The Art of

119
The first NO!art anthology appeared in 1988, published by the Edition Hundertmark.
It was designed as an artist’s book, and was compiled and edited
by Boris Lurie and Seymour Krim. 01 I can recall almost physically the mixture
of horror and fascination that overcame me when I first leafed through the
book. Unlike the solemn pathos of dismay that was beginning to influence
the remembrance of the Holocaust in the Federal Republic of Germany, the
works and texts assembled here were like a slap in the face. Quite obviously,
the works by Lurie in particular were based on his concrete experience of
World War II and the National Socialist concentration and annihilation camps.
Quite obviously, these experiences fiercely penetrated through the works.
Quite obviously—and this was the disturbing thing—Lurie committed himself
and his undivided artistic will to preserving these experiences in their
raw state and rendering them in just this manner: in other words, without
lending them added meaning and without creating the impression that such
experiences could in any way be adequately historicized, symbolized, or
mastered artistically. Those who wished to engage with NO!art were called
on to examine National Socialism as history, albeit one that was overcome
but incomplete and unsettled, and confront a world in which violence remained
violence, cynicism cynicism, pain pain, filth filth, suffering suffering,
and lies lies. There was no sublimation in this world, any more than a notion
of love that was perhaps still conceivable beyond and unaffected by the
marketing of (female) bodies and desire. Here, art was not synonymous with
the beautiful, good, and true, but was intervention, a form of expression for
what was actually ugly, evil, and oblique behind the beautiful semblance; it
was civilization’s garbage, destruction; was self-destruction with its own devices,
and at the same time—and paradoxically—self-assertion. “We meant
to show, draw attention to, underline the ‘vulgarity’ within us as much as
the vulgarity around us, to accept such vulgarity, to absorb it, to become
conscious of it, to exorcise it.” 02 In short: “PIN-UPS, EXCREMENT, PROTEST,
JEW ART”—as set out in the subtitle of the NO!art anthology.
Boris Lurie was born into an affluent Jewish merchant’s family in Leningrad
in 1924. After Lenin’s death, the foreseeable end of New Economic
Policy, and the rise of Stalinism, his family defected to Riga. Following the
occupation of the Baltic countries, the Germans herded together the Jewish
population of Riga into two ghettos. The family was separated. Lurie and
his father had to perform forced labor in the “small ghetto,” while his mother
and sister were taken to the “big ghetto.” Only a short time later, security
police task forces and the SS security service began mass shootings in the
surrounding forests. Lurie’s mother and sister, as well as the love of his
youth, were murdered and hastily buried in mass graves. He and his father
survived, thanks to the latter’s ingenuity—ultimately, however, by sheer
chance, and Lurie always remained aware of this—the Lenta forced labor
01
BORIS LURIE/
SEYMOUR KRIM/
ARMIN HUNDERT-
MARK, EDS.
NO!Art. PIN-UPS,
EXCREMENT, PRO-
TEST, JEW ART,
Berlin/Cologne: Edition
Hundertmark, 1988.
02
BORIS LURIE
“SHIT NO” (1970), in:
ibid., p. 66.
VOLKHARD KNIGGE