Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Minkowski

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A few days ago (Wednesday, 14th March) I looked at how people sometimes question the relevance of events such as the Holocaust and how some do not wish to participate in or view works (whether art, photography, documentary or film) which deal with such a difficult subject. I quoted Henri Begson and after reading Gaston Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’, I came upon this quote regarding Eugene Minkowski:

“Minkowski followed Bergson in accepting the notion on ‘elan vital’ as the dynamic origin of human life. Referring to Tymienwicka’s book ‘Phenomenology and Science’ we can say that for Minkowski, the essence of life is not ‘a feeling of being, of existence’ but a feeling of participation in flowing onward, necessarily expressed in terms of time and secondarily expressed in terms of space.”

In this quote, I read that we are all somehow partipants of the same past, the same space; that events 60 years ago in Poland are just as relevant as they are now. Bergson’s quote equating the past’s existence with that of objects warns us that just because we do not look does not mean that the past stops – in effect, one might say that the horrors of the past continue to this day; they are happening all the time.

Maps and Walking

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The main theme of much of my work has so far been the Holocaust and in particular its sites, such as those at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec and Babi Yar. I’ve also been studying memory and how memories within objects and buildings might allow us a glimpse of the past; a theme which has fascinated me ever since I was a child. It was through reading Bill Viola’s writings a few months back that I was reminded of the mnemonic techniques practiced by the ancient Greeks:

“The idea of art as a kind of diagram has for the most part not made it down from the Middle Ages into modern European Consciousness. The Renaissance was the turning point… The structural aspect of art, and the idea of a ‘data-space’ was preserved through the Renaissance however in the continued relations between image and architecture. Painting became an architectural, spatial form which the viewer experienced by physically walking through it. The older concept of an idea and an image architecture, a memory ‘place’ like the mnemonic temples of the Greeks is carried through in the great European cathedrals and palaces, as is the relation between memory, spatial movement and storage (recording) of ideas.”

When I first read this quote, I was at the time researching The University Parks in Oxford, and in particular examining the plaques on the benches. I realised then, that my act of walking and ‘remembering’ those who have passed away, was in a broad and rather loose sense, like walking through one of those ‘mnemonic temples’ albeit in a physical sense. I was constructing a bigger picture of the place.

More recently, walking has started to play an important role in my work on the Holocaust (one of the themes which has struck me through my research has been that of walking. Many photos of the Holocaust show people walking, usually, and tragically, to their deaths). I’ve started to look at the Operation Reinhard camps and in particular Belzec. Laurence Rees, in his book, ‘Auschwitz’, describes the unimaginable scale of death and contrasts it with the disproportionately tiny size of Belzec Death Camp, which measured less less than 300m x 300m. I knew this was a small size, but it wasn’t until I walked around some familiar spaces in Oxford – including the University Parks – that I realised just how small it was.

Since then I’ve started looking for more evidence of the size of Belzec (and other camps) so that I might walk specific distances around the city, and have since discovered a number of maps drawn by survivors, SS men and archaeologists. These roughly sketched maps, these ‘memories,’ are a poignant reminder of the camp’s existence and might help me in my attempts to bring people closer to the Holocaust, which should never be forgotten.

“All things fade away in time, but time itself is made fadeless and undying by recollection.” Apollonius of Tyana
“We have to describe and to explain a building the upper story of which was erected in the nineteenth century; the ground-floor dates from the sixteenth century, and a careful examination of the masonry discloses the fact that it was reconstructed from a dwelling-tower of the eleventh century. In the cellar we discover Roman foundation walls, and under the cellar a filled-in cave, in the floor of which stone tool are found and remnants of glacial fauna is the layers below… Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are ‘housed’.” C.G. Jung
“Memory, whether individual or generational, political or public is always more than the prison house of the past.” Andreas Huyssen

Here I must return to the ancient Greeks and their mnenomic temples. With a place or loci, such as a house, fixed in the mind, the person remembering would place various objects in its rooms (“…what I have spoken of as being done in a house can also be done in public buildings, or on a long journey, or going through a city…”), objects which by association would remind them of part of the whole thing – such as a speech – to be remembered. Here I saw at once a correlation with my work on Belzec. The ancient Greeks were walking as a means of remembering, of not forgetting; their memory loci were in effect maps which one could sketch, maps of the mind. Therefore, the maps drawn by survivors, are in effect maps of their minds and bring us closer to the horrors of the time – closer to the individuals who suffered.

The fact that objects were used to create associations, and therefore build (through ‘walking’) a bigger ‘picture’ of something also fits in with the recent work I’ve been doing on Auschwitz, looking at the possessions left by the victims and trying to build a picture of the individuals before the Holocaust, to see them not only as victims, but people who lived lives before its horror.

Through walking distances which I’ve taken from descriptions of the camp, I have found myself walking back into my own past and the past of the city in general; for example, walking the route of Cuckoo Lane and the Old London Road at Shotover. My own past confirms my individuality and the past of the city confirms my place as a small part in the mass of memories associated with this place (this also correlates with my work on Auschwitz, trying to find the individuals amongst the huge number of dead, individual possessions from amongst the mountains, names rather than inconceivable numbers). The fact these walks have been derived from a map or a description of Belzec, helps me to identify further with the individuals who suffered there; not because I can in anyway conceive of their suffering – no-one could ever imagine the horrors they endured – but because I can imagine their own pasts and that of the places they knew so well, places from which they were taken to their deaths.

Arie A. Galles

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I found this artist’s work whilst looking on the web for maps of Belzec. He’s created fourteen extraordinary charcoal drawings of different Holocaust sites and in a statement says the following:

“Under no condition can art express the Holocaust. To withdraw art from confronting this horror, however, is to assign victory to its perpetrators.”

Following on from some of the feedback I received yesterday, I found this particularly pertinent.

Bergson

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Following on from the collaborative work Austin and I presented yesterday, I was thinking about those comments from people who did not wish to engage with the work and the idea of people turning their backs (not out of spite) on difficult subjects. In respect of the Holocaust, people often say ‘it’s in the past, what relevance does it have for today?’ The following quote is from Henri Bergson:

“There will no longer be any more reason to say that the past effaces itself as soon as it’s perceived, than there is to suppose that individual objects cease to exist when we cease to perceive them.”

I find this quote particularly pertinent in that it suggests a correlation between how we perceive the past and how we perceive objects; in effect there is no difference at all. With much of my work focusing on objects and memory, its resonance is particularly striking.

A Young Man. A Middle-Aged Man.

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Today, I, along with fellow student, Austin, presented some work in progress which we’ve been developing over the last few weeks. The origins of the project was a piece which I’d planned concerning my difficulty in ‘finding individuals’ amongst the countless victims of the Holocaust – particularly when faced with a mountain of shoes and suitcases, as was the case in Auschwitz. I’d intended to ask people to bring in a piece of luggage containing a selection of personal items, and having seen Austin’s work with text and sound, thought it would be good to put the two together. His sound work consisted of a group of people reading the same prepared piece of text and resulted in a sound that was at first a mass of tangled voices, ending with just one. This illustrated perfectly the idea of looking for a single object, for an individual amongst a mass of objects; amongst countless numbers of dead.

The process of the piece was as follows. People brought in bags of objects as requested, whereupon, on my own, I emptied the luggage, and documented the contents. I then piled them in the middle of the room and asked people to come inside. Having had time to study the pile, Austin initiated the first sound work of the performance, dividing viewers into two (men and women) and then again, as if arranging a choir. They were then asked to read a prepared text – lists of people Austin had seen during specific intervals on a specific date: a young man, a middle-aged man etc. – which they did, the result of which was as hoped, a mass of voices ending with just one.

For the second part I sorted the possessions into six piles (one for shoes, one for clothes etc.) and then Austin asked everyone to read (this time positioned individually around the objects) from a second list which was itself a sorted version of the first text. Again the results were the same, albeit with a different sound; many voices becoming just one.

The last part of the piece was getting people to take their bags and reclaim their possessions from amongst the piles, in effect reclaiming their individuality.

Reactions to the piece were mixed. Some saw the sound work as being a separate thing altogether, others saw them both as a whole. Some felt the piece to be difficult and challenging (as expected) and one felt it ‘offensive’ (although not as far as I could tell in respect of the victims of the Holocaust). Dealing with a subject as emotional and as difficult as this presents the artist with many challenges, but ones which he or she must not shy away from. Equally, potential audiences should be encouraged not to ‘turn away’ from such works – some today clearly didn’t want to engage with the work at all – as this only serves to illustrate how easy it is for us now, just as it was then, to pretend that nothing bad is happening in the world.

This was a work primarily about the Holocaust, but atrocities occur every day; not on the scale of the Holocaust perhaps, but nevertheless, a murder is still the death of an individual, wherever, whenever or however it occurs.

Panorama

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Just back from a New Year visit to Poland where I visited my girlfriend and saw more of the attractions the country has to offer. This time we took a trip to Wroclaw (a five hour train ride from Warsaw) and there saw amongst other things, the Panorama of Raclawicka. I had no idea what to expect of it, only that it was a large painting of a battle and that we were going to look at it for half an hour. At 3.30pm (our appointed slot) Monika and I made our way along with a number of others, up a slope inside what the Rough Guide describes as a ‘gargantuan wicker basket rendered in concrete’. I could see a part of the painting as we approached from below – the sky and some of the ‘set’ displayed in front of the painting, in this case what looked like a wheel from a cannon. On seeing this my heart sank a little, as the combination of a painting with ‘added scenery’ called to mind a set for some dodgy play, but on reaching the painting proper, and seeing the whole thing in its entirety, I was more than very pleasantly surprised.

The painting itself is 120m long and 15m high and is beautifully painted, and far from being a bit twee, the ‘set’ between the painting and the viewer works really well. And it got me to thinking about my own work and the paintings I made last semester. I want to create something like a panorama, in the style of the paintings I have already created, onto which I can project the shadows of those viewing. I’m not sure how, but it’s an idea nonetheless.

Translocation

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Having showed work concerning my experience of Auschwitz-Birkenau, I began to think back to the work I started earlier in the semester which concerned another place; Oxford’s University Parks.

Although these places are – for obvious reasons – both very different, they are nevertheless open spaces in which people are remembered. In the case of Auschwitz-Birkenau it is the 1.1 million victims of Nazi Genocide who are remembered; in the case of the Parks, it’s a comparative scattering of people who knew and loved the place.

What I find interesting in these two places is the way in which the dead are remembered. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, it’s as if “the dead are still drilled“, still confined to Barracks, whereas in the Parks they sit on their benches and enjoy the place they loved while they were living.

I’ve also begun to wonder whether it is possible to describe one place in terms of another? Many in this city, will never get the chance to (or may not wish to) visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. So can I somehow describe its qualities – its scale, space, atmosphere – it terms of The Parks?

Bruno Schulz

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From ‘The Street of Crocodiles’

“But where the ground extended into a low-lying isthmus and dropped into the shadow of the back wall of a deserted soda factory, it became grimmer, overgrown and wild with neglect, untidy, fierce with thistles, bristling with nettles, covered with a rash of weeds, until, at the very end of the walls, in an open rectangular bay, it lost all moderation and became insane… It was there that I saw him first and for the only time in my life, at a noon hour crazy with heat. It was at a moment when time, demented and wild breaks away from the treadmill of events and like an escaping vagabond, runs shouting across the fields. Then the summer grows out of control, spreads at all points over space with a wild impetus, doubling and trebling itself into an unknown, lunatic dimension.”

Bill Viola

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From ‘Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House – Writings 1973 – 1994’

“Chartres and other edifices like it have been described as ‘music frozen in stone’. References to sound and acoustics are twofold. Not only are there the actual sonic characteristics of the cavernous interior, but the form and structure of the building itself reflects the principles of sacred proportion and universal harmony – a sort of ‘acoustics of acoustics’. When one enters a Gothic sanctuary, it is immediately noticeable that sound commands the space. This is not just a simple echo effect at work, but rather all sounds, no matter how near, far or loud, appear to be originating at the same place. They seem to be detached from the immediate scene, floating somewhere where the point of view has become the entire space.”

Recent Book Purchases

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Species of Spaces and Other Pieces – Georges Perec
Memory, History, Forgetting – Paul Ricoeur
Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Cultural Memory in the Present) – Andreas Huyssen
Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination – Annette Kuhn
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World – David Abram
White Magic and Other Poems – Krzysztof Baczynski
The Art of Memory – Frances A. Yates
The Poetics of Space – Gaston Bachelard
Shadows and Enlightenment – Michael Baxandall
A Short History of the Shadow – Victor I. Stoichita
In Praise of Shadows – Jun’ichiro Tanizaki

Charles Nodier

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“The different names for the soul, among nearly all peoples, are just so many breath variations and onomatopoeic expressions of breathing.”

Charles Nodier, Dictionnaire Raisonné des Onomatopées Françaises, 1828

A New Website

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After thinking about it for quite some time I have finally made some changes to my website. Since starting my MA in Composition and Sonic Art at Brookes University here in Oxford, I have come to the realisation that for too long I have been restricting my artistic practice by compartmentalising everything I do. So, whereas before on my website I had categories for art, music and writing, I have chosen instead to see these disciplines as more a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. So, from now on, everything I do will come under the singular term ‘art’, even though ‘art’ is not in itself a category on this website; I am an artist rather than an artist, writer and musician.

On the MA, we have been encouraged to explore different strategies for creating artworks, and for exploring ideas. I have been guilty in the past – like so many others – of having an idea and instantly thinking of the end result; designating a medium and visualising a form before I’ve even explored the idea or theme. Working this way has always blocked me, for, rather than thinking about the meaning behind the work, I have instead always thought about the work – or what I have perceived the work will be. For example, I think of an idea, and say to myself, “I will do a 10 minute video piece…” and at once the idea is constrained, strait-jacketed, and, as a result it withers and dies; crushed, more often than not, by concerns over technical constraints (and possibilities).

So, this website marks a departure from that way of working. Now with my ideas, I try and look for a way in using strategies such as free-writing, drawing (as a means of understanding a given thing) and mapping. However, in designing the website, I still required categories of sorts and decided upon three; not Art, Writing and Music as I had before, but rather Places, People and Objects.

Much of my work is centred around the concept of place and deals in particular with memories of that place. These works might – eventually – be video-based, sonic, aural, text-based, paintings, drawings… whatever, but I have refrained fromusing any of these as categories in themselves. Instead, under each heading I have listed the various projects I am working on and within each of these have created six headings, those being; Introduction, Context, Evidence, Approach, Journal and Progression. More may follow, but as things stand these will suffice.
Introduction is just that, an introduction to the themes and ideas which I am exploring. Context is an explanation of my reasons for wishing to pursue the idea; how the Place, Person or Object relates to me and vice-versa. Evidence is an exploration of the thing’s background; it’s history, it’s place in the past, the present and – in conjecture – the future, as well as being a collection of relevant readings and/or images. Approach is a summary of the methods I have used – or am using – to explore the idea or theme, for example, free-writing, drawing or mapping. Journal comprises extracts of my journals and sketchbooks and Progression is a look at work carried out thus far, with thoughts on possible final pieces.

As said, this way of working – and indeed thinking – marks a departure for me, but already I have reaped the rewards. Hopefully, you, whoever you are, might reap some reward too.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024