Projecting the Past Onto the Present

It was Shimon Attie’s father who taught him, at an early age, “the importance of not looking away from what has gone before.” But how exactly can one see something that has passed, that is no longer there in a recognizable, tangible way? Reflecting on history is one thing, but actually seeing it is something else.

Attie has more than managed. For the past decade, the photographer and installation artist has devised extraordinarily potent methods of transforming evanescent memories into vivid visual experiences.

In Berlin, he projected photographic images of Jewish street life before World War II onto the scarred surfaces of the former Jewish neighborhood where those scenes transpired. In Copenhagen, he submerged nine large light-boxes with photographic transparencies several feet underwater in a canal running through the center of the city. The faces that hovered just under the undulating surface belonged to Danish Jews rescued during the war, as well as to current Eastern European refugees seeking asylum in Denmark. In New York, Attie interviewed residents of the Lower East Side about their dreams and memories, then used laser light to write out fragments of their texts, in the immigrants’ own languages and handwriting, on the walls of neighborhood apartment buildings.

These and several other projects are documented and reprised in a museum setting in the show “Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie--Photographs and Public Projects, 1992-1998,” opening today at the California Center for the Arts in Escondido. Attie spoke about the show, his first museum survey, by telephone from his home in Brooklyn, where he’s lived for the past two years. “The East Coast,” he says, “is a compromise between California and Europe. It’s American, but the sense of history is European.”

He also keeps a home in San Francisco, where he settled more than 20 years ago. Belonging to at least two places is characteristic of Attie, 42; fluidity is the operative condition of his life and work. Superimposing images from the past onto the surfaces of the present, he complicates the visual, psychological, political and social texture of everyday life wherever he stages his “interventions.”

“What I’m responding to is places, and sites. There is some kind of confluence between witnessing, on the part of personal experience, and excavating, bringing to the surface stories that are embedded in the architecture or cityscape.”

Born in Los Angeles--”which for my family was almost ahistorical,” he says--Attie headed to Northern California to study psychology at UC Berkeley. Two years after he graduated, he earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Antioch University. For the next seven or eight years, he maintained a psychotherapy practice in San Francisco while he attended art school, spending a few days of every week at the office, and the rest at his studio.

“It was the same sort of sensibility or predisposition that led me to both [psychology and art],” he says. But it isn’t a case of one discipline being driven by the other: “Both areas are influenced by who I am.”

In the summer of 1990, before his last year in the master’s program in fine arts at San Francisco State University, Attie traveled to Berlin to do a project he called “Surface Anatomy.” Working with the idea of Berlin as a city that had been divided and was starting to come together, he projected medical illustrations of surgery and suturing onto buildings in eastern and western Berlin that had been damaged in the war and never repaired. “I borrowed a medical metaphor to describe a political process,” he says of the project.

After receiving his degree, he returned to Berlin, drawn back to the city by “the palpable sense of history that’s felt on every block,” and energized by the contrast between comfortable San Francisco and edgy Berlin. He expected to stay four months and ended up living there for six years.

“Being Jewish was the engine for the whole thing. It was almost like a counter-phobic fascination. What’s ground zero for the Third Reich? I went right into the lion’s den.”

Though his immediate family did not suffer in the Holocaust--his maternal grandfather emigrated from Germany before the war, his paternal grandparents came from Syria--many family friends were survivors. Attie’s father felt a connection to the collective loss and passed that sensibility, as well as an attitude of vigilance against bigotry of all kinds, onto his son. Absence became a palpable force in Attie’s understanding of his culture and the world. With the framework provided by his father, Attie started, at age 10 or 12, he says, to fill in the details on his own, checking out books about the Holocaust from the library and reading himself to sleep.

When he returned to Berlin in 1991, he steeped himself in the amorphous presence of the city’s vanished Jewish culture. Combing through archives, he gathered prewar photographs of kosher butcher shops, schools and bookstores in the Scheunenviertel, the quarter where Russian and Polish Jews settled in the early 20th century, retaining their small-town ways and appearances in the big city. Not many of the original sites of the photographs survived wartime bombing or postwar rebuilding, but Attie was able to match exact locations for about a quarter of the photographs he selected.

Working from “the discrepancy between what I felt and what I did not see,” Attie projected slides made from the photographs onto walls and doorways in the former Jewish quarter, repopulating the neighborhood, a few nights at a time, with spectral reminders of its former inhabitants, most of whom had been deported and killed.

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Visitors to the Escondido show--which was organized by museum director Ellen Fleurov for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where it originated--will experience the Berlin project “Writing on the Wall” in the form of photographic transparencies displayed in wall-mounted light-boxes in an otherwise totally darkened room. For “The Neighbor Next Door,” a 1995 project staged in Amsterdam, Attie mounted projectors in the windows of homes that sheltered Jews during the war, and projected onto the street below archival footage of German soldiers, passing funerals and military bands. The project is only visible in the current exhibition through slits in a wall.

“It puts you in the position of looking out, from being in hiding,” Attie explains. The project probes, in its oblique way, the reputation of the Dutch as heroic shelterers of the Jews, based largely on the iconic power of the Anne Frank story. In fact, Attie points out, nearly 80% of Amsterdam’s Jews--all “neighbors next door”--were deported and killed, betrayed.

Artists who address issues of the Holocaust face a subject so daunting and immense that it can easily dwarf any effort to comment on it or interpret it. Attie treads lightly, resists any presumptuous attempts at closure, and personalizes the loss without undue melodrama. “I don’t work in a didactic way,” he says. “I want people to draw their own conclusions.”

His projects in public spaces have consistently generated a good deal of response, and in Berlin, particularly, he met with some resistance from older residents of the formerly Jewish neighborhood. But, he notes, what people experienced “first and foremost, was an aesthetic response. People would walk by and see something beautiful--maybe hauntingly beautiful, but beautiful. That’s important to me. They would have a visceral response. Then the content would sink in, and that would be a different matter, because sometimes the content is painful. I’m not in politics, or a historian. I’m working as an artist. My work gets at some of the same issues, but using a different language.”

Despite the complex technical means necessary to execute his public projects, Attie’s work comes across as poignantly understated. It seeps into the consciousness, then it, too, passes into memory. “The appearance of a spectral image image for a few nights--the memory of that lives on longer in the imagination than something that’s static and permanent,” he says.

What accounts for the endurance and density of Attie’s work is its layering of sources and approaches: past atop present, translucent overlaid onto opaque, black-and-white colliding with color, truth challenging myth. In his public projects, he connects a past situation with a present condition. With “The Neighbor Next Door,” Attie hoped the work would also bring to mind in its Dutch viewers the thousands of illegal immigrants currently living in hiding in Amsterdam, at the mercy of the government’s policy toward political and economic refugees.

“The connection between the historical situation and the present condition is really important,” he insists. “I don’t believe that the past is really ever over. I reject the separation between past and present. The past is always here.”

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“SITES UNSEEN: SHIMON ATTIE--PHOTOGRAPHS AND PUBLIC PROJECTS, 1992-1998,” Museum, California Center for the Arts, 340 N. Escondido Blvd., Escondido. Dates: Through May 7. Closed Mondays. Price: $5. Phone: (760) 839-4138.