Dancing at Auschwitz: reflections on art's "intolerable image"

My reading of philosopher & art theorist Jacques Rancière lately has suggested some new inroads into poetry, some aspects of his post-critical thought on contemporary art seeming even to dovetail nicely with an examination of the minimalist ("pwoermd) poetry of Geof Huth. But it's done more than that. I've just read  Rancière's "The Intolerable Image" chapter of his The Emancipated Spectator, where he brilliantly critiques artistic representations of the most horrible realities imaginable, looking specifically at Oliviero Toscani's posters of anorexic models and Martha Rosler's 60s Vietnam War photographs,  the media depictions of Auschwitz, the Rwandan & Cambodian genocides, and  Kevin Carter's Pulitzer-winning "vulture stalking a dying child". He questions whether the intolerability of the image can form part of critical art, one where montage, collage and détournement techniques are understood as artistic channels for social & political critique. Do these venerable critical art forms run aground here?                                       

He wonders, in particular, if content of this kind can be separated from image, the former normally regarded as the true reality behind the image and the impetus for protest against the injustices & inhumanities that graphic representations disclose. Environmental activists oftentimes exploit the social activist potential of imagery. Rancière's own view is that the gap between picture and content's been closed: far from stirring the indignant viewer to action (or to thoughts of it), the image as picture, painting or poem reveals a tension at the heart of viewing itself. And if the question of the nature of the artistic representation in general leads to that of the nature of the intolerable in particular, the lines between spectator and object seem to have been blurred beyond recognition. It's not clear what Carter's image of a dying girl in Sudan can be: a political (a "call to arms") or its own unique thing as art, something to be passively viewed & registered aesthetically. Rancière refers to this inner-tension in art as "the dialectic inherent in the political montage of images." A discussion too complex to pursue here.

                                              Kevin Carter's "vulture stalking child"

My reading of Rancière also happened lately to have coincided with what I consider to be another example of  "intolerability of the image": namely, a recent YouTube video of an eighty-nine year old holocaust survivor Adolek Kohn who's seen dancing with his family to disco music (the song "I Will Survive") at the Auschwitz site where he was himself interned. Here's a video compilation of disco music & damce staged against boxcars, entrances and crematoria. The image certainly looks grotesquely inconsonant with reality (the Shoah). It counter-poses (a favorite verb of Rancière's) to the image of unimaginable suffering that of dance and joyful celebration of life. As he says, "We came from the ashes and now we dance."

Auschwitz is emblematic of this "inner tension" in art. But the viewer asks how the video can be articulated as art and even dared to be displayed to the public while, at the same time, feeling its appeal as one form of contemporary expression, almost on a par with any other. It's troubling that here "image" (joyful celebration) and "content" (mass extermination) can't mercifully collapse in on themselves, and strike the video out of our artistic consciousness.The fact that they can't, of course, is deeply problematical. Declaring the image itself to be unrepresentable in this way is to run the risk of adopting a too 'uncritical' position in regards to art in general. It's as though the intolerable content (anorexic model, vulture stalking dying girl, holocaust survivor dancing at Auschwitz) were something to be suspended in critical space, just one type of 'image' (of viewing) among a whole array of others.

 Kohn's daughter Jane Korman, the producer of the video, said her purpose was to "make some artwork that would waken people and make them think again about this past". She could have cited Roberto Benigni's portrayal in movie La Vita Bella or Claude Lanzmann's Shoah as similar types of artwork. Originally displayed in an Australian art gallery, her image of the intolerable is now offered as a legacy to a YouTube and MuchMusic generation who've been normally too "numbed", "desensitized" to the Holocaust event. Korman gives a more appealing  inverted 'image' of the hopelessness and despair that's been historically associated with Auschwitz: the unimaginable softened (more delicately aestheticized) for the young as song & dance. Otherwise "who would bring their grandchildren here?" asks Kohn.

Without holocaust survivor himself present, the dance video would be rightly condemned as a form of Holocaust-denial or -denigration and yet a very uncomfortable sort of acquiescence in the suitability of artistic form, promoted by a holocaust survivor himself, can be the effect of seeing Korman's video. What should be a clash of irreconcilable opposites in artwork doesn't here necessarily result in a single efficacious point of unbearable horror (perhaps the same that had led to criticism of Carter's picture & the photographer's own suicide). The viewer can choose to view it dispassionately, considering its artistic merits alone. And not condemn it as a lie only. Interestingly enough, the presence of  Kohn and family (as contrary to the claims of the Anti-Defamation League) is sufficient condition for viewing the video as "artwork" & a type of memorial in its own right. But has artistic expression been given a de jure pass on moral condemnation?  Does the inner tension of the image (the troubling dialectic between really two competing images of the horror of extermination) trump the fear that the video may dehistoricize the Shoah?

What Rancière would say to the Kohn video is, I think, what he's already said in regard to Lanzmann's Shoah, a lengthy passage worth quoting in full:

Representation is not the act of producing a visible form, but the act of offering an equivalent-something that speech does just as much as photography [videography]. The image is not the duplicate of a thing. It is a complex set of relations between the visible and the invisible, the visible and speech, the said and the unsaid. It is not a mere reproduction of what is out there in front of the photographer or the filmmaker. It is always an alteration that occurs in a chain of images which alter it in turn. And the voice is not the manifestation of the invisible, opposed to the visible form of the image. It is itself caught up in a process of image construction. It is the voice of a body that transforms one sensible event into another, by striving to make us 'see' what it has seen, to make us see what it tells us." (93-94)

Kohn's YouTube video leaves us with a silent tension between the visible horror of mass extermination and the unspoken  horror of art's ability to turn just about anything, however intolerable its image, into artistic expression: unspoken, or invisible, or unrepresentable because to say it would be too unpardonable an offense against human decency. There's this other 'image' lying within the horror of content (shoving aside the thing itself) that is a troubling nexus of competing ways of seeing the stalking vulture, anorexic model & dancing Holocaust victim. A troubling 'something' that's perhaps the product of a hypermediated age.