Minneapolis Star Tribune Review
Untitled Installation
Published: March 29, 2002
Edition: METRO
Section: VARIETY / FREETIMECORRECTION
Page#: 18E
IN MEMORIAM
By Mary Abbe; Staff Writer
RSEC:CORRECTION PUBLISHED 03/29/02: This article misidentified the artist and the subject matter of the artwork in this review of an exhibition at pARTs Photographic Arts. A cave-like installation that included audio-and-video interviews was by Jackie Hayes and concerned Armenian genocide experienced by the artist's family. The exhibition continues through May 5.
"After all, who now remembers the Armenians?'' _ Adolf Hitler
Or, for that matter, who now remembers the My Lai massacre, the fire-bombing of Dresden or the systematic slaughter and death by dehydration of the Herero people of Namibia?
Few know. Even fewer remember. Survivors are scarce and dying steadily. Stories change, are lost, drift into deserts of memory.
British photographer Simon Norfolk set out to document eight of the 20th century's episodes of genocide. He was not a witness to any of the slaughter, but traveled to Armenia, Vietnam and elsewhere to record what remained.
A harrowing but strangely tranquil exhibition of Norfolk's photos, derived from his 1998 book ``For Most of It I Have No Words: Genocide, Landscape, Memory,'' is at pARTs Photographic Arts through May 10.
With it are installations and photos by Twin Cities artist Keith Holmes, who photographed survivors and ruins of the ethnic slaughter in Croatia and Bosnia during the 1990s, and a photographic meditation by Doug Beasley, also of the Twin Cities, on the landscape of Wounded Knee, S.D., which was scarred by the conflict between American Indians and Euro-Americans in the 1800s.
Picturing genocide is no easy proposition, and the three photographers have taken different tacks, deftly picking their way through the topic's psychological and aesthetic minefields.
Each photographer struck a slightly different compromise with the problem. While the exhibition certainly has its stomach-churning moments, the overall impact is sobering, not sensational. All the photos are in black-and-white and benefit from the accompanying text panels.
Beasley's eight images are the result of a pARTs commission that included a stipend to visit and document sites in Minnesota and South Dakota where Indians and whites had clashed fatally in the mid-1800s. His photos have an elegiac poetry that is deepened with explanation. The angled shadow of a church, silhouetted against the sky, seems more ominous when the caption explains that Indians were given blankets infected with smallpox there. Shadowy patches of ice and water are identified as a massacre site.
The images themselves don't convey the anxiety and terror that people once experienced there, but the captions suggest it. Like the landscape itself, the photographs become a template on which language projects meaning. They document spaces, steeped in history, whose significance is branded by recorded memories.
Holmes creates elaborate installations that use photographs to evoke war's confusion, loss and destruction. One installation is a spacious but cavelike space filled with tree branches, rug-topped stools and audio-and-video recordings of interviews with survivors of the ethnic slaughter in Bosnia and Croatia. Other installations include photos of ruined buildings and stacks of bricks that Holmes treated with photo-sensitive emulsions and then printed with portraits of survivors. Arranged to suggest walls and shattered rooms, they dramatically personalize the rubble and graphically illustrate war's psychological and physical toll.
This is Norfolk's second exhibition at pARTs this year, following his recent display of huge color photos of war-ravaged Afghanistan. Given the current American engagement in Afghanistan, the earlier photos had a topical, fresh-from-the-front quality markedly different from these. Marinated in time and memory, these 39 black-and-white pictures depict a grim, melancholy and resigned world where numbingly awful things have occurred.
Norfolk went to Rwanda, where an average of 7,000 people were hacked to death each day for 100 days in 1984. To Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge launched a systematic experiment in ``medievalist peasant communism'' that left more than 1 million dead between 1975 and 1979. And to Vietnam, where 58,000 Americans and 4 million Vietnamese died in the 1960s and early '70s.
Also to Auschwitz, the world's ``largest cemetery,'' where lie the remains of 1.5 million people; Dresden, where 35,000 to 40,000 German civilians died in a 1945 British firebombing; the Ukraine, where an estimated 6 million starved in nine months of 1932-33 after Stalin confiscated their grain; Armenia, where in 1915 the Turkish government systematically butchered or starved 1 million Armenians, and Namibia, where in August 1904 the ruling Germans drove the nomadic cattle-herding Herero people into the desert to die of dehydration.
Walking clockwise around the gallery, viewers move back through time, from 1984 to 1904, through classrooms and churches heaped with skulls and rotting fabric, past grotesquely deformed young Vietnamese maimed by Agent Orange and land mines; through bleak fields bordered by human ash pits and crematoria; to the landscapes of Armenia blanketed by snow and amnesia, and finally into the sands of Namibia, which long ago erased all trace of those who died there.
The final photos in Norfolk's exhibition, and the accompanying book, are dark and elegant, as sand-dune images often are. They are images of stillness, of peace, of countless little things _ lives, grains of sand _ heaped up in memoriam.