This document provides the transcript of a lecture given by Dr. Lori Kent on the topic of where art comes from from an artist's perspective. It discusses various influences on art such as memory, imagination, experience, representation, passion, and re-presentation. It provides examples of artworks from different time periods and contexts, including the Holocaust and natural disasters, to illustrate how artists draw from collective and personal memories and experiences to create work that represents and comments on the world around them.
1. The Artist, Collective Memory,
and Crisis of the Natural and
Unnatural Kind
January 27, 2010
A Lecture to Jagalonian University Cultural
Studies Program, Class in Visuality
Dr. Lori Kent
Fulbright Fellow, Academy of Fine Arts
Leadbelly (1930s) “Ox Drivin’ Blues” from the album “King of the 12-String
Guitar”
91. “We shall discover and encourage the artists
who are able to impress upon the State of the
German people the cultural stamp of the
Germanic race . . . in their origin and in the
picture which they present they are the
expressions of the soul and the ideals of the
community."
(Hitler, Party Day speech, 1935)
98. WŁADYSŁAW SIWEK
Background Prior to World War II, Siwek studied at the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts and worked for the
Kraków Railway Headquarters.
Arrest and Deportation to Auschwitz He was arrested for resistance on January 14, 1940 and sent to
Montelupic prison. October 8, 1940, Siwek was deported to Auschwitz, where he was assigned prisoner
number 5826.
Art Produced at Auschwitz He was initially assigned to hard labor in the stone quarries and became
emaciated and ill. Siwek was then sent to the prisoner infirmary, where fellow artist and prisoner Leon
Turalski helped secure him an easier labor assignment with the painters’ labor detail. May 1941 through
September 1943, Siwek produced calligraphy, portraits, landscape paintings, and hunting scenes for the
SS. In addition to portraits of the SS families, he did portraits, in secret, of over 2000 prisoners.
108. “NIGHT…. A brick has come
loose from the low wall
separating out cell from
the next where other
larvae sleep, moan, and
dream under the blankets
that cover them – these
are shrouds covering them
for they are dead., today,
tomorrow what does it
matter,… We feel that we
teeter on the edge of a
dark pit, a bottomless void
– it is the hole of the night
where we struggle
furiously, struggle against
another nightmare, that of
our real death.”*
MieczyslawKoscielniak, from the series: "A Day in the Life of a Woman Prisoner"
111. You don’t have to be an artist to draw.
Create a small scene from
your life, at any age, that is
memorable.
Use imagery only, no text.
Unknown Artist (1944) Portrait of Albert
Frecke
Editor's Notes
The Peninsular War was probably the worst mistake Napoleon Bonaparte made during his lengthy reign over France - the attempted subjugation of Portugal in a bid to tighten his trade blockade of Britain.To get at Portugal, Bonaparte had to trick his ally Spain into allowing a French army under General Jean-Andoche Junot to move through its territory.
Katrina was a strong cat 4 at 140 MPH
Viewing the terrain of Birkenau today, it is difficult to visualize the conditions under which the prisoners were forced to work during the construction of the camp in 1941/2. A penal company had been formed for the purpose of digging an enormous ditch in Birkenau, called Konigsgraben (Kings Ditch), to collect the ground waters and to drain the water into the Vistula. The prisoners detailed for the penal company were to be killed afterwards, but before they met their death they were to be ruthlessly exploited for labor.
I included Arno Breker in this archive first because he was in a certain sense both the best and the worst of the Nazi artists. His technique was excellent, and his choice of subject, poses, theme, and so on were outstanding, but on the other hand, Breker was therefore much more directly and effectively a supporter of the Nazi cause. Had his sculpture been ugly, ambiguous in meaning, poorly-executed, or less directly associated with Nazi militarism, the negative effects on the world of his sculpture would have been considerably lessened. In a certain sense, Breker uses his numerous "naked men with swords" to unite the notions of health, strength, competition, collective action and willingness to sacrifice the self for the common good seen in many other Nazi works with explicit glorification of militarism.
Nazi Folk Art". The themes running through such works (and there were a LOT of them) are the virtues of the simple, natural life, living close to the land, and using muscular power to turn the land into a healthy living. This is a theme I find often portrayed in the more recent primitivist art of the environmentalist movement except that it tends to promote a more etherial or surreal notion of what "union with the soil" and "the simple life" might entail. More likely than not because rural Germans had some experience with "the simple life"
Marc Chagall was born in Russia in 1887. His life was deeply rooted in Jewish tradition and religion.
In Birkenau latrines were cleaned by hand, another strategy of dehumanization. Author Terrence Des Pres described it as an "excremental assault" and wrote: "How much self-esteem can one maintain, how readily can one respond to the needs of another, if both stink, if both are caked with mud and feces?" [Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (Pocket Books: New York, 1976) p. 66.]
http://remember.org/then-and-now/tn16.html* Charlotte Delbo, Night (from Auschwitz and After: None of Us Will Return), (1995) Yale University Press, p56. **Charlotte Delbo, Morning (from Auschwitz and After: None of Us Will Return), (1995) Yale University Press, p62.
Moshe Rynecki was a painter whose work often directed attention to the persecution of the Jews. He lived in the Warsaw ghetto and died at Majdanek.