Thedialecticof exterior,publiccommemoration
of thepastandits interior,privatetracesrefuses
Shelley Hornstein
Fugiltive Places
I am deeply appreciative of the feedback I
received while thinkingthrough this article, espe-
ciallyto Reesa Greenberg, Vera Frenkel, Fred
Bohrer, Carol Becker, Florence Jacobowitz, and
Wendi Rechtsman. My thanks also extend to
Dean Otto and Renee van der Stelt at the Walker
Art Center and to John di Stefano and Kaucyila
Brooke for includingme to speak on their panel
"Traveling,Traveling:On Distance, Location and
Transformations,"College Art Association Annual
Conference, Los Angeles, 1999, where this article
had an opportunity to develop. Finally,John Alan
Farmer'sperspicacious comments were critical
duringthe article's final edit.
I. MartinJay, "AgainstConsolation: Walter
Benjaminand the Refusalto Mourn," in Jay
Winter and EmmanuelSivan, War and Remem-
brance in the TwentiethCentury(Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999). My thanks to
Jay Winter for the early version of Jay's text while
the book was in press.
easyreconciliation.
-Martin Jay'
In Fran.ois Girard's latest film, TheRedViolin,a violin painted red changes
hands over three or four centuries. With each change of hands, with each new
violinist (man, woman, child) comes a new era, a new story. The material
object seems to carry with it the lives of those who have held and played it
through time. As a lifeless yet almost eternal vessel, it has the capability to
transport with its every passage the lives of those for whom it played a central
role, much like the precious little sweater my grandmother gave to me, which
belonged to her mother, whose mother in turn embroidered it for her. With
that violin and that sweater and all the trinkets, heirlooms, threads, buttons,
and ends of bits we hold dear, we are assured that we have in some unknown
way been in contact with lives that are meaningful to our past.
But it is not only that sweater; it is the buildings, walls, doors, gateways,
gardens, and homes that carry the very same historical and memorial weight.
More poignant still is that in contrast to the red violin or
the embroidered sweater, many objects and sites important
to our heritage no longer exist. When a town is erased, its
citizens murdered, their objects confiscated, and its build-
ings decimated, what happens to the memory of the place
that is no more? Can we bring such a site to mean any-
thing aside from its traumatic end? Is it possible to return to the place where
my great-grandmother embroidered that sweater, when my suspicion is that
nothing material survives-that even the streets are no longer thosestreets? Is
it even meaningful to walk into the old neighborhoods of Jewish life since
rezoned, where no one former street is the same? And if I do, to what end?
How can traveling to a place that architecturally and morphologically no
longer belongsto me (yet might hold a key to my past) reaffirm a sense of my
identity? Without the red violin, is there a story to tell?
Confronting hard issues about what to do with sites where trauma has
occurred is complex and deeply emotional. Chantal Akerman and Vera Frenkel
are two artists who, rather than attempting to locate and fix geographically
the site of the Holocaust, instead present an altogether new terrain that cannot
be identified with or anchored to any one location with a known political
boundary. Instead, movement, as a counterpoint to the fixity of place, becomes
a key strategy-fugitive at all times-to locating the site of the Shoah, a site
that remains situated within personal memory.
Signpost No. I
When we think about who we are, our thoughts are all too frequently rooted
in a physical, geographical place that contextualizes our sense of identity.
Living leaves traces, as Walter Benjamin suggested; architecture, even though
it may be destroyed, still carries what Maurice Halbwachs calls "social frame-
works of memory." By this he means that there exists a geographic timeless-
ness that anchors us to a place and stabilizes our impressions; once we under-
stand that the past is preserved by our physical surroundings, we can attempt
45 art journal
Vera Frenkel.... from
the Transit Bar, 1994. Six-
channel videodisk instal-
lation and functional
piano bar first built at
documenta IX, Kassel,
reconstructed here at
the National Gallery of
Canada, Ottawa.
Photo Charles Hupe,
Ottawa.

44 SPRING 2000

2. Maurice Halbwachs, On CollectiveMemory,
trans. F.Ditter, Jr.,and V. Ditter (New York:
Harper Colophon, 1980), 140.
3. Walter Benjamin,"The Work of Art in the Age
of MechanicalReproduction," in Illuminations, ed.
HannahArendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New
York:Schocken Books, 1988), 239-40.
4. Walter Benjamin,"A BerlinChronicle," in
Reflections,ed. Peter Demetz and trans. Edmund
Jephcott (New York:Schocken Books, 1978), 26.
My thanks to Fred Bohrer for assistance on this
passage.
5. Helene Cixous, "Attacksof the Castle," in
Rootprints:memoryand life-writing/HeleneCixous&
MireilleCalle-Gubar,trans. EricPrenowitz (London:
Routledge, 1997).
6. Aharon Appelfeld, The IronTracks,trans. Jeffrey
M. Green (New York:Schocken Books, 1998).
7. Paulde Kock, "Les chemins de fer," in Lagrande
ville.Nouveaux tableaux de Pariscomique, critiqueet
philosophique,vol. I (Paris, 1842), 188, as quoted
in Clement Cheroux, "Vues du train:Vision et
mobilite au XIXe siecle," Etudes photographiques,
no. I (November 1996): 73-88.
8. Cheroux, 73.
to recapture it.2 Surely then, underlying any romantic desire to turn (or
return) or formulate (or reformulate) a past we never knew is this persistent
truth: architecture acts as a tangible agent for the past, like the red violin;
walls are not only visual reminders, but the built legacy of a specific tactility,
as Benjamin described it, where a tactile sensation overrides even optical
appreciation. Running our hands over the very spot someone else did, some-
one we might have known or called a relative, someone legendary, perhaps,
stretches the search beyond any simulation of the past and home, its nostalgic
partner, to a knowledge of the material object and notions of authenticity.3
Whether architecture and places continue to exist or not, our memory of
them carries on; we are committed to connecting ourselves to the material
ground, to the cities we yearn to see in order to trace the sites of past lives.
For the ground, Benjamin writes, like memory, "is the medium in which
dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must
conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of
genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to
the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns
over soil."4
One response to Benjamin's method is suggested by the following exam-
ple, where Helene Cixous, teetering on the verge of such a project, tells us of
her aborted attempts to gain access to the past:
TherearethreecitiesI wouldlike to go to andI will nevermakeit. ThoughI cando
everything to try to get there,in realityI do not makeit, I meanit's impossible forme to
findmyselftherein the fleshin the streetsin the squaresin the roadsin thewallsbridges
towerscathedrals facadescourtyards quaysriversandoceans,theyarestill wellguarded.
Thesearethe citiesI havethemostmeditated andrunthrough
on, lay siegeto frequented
in dreamsin storiesin guidesI havestudiedthemin dictionaries I havelivedin themif not
in this life thenin anotherlife.
Promised Pragues.Youdreamof going.Youcannotgo. Whatwouldhappenif you went?5
Chantal Akerman and Vera Frenkel embark on a journey with a sense of
returning to the sites of the consequences of their personal family histories,
even if traveling to them for the first time. By using the theme of travel-
almost hypnotic at times-as a means of viewing (and re-viewing), both
artists render the specificity of destinations meaningless. What is observed is
the site of the in-between, with no point of departure or place of arrival.
For Frenkel, trains, but also other unknown forms of transportation that
function as symbols of movement, form the centerpiece of her installation, . . .
fromthe TransitBar.In Aharon Appelfeld's novel TheIronTracks,the protagonist, a
Holocaust survivor, says, "The trains make me free," which is to say that the
train as the nineteenth-century emblem of technological progress was, first, a
vehicle of death and then, ironically, of liberation.6 The writer Paul de Kock
proposed a metaphor for train travel in i842: "Le chemin de fer est la veri-
table lanterne magique de la nature" (The train is the true magic lantern of
nature).7 Rather than make the train an object of locomotion, de Kock sees it
as a machine for viewing-a machine for seeing not that which is the train
itself (the object of movement and transportation, the speed technology of the
nineteenth century, showcasing the triumphs of engineering and industry),
but instead, that which can be viewed fromit.8
46 SPRING 2000
Vera Frenkel.... from In many of the video monitors placed about Frenkel's TransitBar, vehicles
the Transit Bar. 1997
of movement (sometimes trains that we see, at other times trains or other
Rikutstallningar touring
version. Detail of recon- vehicles that are used to see beyond) give visual access to the place of the in-
struction at Centrum between and heighten our sense of entrapment in this wait-station, while also
Sztuki Wsp6lczesnej
(Centre of Contemporary offering relief with the knowledge that we are in a fictional space that we can
Art),Warsaw. Photo exit at will. To achieve this space of limbo, Frenkel uses as background for
Ula Sniegowska, CCA
Warsaw. narrators recounting their experiences of displacement, video footage seen
from a moving train, as well as digitally altered images of a piano bar sign.
Finally, texts, images, and speakers emerge from and disappear into black to
create motion. The filmed illusion of movement of that which is viewed is
the operative concept structurally inherent in each video monitor image.
Akerman's camera, located inside vehicles (trains, cars, or other
"machines for viewing"), films the landscape as it appears to move, but really
as we move from somewhere to nowhere and back again. These strategies of
travel foreground the notion that the past is not linear, and that "real" places
are forever reshaped or imagined. The places Frenkel and Akerman suggest
cannot and never have been the same, as they were remembered or imagined;
they are places that are not necessarily tangible at all, yet they are always loca-
tions, dislocated, dug up, and new again. Their works underscore, too, that
national and personal identities, informed by geographic place, are always
fugitive and arbitrary.

47 art journal

;" . II
Vera Frenkel... from
the TransitBar.
Riksutstallningar,touring
version, 1997-98.View
from entrance, recon-
struction at Kungl.
Konsthogskolan,
Stockholm.
Consider Anne Michaels's evocative novel, FugitivePieces.Presented in
sequential and broken frames, this work is an action of multiple levels of
memory. Metaphorically, traveling, the fugitive quality of being glued and un-
glued from a consensual history, is apparent throughout in a style that repeat-
edly and randomly clusters paragraphs and scatters them into fragments or
disperses the ideas and collects the words. These bracketed
sections-snippets now linked, now disjointed-create
holes and vacuums to ensure breaks as periods of reflec-
tion and discontinuity from any semblance of a narrative.
1 ^^?l
X S (Frenkel's musical score, arranged by the artist and Stan
Zielinski and played on a Disklavier, is a ninety-minute
medley of Polish and Yiddish melodies, popular stan-
dards and her own compositions, replete with disso-
;" |; ;?<S nances and occasional breaks that are strikingly and
i: intentionally silent). Fugitive by all accounts, Michaels's
book attempts somehow to be geographically grounded
(Poland, then Greece, and finally Toronto). It is steeped
in vocabularies proper to the disciplines of geology and
archeology, for example, to remind us of our physical
place. Yet they nonetheless escape being identified with
any set place. Ironically, we begin to understand that our
physical location is nothing more than accidental, and
that to record these sites requires traveling and searching
for the pieces missing from this or that story of the
journey and the (last or more recent) place from which
we've come.
Travel can be escape in the most literal sense. Some-
times flight is propelled metaphorically by becoming a
state of mind in spite of any desire to end it by settling
in a physical place and traveling no more. Travel pushes
our noses up against the glass of differences, boundaries,
and identities and forces us to unsettle ourselves, realign
our equilibrium, and rearrange our processes of thought.
Travel frequently shifts us from one time zone to another
and disturbs our faithful inner clock. The action of travel-its movement-
relentlessly reveals newness and is flashed against the backdrop of what we
know to be safe (and familiar) in our memory about the place from which
we've just come. Adventure and anxiety (the odd pairing) envelop our pre-
concepts of places that we've never known or that we're hoping to forget
as we yearn to remember and search for that safety again. Travel places us
squarely in front of ourselves: who we are, where we've buried our memo-
ries, and where we belong. But not only is travel voluntarily enacted; it can
be very much involuntary as a result of expulsion and rejection. Not only
does travel locate and relocate, it is a medium to dislocate.
Akerman and Frenkel explore survival and the site of the in-between after
Auschwitz-the violent ruptures and the forced displacement from places of
the familiar. A displaced person is, after all, one who has experienced the
forced separating out of oneself from one's place. But what I want to distin-
48 SPRING 2000

Vera Frenkel.... from
the Transit Bar.
Riksutstallningar, touring
version, 1997-98.
Installation view of
reconstruction at Kungl.
Konsthogskolan,
Stockholm.
9. Charlotte Delbo, La m6moireet lesjours (Paris:
Berg International, 1985), I I, and as discussed fur-
ther in Lawrence Langer,Holocaust Testimonies:The
Ruinsof Memory(New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1991), 3.
10. Builtinitiallyat documenta IX, Kassel (1992);
installed subsequently, among other venues, at The
Power Plant,Toronto (1994-95), the Setagaya
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1995); the
Gesellschaft fur Aktuelle Kunst (GAK), Bremen,
and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
(1996); the KunglKonsth6gskolan, Stockholm, the
Centre of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, and the
Gotesborg Konstmuseum (1997-98), and with the
virtualversion scheduled for the installationat the
SigmundFreud Museum, Vienna (2000). See the
exhibition catalogues ... fromthe TransitBar/du
transitbar/ausder Transitbar(The Power Plantand
National Gallery of Canada, 1994) and Vera
Frenkel,... fromthe TransitBar, BodyMissing,
www.yorku.ca/BodyMissing, Riksutstallningar,
Stockholm (1997-98).
guish carefully is that more than this, more than displacement, both artists
are attempting the impossible task of rebuilding a logic of everyday life: the
puttingbackof dailyfunctionsintosomesemblance
of life. Charlotte Delbo-author,
Holocaust survivor, and non-Jew-when asked if she lives with the memory
of Auschwitz continually, responded, "No-I live beside it. Auschwitz is there,
fixed and unchangeable, but wrapped
in the impervious skin of memory
m lidea|
that segregates itself from the pre-
sent 'me."' For Delbo, to become
human again meant re-educating
herself to learn how to use a tooth-
brush, toilet paper, handkerchief,
_en tsrgtifm
po~in.t.. to and knife; the simple act of
sesfork,
relearning how to smile and distin-
guish forgotten smells and tastes.
This process of renewal and re-iden-
tification is entirely apart from and
beyond the act of displacement and
br iitakes us to the edge of a world that
remains indescribable.9 To consider
the responses by these artists is to
explore displacement, to be sure,
and also loss, in ways that place
their works, I want to argue, in a
very separate realm of critique. But
this is the subject of another essay.
Theirs is a kind of travel that plots, on one level, a visual and aural repre-
sentation of a place of transit or an intangible home but makes even stranger
the idea that an identity might ever be recuperated in any foreign and fugitive
place. Surely part of traveling is to find sameness, stepping-stones leading to
who we are so that difference can be defined. We recognize the similarities as
deliberately as we see alienation and foreignness, security and danger, which
travel brings to our awareness. The space between here and there is measured
in different ways but is always recognized as a distance, a gap between two
points to define the struggle to inform ourselves of what is lacking in each, to
complete the circle of our own identities.
Signpost No. 2:Vera Frenkel
In ... fromthe TransitBar, Vera Frenkel enables visitors to imagine a conflation
of the present and the past.'? This installation is built as a functional piano
bar, in which visitors are served drinks and may sit, talk, and listen to music.
It also includes six video monitors distributed throughout the space. These run
in a cycle of eighty-minute sequences, with computer-programmed orchestra-
tions of images and on-camera narrators giving first-person accounts about
displacement, the latter consisting of voice-overs of texts spoken by different
narrators. These narrators speak in what might be interpreted at first encounter
as indecipherable languages, even though visitors may, for short moments,
catch mild snippets of familiarity. But in fact, overdubbing the languages of
49 art journal
 the original, they are Yiddish and Polish, two of the languages spoken by the
grandparents Frenkel never had the opportunity to know. These narratives are
subtitled alternately in English, French, or German-languages that are seen
and read, but not heard, in contrast to Yiddish and Polish, which are heard
but not seen and read. This subtle layering reveals the complexity of the frag-
ments of stories. Initially
conceived for documenta
IX, the installation evokes
the experience of displace-
ment, in that only frag-
ments of the stories told
can be understood by the
average visitor. Because
Yiddish and Polish are mar-
ginalized languages in Ger-
many as in North America,
Frenkel chose to highlight
this exclusion and thereby
disorient part of her audi-
ence (sometimes, and in
Warsaw particularly, these
languages were understood
to a signficant degree). In
so doing, she ensured a
constant state of displace-
ment for most viewers."
While the space
Frenkel constructs for us
Chantal Akerman. ... .. i
to visit represents on one
Bordering on Fiction: ~
Chantal Akerman's "D'Est", .-
i!g 3j_~,~'[~ i:.;/lllimmediate
Ij:jR:JE level a space
1993/95. Four I" master of pleasure (after all, it is
videotapes, four color- a bar and a social setting
corrected D2 masters,
28 laserdiscs, I" master complete with drink,
videotape (for the single- music, and conversation),
monitor installation,
there is a natural desire
French and English lan-
guage versions), Magno for us as participants to
"draw" disc, 16mm make sense of why we
filminternegative, two I"
masters.Walker Art have sequestered ourselves
Center, Minneapolis. Justin here. What are we actually
Smith Purchase Fund,
1995. doing here and why? If this really is a transit bar, we are coming from some-
where and on our way somewhere else. But where have we come from, and
where are we going? Destinations seem to be obliterated, or at least unknown;
there is a reverberating discomfort of being caught in this space of the in-
between (between places and between languages). We are forever in transit
I I. JonathanRosen's review of Aharon Appelfeld's
IronTracksdescribed language as a recurring in a sometimes muddled and confused dissonance of sounds suspending us
theme: "The few broken Jews and half-JewsErwin between the here and there but, most importantly, without beginning or end,
encounters lapse repeatedly into excruciating
where there is no teleological telling of this story and no specific, geographic
silence, as if language itself were a casualty of the
war"; see New YorkTimes,February 15, 1998. place in which we can locate this bar which evokes the anonymous lounges in

50 SPRING 2000

12. This exhibition was co-curated by Kathy
Halbreich, Bruce Jenkins,Catherine David, and
MichaelTarantinofor the Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis,in conjunction with the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art, and was shown at both
institutions and also traveled to the Galerie
Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris;the Societe des
Expositions du Palaisdes Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles;
the IVAMCentre del Carme, Valencia;the Kunst-
museum, Wolfsburg, and The Jewish Museum,
New York.
bus stations, train stations, or airports. Going from here to there, from no-
where to somewhere, and in fact going nowhere at all, visitors to this transit
bar encounter a manufactured space of rupture, a place of the in-between
where our captivity is but an invention. Yet, we want to feel that this place
can be geographically determined and physically concrete. Situated between
documentary and fictional spaces, it has a pulse of its own. The invisible
cordon imprisons us and creates parameters for our memory (here, as with
Akerman, reminding us that we take it for granted). With both artists, one of
the important readings is that we yearn for the solid and the tangible, in spite
of the fugitive qualities of what represents home. The spatial presence of the
Transit Bar acts as a template for our personal and active engagement with
our own memories. What adds layer upon layer to this suspended wait-station
(this oxymoronic notion of a place that leads us somewhere yet never will)
are the bits and pieces of our fragmented selves stuck in the languages that
are nothing if not a mix of haunting voices condensing the past in the present
and holding the deep-cut memories of lost lives. Part of this profound expul-
sion-travel that Frenkel tells traces the invisible contours of people who have
been annihilated, yet exist in the ineluctable fragments and zones of memory.
Signpost No. 3: Chantal Akerman
The i995 exhibition Bordering on Fiction:ChantalAkerman's"D'Est"included a large
film and video installation that chronicles a grand journey, as the artist calls
it, "across Eastern Europe ... To Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia,
the former East Germany, and back to Belgium."'2 The first darkened room,
where the full-length, dialogueless film D'Est(From the East) is screened, is
followed by a second darkened room that includes twenty-four video moni-
tors grouped in sets of three on waist-high bases, showing looped sequences
excerpted from the film in the previous room. As with the film in the first
room, only ambient sounds form the soundtrack. The film records vignettes
of everyday life across a Europe, as we detect from the details of architecture
and clothing, that seems no longer to register difference-almost a Europe
without borders; a Europe of images without labels or words, with only visual
cues and urban noise; a Europe whose borders and national and cultural iden-
tities are ever-changing.
The final and smallest room-a sanctuary of sorts-named the "twenty-
fifth screen" features a single twenty-fifth monitor placed close to the floor
that shows a digitally manipulated video with intensified colors and an image
of a Moscow street at night. The image seems to transform into a sputtering
of light flashes like fireworks. The near silence of the first two rooms is punc-
tuated here with the sound of Akerman reading aloud in English and Hebrew,
beginning with the passage from Exodus about the Biblical injunction against
idolatry: "Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, nor any manner of
likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above . . . thou shalt not bow down
unto them, nor serve them." Akerman recites this text against a background
of the traditional cantorial melody for Kol Nidre, a prayer for Yom Kippur,
the Day of Atonement. Also reading from her journal, she calls for an engage-
ment in the present to challenge the aesthetic, cultural, and national borders
(fictions) that, because of the trauma of the past, numb us to silence.
51 art journal
Chantal Akerman.
Bordering on Fiction:
ChantalAkerman's
"D'Est".

In the first room, under the guise of a documentary, Akerman presents an

autobiographical travelogue recording the history she digs for as she returns
to the places her parents were from. Acting on this impulse, she begins by
hoping to register a truth, she will discover, that borders, as she puts it, on
fiction. We are invited to yearn for and simultaneously reject the world she
crafts in her travels. During this process of recovery, she unearths the empti-
ness of any sense of herself in those places; yet, a strange sense of oneness ties
them together. The process continues-in quiet revenge-to reveal the com-
pactness of that oneness and the absurdity of our presence or our ability to be
situated (or relocated) within its narrative. Returning, as it were, to that place

52 SPRING 2000
of rejection and violence, is a journey into emptiness inside great breadth.
Rather, the film, the exhibition as a whole, records us as we who are absent
from it. This is an installation of memories lost and found and identities
found and lost, with the possibility of hopefulness being exclusively in the
act of making this art, since the travels offer no relief from the recurring
images of that which has been forgotten.
Traveling to a site with the objective to act out memory carries an almost
impossible risk of failure, since it can never be fulfilled. Instilled in this atmos-
phere is the palpable anguish of personal identity unrelieved by the pained
images that echo the shadowed silences of Akerman's parents' stripped identi-
ties, their displacement, and removed from what might otherwise be inter-
preted as a uniformity of national belonging. It doesn't take much for us as
viewers to see, as the visuals confirm, that no matter how familiar some of
the traditions might seem to be, she, and we, will never belong. Filing past
the multiple sequences of unrelenting images and very little text, we come
to a painful awareness of the hollowness of where we stand (outside).

Signposts to Somewhere and Nowhere

For both Frenkel and Akerman, as well as for other artists, these works seek
to expose subversively the indifference and cost of what it is to forget. Such is
the nature of returning to fugitive places. By criss-crossing time and mapping
geographies, these artists bring our awareness to the circularity and invisibility
of sites that mean something for us. They create signposts to somewhere and
nowhere in order to mark boundaries and destinations today that may very
well be plucked out of the ground tomorrow, while running the risk that
there is no further need to mark such a site as a point of departure, passage,
or place of return.

Shelley Hornstein is Associate Professor of Art History at York University in Toronto. She co-edited
CapitalCulture:A Readeron ModernistLegacies,State Institutions,and the Value(s)of Art (McGillUniversity
Press, 2000) and is co-editing Representationand Remembrance;The Holocaustin Art, a book on post-
Holocaust visual art and film.

53 art journal