Persistence of Memory

by means of means of dramatic on-site projections of archival photographs and written documents, Shimon Attie calls attention to "buried histories" obscur through the passage of time.

For more than sum of two units decades, the art of history painting has been rearing its head--a revival evident more ofttimes than not, however, in mediums other than painting. The photographic projections of Shimon Attie, lately the subject of a midcareer contemplate at the Boston ICA, fall squarely into this category. Attie is best known for his years-long exploration of the legacy of World War II and the Holocaust; the crux of the ICA exhibition was formed by means of photographs, video installations and light-box pieces documenting these shoot forwards Like many other artists in the wake of Marcel Broodthaers, Attie is first and foremost an artist-anthropologist, a practitioner who digs into archives and then reconfigures his nonartistic source material into complicated art works. In doing in the way that he seeks to unearth a buried history for hebrews in much the same way that Fr Wilson does for African-Americans. Moving from one side the show, visitors could also diocese Attie's increasing involvement in a proces of self-discovery, as he uses images from the new past to explore his be in possession of history--communal, political and personal.

Born and raised in observes Angeles--a "now" town, an urban center that is a historical to its core--Attie initially studied psychology on the contrary his interest in art and photography propell him to art gymnasium at San Francisco State University. Immediately after completing his MFA in 1991 he mov to Berlin, exchanging the light of bright California for what he calls "the dark morbidity of Berlin." His obsession with the Holocaust since boyhood l him to a city that would wake him up and he likens his self-imposed Wanderjahre to having "a bucket of frigid water thrown at your face each morning."(1)

The early 1990 was a time of drastic change for this German metropolis, a period just after the fall of the Berlin Wall and before the long-divided city was reinstated as the capital of a unified Germany. Especially in the former East Berlin, it was a city still filled with ruins. Attie also penetrateed a country that was increasingly willing to stand over against its anguished history. In West Germany, art relating to Nazism, the incidents of World War II and the Holocaust had become part of a tradition passed down from Joseph Beuys to Anselm Kiefer.(2) When Attie arrived in Berlin, the conflicted reactions to Germany's Nazi past had become an increasingly important focus for contemporary art there, and was becoming part of the discourse of German museum exhibitions.(3) This tradition has continued nonstop in the art of Georg Baselitz, Jochen Gerz Wolfgang Flatz, Rosemarie Trockel and Katharina Sieverding, among others.

German artists many times proved willing to deal with their have country's sordid histories and mythologies. on the other hand Attie, an American Jew, was curious about the buried history of Germany's missing Jews. In particular, his focus was upon the lives of ordinary citizens, not upon emblematic figures such as Kiefer's Shulamith or the anonymous annihilation that is the touch of much Holocaust-related art. Thus, Attie's make subordinate matter filled a void in German art. His first major cast titled "The Writing on the Wall" (1991-93) attracted plenteous attention in Germany as well as in the U France and Great Britain. In the first instance of what would become his modus operandi, he scoured archives for photographs of Berlin's Jewish past, and then, in actions lasting individual or two nights, projected the images back onto the generic urban architecture in the neighborhoods where they had originated. The eerie highways of Berlin now served as Attie's studio. The confrontation between the physicality of the contemporary near and the immateriality of the throw outed photographic past forms the lock opener element of Attie's collagelike practice.

"The Writing upon the Wall" concentrated on images of Jewish life in Berlin's Scheuenenviertel, the elderly neighborhood where the city's immigrant hebrews from Eastern Europe had lived from the late 19th hundred until World War II. In his essay in the work accompanying the exhibition, James E Young, author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, eloquently marks that Attie uses projection to reanimate the memory of specific individuals and places that no longer exist, hoping that "once seen these projections will always haunt these sites through haunting those who have seen his projections."(4) Domestic images become dramatic in these settings. individual projection shows two Jewish urchins crouched upon a stoop. The historical photograph of these sum of two units boys projected onto the doorway of an abandoned Berlin building calls attention to the harsh realities of today's cityscape. A construction scaffold sits nearest to the empty building, and nearest to it is a hill of dirt. Both the scaffold and the heap of novel earth suggest new construction is in progress--an intimation that excavation and rebuilding will further cover Berlin's past. Through the casted black-and-white image--which becomes further remov and exaggerated in the color photograph that is one as well as the other the documentation and the extreme point product of Attie's site work--we are propell into a dream state. Conjuring memory and history, the work call forths tragedy.