Seeing the Invisible: Representing what Cannot Be Represented

Mark Callaghan

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Seeing the Invisible: Representing what Cannot Be Represented

in Cultural Experiences of Fear, Horror and Terror

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Mark Callaghan

Mark Callaghan
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Art:: Kapitel

Seiten:: 1–14

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9781848883314_002

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This chapter will focus on Jochen Gerz’s unique representation of the Holocaust and the consequences of encountering mimetic depictions of violence and horror. Gerz’s 2146 Stones: Monument Against Racism (1993) is an invisible artwork, situated in an urban setting, that relates to the egregious and visually familiar crimes of the Nazis. Created clandestinely, and without legal authority, the formation of this invisible monument was akin to a guerrilla memorial action, with Gerz, his eight students, and representatives of the Jewish communities of Germany, all working toward an unprecedented collaboration that would result in a paradoxical showing of nothingness. Of the inestimable roots for aesthetic discourse emanating from this case study, my concentration is directed toward the question of whether Gerz, by creating an invisible artwork, inadvertently solved Theodor Adorno’s post-Auschwitz Aporia – a conundrum often referred to as the ‘crisis of representation’ where Adorno outlines his palpable fears concerning the effects of violent imagery, and thus calls for an art which bears witness to its predestined failure, artworks which present the fact that the ‘unrepresentable’ exists. Extending this further, Susan Sontag helps us to understand society’s management of violence and the effects that graphic imagery can have: why we are both stimulated yet repelled by explicit, horrific scenes, and the role that art can have in the process of controlling fear and representing empirical reality. It is against this theoretical background that I explore the merits of Gerz’s work and ask what values his ‘atrocity aesthetic’ brings to a German public square where the invisible artwork was created and subsequently remains. Conversely, I ask whether the invisible monument actively blocks out memories that are too difficult to represent; a self-censoring barrier to aspects of the past that are too disturbing. Using supporting evidence, including interviews with Gerz and his students, I pursue these questions and also introduce a new conundrum to the discourse concerning representations of fear, horror, and terror – the ‘Memory Aporia’ – which highlights the problem of abstract ‘blank canvas’ artworks in the face of seemingly indelible Holocaust semiotics and iconography.

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Cultural Experiences of Fear, Horror and Terror

ISBN:: 9781848883314

Verleger:: Brill

Print-Publikationsdatum:: 01 Jan 2016

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Seeing the Invisible: Representing what Cannot Be Represented

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