The act of codification that is enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights has ensured that the unspeakable has been cut down to size at the very moment that it is protested against.
—Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, on the UN General Assembly’s defining of the term “genocide.”
"Voyage of the Doomed" from "They Spoke Out." Courtesy Disney Educational Productions.
This spring marked the launch of an ambitious motion comic series addressing the Holocaust, titled They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust. The project, a collaborative effort by comic book artist Neal Adams, Disney Educational Productions, and the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, is a multi-part series, the first volume of which was recently screened by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York (and whose initial graphic installments have been made available here). Each episode of this ten-part series aims to chronicle little known stories of heroism by various Americans who spoke out against Fascist extremism or otherwise performed extraordinary acts of bravery, recounting, as the authors of the series put it, the “remarkable stories of Americans of all faiths who raised their voices, marched in protest, or even helped smuggle Jewish refugees out of Hitler’s Europe.”
The mission statement of the series is set forth as follows:
Each year, educators seek new and innovative ways to teach this difficult topic. They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust addresses this need by presenting an important but little-known chapter of Holocaust history – and presenting it in a unique and compelling way: through motion comics. Blending the features of comic books, animation, period footage, and photographs, motion comics are the newest, cutting-edge way to entertain and to educate simultaneously.
This graphic project, particularly its artistic strategies and goals as articulated in the above mission statement, inevitably calls to mind and invites comparison to Art Spiegelman’s own two-volume graphic comic project, Maus. A project engaging with the Holocaust, such as They Spoke Out, also raises the question about artistic strategies of representing traumatic events and historical catastrophe, with the prospect that representing catastrophe is fraught with the risk of diminishing the enormity of the represented event, be it the Holocaust or 9/11. Indeed, as Theodor Adorno suggests in the epigraph, codifying catastrophe carries with it the danger of diminishing the specificity and enormity of the historical event. As Alex Thomson has described it, when representations “become a shorthand way of referring to the event and placing it into the continuum of history as such, then the risk is in normalizing and taming the traumatic singularity of any given catastrophe.” (The problem of representing the Holocaust was a subject explored in the Jewish Museum in New York’s controversial 2002 exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art and one of the reasons for the vocal opposition to the exhibition).
"Rescue Over the Mountains" from "They Spoke Out." Courtesy Disney Educational Productions.
While They Spoke Out and Maus both employ a blend of word, graphic images, diagrams, and documentary photographs, they take decidedly different stances toward the catastrophic past. For unlike the straightforward narratives of various historical figures and events in They Spoke Out, Maus is a complicated and deeply personal tale about Spiegelman’s father’s experience in the Holocaust and the author’s own fraught relationship to that traumatic past. Whereas the stories chronicled in They Spoke Out aim to recover for readers heretofore unheralded or forgotten acts of heroism from the historical past through what is essentially a conventional narrative framework—presenting a kind of narrative fullness, if you will—in Spiegelman’s tale, the reader is confronted with certain gaps and discontinuities, which confound the reader’s own process of meaning production.
New column! On View Now
What better way to kick off this first day of July than with a new column (one of two, in fact)? We are pleased to introduce On View Now.
Written by Max Weintraub, On View Now explores recent developments in and issues central to contemporary art practice and theory, focusing on artwork at the intersection of traditional histories of arts, mass media and everyday life. Addressing a broad range of aesthetic strategies and theoretical frameworks, On View Now attends to such themes as the nature of representation, the implications of art’s transformation into mass culture, and issues of identity in a rapidly changing world. Each month, On View Now will explore these and related issues in contemporary visual culture from around the globe, with particular attention paid to what’s on view in the New York art scene. It publishes the first Thursday of the month.
A guest blogger alum from last September, Max Weintraub received his Ph.D. in the History of Art from Bryn Mawr College in 2006, where he completed his dissertation on the art of Bruce Nauman. Max has has worked in curatorial and educational departments at the Denver Art Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From 2006-2008, he was the curator of The Reis Collection of Modern & Contemporary Art in New York City. Presently, Max is an adjunct professor in the Department of the History of Art at Hunter College in New York City, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on modern and contemporary art.
