Word: holocaust
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Burnt Whole: Contemporary Artists Reflect on the Holocaust...
...rest of the exhibition is subtler, tamer and less effective. Burnt Whole: Contemporary Artists Reflect on the Holocaust delivers what its title promises, but not necessarily what the visitor expects. All thirty-one artists involved were born after World War II. Although there are some direct responses to the Holocaust itself, many of the works displayed are responses to response, depictions of secondhand guilt. Several of the artists are groping in the dark, trying to understand stories which were never spoken, and history which was never quite revealed to them. In their art, they try to grasp the meaning...
Unfortunately, the viewer finds himself asking the same question. Why is it so hard to recall the Holocaust through through this exhibition? The artists expect a lot of themselves, but so do the observers. There is a self-induced pressure to understand, not just mentally, but viscerally, the horror of mass death. Burnt Whole fails to produce the necessary gut reaction, leaving the viewer confused, between guilt and disappointment...
Even without resurgent anti-Semitism, nobody believes Jewish life in Central Europe will ever be what it was before the Holocaust. The world of the shtetl is lost; the Yiddish language is becoming as inaccessible as Welsh or Aramaic; the Jews of Marc Chagall's paintings are gone forever. ``You cannot revive Jewish culture here,'' says Russia's Gerber. ``You cannot revive something that is finished.'' Others are troubled that the youthful embrace of Judaism is only rarely a question of faith. ``A lot of them want to be Jewish without the religion,'' complains Rabbi Jozsef Schweitzer, head of Budapest...
...into the wooden barracks, stood in silence amid the ruins of crematoria dynamited by the Nazis in a failed attempt to hide the evidence of the greatest crime. They saw, they remembered, they mourned--and they wondered if the world would ever learn the lessons of Auschwitz and the Holocaust...