The Art of

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possibility of a transcending interpretation and the later endowment of
meaning, it becomes clear that Lurie strikes the very core of mass-cultural
and mass-media memory with these works. One need only leaf through a
postwar illustrated journal or a contemporary magazine: representations of
suffering and cruelty are easily reconcilable with those of sex; in their own
way, both avail themselves of marketing and voyeurism. Curiosity and horror
after the Shoah, curiosity and horror on the part of those not directly
affected, are probably very difficult to distinguish from one another. But
one may become aware of their connection by addressing their simultaneity.
And one can attempt to work against the dulling of horror due to its
progression through history, through the unremitting series of horrific images.
This is Lurie’s aim. But one probably also cuts him short if one understands
works such as Railroad to America, 1963 | see image p. 23 or Saturation
Painting (Buchenwald), 1959–64 | see image p. 22 exclusively as a critique of
reception. We shall no doubt have to tolerate the culturally skeptical idea—
and Lurie would not be the first to put it into words—that desire can be
achieved through both Eros and violence. We will probably have to tolerate
the idea that in his very personal, abrasive way, Lurie is also lending expression
to a longing for love. The melodic rhythms of his collages, especially his
very large-format ones, testify to this through all the horror and obscenity
on their surface. And there are—often overlooked—groups of works visibly
based on longing and tenderness, like the Ball Room Series, for example. In
Lurie’s New York apartment, in which he lived as if in a dirty, poetic collage,
he always hung a photograph of his massacred first love among all the clippings
of horror and the marketed obscenities. In any case, outrage does not
do justice to these works any more than their celebration as an anti-authoritarian
liberation or as the explosion of superficial political correctness, for
instance that of memorial culture. According to Lurie, the Star of David remains
both a badge of honor and a weight around one’s neck, and “Jew Art”
is the expression of a historical experience that—unsatisfied—can never be
appeased.
Ultimately, Boris Lurie’s oeuvre also testifies to the hopes he was forced
to abandon in light of his own experience and the course of history after
1945: the hope that the experience of National Socialist crimes and World
War II, the experience of the camps and the countless millions of dead, may
be capable of leading directly to catharsis in society; the hope that the facts
about the Holocaust that came to light during the Eichmann trial beginning
in 1961—as well as the simultaneous threat of a possible nuclear apocalypse
due to the Cuba crisis—would finally prompt a fundamental change in policy
and social circumstances; the hope for a liberal left-wing, although its
sympathies with the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian
cause, to which Lurie, like others driven to the periphery, felt strong ties,
VOLKHARD KNIGGE