Blah Blah.

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German-born artist Erika Marquardt and I worked together for eleven years. We met in 1995, when art critic and curator Charles Guiliano, and curator and writer Astrid Heimer, introduced us and asked us to show our work in an exhibition addressing the legacy of World War II, National Socialism, and the Holocaust. That same year, we were invited to do so again in Leipzig, Germany. While in Germany together, our conversation deepened and increased in complexity to the point that we decided to bring our dialogue literally onto canvas.

Erika Marquardt was born in Berlin in 1937. Her father was a train engineer and an officer in the Wehrmacht. She does not know much of what he did. After the War, the family lived in the former East Berlin, from which they escaped just before the Wall was built. Her father had refused to join the Communist Party and feared imprisonment. Erika is thus the daughter of a perpetrator, willing or unwilling, of the Holocaust, but she also experienced the trauma of having been a child in war and the daughter of a POW in Soviet labor camps. Her complex legacy informs her work from every direction.

Kriegsschäden was a highlight of our work together. Erika thought we were trusting each other enough by then to really let go in it, and we did so to the point of scaring ourselves with the imagery. It is a gruesome, horrific piece, a vomiting of historical traumas. Tied to World War II and the Holocaust, I saw it as addressing, in poet Heinrich Heine’s words, “a great period of human illness.” It was also a larger attempt to understand the incomprehensible.

Matthew Swift asked me to say why I thought it would be important to show this piece twenty-two years after its creation, a piece about events seventy-five years ago. To me, Kriegsschäden was and is about the cultural disease that allows us to completely dehumanize others. Sadly, it is a chronic disease with acute flare-ups, a disease of the spirit creating a soul-less world. One reason scholars have been fascinated with the Holocaust is that the comprehensive documentation by both perpetrators and victims is a step by step guide to the creation of a society capable of living with crimes against humanity and even genocide, even on its own soil, even against its own citizens.

We should, as a society, ask ourselves now how far it is from detention camps at our border, where people are kept in cages and where children are separated from their parents, to other kinds of camps? How far is it from working to deny health care and food stamps to the poor, from starving their public schools, from consolidating every government-influenced penny possible with those who already have plenty, to watching those poor die in ghettos? How far to the point when more hungry mouths scream at us to listen?

Kriegsschäden literally means “war damage,” and that is how Erika and I thought of our piece in 1997 when “war” meant World War II to us. As I look at it today, I see the war being addressed as the one for our own country, and the damage to our society already evincing the monsters in this piece.

My maternal grandmother, a Ukrainian immigrant, made lace and clothing samples for a manufacturer. It is her lace on Gertrude and Me. The eyes are mine. Gertrude and I did not have a close relationship. She was a rather cold woman, quite harsh, and I don’t feel like I knew her well, though she and my grandfather lived with us growing up. On the other hand, I am so proud of my grandmother, who was also a suffragette and labor organizer, and an incredibly strong woman. She taught English and helped refugees, and one day recently, when I was doing the same things, I realized why I had needed to do this piece.

While working on this painting, I was thinking of the bricks of buildings in Germany devastated by bombs and artillery during WWII, which women removed and cleaned one by one, so that they could be used to rebuild. The women were called Trümmerfrauen, “rubble women.”

My rubble, however, is more from erosion, from the disappearance of people, than from war. It is after we are gone.

There is a beauty in decay, even sometimes in the aftermath of destruction. As we abandon all wisdom and planning and caring about what comes after us, we will leave behind only our remains, which nature will take back and deal with as she sees fit. So I ended this piece by painting new grass, and having it start to grow up and between the bricks. Thank goodness for nature. She will always reclaim.

The brilliant nineteenth century American journalist, critic, and women’s rights advocate friends early in life with Emerson and other transcendentalists, and she shared their perception of nature as an expression of divinity.

For me, her words describe a state of mind I experience in the presence of natural beauty, a sense that I can never feel or appreciate it enough, see it well enough. I want to understand its beauty and wonder more fully, to incorporate it into my being. I am grateful to Fuller for these words, which both acknowledge a strong desire to know and feel more and calmly accept the feeling of inadequacy, giving more space for emotions of awe and joy.

But there is more about Fuller that draws me to honoring her power, as I try to do by putting her words in public. Fuller became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840. Four years later, Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, hired Fuller as a literary critic, and two years later she became the Tribune’s first female editor. She was now earning $500 a year and reviewing American and foreign books, concerts, lectures, and art exhibitions.

She published over 250 columns on art, literature, and political and social issues, such as slavery and women’s rights. In 1845, Greeley published Woman in the Nineteenth Century, her seminal and groundbreaking book on women’s rights, expanded at his encouragement from essays she had published in series in The Dial.

Fuller believed in equality, in the same civil rights for all — for men, for women, and for African Americans and Native Americans, both of whom she believed were wronged by America. She stayed overnight in Sing Sing prison to do interviews and report on an effort to develop a more humane system for female prisoners. She grew concerned with the plight of prostitutes, the homeless, and the poor. She advocated for reform at all levels of society, a concern which separated her from the Transcendentalists, whom she felt too involved with individual improvement and not with societal concerns.

After her book’s publication, the Tribune sent Fuller to Europe as its first female correspondent. In 1846, she met Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian revolutionary in exile in London since 1837, and allied herself with his cause. She also met Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, a Mazzini supporter, who later became her partner and with whom she had a son. Ossoli fought for the establishment of the Roman Republic in 1849, and Fuller volunteered at a hospital and sent dispatches home. The Republican cause went down to defeat, however, and they now had to flee to America.

Upon her return to the US, Fuller planned to finish a book about the history of the Roman Republic. Unfortunately, the family of three all drowned when their American-bound ship wrecked off of Fire Island. They were less than 100 yards from shore, but no one would come out to save them.

Fuller, as one can imagine, was often criticized in her lifetime. She was thought by many to be arrogant. She was certainly radical in her views. She was called “the precursor of the Women’s Rights agitation” by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage in their book, History of Woman Suffrage.

All of the above went into A Precise Notion, 2018. It is still a time when concerns for the rights of women, people of color, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, and concern for civil society deserve the kind of attention and courageous commitment that Fuller gave them, and it is a time when the effects of our thoughtless mistreatment of nature is taking an increasing toll on our lives.

This is the piece that got me through the summer of 2018. I wanted to say something as big as the canvas, and I planned on using text to do so. But I could not develop my text-based ideas into effective aesthetic strategies, and I realized I could find no words adequate to this time. I was even personally out of words. I just kept saying, I can’t believe this is happening. I looked to artists I have turned to before for solace, and I turned not to Rembrandt, my usual choice, but to Rothko. Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists, like the Dadaists and Surrealists after WWI, felt the need of a new language to address the aftermath of WWII. They settled on one without recognizable imagery, because what had happened was previously unthinkable on such a scale.

I needed a meditative practice and defaulted to my most loved one, crosshatching. I knew I wanted structure and order, a container for chaos, and that became what this piece was about. I wanted to create a space inspired by the spiritual spaces Rothko’s work creates, a wordless, serene, quiet place. I thought of using charcoal, to create a hiding place, a dark, safe hole no one can find. But then it became a love letter to Rothko and a sanctuary and had to have light. I hope it can do that for others, as well.

After preparing the paper, I began to build a charred landscape with burnt paper. I thought about it as my scorched earth piece. Then it stopped being a battlefield. The earth was scorched, but I didn’t know from what. I felt lost in it, which led to my realizing that I felt lost, too, in my country, in this time, in my beloved America.

I thought we in America were going to get away with democracy.

I laid down layers of white pencil and acrylic over the burnt paper. I wanted the ground to look ashen but silvery, depleted, yet with its own beauty.

Layers of different yellows followed the whites, making a gaseous and toxic sky, a cloud of pollution, greed, and hate. The paths or rivers or veins are red because red is blood, life, and death. They lead nowhere, all dead ends.

Now we don’t recognize our country. “This is not who we are,” people say about whatever new horror of words or deeds, new manifestation of hate, lust, or greed. But it is who we are. We Americans. We Jews. Every flavor of “We.”

The Rabbi in Gloucester says about Adam and Eve eating the apple that they had one rule, only one, to keep in order to live forever in Paradise. They couldn’t do it. They may have looked like God, but they did not have humility.

Growth began as a piece about edges, inspired by the exhibition Edge that Trident Gallery mounted at the Paint Factory. I glued two pieces of paper together expressly to create an edge at the seam.

I had trouble deciding how to bring meaning to the edge. Was it the cliff that we are going off of, the ever-changing edge of the land and sea, or the edge of the seen and the subterranean?
In our time, the coastline edge has taken on new meaning in relation to climate change. The only comfort I glean from the enormity of human heartlessness and mindlessness towards the natural world is the faith in nature’s ability to create new wonders after our demise.

The edge in my piece became the boundary not only between land and sea, but between water and sky, and earth and sky. I keep wondering what would grow in a post-Anthropocene era, the first plant that grows, the first creative force that flourishes after we are gone.

STATEMENT

We humans have always searched for gods.
Has any god saved us from ourselves?

IMAGERY

A photograph of an artificial nose like the one worn by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601).

Unfortunately, this is not a photograph of Brahe’s nose, as I had thought. But in the end it is fitting that while working on this piece, I falsely attributed this false nose.

Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman, astronomer, and writer known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical observations. He studied botanical and alchemical medicine at the University of Rostock, and then worked under the patronage of the Danish King Frederick II.

Building on the astronomical theories of Copernicus and Ptolemy, he believed that the moon orbits Earth and that the planets orbit the sun, but that the sun orbits Earth. He also argued against Aristotle that the universe was changing as new stars formed and comets traveled.

In 1597, Brahe had a falling out with the new King Christian IV and went into exile. He was subsequently invited to be the official imperial astronomer under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudoph II. He set up an observatory in Prague and during the last year of his life was assisted by Johannes Kepler, who built on Brahe’s work to develop his three laws of planetary motion.

After part of his nose was severed in a duel in 1566, Brahe wore a prosthetic nose, kept in place with paste, until he died. The nose was thought to be made of silver or gold, but chemical analysis of his bone in 2012 determined it was probably of brass.

Brahe was a pioneer in the search for discoverable truths about the universe. But his nose, plain as day, was fake. It’s an irony that has stayed with me since I learned the history as a 21-year-old. I was a silversmith at the time, and I loved that his nose was supposedly of silver. I started thinking about False god when I came across the photograph of the nose on the Internet. I knew it had to be in the center and serve as the false god.

Since Trump announced his campaign, questions of truth and lies have been a greater part of the political discourse in this country than I can ever remember. What is a fact? What is opinion? How does one tell the difference? Does truth matter? The conversation seems to me a throwback to Hitler’s concept of the “big lie,” a huge untruth that is repeated over and over as a propaganda technique (Mein Kampf, 1925).

A photograph of Crane’s Beach in Ipswich, Mass., by Jay Lee Jaroslav.

The beach is a reminder of the nature we disrespect as we follow the false god of consumerism.

My photograph of train tracks in the industrial Ruhr area of Germany.

The tracks are a reminder of the links between industry, modernity, and inhumanity, typified by the tracks which brought victims to concentration camps in Europe.

Photographs of eyes and noses.

The photographs are from a chart entitled “Synoptic table of physiognomic features: to be used for the study of the ‘spoken portrait.’ ”

Alphonse Bertillon was a French criminologist who, in 1879, developed a system of identification of persons by means of detailed measurements and descriptions of of body parts, especially the face and head — a “spoken portrait.”

At first simply a filing system for photographs, “Bertillonage” became widely used by police forces in many countries, until it was displaced in the early 1900s by more accurate and less cumbersome fingerprint analysis, to which Bertillon himself made substantial contributions.

Bertillon played an ignominious role in the Dreyfus Affair, however, when he presented in court a pseudo-mathematical analysis of Dreyfus’s handwriting, which helped cement this infamous miscarriage of justice.

Bertillon was a pioneer of science and was also a principal in one of the many instances in which objective measurements of people have been misused to demonize and persecute.