Roee Rosen: “Live And Die As Eva Braun”, 1997.
Written by Nufar Kedar
Fig. 1: Roee Rosen Live and Die as Eva Braun, #1. Acrylic on Paper.
Preface
“Dear customer: As soon as you put on
the state-of-the-art head gear, body suit, and electronic sensors, you find
yourself in the bunker. Late April 1945. … You sense the blasts by the shudders
sent through the rooms and up your body. Your lover is about to arrive. You
head to the bathroom to tidy yourself up.
You look in the mirror, leaning forward, and
your own image is revealed to you for the first time. You are blond, your face
is still young, your complex pinkish-pure, your bosom ample. You seem truly
good natured. Anyone would be thrilled to be you, but for you it should merely be
a given – you are Eva Braun”.
Thus begins the first out of ten scenes in Roee Rosen’s installation, “live and Die as Eva Braun”. The installation was holding 60 black and white drawings made of acrylic and ink on paper, and long stripes of cloth, on which the text was written. While walking around in the room, the customer-spectator becomes Eva Braun and goes through ten fazes: The arrival, the bed, the dream, tears, the shot and more. He or she will experience, through text and image, the waiting for Hitler, the meeting and physical contact with him, and also – once Germany’s downfall is a fact – Eva Braun’s murder by Hitler. The last two parts of the story is a dreamlike flight over Europe and landing in the Milan Wax Museum, while you-as-Braun are watching your own sculptured death. Than you will awake and find yourself massaged by Hirohito, the giant Korean massagist.
Rosen’s project raises many questions about the spectator’s ability to absorb and to comprehend what is in front of him. It raises questions about unusual ways of representation and about art’s lame but obstinate ways of doing so. “Live and Die as Eva Braun” also raises questions about victim and victimizer, relations of control and of losing it completely.
In this
paper I will touch briefly questions about Identity, gender and childhood as
represented in Rosen’s work. I shall also touch the problematic issue of visual
representation of the Holocaust in art as a whole, and specifically in Israeli
art and discourse. All through this paper, I would like to claim that Rosen’s
work is a complexed one: An important work of art, which challenges every
spectator to deal with his most inner frights, on the edge of abyss.
Rosen’s home
Gallery and a general view of the exhibition:
More about Eva Braun:
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/braun.html
Mirroring Evil exhibition site: Mirroring
Evil.
Roee Rosen – Introduction: A Word file
“Split existence”
– Gender and Identity in Rosen’s work.
In an interview made with the artist while his work was
exhibited, Rosen declared that he was interested in three dimensions of meaning
in his project: How is identity constructed through childhood experiences; the
Holocaust as an historic trauma which constructed Rosen’s own identity; and
sexuality on all its meanings. The installation, said Rosen, exposes layers
upon layers of identities, thus keeping in mind a split, non- coherent being
(in: Yahav, 1997, 26).
Indeed, it seems that
the images in this work has little to do with the text. Toy trains, Rorschach
spots which turn into liquid swastika: Little red riding hood watches a wolf
dressed in women’s clothes, Iron eagles and teddy bears turning into little
girls with pigtails having sexual intercourse with little boys inspired by
German children books
(figs. 2 - 3 ).
Fig 2.: Roee Rosen, Live and
Die as Eva Braun, # 34. Acrylic on
Paper.
Fig 3.: Roee Rosen, Live and Die as Eva Braun, # 6. Acrylic on Paper.
A closer look onto the images reveals the use of “low” artistic materials, such as illumination from children books published during the mid- 19th century. Rosen uses mainly Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz and Der Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffmann. In these books, children are being cruelly punished by adults who wish to “educate” them (figs. 4, 6). The book’s cover inspires the image of Rosen wearing Hitler’s mustache, while two pairs of scissors hovering over his head (fig. 5). (Spitz Handler, 2002, 45).
Fig. 4. From Der Struwwlpeter: The Story of
Conrad
Fig 5.: Roee Rosen, Live and Die as Eva Braun, # 2. Acrylic on Paper
Fig 6.: Roee Rosen, Live and Die as Eva Braun, # 50. mixed media on Paper
Fig 7.: From Der Struwwelpeter: The dreadful story of Pauline.
However, in Rosen’s images the child is being expropriated from any “natural” comfort surroundings. He or She is re-located in scenes depicting murder, lust and sexual practices under the shadow of the iron eagle or the watching wolf. Children are taking an active part in some of the scenes, as all naivety makes room for a chaotic nightmare. Rosen does not tend to victimize the child as a helpless being – though he does not ignore childish innocence: Instead, he lives his own childhood as bare and exposed to cultural influences, which scarred him as a child (Yahav, 26).
The text offers a slightly different journey via metamorphosis. In the Hebrew text, the male spectator is invited to go into a woman’s body – that of Eva Braun. But whether the spectator is a woman or a man, he is exposed to an unbearable intimacy with both Braun and Hitler’s bodies. As you are being murdered, you sense the physical power of the oppressor: “Before he shoots you he presses his lips to yours with the vengeance of despair, his hand gripping your scalp forcefully from behind. His lips are so dry they seem to sip and suck and drain the liquid of your whole body. There`s an unpleasant smell in the air, probably urine – but you would rather not know. He points the barrel at your forehead. … You stare at him transfixed. How much love can a womb doomed to remain barren retain?” (The Shot, scene 7).
This scene points out complicated relationship between a victim and her killer; relationship that involves violence, use of force and dominance. The text uses dichotomies such as man/woman, oppressor/oppressed: But as the oppressed is the (universal) spectator in a virtual space, this meeting face-to-face becomes a delirious one, and as such – an impossible one. The impossibility of taking one identity and experience it as a whole denies the utopian hope of every human being: The hope to identify with your Other. This incoherence creates irony: Through a game of replaced identities, Rosen evokes questions about the connections between total Taboo, complete evil and breaking the limits of our own identity as we believe we know it (in: Yahav, 1997, 28).
More about Der Struwwelpeter:
http://www.fln.vcu.edu/struwwel/struwwel.html
More about Max and Moritz:
http://www.fln.vcu.edu/mm/mmmenu.html
`Live and Die as Eva Braun`: An abomination or a piece of art?
Fig 8.: Roee Roen,. Live and Die as Eva Braun, # 30. mixed media on Paper
A. On Limits of Representation
The limits of visual representation concerning the Holocaust are constituted under strict norms and regulations. These norms are organized under a certain gaze: A gaze, which enables the spectator to construct a coherent, well-understood and reasonable story. This gaze is crucial to constitute a memory that anyone can cope with. It lives almost no room for works as Rosen’s, works that does not give the customer-spectator what he wish for (Azoulay, 1999, 52).
In Rosen`s exhibition the spectator, instead of analising the text and become a participant in difining limits of memory and representation, becomes a passive, mute and attentive subject without sovereignity. The walls speak in the exhibition, a disturbing phenomena that shades museological discourse, Holocaust discourse and the connection between the two (ibid, 55). Since the Holocaust can be remembered in regular terms and repetitive norms such as ceremonies, parades and memorial days, representation is acceptable only within this shrine of memory, where mechanisms of organization and preservation are isolating the subject from his daily life (ibid, 60).
In her essay “The Returned of the Repressed”, Ariela Azoulay returns to the question of the gaze its function. Azoulay claims, that in ‘Live and Die as Eva Braun” Hitler has made his premiere in Israeli art. She believes that the essence of the exhibition is not, in fact, the representation of the holocaust, and not even about Eva Braun: But it is about the ability to watch Hitler and the spectator’s own death by Hitler’s hands. The return of Hitler in this exhibition is the return of the repressed. No one – even Rosen himself – has noticed the absence of Hitler from the Israeli visual dimension. It is a symptomatic absence: Since the return of the repressed forces the necessity to face Hitler’s presence, and to choose sides. While participating in Rosen’s exhibition, the spectator feels, very powerfully, the traumatic gaze as an unhealed wound (Azoulay, 2001, 59).
The problematic issue of limits of representation sharpens as it focuses
on Israeli art. As I will show next, the Israeli spectator has hardly the means
to face Rosen’s work.
B. “A thin Line Between Forbidden and Permitted”: The Israeli Point of View.
A year before his exhibition was shown to the public, Rosen has written an essay about the artist Moshe Gershuny[1]. In this essay Rosen showed a deep interest in the fact, that the Holocaust was invisible in Israeli art for many years. The Holocaust, says Rosen, is a traumatic site in the heart of Israeli society. As such, its invisibility until the 80th - when Gershuny’s work appeared – is highly bothering. Even the mute silence around this fact was not discussed (Rosen, 1996, 44). The mere trial to touch the subject received antagonistic reactions. In variation on Adorno`s famous phrase, Rosen marks that “it is impossible to create visual contemporary Israeli art on the subject of Holocaust”. Rosen gives two reasons to this situation: Firstly, one realizes that in the face of total trauma it is hopeless to translate it into visuals. Once one has tried to do so, he is in danger of falling into clichés, cheep manipulations and low aesthetics. Secondly, character of Holocaust discourse in Israel tends to be an aggressive national – and even nationalist – one. Hence, artists shun participation in this discourse and try to avoid any “ambassador-of-loss” stigma. But by and by, Israeli artists took a very active role in establishing sculptures, monuments and memorials all over Europe: A bitter contradiction to the lack of images in Israeli art. This international participance allegedly gives the artist the authority to take part in the Israeli Holocaust discourse (ibid, p.55).
And so, it comes to the point where Rosen, while showing “Live and Die as Eva Braun” to the Israeli public, has touched a rather none-canonical and none-discussed subject in Israeli art: And he did it by merging outrageously text and images which never mentioned “traditional” imagery of the Holocaust, nor images which take place in our collective memory: No depiction of Jews in text or image, no wire fences or barracks, no Nazis or Hitler’s actual face. Only the mustache appears, a detached trace in dark skies.
Rosen’s work has been attacked in Israeli media before the opening night. Jerusalem’s Mayor deputy, Shmuel Shkedi (a Mafdal representative), said that “no exhibition which shows feelings and humanism in Nazism” should be supported by the city, and therefore threatened to “withhold all budgets [almost one million dollar] from the museum, unless the exhibition will be taken off the museum walls”. Tommy Lapid (then a radio broadcaster and today the Minister of Justice) said in his radio show: “There is a limit to everything, and the limit is a pornographic abuse of the Holocaust. One has to simply say that: this is not art, but an obscene filthy deed. There is a need to close the exhibition, kick off the supervisors and purify the Israel Museum from the abomination”. The Museum stood its ground, announcing that Rosen, being a second-generation artist, has the full right to present his work (Shachar, 2002, 39).
The museum’s assertion, that Rosen has a right to exhibit because of his second-generation position, represents the voice of authority in the institutional Holocaust discourse in Israel. But this authoritative voice disguises the real situation of absence: Absence of fertile discussion about relations between artistic practices, the museum space and practices of Holocaust memorization. In this perspective, ignorance and absence have one aim – to fix the Holocaust as a one-time, incomparable event, which must be kept out of any discourse about 20th century horrors (Azoulay, 1999, 58).
In other words, Rosen puts a disturbing mirror in front of the Israeli society. By focusing on the pervert body of the holocaust makers and wrong doers, Rosen turns the norms of representation while exposing them at the same time (Shachar, 2000, 47). Both Azoulay and Shachar point out the paradoxical nature of “Live and Die as Eva Braun”: One has the obligation to represent the Holocaust, but it cannot be represented. Rosen, who is aware of this paradox, shows that his way of representation is impossible: The painter, symbolized by the monkey, tries to imitate reality in vain: The monkeys are holding the mirror at us, as we watch what Rosen calls “the split existence” (fig. 1).
It seems, then, that Rosen has awakened demons out of their lairs. The artist has actually brought forward a new kind of speech, while expanding its lines and touching Israeli discourse by its core. As Rosen puts it, in reply to all his critics: “There is no cynicism in my work. You will only find here irony which derives from pain and the attempt to face the Killer: Here is an act of criticism against the traditional representation of the Holocaust, a tradition which presents the victims in a manipulative cliché: and that is kind of amnesia. The properness is Improper.” (in: Yahav, 27).
More about Gershuny: Givon Gallery of art