The Art of

149
09
See
HANNAH ARENDT
Ich will verstehen:
Selbstauskünfte zu
Leben und Werk, ed.
Ursula Ludz, Munich:
Piper Taschenbuch,
2005, pp. 61ff.
sizes that Flatcar. Assemblage, 1945, by Adolf Hitler should be understood
as a direct reply to the Conceptual Art of the modern era, or, more specifically,
as a “corrected ready-made,” 08 and refers in particular to the title of
the work. By choosing this title, Lurie not only places his offset print in the
context of the much-acclaimed exhibition The Art of Assemblage presented
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that same year, but also professes
the picture showing the flatcar of corpses to be an artwork by Adolf
Hitler. The radically negative concept of art Lurie expresses in the title of his
collage sets the offset print against the painting, the ready-made against
the photographic staging, the harsh concept against the stagy description,
artist Adolf Hitler‘s production of corpses against the staging of the corpse
by photographer Bourke-White. Unlike Saturation Painting (Buchenwald),
Flatcar. Assemblage, 1945, by Adolf Hitler not only undertakes an intervention
contra to the media distribution and reception of an iconic photograph
of the liberated concentration camp. The offset print also anticipates the
famous words spoken by Hannah Arendt in a television interview with
Günter Gaus in 1964: “The fabrication of corpses ... should not have happened.
Something happened there to which we cannot reconcile ourselves.”
09
Lurie‘s work refers these words both to what the photograph shows as
well as to the image itself. In his ready-made he lends it the status of a negative
image that has been etched into collective memory.
While Flatcar. Assemblage, 1945, by Adolf Hitler expresses a radically negative
art concept primarily in and with its title, Lurie sets his intervention inside
the image itself in the work Railroad to America from 1963. A woman
undressing, her bottom half exposed, is displayed at the center of the photo
of the flatcar with corpses. Once again, the picture and the pin-up girl
are reproduced as newspaper prints; their patina seems to be coordinated
with the canvas in the background. In the upper part of the work there are
four reddish elements: serial and regular in shape yet hand-drawn, they extend
into the picture frame as if to provide a reminder of the artist‘s hand.
Beatrice Howell describes the composition of the collage as follows: “The
contrast is startling. Not only between canvas and photographs, the artist’s
mark and the camera’s mechanical eye, but also the grotesque shifts between
the emaciated bodies, and the enveloping invitation of the woman’s
flesh... Any beauty of the corpses, however ‘tragic,’ is refused by the gratuitous
bare flesh above.” 10
Unlike the direct exchange of eye contact with viewers in the collage Saturation
Painting (Buchenwald), Railroad to America leaves them to their own
devices, so to speak. The railroad in the work‘s title refers to the deportation
trains but also indicates that the viewer‘s gaze is drawn inevitably towards
the pin-up girl at the center of the image and transformed into lust
at the display of what is being presented to the viewer—to some extent
08
ESTERA MILMAN,
“‘NO!art’ and the
Aesthetics of Doom,”
Evanston: Mary &
Leigh Block Museum of
Art, 2001, p. 17.
10
BEATRICE HOWELL
“Ethics and Aesthetics:
Boris Lurie’s Railroad
Collage and Representing
the Holocaust,”
pp. 23ff., text.no-art.
info/en/howell_ma-ethics.html
(accessed 6
January 2016).
From Display to Lust