Cracked Architecture

This is an essay reviewing "Journey Into Darkness," an exhibition by artist Carol Rosen at the Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, New Jersey.

C R A C K E D A R C H I T E C T U R E

Adolf Hitler & Carol Rosen

People tend to forget that Hitler was an artist and an architect.

Note the absence of the adjective ‘failed’ before the noun ‘artist.’ Although many historians like to point out that Hitler was a “failed artist” to account for his subsequent social policies of atrocities, I do not because, for a time, Hitler was that most ambitious artist, that supremely evil architect who held an entire nation, if not the whole of eastern Europe, under the cast of his remarkable sadistic vision. And like so many artists throughout the ages, Hitler’s root impetus, his core concern, was one of ‘beautification,’ of remaking the world according to some Utopian dream. The fact that the grand scale of his future Utopia meant plunging most of the continent into a nightmare of death and destruction, the likes of which had not been seen before or since, was, in his eyes, but a trifle matter. Even as late as February 1945 when it was becoming increasingly clear his great war was lost, the architect ideal still drove him. In the war’s waning hours, he had already stepped up his ‘purification’ campaign in exterminating the Jews and so, sitting in his subterranean bunker, he looked and looked and looked at the just completed architectural model of the city Linz - much of it based on his own designs drawn twenty years prior - which was to house Germany’s vast collection of art, much of it plundered, as Allied bombs reduced Berlin to cinders above him.

Now three quarters of a century later, this is the man, the artist and the mad dream that artist Carol Rosen, challenges. In shining a light into specific corners of its architecture, Rosen’s incisive images illuminate the human toll of that ultimate “Journey Into Darkness” known as the Holocaust.

Rosen’s art takes the form of installations. These include found object constructions, photo-composites printed on large printmaking paper and on slabs of granite, as well as poetry displayed on the wall or incorporated into the prints or carved into the stones. No doubt, the Fuehrer would deem Rosen’s practices ‘degenerate’ and have included her pieces in the traveling “Degenerate Art” exhibitions he employed to ‘educate’ the masses. But unlike those German exhibits, Rosen’s dark journey at the Hunterdon Art Museum in Clinton, New Jersey is an education in human empathy.

In tackling any great subject, especially one as thoroughly sifted through and exhaustively analyzed and critiqued and explored and as heavily historically-freighted as the Holocaust, there is the danger of the artist coming to it with an insufficiently genuine emotional engagement, thus converting its significance into a somewhat self-serving exercise. It is like seeing too much of a director’s hand in a movie plot or an author’s didactic message in the movement of his characters on the novel’s page. I detected some of that in Rosen’s handling of the subject matter, but to her credit, only minimally.

Whatever one’s subject, every artist faces choices in materials, processes, scale and placement to elucidate it. Given that her subject matter is so well-known, Rosen’s task is much harder: she must communicate some personal universal emotional truth and to craft a living memory that does justice to the permanence of mass genocide. Rosen is on firm footing here. There exists a seamless correlative dynamic in her subject matter (the what) and her creative choices (the how).

Rosen makes sure to keep the viewer focused on the human equation: nearly every one of her pieces utilizes one or more human figures. Usually, the use of any human figure sets up a narrative context, a story. But Rosen’s figures are torn from different scenes, thus her narrative is one of ‘displacement’ or literally, a ‘displaced people.’ Since her photographic composites are of archival ones - mixed with shots she’d taken when visiting the European camps - much of her source material is blurred in the original. By enlarging her composite images, this blurs them even more. Overlapping her images cause human forms to appear to ‘dissolve.’ This blurring and dissolving evokes a sense of an ‘erasure of identity.’ In printing her images on large format printmaking paper - rather than on the plastic coated glossy photo paper - she gives them a grainy, grimy quality that pushes the grays and blacks into ash. By combining many images into one, she achieves a fractured state that evokes confusion and chaos, a visual disorientation that mirrors the tense psychology of her subjects. Printing her images on slabs of granite - alongside poems etched into other granite slabs - and placing them either on the ground or housed together inside sculptural tables - keeps them below eye level and turns them into memorial tombstones.

All of these creative choices are symbolic of the forced uprooting of whole populations of people and their subsequent extermination in the Death Camps. Even Rosen’s rusting, ramshackle sculptures allude to the factory and the foundry atmosphere, so much so, that one can almost smell the smoke.

But as strong as her combined imagery is, it was her simplest piece that was the most riveting for me.

In “Sarah I” and “Sarah II” - two small metal framed granite slabs placed side by side on the wall - Rosen forces the viewer to confront a soft, delicate portrait of a young girl. On the right, Sarah’s photograph presents in the positive. On the left, is its negative mirror-image. The two seem to balance in a metaphysical totality, one that represents before and after, presence and absence, flesh and spirit, existence and death. While that little gap of space in between them leaves us to contemplate the enormity of the difference.

If the horror of the Holocaust is a monumentality too big for the human mind to comprehend, if it is too much of a decisive rift in the fabric of history with all its ‘could-have-beens,’ for man’s meager capacity at language to say anything about besides the word NO, then good or bad, weak or strong, just standing up against its implacable weight and holding one’s own is an achievement. In lending her voice to the long and ongoing chorus of opposition voices raised against the cruel architecture of Hitler’s perverse public policies, Carol Rosen helps widen the cracks in its foundation, so that one may hear the singular voice of its victims crying NO from the grave.

- Tony Sienzant

“Carol Rosen: Journey Into Darkness” continues until May 12, 2013 at the Hunterdon Art Museum, 7 Lower Center Street, Clinton, NJ. 908-735-8415

http://www.hunterdonartmuseum.org/exhibits/