Impossible Images: Contemporary Art After the Holocaust

by Shelley Hornstein, Laura Levitt, Laurence J. Silberstein

Overview

Impossible Images brings together a distinguished group of contributors, including artists, photographers, cultural critics, and historians, to analyze the ways in which the Holocaust has been represented in and through paintings, architecture, photographs, museums, and monuments.
Exploring frequently neglected aspects of contemporary art after the Holocaust, the volume demonstrates how visual culture informs Jewish memory, and makes clear that art matters in contemporary Jewish studies. Accepting that knowledge is culturally constructed, Impossible Images makes explicit the ways in which context matters. It shows how the places where an artist works shape what is produced, in what ways the space in which a work of art is exhibited and how it is named influences what is seen or not seen, and how calling attention to certain details in a visual work, such as a gesture, a color, or an icon, can change the meaning assigned to the work as a whole.
Written accessibly for a general readership and those interested in art and art history, the volume also includes 20 color plates from leading artists Alice Lok Cahana, Judy Chicago, Debbie Teicholz, and Mindy Weisel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814798263
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	10/01/2003
Series:	New Perspectives on Jewish Studies , #4
Pages:	285
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Shelley Hornstein (Editor)
Shelley Hornstein is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History at York University.

Laurence J. Silberstein (Editor)
Laurence J. Silberstein is Philip and Muriel Berman Professor of Jewish Studies at Lehigh University, where he directs the Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies.

Laura Levitt (Editor)
Laura Levitt is Associate Professor of Religion at Temple University. She is the author of Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home and co-editor of Impossible Images: Contemporary Art after the Holocaust and Judaism Since Gender.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Framing the Holocaust: Contemporary Visions
I. GEOGRAPHIES OF THE HEART: PLACES/SPACES
OF REMEMBRANCE
1. Archiving an Architecture of the Heart
2. Haunted by Memory: American Jewish Transformations
3. A House for an Uninhabitable Memory (The Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University)
II. ISRAEL AND THE POLITICS OF MEMORY
4. The Return of the Repressed
5. Racism and Ethics: Constructing Alternative History
6. “Don’t Touch My Holocaust”—Analyzing the Barometer of Responses: Israeli Artists Challenge the Holocaust Taboo
III. TRANSGRESSING TABOOS
7. Holocaust Toys: Pedagogy of Remembrance through Play
8. The Nazi Occupation of the “White Cube”: Piotr Uklan´ski’s The Nazis and Rudolf Herz’s Zugzwang
9. On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise
IV. CURATING MEMORY
10. Holocaust Icons: The Media of Memory
11. Sense and/or Sensation: The Role of the Body in Holocaust Pedagogy Artists’ Works
A selection of works by artists Alice Lok Cahana, Judy Chicago,
Debbie Teicholz, and Mindy Weisel, who participated in the
Berman Center’s conference, “Representing the Holocaust:
Practices, Products, Projections.”
About the Artists
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The essays probe the growing vocabulary of Holocaust imagery and address the various ways (in varied venues) that the Holocaust has been remembered, represented, and received.”
-American Jewish History

,

“(Makes) a cogent case for a deeper, unmastered engagement with Holocause trauma.”
-Journal of Jewish Studies

Editorial Reviews

"(Makes) a cogent case for a deeper, unmastered engagement with Holocause trauma."

Journal of Jewish Studies

(Makes) a cogent case for a deeper, unmastered engagement with Holocause trauma.”
• Journal of Jewish Studies

From the Publisher