Making something "new" from a different angle, or helping the viewer "feel" the subject at hand. What do you want to do with your art? Take someone take an old issue and view it anew? Or, immerse the audience in it, to feel it?
A Polish rabbi says it this way: Art “can motivate us to face issues and concepts we prefer to ignore.” Polish. You might wonder why I'm headed to a Polish rabbi for a quote.
Well, here's why--the Holocaust, specifically Auschwitz, Poland, is a subject of the arts. It is an interest in aiding the audience the "feeling" of the Jews at that moment when they walked into a camp, or a gas chamber.
As Theodor Adorno, a great art critic, said, "The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth.” I think suffering is a topic spanning across centuries of artwork. As the life line threaded through the human condition, suffering is a reality that needs to be grappled with . . . especially by artists.
So, here's where a Mexico-native artist, Yishai Jusidman, comes in. Living in Los Angeles, he paints depictions of the Holocaust gas chambers of the concentration camps in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Birkenau. Using the pigments that are either chemically or conceptually hinged upon the compounds used to gas the Jews (or using "flesh tones"), he paints the shower chambers. He says he uses these hues "to generate the pictorial impression of a silence as solemn and forthright as it is eloquent" as he aims to "trigger what the sheer awareness of the Holocaust feels like."
Feeling. Suffering. These two come together to make this art intensely meaningful.
Though, one critic may wonder--what are a Mexico-native's credentials to depict something like this when he is not a Jew?
I've been asked a similar question in the concepts of my work on suffering. . . .
And, I believe the answer goes something like this:
"I am human. Am I not? I share in the pool of suffering, if even not so intense as these subjects. What is my life, then, if I do not respond to their suffering but turn, instead, a blind eye so as to not deal with their pain? I think, by the gifts I have been given, I have a duty to them, to tell their story, so that others may know and come to understand that pain that crosses all boundaries--be they continental boundaries, or the boundary from you to the person next to you. We all have a story that can be connected to a greater reality. Suffering is a reality. It needs to be shared, so that the other can know that we care."
We care. As an artist. So, we make art. That matters.
References: The Holocaust Art
A Polish rabbi says it this way: Art “can motivate us to face issues and concepts we prefer to ignore.” Polish. You might wonder why I'm headed to a Polish rabbi for a quote.
Well, here's why--the Holocaust, specifically Auschwitz, Poland, is a subject of the arts. It is an interest in aiding the audience the "feeling" of the Jews at that moment when they walked into a camp, or a gas chamber.
As Theodor Adorno, a great art critic, said, "The need to let suffering speak is a condition of all truth.” I think suffering is a topic spanning across centuries of artwork. As the life line threaded through the human condition, suffering is a reality that needs to be grappled with . . . especially by artists.
So, here's where a Mexico-native artist, Yishai Jusidman, comes in. Living in Los Angeles, he paints depictions of the Holocaust gas chambers of the concentration camps in Dachau, Auschwitz, and Birkenau. Using the pigments that are either chemically or conceptually hinged upon the compounds used to gas the Jews (or using "flesh tones"), he paints the shower chambers. He says he uses these hues "to generate the pictorial impression of a silence as solemn and forthright as it is eloquent" as he aims to "trigger what the sheer awareness of the Holocaust feels like."
Feeling. Suffering. These two come together to make this art intensely meaningful.
Though, one critic may wonder--what are a Mexico-native's credentials to depict something like this when he is not a Jew?
I've been asked a similar question in the concepts of my work on suffering. . . .
And, I believe the answer goes something like this:
"I am human. Am I not? I share in the pool of suffering, if even not so intense as these subjects. What is my life, then, if I do not respond to their suffering but turn, instead, a blind eye so as to not deal with their pain? I think, by the gifts I have been given, I have a duty to them, to tell their story, so that others may know and come to understand that pain that crosses all boundaries--be they continental boundaries, or the boundary from you to the person next to you. We all have a story that can be connected to a greater reality. Suffering is a reality. It needs to be shared, so that the other can know that we care."
We care. As an artist. So, we make art. That matters.
References: The Holocaust Art
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