Women in Dark Times (33 page)

When Shalev-Gerz puts the question to her participants – What story should be told today? – she is therefore also asking: What is the Europe in which we are living today? When French philosopher Alain Badiou suggests that the foreigner should be honoured as citizen before anyone else (he takes as his exemplar an immigrant from Mali washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant), he does so because she or he is the ghost of those who once belonged.
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Imagine all these speakers as shadowing the body politic, mouthing the sometimes articulate, sometimes muttered – only partly decipherable – runes from a time we thought had gone. If migrant workers are the pawns of ruthlessly mobile capital, as well as the possible harbingers of a more racially and culturally mixed world, they also can be seen as the haunting reminder of what, in its worst moments, Europe once tried to become. This gives a whole new and urgent meaning to the misfit or outsider or immigrant, the errant actors in Shalev-Gerz’s creative drama. Fragments of European memory made flesh, they become the truest witnesses of a deadly European legacy which has shadowed the whole of this book. We should not be surprised therefore to discover this monumental, unspoken history also hovering beneath the surface of these seemingly anecdotal tales. One of the most shocking Aubervilliers stories shows a participant recalling her conversation with a woman who had worked in a jam factory under the German occupation of France and who had described putting shards of glass in the jam headed for the Germans at the Russian front. (‘A moment of resistance, it was one, I think.’)
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History erupts as violent remembrance. Or as taint: ‘People from Alsace Lorraine were called “Filthy Boches”. The children of the area are the bearers of a powerful history.’
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Or as plea: ‘What matters more than anything, what makes a space human, is to see the marks of History.’ ‘I lived six years in a city marked by History. It was Berlin and that is why I was there.’

In all of this Shalev-Gerz has the acutest sense of the demand she is making by entering these worlds which are not – or not yet – hers or our own. Always she arrives in these communities as an outsider, acknowledging her own status as alien. One respondent sums up the questions he feels she is, or perhaps should be, putting to herself: ‘Where am I? What does it mean to be a stranger here? What could I give to this place that it might not want?’
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She never slips into a fraudulent identification or self-comforting empathy with the predicament of any of the subjects telling their tales (which would immediately render them victims of their fates). You may learn much by listening and watching, but you cannot be consoled by these stories. Without this gap or distance – which is above all her own – the viewer would slip into the trap of the voyeur (remember her plea for humility as the answer to dictators). ‘The only thing I can give you,’ she has commented, ‘is my distance to you.’
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*

For me, Esther Shalev-Gerz is the errant, passionate and intimate chronicler of the darkest side of our modern world. One final work shows how far she has come only to find herself returning, historically and creatively, to the same place. In the exhibition
D’eux
of 2009 –
translated as
On Two
but which equally means ‘of or about them’ (remember ‘I want my work to be them’) – she juxtaposes two parts of her own history by filming Jacques Rancière and Rola Younes, a twenty-five-year-old philosopher of Lebanese origin, and showing the videos on separate screens.
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The exhibition thus reflects the split between Paris, where Shalev-Gerz now lives, and the Middle East, where she spent twenty-five years of her life. The filming takes place against the backdrop of an island west of Paris, a now derelict but once proud industrial centre, and a forest on an island west of Canada (forests, where her mother hid, are also, we may recall, marked with the sign of loss and dereliction). There is no obvious connection between the settings and speakers; instead, she suggests, each one ‘evokes a particular displacement of boundaries . . . opening out the idea of elsewhere’.
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While Rancière reads from his book
The Emancipated Spectator –
a concept which Shalev-Gerz’s work could be said to bring to life – Rola Younes responds to questions put to her by the artist. Like her interlocutor, Younes too is a woman of many languages, which are her passion: her mother tongues, French, English and Arabic, and then the languages she has taught herself, Yiddish, Hebrew, Persian. To have learnt these languages – especially Yiddish and Hebrew – is for her a special achievement: ‘What we call in Arabic,’ she explains, ‘ “
at-ta’arof al ahli
”, literally meaning people knowing one another.’
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She likes Yiddish more than Hebrew because it is not linear but ‘more like a bouquet’ (full of interjections and words that can belong grammatically to more than one category).
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She wanted – remember she is Lebanese, her mother Druze, her father Maronite – to know ‘the Hebrew world and the Yiddish world from the inside’. ‘I think’, she observes, ‘it is a very good vaccination against fanaticism.’
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She is, she insists, a minority. ‘There are only minorities in Lebanon.’
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When I put the question to her, Esther Shalev-Gerz had no doubt that being a woman has played a key role in Rola Younes’s ethics, the remarkable project of immersing herself in the tongues of a culture which for many of her people are simply that of the sworn enemy. This young woman, who can be seen as the future, wants to cross borders, to go where she is not welcome, to bring the outsider – which she herself also is – into the heart of her community, and of her own mental and geographical space. One of her formative, shocking memories is of bombs falling on Beirut, and of the Asian nanny who raised her as a child being put out on the balcony while the rest of her well-to-do family took refuge in the shelter. These sounds of violence are her refrain. According to her mother, at the sound of blasts and shells, Rola would jump inside the womb. After she was born her mother chose to carry her baby across the city under fire to their home to escape her in-laws. We are back to the beginning of this chapter, to
Sound Machine
and the factory noises
resounding inside the pregnant bodies of the women workers, or to Charlotte Fuchs in
Does Your Image Reflect Me?
– her baby screaming and spitting out his milk as bombs dropped on the city of Hanover. Where do these noises go? For Rola Younes, they have never stopped: ‘I think that I have kept some kind of memory of that noise, the noise of shells, the noise of explosions, in my relations with my mother’ (like the void that Shalev-Gerz’s mother passed on to her child).
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Once again we are inside the womb where birth is threatened, but also perversely accompanied, by the brute political cacophony of the streets. We need to recognise this world – indeed all the worlds, however vagrant or dissonant, into which Shalev-Gerz invites us – as our own. But it takes a woman to have the guts to go there. ‘We have to,’ she simply states (although the assertiveness ‘we
have to
’ is untypical), ‘as women, we have to go there.’
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6

Coming Home

Yael Bartana

Of course, when I was living in Israel as a young girl, people spoke of going back to Poland, especially among my mother’s generation, but such talk was regarded as crazy.

Esther Shalev-Gerz on Yael Bartana, in conversation with Jacqueline Rose, 2013

‘Hollywood Exodus – Eight of Hollywood’s largest film studios have decided to pull the plug and move to Poland’,
Los Angeles Times
, 4 June 2018.

A Cookbook for Political Imagination
, ed. Sebastian Cichoki and Galit Eilat,

to coincide with Yael Bartana’s exhibition,
. . . 
And Europe Will Be Stunned

Polish Pavilion, 54th International Art Biennale, Venice, 2012

It was an irony of Marilyn Monroe’s life and times that so many of the Hollywood moguls for whom she worked were predominantly East European Jews who were drawn to her because she was ‘as un-Jewish as she possibly could be’.
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Long before she converted to Judaism for her marriage to Arthur Miller, Monroe felt an affinity with a people whom she saw as the orphans of the world.
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According to Susan Strasberg, close friend of Monroe and daughter of Lee and Paula Strasberg, the famous New York acting coach duo, the moguls were in flight from their past. Hollywood was after all the factory of dreams. Monroe’s beauty was, as we saw, a way for America to proclaim its own post-war perfection, to show itself unsullied by the ugliness of the Europe which it had saved. That belief – America as utterly distinct from a continent that cannot survive without it – has continued to dictate the relationship between the United States and Europe, and indeed the rest of the world, to this day. But, I suggested, the excess and frailty of Monroe’s beauty also exposed that belief, together with the dream of perfection that accompanied it, as a myth.

In 2012, the artist Yael Bartana was selected to represent Poland at the Venice Biennale for her extraordinary film trilogy 
. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned.
Born in Israel, now dividing her time between New York, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv, she could not, as an experimental film-maker and video artist, be at a further remove from Hollywood. To coincide with and celebrate her presence at the Biennale, Bartana, together with two collaborators on the exhibition, published a
Cookbook for the Political Imagination
(evoking a female tradition not wholly usurped by today’s generations of mostly male master-chefs), with recipes, drawings, photographs, essays, and blank pages for readers to add whatever they wish. One entry imagines – or rather projects as a future reality – a moment when the exodus of Jews from Europe to Hollywood will go into reverse. ‘Hollywood is run by Jews, it is owned by Jews,’ Marlon Brando proclaimed in an anti-Semitic tirade in 1996, ‘and they should have a greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering.’
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His outburst is not untypical. Alongside this remark, the
Cookbook
provides a run of such complaints including one from Texe Marrs, ‘Meet the Jews who own Hollywood’, on his biblical website www.powerofprophecy.com in 2011, and another from Edmund Connolly, ‘Hollywood and the Jewish War on Christmas’ in the
Occidental Quarterly
of 2009.
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Hollywood has not been spared the hatred for which it was meant to be the cure: ‘What could be’, the
Cookbook
muses, ‘distant relatives of Hollywood’s founding fathers have made full circle by returning to Poland.’
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Although she left Israel in 2000, Bartana is an Israeli citizen. It is the scandal of her work that this has not stopped her from still seeing the Jews as the orphans of the world, or from continuing to ask the question which the creation of Israel was meant to have settled once and for all: where do the Jews belong?

To this question, her work offers its startling reply. 
. . . And Europe Will Be Stunned
opens with a young Polish man standing in an almost deserted, derelict sports stadium in Warsaw calling out his impassioned appeal for the Jews to return to his country: ‘We want three million Jews to return to Poland, we want you to live with us again!’
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He means it. The actor who plays the part, Sławomir Sierakowski, is a real-life activist, leader of today’s Polish New Left, who, together with another well-known activist, wrote the speech himself. Like Esther Shalev-Gerz, Yael Bartana is a woman artist who chooses to take us back into Europe’s darkest hour in order to make her bid for the future: ‘We need you! We are asking you to return!’ proclaims Sierakowski. ‘Return and we shall finally become Europeans.’ The
Cookbook
opens with a manifesto for the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), launched on the back of the trilogy and defining itself as ‘a political group calling for the return of 3,300,000 Jews to the land of their forefathers’.
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Thousands of signatories have signed up to the manifesto and the movement held its first congress in May 2012 in Berlin.

If such an idea may at first glance seem crazy, by inviting Bartana to represent Poland in its pavilion at the Biennale, the Polish art world at least has clearly been responsive to the call (the project was approved by the Polish Minister of Culture). In fact she is the first non-Polish national in the history of the exhibition to be honoured with such an invitation. Crazy, it has been my argument throughout, can make another type of sense. Often it simply means that someone – notably women – has been stirring the depths. It is Bartana’s talent to conjure history in a barely imaginable form. Cinema has always had the capacity to bring to life the unreal – what is most fervently desired and feared – as much as the real, to set it moving in front of our eyes. In this the movement of the image is crucial, which is why, unlike horror movies, horror photography has never quite made it into the popular imagination as a genre. Bartana makes use of this visual licence of cinema – which so readily taps into terror – to actualise history in the very shape it has most tried to repress.
Mary Koszmary
or
Nightmares
is the title of this first film – once more into the dark. Hallucinatory, delirious, incantatory are terms often evoked in relation to her work. Bartana is another woman alert to the fact that true historical transformation can only take place by tapping into the unconscious of nations. She is a ghost-trailer. Like Shalev-Gerz, Bartana invokes Europe’s past, calling up a time that Poland has wanted to forget. If Shalev-Gerz brings the lost voices of Europe to the surface, the migrants and misfits whose stories are rarely told or heard, Bartana, no less in search of the unspoken, culls the night. Both are undercover artists. We have of course been here before. Remember Rosa Luxemburg writing to her lover in 1907 of her desire to plunge into the dark whirlpool of the London city streets, into dangers in which she was sure to be lost. Yael Bartana goes further – placing a wish that Luxemburg was troubled to discover within herself at the very core of her art. She is more than aware that to do so takes us to the limits of what it might be possible, aesthetically and politically, to tolerate. ‘It was a really deep, metaphysical link. I could feel the place,’ she writes of her felt connection to Poland, where she lived for four years while making these films. ‘There was something there that attracted me so much that I really wanted to open all the wounds.’
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