The Art of

141
06
In the Jewish Encyclopedia,
the figure of the
Schlemihl is defined as
follows: “Popular
Yiddish term for an
unfortunate person. . . .
Many of the most
popular anecdotes of
the ghetto relate to the
experiences of persons
who, through no fault
of their own, are
pursued by misfortune
to the end, and endure
it without murmuring.”
Cyrus Adler/Joseph
Jacobs, “Schlemihl,”
http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13275-schlemihl
(accessed 9 September
2015).
the vital efforts of the sensual body in the curious prose poem “Geschwör
an Heinrich Heine” as the path to the “Hirnestür,” or “door to the mind”:
“My father, may he rest in peace, said to himself in thought, but in my
presence, so that it would tickle my balls: ‘S’ist alz a Cholem’ (dream). He
never committed this apathetic sin; he was, as he said: a ‘major manufacturer.’
He was wrong. What has-occurred-and-been, it never disappears.
It lives forever, darling, at inaccessible heights or deep, in the ‘Seelenschmiehl.’
And always returns and knocks nicely on the door to the mind.
And even if not directly in my case, then in the case of you-and-you and
the case of putrid you-and-you-and-me. So much then for ‘understanding,’
not obscuring.” 05
The “Schlemihl” becomes the “Seelenschmiehl,” whose soul still continues
to be pursued even though the father declares everything to be a
dream, in order to tickle his son’s balls—but this also only exists in negation,
in absence. 06 Rather than tickling his balls, there is constant knocking
on the “Hirnestür” (instead of on the “Hintertür” (backdoor) of erotic
euphemisms). Lurie breaks with the canon of the pornographic as well as
with the canon of the eroticism of the Surrealists. The obscene poses of
the women’s bodies, the abject parts in the images are parts of that
shadow world that can neither be accessed nor grasped. In this extreme
of a negative world, art and concentration camp relate to each other in a
peculiar way—although one might disagree in particular details about
whether Lurie’s work is of consistent quality, as one can and must do in
the case of every oeuvre, however, with his program of a NO!art as Jew-
Art, Lurie indisputably dedicated himself to a negative aesthetic that addresses
the canon itself, that has been connected with it since Adorno’s
Negative Dialectics. In it, Adorno presents a culture—no less enigmatically
and no less radically than in Lurie’s images—in which Weimar and Buchenwald
coexisted informally in that “Buchen/wäldchen” (little/beech
tree forest) of which Lurie wrote: “The integration of physical death into
culture should be rescinded in theory—not, however, for the sake of an
ontologically pure being of Death, but for the sake of that which the
stench of cadavers expresses and we are fooled by their transfiguration
into ‘remains.’ A child, fond of an innkeeper named Adam, watched him
club the rats pouring out of the holes in the courtyard; it was in his image
that the child made its own image of the first man. That this has
been forgotten, that we no longer know what we used to feel before
the dogcatcher’s van, is both the triumph of culture and its failure.” 07
Since in culture, its lethal force is disowned like the ax in the house of the
executioner: “It abhors stench, because it stinks; because, as Brecht put
it in a magnificent line, its mansion is built of dogshit. Years after that
line was written, Auschwitz irrefutably demonstrated that culture had
05
BORIS LURIE
“Geschwör an Heinrich
Heine,” in: Geschriebigtes
/ Gedichtigtes: Zu
der Ausstellung in der
Gedenkstätte Weimar-Buchenwald,
Volkhard Knigge,
Eckhart Holzboog,
Dietmar Kirves, eds.,
Stuttgart/Bad
Cannstatt: Eckhart
Holzboog Verlag, 2003,
p. 19.
07
THEODOR W.
ADORNO
Negative Dialectics,
trans. E. B. Ashton,
New York: Routledge,
1979, p. 366.
Boris Lurie’s NO!art and the Canon