The Mechanics of Memory
(The following essay was published in 1998 in a lovely book designed by Jud Burgess and funded by the generous support of The El Paso Holocaust Museum and Study Center, The Adair Margo Gallery, Irving and Felicia Rubin, The Kallman family in honor of Edith Kallman, and Jim Haines. The four Holocaust paintings are part of the permanent collection of The El Paso Holocaust Museum. Living Room Painting and Dining Room Painting were "gifted" to Stewpot Ministries of Jackson, Mississippi.)
© 1998 by Becky Hendrick
THE MECHANICS OF MEMORY: FOUR HOLOCAUST PAINTINGS
GENESIS
During the 1980s, the art world boomed. It was Big Business, painting was hot, and we painters got spoiled by attention and sales. So when a collector asked to meet me and see my paintings, I was ready and eager to discuss the work: its intentions, the formal choices, the imagery and, most important to me, the content: relationships – causal, oppositional, complementary, paradoxical ---, that sort of thing. The themes I was dealing with were complex and consuming: choice, chance and consequence; the physics of change.
When the potential patron walked into the gallery, she was a living, breathing cliché; holding a fabric swatch, she wanted a painting to ‘match.’ I was probably polite and I probably did whatever was necessary to make a sale; my art may be oh-so-serious, but I am human. Privately, though, I still had enough liberal zeal to take offense at the contradiction between the content of my paintings and the spirit in which they were being bought and sold.
For a few years I had been considering the nature of pictures: whether, in an image-saturated culture, pictures still had the power to “work,” and if so, how. I began a series of Living Room Paintings in response to those people who shopped the contemporary galleries for their interior decoration needs. These paintings combined images of families displaced from their homes by war, poverty, or climate --- people with no living room --- with borders of decorative fabrics. My thinking was that if one has several thousand dollars to spend on something to hang over a sofa, that thing should be a constant reminder that owning it is a privilege!
© 1998 by Becky Hendrick
THE MECHANICS OF MEMORY: FOUR HOLOCAUST PAINTINGS
GENESIS
During the 1980s, the art world boomed. It was Big Business, painting was hot, and we painters got spoiled by attention and sales. So when a collector asked to meet me and see my paintings, I was ready and eager to discuss the work: its intentions, the formal choices, the imagery and, most important to me, the content: relationships – causal, oppositional, complementary, paradoxical ---, that sort of thing. The themes I was dealing with were complex and consuming: choice, chance and consequence; the physics of change.
When the potential patron walked into the gallery, she was a living, breathing cliché; holding a fabric swatch, she wanted a painting to ‘match.’ I was probably polite and I probably did whatever was necessary to make a sale; my art may be oh-so-serious, but I am human. Privately, though, I still had enough liberal zeal to take offense at the contradiction between the content of my paintings and the spirit in which they were being bought and sold.
For a few years I had been considering the nature of pictures: whether, in an image-saturated culture, pictures still had the power to “work,” and if so, how. I began a series of Living Room Paintings in response to those people who shopped the contemporary galleries for their interior decoration needs. These paintings combined images of families displaced from their homes by war, poverty, or climate --- people with no living room --- with borders of decorative fabrics. My thinking was that if one has several thousand dollars to spend on something to hang over a sofa, that thing should be a constant reminder that owning it is a privilege!
LIVING ROOM PAINTING
Acrylic and alkyd on canvas, 48” x 48”
Dining Room Painting continued the series with a news image of hungry faces, upraised hands, and empty bowls overlaid with a grid of ‘kitchen colors’ and flanked by wallpaper designs of plump fruits. (The original photograph was in color but I translated it into black and white since that is one way that reproductions of real-world events distance us from the subject portrayed.)
Acrylic and alkyd on canvas, 48” x 48”
Dining Room Painting continued the series with a news image of hungry faces, upraised hands, and empty bowls overlaid with a grid of ‘kitchen colors’ and flanked by wallpaper designs of plump fruits. (The original photograph was in color but I translated it into black and white since that is one way that reproductions of real-world events distance us from the subject portrayed.)
DINING ROOM PAINTING
Acrylic and alkyd on canvas, 4” x 48”
Need I say that these “morally correct” paintings did not sell? I have them still, displayed in my house above couches and dining table, the latter a substitute for Mother, reminding us to 1) clean our plates, or 2) take less food in the first place..
I wondered how far I could push the idea of taking unpleasant imagery, with content that is often avoided or denied outright, and transforming it into visually engaging compositions that initially seduce and then shock the viewer. In this way I arrived at the subject matter of the Nazi death camps.
I am not Jewish. I was born after World War II into a stereotypical WASP family in the deep South. Although I now reside in New Mexico, I don’t adhere to the ideology of the New Age: I am unaware of having lived past lives and I don’t own a crystal. All that being said, I admit to having had repeated and synchronic events that compel me toward Judaism. As I worked in deep concentration with images from the Holocaust, these mysterious bonds became stronger. At the same time, I realized that the pictures I used, rooted in facts, might be expanded to apply to any of mankind’s inhumanity to man, and that the victims pictured could be those of any genocidal event, man-made or viral. I offer these paintings and the process that created them to your attention so that the lessons I learned through them might be useful, too, to you.
Acrylic and alkyd on canvas, 4” x 48”
Need I say that these “morally correct” paintings did not sell? I have them still, displayed in my house above couches and dining table, the latter a substitute for Mother, reminding us to 1) clean our plates, or 2) take less food in the first place..
I wondered how far I could push the idea of taking unpleasant imagery, with content that is often avoided or denied outright, and transforming it into visually engaging compositions that initially seduce and then shock the viewer. In this way I arrived at the subject matter of the Nazi death camps.
I am not Jewish. I was born after World War II into a stereotypical WASP family in the deep South. Although I now reside in New Mexico, I don’t adhere to the ideology of the New Age: I am unaware of having lived past lives and I don’t own a crystal. All that being said, I admit to having had repeated and synchronic events that compel me toward Judaism. As I worked in deep concentration with images from the Holocaust, these mysterious bonds became stronger. At the same time, I realized that the pictures I used, rooted in facts, might be expanded to apply to any of mankind’s inhumanity to man, and that the victims pictured could be those of any genocidal event, man-made or viral. I offer these paintings and the process that created them to your attention so that the lessons I learned through them might be useful, too, to you.
THE MECHANICS OF MEMORY
Acrylic and alkyd on canvas; 45” x 45”
As I began this painting, my initial intent was to cover a canvas with a black-and-white picture of corpses from the Nazi death camps and to overlay a central circle or flower-like area with glaze of seductive colors. Early in the painting process, that intention changed.
I found a picture in a book and photocopied it. The reproduction was a few inches square, and my canvas was four feet square. I used a simple grid to enlarge the image, cutting the reproduction into 1” square segments and working piece by piece. I painted with a very small brush that quickly degenerated into a bald stick. I kept pushing the black and white paint around with the stub of the brush. I held the small paper chip close to my eyes, about six inches away, and focused very intently in a manner I have since labeled ‘deep looking.’ I painted in what is sometimes called a right-brain manner, seeing the visual information as shapes of light and dark rather than as identifiable subject matter.
The photocopy had very little apparent information. Most of it was blue black and pure white, but as I engaged with the reproduced image and ‘zoomed in’ deeper and deeper, I began to discover areas of varying gray tones. I worked in this way for quite a while --- time ceases to have meaning when one is working in this intense way --- and covered less than one square foot in several hours.
As I painted, my mind-voice spoke: “… this is dark gray and this edge gets a little darker and then there is a white shape here and then there is a line of gray…” and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, without any conscious desire on my part, I saw and thought “… a hand!” What had been a meaningless smudge of black and white emerged as a defined shape, a human shape. My mind --- left-brain --- recognized it and made it known to me.
As I continued to paint --- black, white, gray, this shape and that shape, an edge, a swirl --- I began to think about the hand, about my hand, about how my husband loved my young hands. And without planning it, I began to spin a story about the hand in the picture: She sits at an outdoor café with her lover. Her hand curls around a coffee cup. She is wearing an amethyst ring on her long smooth fingers. Her reaches across the table to touch her and says, “I love your hands.”
I recovered my composure and returned to painting in a detached way --- black and white, a circle, an angle, a highlight --- and time passed. Again without warning, my brain shifted and I saw “…a head!” What appeared as a simple curved shape revealed itself to be the back of a child’s head, and I mentally composed: He was not her smartest child or the best-behaved, but there was something special about him that only she recognized. And she could pick him out of a crowd by the shape of his head.
Over the days and weeks that this painting demanded, I allowed the storytelling to continue, never actively seeking an image, but allowing each one to emerge in its own time. I discovered the face of a man who, in my imagination, became my father; his face wore a death-mask of horror, fixed with a look no human face should ever have. He was a doctor and a poet, a gentle man who never raised his voice to his children.
Now, a decade later, my words can’t do justice to the overwhelming feelings and thoughts I experienced as I worked on the painting, but I clearly remember saying quietly over and over as I painted, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” And I cried.
Let me hasten to say that even while I responding with very sincere emotions, I was aware of the liberties I was taking with this image. As horrible as the photograph was, it was incomplete: there was no color, there was no small. My life is blissfully free of conflict, and I have never been the target of hate or violence. I recognized that my little vignettes were fictions that, while done with respect and tenderness, could not fully honor the reality of any individual’s particular history. Still, it seemed that my process was a justifiable way to make these seemingly empty patterns of black and white have meaning, to give new shape and new life to them.
When I was a little girl, I would often sneak down my father’s book on World War II and pore over the photographs from the death camps. I remember mentally putting myself into the pictures: What if that had been me? Now, forty years later, as I made this painting, I realized that empathy at its best is not putting me in the place of the victim, but putting the people I most love --- my daughter, my lover, my parents and friends --- into the scene.
I also realized that my original expectation for this painting had to be abandoned; the image was too powerful and precious for it to be trivialized in any way. I selected out a central square and ‘colorized’ it, following my earlier instincts but approaching it with a new goal. This, I thought, is how memory works, the mechanics of memory: it separates us from reality, it keeps us at a safe distance, it diminishes and tempers the horror, it falsifies. But, too, I learned that no matter how incomplete and untrue they may be, pictures do provide evidence that serves our collective memory and, as the painting process had taught me in a life-altering way, they have real power and potential.
Shaken by The mechanics of Memory, I needed to make a painting to share the lessons it had taught me. The process of ‘deep looking’ had revealed each black-gray mark to be a formerly living body, a human being. Each ‘victim’ had a unique history and, at the very least, each was someone’s child and, in my mind, a beloved child.
While I contemplated the dynamics of memory, I also pondered the origins and outcomes of hate. I remembered a passage I had copied into my journal from Margaret Atwood and I looked it up:
“This is what you have to do before you kill… You have to create an it, where none was before.
You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.”
We know that hate begins in little ways, by identifying a target group, by name-calling, by demonizing and exclusion. It seemed that by working backward --- recognizing the shapes, naming them, inventing a believable life for them, humanizing and personalizing them ---I might reverse the process of hate and, in a private and symbolic way, make the picture ‘work’ and be useful.
While I contemplated the dynamics of memory, I also pondered the origins and outcomes of hate. I remembered a passage I had copied into my journal from Margaret Atwood and I looked it up:
“This is what you have to do before you kill… You have to create an it, where none was before.
You do that first, in your head, and then you make it real.”
We know that hate begins in little ways, by identifying a target group, by name-calling, by demonizing and exclusion. It seemed that by working backward --- recognizing the shapes, naming them, inventing a believable life for them, humanizing and personalizing them ---I might reverse the process of hate and, in a private and symbolic way, make the picture ‘work’ and be useful.
REDEMPTION
Acrylic and enamel on canvas and aluminum, 36” x 60”
Redemption was preconceived and simple: a scumbled reproduction of a death-camp scene flanked by an aluminum panel on which I stenciled terms of endearment, trite words we call our children and loved ones: darling, sugar, precious, buddy, sweetheart, honey, dear, princess, angel, cutie, lover. Every mark on the canvas signified a child, a beloved, my child, my beloved. In this way the barriers between Other and Self dissolve, and we become one --- and are redeemed.
While doing research I came across one photograph that was particularly disturbing. The scene depicted a line of women, stripped of their clothes and waiting for purported “delousing” and sure extermination. The reproduction in the book and the subsequent copy I made of it --- third or fourth generation --- had very little information visible and required a lot of deep, meditative investigation.
Many things about this photograph hurt and outraged me. Who took this picture? (For a while I condemned the photographer, but lately I find myself grateful to him since the photograph bears witness to an event that would be otherwise unimaginable.) I was painted, too, by the fact of the women’s nakedness. If someone told me today to go outside and disrobe --- today, in the late 1990s when nudity is everywhere and hardly shocking --- I would --- today ---- be horrified. So to imagine a woman of the 1930s, one who may not have ever revealed her body to anyone, being forced into such public degradation … The mind reels!
As I studied my photocopy up close and at length, I saw that many of the women carried small children and babies. One woman held what appeared to be a newborn infant. By now my empathetic powers were well-hewn and I saw every figure as my sister, my mother, my aunt, my daughter.
I knew I wanted to make something of this potent image. I thought how, at the moment of the photograph, these women had no future. I thought how we all take our futures for granted; isn’t that our right? I wanted the painting to give back their futures. I had an idea to combine this group shot with one of a young woman who would embody vigor, life, and potential.
Acrylic and enamel on canvas and aluminum, 36” x 60”
Redemption was preconceived and simple: a scumbled reproduction of a death-camp scene flanked by an aluminum panel on which I stenciled terms of endearment, trite words we call our children and loved ones: darling, sugar, precious, buddy, sweetheart, honey, dear, princess, angel, cutie, lover. Every mark on the canvas signified a child, a beloved, my child, my beloved. In this way the barriers between Other and Self dissolve, and we become one --- and are redeemed.
While doing research I came across one photograph that was particularly disturbing. The scene depicted a line of women, stripped of their clothes and waiting for purported “delousing” and sure extermination. The reproduction in the book and the subsequent copy I made of it --- third or fourth generation --- had very little information visible and required a lot of deep, meditative investigation.
Many things about this photograph hurt and outraged me. Who took this picture? (For a while I condemned the photographer, but lately I find myself grateful to him since the photograph bears witness to an event that would be otherwise unimaginable.) I was painted, too, by the fact of the women’s nakedness. If someone told me today to go outside and disrobe --- today, in the late 1990s when nudity is everywhere and hardly shocking --- I would --- today ---- be horrified. So to imagine a woman of the 1930s, one who may not have ever revealed her body to anyone, being forced into such public degradation … The mind reels!
As I studied my photocopy up close and at length, I saw that many of the women carried small children and babies. One woman held what appeared to be a newborn infant. By now my empathetic powers were well-hewn and I saw every figure as my sister, my mother, my aunt, my daughter.
I knew I wanted to make something of this potent image. I thought how, at the moment of the photograph, these women had no future. I thought how we all take our futures for granted; isn’t that our right? I wanted the painting to give back their futures. I had an idea to combine this group shot with one of a young woman who would embody vigor, life, and potential.
FUTURES PAST AND PRESENT
Oil and acrylic on two canvases, 48” x 96”
While I painted the large canvas, I looked through magazines and books and old photo albums, scanning for “my girl.” It didn’t matter who she was: a model promoting perfume, and athlete, whatever. But I couldn’t find her, so I set the large painting aside and decided to quit searching. My girl, I figured, would eventually turn up.
Oil and acrylic on two canvases, 48” x 96”
While I painted the large canvas, I looked through magazines and books and old photo albums, scanning for “my girl.” It didn’t matter who she was: a model promoting perfume, and athlete, whatever. But I couldn’t find her, so I set the large painting aside and decided to quit searching. My girl, I figured, would eventually turn up.
As indeed she did, in a most serendipitous way. It was months later when I received my quarterly college alumnae magazine. The journal featured a wonderful photograph of four Newcomb College students frolicking --- that’s the only word for it --- in Lake Ponchartrain in 1918. On the left was the figure I had been looking for, looking right back at me. To make it even better, this anonymous young woman could easily have been Jewish; Newcomb College of Tulane University had (and I presume still has) a large Jewish enrollment. She would have been middle-aged by the late 1930s and could have been, at least in theory, a person in my painting. Creating a second, adjacent canvas panel, I rendered her ‘in living color’ and emphasized the water as the unknowable, the unforeseen, the future.
* * *
By the early 1990s I was riding an emotional see-saw of alarm and despair. The world, it seemed to me, was ignoring urgent issues and crises. Environmental concerns, homelessness, and AIDS were reaching critical mass, and I worried that we had passed the point of no return. In response to the ‘decade of denial,’ I made a few paintings to address the subject.
In several works, I contrasted images from environmental disasters (Alaska suffered a major oil spill at this time) and pictures of victims of various social and physical illnesses with a double-handled vessel. The vase form was my reference to one of the Golden Sayings of Epictetus that goes something like this:
Everything is a vessel with two handles: one by which it can be borne and one by which you cannot bear it.
For example, if your brother hurts you, you cannot bear it by the handle of his injustice to you
but rather by the fact that he is your brother.
This is one of the few lessons from Philosophy 101 that I remember, no doubt because it seemed to be one I might actually use. While no one would mistake me for a Pollyanna, I do find myself often seeking the ‘second handle’ in my day-to-day life: how can I bear a minor stroke of bad luck or a major tragedy?
Some things --- genocide comes to mind --- do not have a bearable handle. But working with Holocaust imagery made me realize that acknowledging humankind’s history of hate (and therefore potential for hate) was one way to actively struggle against it. The corollary to ‘out of sight, out of mind’ motivated the Lessons of Epictetus, and the finished painting serves as a constant reminder. Engaging visually and mentally with the photograph-as-process and with the resulting painting-as-product became the second handle.
* * *
By the early 1990s I was riding an emotional see-saw of alarm and despair. The world, it seemed to me, was ignoring urgent issues and crises. Environmental concerns, homelessness, and AIDS were reaching critical mass, and I worried that we had passed the point of no return. In response to the ‘decade of denial,’ I made a few paintings to address the subject.
In several works, I contrasted images from environmental disasters (Alaska suffered a major oil spill at this time) and pictures of victims of various social and physical illnesses with a double-handled vessel. The vase form was my reference to one of the Golden Sayings of Epictetus that goes something like this:
Everything is a vessel with two handles: one by which it can be borne and one by which you cannot bear it.
For example, if your brother hurts you, you cannot bear it by the handle of his injustice to you
but rather by the fact that he is your brother.
This is one of the few lessons from Philosophy 101 that I remember, no doubt because it seemed to be one I might actually use. While no one would mistake me for a Pollyanna, I do find myself often seeking the ‘second handle’ in my day-to-day life: how can I bear a minor stroke of bad luck or a major tragedy?
Some things --- genocide comes to mind --- do not have a bearable handle. But working with Holocaust imagery made me realize that acknowledging humankind’s history of hate (and therefore potential for hate) was one way to actively struggle against it. The corollary to ‘out of sight, out of mind’ motivated the Lessons of Epictetus, and the finished painting serves as a constant reminder. Engaging visually and mentally with the photograph-as-process and with the resulting painting-as-product became the second handle.
REVELATIONS
Oil, enamel and acrylic on canvas, 30" x 60"
Many times the content and intent of art is not obvious, it doesn’t flaunt itself, but reveals itself bit by bit through serious contemplation. The forms of the art --- the visual vocabulary, the subject matter, the format, the handling of media, the title --- are decisions, both conscious and intuitive, made by the artist in service to its content. Through thoughtful consideration of all the formal choices, the viewer can discover and explore layers of meaning and significance.
I did not consciously set out to make paintings about the Holocaust. I arrived at the subject as I pursued the notion of change and painting’s relevance to change. The lengthy and in-depth scrutiny of Holocaust imagery worked profound and lasting changes within me, as an artist and humanist.
Increasingly, at mid-life, I insist that my art ‘work’ for me, and these four Holocaust paintings were successful in that regard. Dealing with reproductions that depict the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust validated my belief in the power of pictures. The act of painting from tiny, subtle imagery required me to employ a depth of visual and mental concentration that resulted in new lowers of connection and revelation. If the art is fully successful, it will have the power to ‘work’ from the inside out, for those who engage with it. It is my hope as an artist that these Holocaust paintings will invite their audience to repeated and lengthy contemplation so that they, too, might effect changes of heart and mind.
Oil, enamel and acrylic on canvas, 30" x 60"
Many times the content and intent of art is not obvious, it doesn’t flaunt itself, but reveals itself bit by bit through serious contemplation. The forms of the art --- the visual vocabulary, the subject matter, the format, the handling of media, the title --- are decisions, both conscious and intuitive, made by the artist in service to its content. Through thoughtful consideration of all the formal choices, the viewer can discover and explore layers of meaning and significance.
I did not consciously set out to make paintings about the Holocaust. I arrived at the subject as I pursued the notion of change and painting’s relevance to change. The lengthy and in-depth scrutiny of Holocaust imagery worked profound and lasting changes within me, as an artist and humanist.
Increasingly, at mid-life, I insist that my art ‘work’ for me, and these four Holocaust paintings were successful in that regard. Dealing with reproductions that depict the atrocities of the Nazi Holocaust validated my belief in the power of pictures. The act of painting from tiny, subtle imagery required me to employ a depth of visual and mental concentration that resulted in new lowers of connection and revelation. If the art is fully successful, it will have the power to ‘work’ from the inside out, for those who engage with it. It is my hope as an artist that these Holocaust paintings will invite their audience to repeated and lengthy contemplation so that they, too, might effect changes of heart and mind.
