The Art of

133
image of the woman is integrated into the pile of corpses; her unseen
face is directed, parallel to the wagon, towards the edge of the wagon
image and beyond it.
The documentary photos Lurie used in these works had been printed
in American newspapers and magazines. They were mostly taken by journalists
accompanying the liberating forces. Some early images from the
death camps were famously published in the spring of 1945 in Life magazine
(by David Scherman and George Rodger) and in Vogue (by Lee Miller).
Those photographs depicting what American soldiers saw entering
the camps—sprawling corpses, inmates weakened by disease and hunger—were
printed side by side with recipes and fashion spreads. These
were images that had circulated in the American media and represented
for the general public what later was to become the symbolic imagery of
“the Holocaust”—although the photographs were taken after the fact,
the camps partly destroyed and the perpetrators already escaped from
the scene.
In Lurie’s work, too, these reused photos did not serve as testimonies
of his experiences or as historical evidence. They constitute a visual index
of history as mediated through mass media. Hence, the same image of
the wagon of corpses is used several times in different configurations, its
status as an icon being increased (in the popular sense). By adding nothing
but a title to this photograph, Lurie in Flatcar. Assemblage, 1945 by
Adolf Hitler | see image p. 20 from 1961 stretches his own concept to its
pithy perimeters, comparing the Final Solution to a work of art, a “Gesamtkunstwerk”
or a “Soziale Plastik” (social sculpture) conducted by Hitler. In
Hard Writings (Load) | see image p. 80 from 1972, the photo is scaled down
while giant letters made of purple stripes spelling “LOAD” are affixed on
top of it. In this late, graphically neat series (other works feature the
words “NO,” “PAY,” or “LICK”), image and language are applied as representation
systems with a double life—both serve as containers of
“meaning” that have been rendered instable and unreliable by history. It
echoes the work of such contemporaneous conceptual artists as Joseph
Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, or Mel Bochner and the concrete poetry of the
sixties and seventies, in which language was used as raw visual material.
However, it would be wrong to assess Lurie’s work merely through its
features of critique. Despite its straightforward appearances and at
times propagandic qualities, the gravity of his oeuvre derives also from
its performative traits. His works exceed their pictorial parameters. They
too, can be seen as an accumulating, destroyed body that is subject to
modern violence. 13
Looking back, it seems that the pin-ups and the images of the camps
came into Lurie’s work at the same time, as signs of similar syntaxes. Out
13
Lurie’s involvement in
business following the
death of his father in
1964 could be understood
as a facet of
performance concerning
his status as an
artist. While outwardly
living as a penniless
artist, his investments
when he died, were
worth $80 million.
Addressing his father,
Lurie wrote: “My
business involvements
are an assertion of
masculinity in a
society that squashes
the balls of the truest
of artists. Had I not
picked up that challenge
when you died ...
I would have been
completely demolished.”
Cited after John
Wronoski, in: KZ-
KAMPF-KUNST.
Shock Treatment: Figures of Women in Boris Lurie’s Work