the question . . . The answer is the question’s sworn enemy.’
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Nothing has been decided. Listen to no one who tells you that the present dispensation of the world is how things have to be. Answering the question, like dictating the meaning of language, is a form of violence and one of the most deadly frauds of history.

We are talking about freedom. ‘I tell my students,’ she comments, ‘that to be an artist is to let something traverse you, not to mutilate it. You must not tell it what to do.’
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When Shalev-Gerz cuts into a visual image, she sees herself as ‘trying to set light free’ (we will see this again with reference to Oulton).
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The drive to freedom, as an aesthetic and historical principle, might therefore be seen as the fundamental impulse of her art. ‘In what way,’ she asks with reference to
Describing Labor
, ‘is liberty embedded in an image?’
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However much she might conduct her own work, by repeatedly handing over her project to the voices of others, she unleashes something spontaneous and unpredictable into the body of her art: ‘While the final compositions are made taut through meticulous editing, their content has its origins in unpredictability.’
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(Remember ‘it was the unpredictable in herself that she used’, Eve Arnold’s description of Marilyn Monroe.) She never has any idea of what she will hear next: ‘I never even try to imagine what the people will say.’
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She is relinquishing her authority and ceding her own power. This makes her a scrupulous respecter of difference, as she uncovers who – as distinct from herself – these people
are
: ‘I am I and they are they,’ she says of the subjects of her work; ‘I would like my work to be them.’
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This is what listening means for her. She is violating – the word she uses is ‘corrupting’ – the sanctity of her own space, which is perhaps why watching her work can make you feel almost dizzy, as if you were being thrown from where and who you think you are.
Nothing is known or laid down in advance: ‘I throw the stone and I run to catch it.’
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Above all, and as we have seen so many times before in this book, this is a new form of knowledge: what I am calling the knowledge of women, a knowledge that neither parades nor aggrandises itself. Once again this is a matter of language, of setting words free. ‘No matter how hard we try to rein in these words,’ she writes, ‘still they will go their own way – spontaneously, intuitively and responsively. It is always surprising. It is always fragile. It never quite gets there. But it is on its way.’
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We are back again with Rosa Luxemburg, for whom spontaneity was the core of all viable political life. No night watchmen, no bullies, no dictators. This is the politics of her art. ‘At this point in time,’ writes Shalev-Gerz, ‘it’s all right to say that you don’t know and that we should perhaps start over again. That it’s good to have contradictions and humility. But politically we’re not there by any means yet. There are still dictators out there. But we have “a foot in the door”.’
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*

If Esther Shalev-Gerz takes up her key place in these final chapters, it is because of the energy with which she carries over these questions into modern times, where we discover them once more in new and alarming forms. Today the question of power – of bullies and dictators – has an added dimension as Europe, increasingly inhumane in its treatment of its migrant peoples, starts to brace itself against, but also to repeat, its own past. As I write, public discourse on immigration is becoming more shrill and threatening by the day: neo-Nazism allowed to flourish in Germany, ignored by authorities who choose to believe that Turkish migrants are killing each other rather than being murdered by native Germans; racist murder in Greece abetted by the police, who turn a blind eye to Golden Dawn recently revealed as in cahoots with the government that officially declared it illegal; the electoral rise of the anti-immigration UKIP party in the UK. This too can be seen as a legacy of the Second World War. UKIP supporters describe the ‘flood’ of migration into the country as making them feel that the war was not won, and – with a truly hallucinatory leap of imagination – that the Germans are invading all over again.
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Here we might return to Tony Judt. It is a paradox of post-war Europe, he suggested, that its recovery was massively facilitated by the homogenisation of populations engendered by fascism. Being reborn from the devastation of the war, the making of a flourishing economy, relied on the worst that the war itself had done. Europe in the 1950s prospered as a world of hermetic national enclaves, rough edges – meaning vagrant populations – smoothed away. An earlier multicultural Europe, described by Polish writer Tadeusz Borowski as a sizzling melting-pot, had been ‘smashed into the dust’.
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Today’s immigrants are therefore the return of the repressed, Europe’s living ‘others’, and the panic they provoke simply shows, to cite his words again, ‘the ease with which the dead “others” of Europe’s past were cast far out of the mind’.
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The hallucinatory return of such ‘others’ will be at the core of Yael Bartana’s work, my second modern artist, to whom we turn next.

It is, however, surely no coincidence that Shalev-Gerz has made these migrant peoples her focus and, with the same urgency as she approaches redundant women workers, anti-Nazis and Holocaust survivors, has given them a voice. Nor that in order to do so, she has travelled back across some of the most neglected and deprived areas of modern Europe: from Belsunce, Marseille and Aubervilliers on the outskirts of Paris, to Skaghall in Sweden and West Bromwich in the Midlands of England, placing herself each time on the periphery of the modern city where immigrants historically congregate. In a series of exhibitions called
Les Portraits des Histoires
(
Portraits of Histories
) that ran from 1999 to 2008,
she combed the cities and peripheries of Europe, picking up – and once more restoring to dignity – the often discarded voices of the modern world. ‘What do we do with a faceless world?’ she asks, as she trains her camera on to the faces of those often unheard and records their stories, to show to the world first and foremost ‘that these people also talk’.
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Even when the people she interviews are what she calls ‘normal’, theirs are not the stories which inspire us or which we are likely to celebrate.
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We have been here before, when honour crime in Britain brushed against the world of the migrant, the homeless and dispossessed. ‘In the early evening the city belonged to us,’ writes Fadia Faqir in
My Name Is Salma
, ‘the homeless, alcoholics, drug addicts and immigrants, to those who were either without a family or were trying to blot out their history.’
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‘I was in a school of 48 per cent immigrants,’ one Aubervilliers participant recalls.
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The central question of Shalev-Gerz’s 2008 Gothenberg Konsthallen exhibition,
The Place of Art
, was: ‘Where does art take place?’ We could say that the place of art is where Europe has to look at its own rejected face. ‘Fifty different nations paint in Bergsjon,’ one of the participants in the project, El Mustapha Sahmoud states. ‘I want to be able to paint with others.’
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There is therefore an alternative world – the world of the misfit and the alien – being registered, but also summoned or created in this work. ‘I am African, Maghrebian, French,’ insists one of the speakers from Aubervilliers, ‘and the idea of frontier has no meaning for me.’
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‘Hopefully,’ one Sandwell participant comments on the recent influx of immigrants into West Bromwich, ‘everyone will be as happy and contented as I have been.’
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At its simplest, the citizens know and experience something their governments do not want to know or see. They testify to more open ways of being, aware that the rituals of daily experience can in themselves be the antidote to hatred: ‘At Ramadan they bring us cakes . . . On the third Thursday of Lent, I bring them crêpes: “You see we are going to fast like you.” ’
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But if the project contains such utopian moments, it makes all the difference that they are juxtaposed with the stories of immigrants fighting to be granted better living conditions (one woman from Cap-Vert in Senegal waiting for a better home for her family of six since 1982), to be registered as citizens, even – or perhaps mostly – to be seen. The point is not just to give the wretched of the earth their voice and space. It is to require those on the outside looking in – on the outside of the outside as we might say – to see themselves in the entrails of the social body. Not all the participants in
Portraits
are of course migrants; some of them have ties to their vicinities that go back centuries. And yet, given their social status, it can be fairly asked whether those who have always been there belong any more than anyone else. A youth worker in Sandwell talks of spending his time with kids with nowhere to go and no one to talk to – ‘outcasts, really’.
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‘Bergsjon’, observes Haky Jasim, participant in
The Place of Art
, ‘is a place where sixteen to seventeen thousand people have no place to be.’
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