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Art after Auschwitz: no final solutions.

Article Excerpt
Mark Godfrey. Abstraction and the Holocaust. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. 304 pp., 40 color ills., 100 b/w. $55

The title of this important and engaging book suggests less a treatise on how postwar art dealt with the death camps than a short story by Woody Allen. What could one of the most hermetic artistic phenomena of all time have to do with one of the greatest crimes in history? And who else would dare link the two, without so much as a subtitle to soften the collision?

Insofar as the word abstraction conjures up the erasure of particularity and individuality, Mark Godfrey observes, it would seem to describe the operations of the Holocaust and abstract art equally well. He explains how both modernist and postmodernist accounts of abstract art have dealt with this discomfiting closeness, whether by excising the history of postwar abstraction from larger history (Clement Greenberg) or by calling art to "witness the very shattering of representational forms" (13) that is the legacy of the Holocaust (the French philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard). (One might associate this latter position with the work of Theodor Adorno, but Godfrey shows the Philosopher is harder to pin down than his famous dictum on the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz would suggest.)

Godfrey eschews both Greenberg's and Lyotard's tacks, but rather than offering a third way to tie or untie the abstraction Holocaust knot, he rewrites its first term: "Abstract artists eschew depiction and figuration and sometimes, overt symbolism, but this is not to say that their work refuses signification" (4). For Godfrey, abstract at can signify not just the historical conditions of its own development (the devaluation of imagery, the crisis of subjectivity, etc.) but something far more specific: it can accomplish what he repeatedly calls "Holocaust representation" (4, 21).

But is it all as easy as that phrase suggests? No, as Godfrey would be first to admit. Even if we believe that the phrase is not an oxymoron, that the trauma of the Holocaust can be adequately represented in art, we are left with the problem of how abstract art can represent anything at all. Here we stumble upon one of the founding dilemmas of the pioneers of abstraction: their simultaneous aspiration to invent a universal language and to escape language altogether, to supplant depiction or representation with something more immediate and concrete,...

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