The Art of

132
10
SIMON TAYLOR
“The Excremental
Vision. NO!Art 1959-
1964,” in: Boris Lurie,
NO!, New York: Boris
Lurie Art Foundation,
2012, p. 43. (Exhibition
catalogue, David David
Gallery, Philadelphia).
12
„Ideology serves only its
own purpose, […] it
does not serve anything
- which is precisely
the Lacanian
definition of jouissance.“
Slavoj Žižek,
The Sublime Object of
Ideology, London / New
York: Verso, 1989, p. 84;
about Hitler: “people
specifically identified
themselves with what
were hysterical outbursts
of impotent
rage–that is, they
‘recognized’ themselves
in this hysterical
acting out.” Ibid. p. 106.
ent day. 10 However, what occurs in Lurie’s female figurations, encloses
much more the question whether Lurie—with those treated, readymade
images—also exposes his own fleshly vulnerability and degradation.
11
It might be noteworthy to compare in this context Lurie’s (muscular
through and through) figuration of the female body with the impressing
work of the Jewish polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow (1926–1973), whose
work has been recently reintroduced internationally, decades after her
death. As a young woman she outlived the Pabianice and Łódz ghettos
and Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and Theresienstadt concentration camps.
Her own body was the object of her poetic-surreal-pop-sculptures.
Her works show a female body that is subject to disease, suffering, and
mutation (crucified) while being at the same time erotic, playful, and
even humorous. By using industrial methods and materials she also related
to fetishistic tropes of consumerism and their relation to the irreversible
expropriation of the private, personal body from itself after the experience
of the death camps. Both artists’ oeuvres, each in a fundamentally
different manner, respond to the two incarnations of mass culture:
mass extermination and mass production.
Explicitness—in graphic representations of sexual activity just as in
graphic documentations of the death camps—was a vehicle for Lurie,
aimed to transgress taboos and create a shock. The shock, an outcome
of the montage, could make the viewer see what might have been concealed
by the documentary image itself as it was found it in the media. It
was aimed to overcome the viewer’s blindness and possibly go through
what the theorist Slavoj Žižek has characterized as the deep “pre-symbolic
enjoyment” which the Nazi fantasy activated and that rational critiques
of Nazi fantasies of purity and omnipotence fail to take account of. 12
Hence in his Saturation Painting (Buchenwald), 1959–64 | see image p. 22,
explicit erotic photographs appear alongside a photograph of the liberation
of Buchenwald taken from newspapers; The same can be seen in
the many variations on the word “No” (e.g. Memo to the U.S., 1963). In
others, swastikas and David Shields mingle with close-ups of models who
direct their gaze at the viewer. The canvases forming Lurie’s later Love
Series from 1962/63 (Bound With Stick | see image p. 41, Blindfolded, Bound
on Red Background | see image p. 38) feature silkscreen prints of women in
S&M positions: tied up, bound, or blindfolded.
Railroad to America | see image p. 23 is made of two photographs mounted
on a canvas. A vertical pin-up of a woman exposing her fleshy behind,
her dark hair falling on white shoulders, is pasted in the center of a photograph
of a wagon stacked with corpses of men, women, and children,
all piled on top of each other, limbs stretched out in every direction. The
11
In an introduction to
his „Selected Pin-ups:
1947–1973“ Boris Lurie
wrote: „On an entirely
different level, and do
not be surprised!—the
pin-ups constitute the
contents of unaccounted
mass-graves of
executed Jewish women
of World War II. Their
physical sensuality,
their feminine gigantism,
their pure anger
masquerading as
ecstasy in their twitching
orgiastic faces, is
nothing but a cover-up
then for sublime
affirmation, of anti-death
procreation, of
pure though hysterical,
death frightened,
pre-execution protestation...
The single figure
embodies a multitude
of possibilities, as if she
represents all of the
women who have been
destroyed, even while
embodying the destructive
principle within
herself.“ See John
Wronoski in: KZ-
Kampf-Kunst, p. 217.
TAL STERNGAST