Is the Message of Holocaust Horrors Lost in the Medium?

It would be comforting to call the Nazi Holocaust a horror beyond human imagining, but it wasn’t. The fascists and their collaborators devised and implemented their genocidal scheme with rational efficiency. We can’t get around that. The Final Solution was an act of the human imagination. It indicted the species.

No wonder we return to it so relentlessly. It’s perfectly appropriate that an exhibition devised last year to mark the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz should appear here this year to commemorate the 51st. It’s a matter of keeping ourselves reminded.

The show is on view at the Finegood Art Gallery of the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus in West Hills. Titled “Witness & Legacy: Contemporary Art About the Holocaust,” it was developed by the Minnesota Museum of American Art and organized by curator Stephen C. Feinstein. It encompasses some 80 works by about 27 artists, including some with personal links to the genocide. Edith Altman watched the rise of Nazism as a child in Germany. Judith Goldstein is a survivor of a ghetto and the camps. Mindy Weisel was born in the Bergen-Belsen camp shortly after the liberation.

Even with that level of aptness and authenticity, however, the exhibition raises another question. If the Holocaust was not beyond human imagining, is it somehow beyond artistic expression?

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Clearly the exhibition has asked itself the same question. The catalog opens quoting Elie Wiesel wondering, “Why, this determination to show ‘everything’ in pictures? A word, a glance, silence itself communicates more and better . . . the Holocaust is not a subject like all others. It imposes certain limits.”

Thus one finds oneself, while looking, attracted to aesthetic questions that distract from the intended object of contemplation. Larry Rivers sure can draw. Wonder why his style lacks the necessary tragic edge? Jerome Witkin’s small piece doesn’t come off. That’s too bad because he’s done big Holocaust paintings that are very moving.

Maybe such arty questions serve as excuses to avoid the subject. Maybe not. Either way it’s not easy to think of a list of artists who might have been able to capture the monstrosity of the Holocaust--Bosch, Caravaggio, Goya, Picasso. . . . Paradoxically the best qualified group would have been the German Expressionists, especially Kollwitz, Beckmann and Dix. Hitler immolated them in a different way by banning their works and forcing them into exile.

Yet there is a certain seepage from the ensemble. Among the most affecting are works that make us recall that tradition and history were being destroyed along with European Jewry. Samuel Bak shows a classic surreal “Tryptich” of stone mountains where the Tablets of the Law begin to melt and coffins appear in living rock. Susan Erony makes a similar poetic with collages of burned pages from books in Hebrew. The Holocaust threatened the foundation of the Judeo-Christian universe.

There are five room-size installations on view. The theatricality of their size and scale give them an expressive edge over more traditional work. Gabrielle Rossmer mixed imagination with documentation to recreate the story of her lost family. A poignant moment in the narrative tells how the family’s clothing business is taken over by an “Aryan” merchant. Pearl Hirshfield’s “Shadows of Auschwitz” is a dark, corridor-like structure suggesting a boxcar or warehouse. A revolving light casts ominous shadows. The entrance and exit are marked with the stenciled words, “Eingang, Ausgang.”

Gerda Meyer-Bernstein’s “Shrine” begins with dozens of traditional skullcaps hung in a vestibule leading to a black room where the floor is covered in straw. One wall is covered with barbed wire, another with repeated photos of a camp commandant. On the far wall is a photograph of an industrial oven with commemorative candles burning inside. Taken together these pieces recall a line spoken in the video that is part of Pier Marton’s installation, “Jew.” “There was only one exit from the camps, the chimney.”

Anyone with an ounce of empathy can identify with the victims of the Holocaust. The Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and political prisoners--murdered or surviving--retained a state of purifying innocence. We can put ourselves in their place with good conscience.

What very few people can do is accept the idea that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were also human. We want to think they were some sort of horror-movie anomaly, but they were not. They’re still out there everyday being human and practicing what Hanna Arendt called “the banality of evil.” They’re very much like you and me. Giving artistic expression to that side of life is a subject more difficult than the Holocaust itself.

* The Finegood Art Gallery of the Bernard Milken Jewish Community Campus, 22622 Vanowen St., West Hills; through April 16, closed Saturdays, (818) 587-3255.