what i gained from my bibliography

Susan Hiller's exhibition (Tate Britain)- from this exhibition i gained a deeper understanding of space and concept within an exhibiotn setting. i also learnt to appreciate film and video much more than before. i was inspired to create my own films and this is what led to my final piece. this exhibition i think was the most useful out of all the research i did for my FMP because i also got inspired by her J Street project which trigeered the intiial idea for studying the holocaust as my final project.

Never the Same River - Simon Starling - From this i learnt to appreciate the boundaries of time an elemtns of time. I also experienced artist such as Mike Nelson who use found objects and installation, also lements of identity in his work which led me to question concepts and themes that run throughout my project such as change in place, and associations of place.

Everything is Illuminated  This Film allowed me to relate to the personal side of my project as mentioned in my Porject Porposal. I wanted to explore the micro scale of the vicimts and get to know them, feel more connected and this helped me to understand individuals as identities rather thasn victims as numbers.
Decasia
Saatchi Gallery
Not In Fashion - Mark Borthwick
Studio - Paolo Roversi
http://the-artists.org/artist/Christian-Boltanski
National Geographic
Oh Comely

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TWBSMc47bw
G-d said, be happy
Martin Gilbert - Auschwitz and the Allies

VOB to quicktime files

So after my final cut pro induction today i am ready to spend all day on my film tomorrow.

there was a problem so i couldnt start today, apparently macs don't open VOB files so just in the process of converting them into quicktime files. while i'm waiting i'm writing poems about holocuats related thoughts and feelings and making canvas pictures, sorry about bad webcam quality, being a bit lazy, have a look:

in college - monday, getting started on the film

i had tonsilitus last week so after a wasted week of being in bed i'm now about to start working with my films.
i was meant to start on thursday but i missed the induction because stupidly i was bed bound. i've never used film before and although i am completely unfamiliar with the idea i decided that i needed to be brave and experimental in order to achieve the best reults. i'm writing some ideas of which shots and clips of the fottage i have that i'm going to use.

after thoroughly familiarising myself with and watching the black and white wedding video, i thought it was an interestng viewpoint to convey a success story, a struggle and a survival and the idea of a battle won. and then also having films from 60's and 50's from their children, the twins, which makes the concept of continuation and rejection or persecution more relatable. their descendents are their rebellion in a sense.

i showed the wedding film to my grandma also as she hasn't seen it in over 50 years. i invited the rest of the family over to view it with her also as i wanted to place and capture all her ancestory and the seeds she has sown, so to speak, the measure of her success is only tangible, visible or even obvious through her descendents. i videod and recorded her reactions.

she was more concerned with telling her audience (the family) who people in the film were and what they're doing now, whether they're alive or dead and what they meant to her, both now and at the time.

i think it worked quite well and was an appropriate way of documenting the transition process between now and then by having recorded her reactions. i may also interview her and find out her feelings and document them in writing, this also could be a useful way of finding out how she feels about the entire process (of life and survival).


the footage and sound i have of her and my family laughing and talking over the film corresponds time wise to the film itself, so when she shouts at something like ''oh there's uncle harry. shame about him not being here'' it might create a nice correlation if i overlayed the two pieces of gathered information, it could be a detailed account in her words, the protagonist, of the footage itself. i think this may be a suitable method of adding sound to the silent cinefilm, rather than finding seerate pieces of music and audio clips to layer over the film.

at first i wanted to use german music in parts where there was dancing in the video but without sound, and maybe even speeches made in germany during the 1940's but although this is also an appropriate use of audio i feel like the effect it creates is not as subtle and thought provoking and cosequently ''powerful'' and it may also be slightly too obvious as it leads the viewer/listener straight to the point, rather than them having to engage with the material to form a relationship with the subjects and form an opinion/emotional connection.

so, to start with i'm going to filter through parts of the film and decide which of the 14 minutes i want to use.

the first few frames/seconds of the film is a very scratched and bitty filming of the sign on the synagogue wall where the wedding ceremony took pace, it reads, '' if g-d lend thee wealth, exalt not thyself above thy fellow...for ye sleep together in the end.''

the composition of the shot coupled with the interpretation and age of the film give it an eerie nature of wholesome goodness whilst also referring to life and death itself, it's quality, or lack of, adds to the message, where the edges have disintergrated and decayed, there are connotations to the death and destruction of culture and history.

to start the project with such a powerful image, piece of film, i feel like from there there has to be a certain 'pace' set. i don't want the film to run at normal speed, the speed at which it runs on a cine-projector, i'd like to slow bits of it down and allow the audience to extract as much character from the subjects as possible. 

the next frame or section could possibly be a more livelier one but so much so that it also creates a larger than life itself feeling. if possible i want to find out if i can use final cut pro to slowly layer the ends of the two frames so that the first piece blurs out to slowly reveal the second which will be the end of the weddding video which also has this crackled and decayed quality of the husband and wife kissing. 

i'd like to possibly experiment with playing this part backwards and maybe adding in ''scartches'' of my own to make the image stutter and repeat at places, like in the music video i found on youtube of a band call s amp.

because the nature of the footage is of such a personal nature, i feel as though the most successful method would be to inject as much distance as possible, by manipulating the footage as much as possible while still conveying a timeline - a form of narrative.

i also want to play on the idea of the footage being ''old'' and found, again manipulating the concepts of decay and damage, mirroring and contrasting with the notion that none of the people present in the videos were directly harmed by the tragic events of europe, although a part of the overall ''plan'', in contrast, that they overcame and survived. this is the story that i think the audio overlayed on top of the footage conveys. 

there are more ideas still to come but my induction for FINAL CUT PRO is starting now. be back soon.

some mock 1940's

using expired and out dated films i've been trying to create the feeling of old found images from european jews of the 1940-50 period. i didn't want to convey sadness, tears and crying etc, i wanted an uncertainty/insecurity and subtle childish vulnerability to enable me to used the image is a variety of layering experiments.

i wanted their hands to be in the images, to create a sense of personality, to keep them ''alive'' with a childish yet naive playful nature.

do we look jewish?

i had some photographs i took form the beginning of the project developed. this was part of the study into the aryan race and stereotypical portrayals of jewish people. based on vaught's practical character reader book (aforementioned - 1902) and the german view of facial features and pigment (blonde hair, blue eyes) these two 19 year old jewish girls do not fit into any bracket (facially), or none that i can put a label on.

TO DO list

right. i have a load of stuff i really need to do so i'm writing this list so i do not forget, or skip any of it.

- get the good stills from cinewedding film printed out onto 1.5 ft by 1.5 ft paper, so can dylom image- maker them onto canvas.
and with them you must:
~ layer them with pencil drawings of sketches from inside death camps,
~ layer them over the fingerprints camnvases
~ layer them over the dot canvases/line canveses to convey figures . person = dot/line
~ layer them over photographs of people nowadays

this list will be added to during the course of the day. when i remember stuff, have ideas etc.

amen

6 million

the paper clips project was a project started initially to try convey the sheer figure and mass of the 6 million jewish people killed during ww2.
to make the concept a more tangible one, the need for an outlet, or physical comparison becomes necessary.

artists such as sam winston have also experimented with the idea of conveying and converting huge figures of death/birth into a more tangible piece of work, to digest easily.
this is some of the information/quotation taken form his website:

''By the time you’ve read this sentence three people have been born into the world.
By the time you’ve read this sentence two will have passed away.
By the time you’ve lived through this twelve-hour day there will be 100,000 more children on the planet. And in the same twelve hours 70,000 people will have died.

Birthday is a work which sets out to record every individual birth and death over a twelve-hour period. Initially imagined to be realised in real time, marking the beat of each life with a small circle. But I immediately realised it was impossible to keep up with events and it would take many months to graphically capture the rhythm of life and death.

I find it interesting that we use numbers to quantify things yet once we pass a certain amount, scale slips away and it becomes incomprehensible. I wanted to understand what a 100,000 physically was – and for me that entailed marking out that number in pen and pencil.

In my mind I am still unable to comprehend such a figure but at least I know my body now holds a memory of the event."

i said at the beginning of my study of the holocaust that i wanted to try as best i could

to create a personal kind of emotive outcome. this word personal is what's now being challenged, even though each individual circle in actual fact has been considered and drawn and has been personally attended to, the overall picture does  not convey a personal account or closeness to the victims or protagonist involved, it is only the artist as aforementioned by winston that is aware of the notion and concept of the number, amount he's dealing with, be it 100,000 or 6,000,000.

this is something for me to think about, in my final piece. and which i'd rather address; my connection with the victims or the audiences'?

the FILM(s)

it started with the greatest find, i was digging around in my grandma's photo collections and came across a box of old cine 9mm film from 1940-1970 about.

so about £100 pounds later, and a snappy snaps dvd in hand, here's a couple of stills:

just doing a bit of editing now. will upload some decent stuff a little later. back to the drawing board, and looking forward to learning some video editing techniques tomorrow in digital media suite.

photographs from poland

    

photographs from poland

  

how do we convey a lost identity?

I went today to the saatchi gallery and had a wander around for a few hours. there were a couple of new and exciting artists that i discovered, so firstly i came across an artist called ximena garrido-lecca and it was her work names ''the followers that was exhibited at the saatchi. you can read about it here:

http://www.ximenagarridolecca.com/followers.pdf

i was inspired by her use of nostalgia and a mixture of found objects.images and text. The sense of every person is sincerely felt. Using this concept I'm going to try and create some images which convey the concept of identity. This idea as mentioned in the previous post that it's not just names and faces that manifest and conjure a sense of personality, relationship, it's the very presence of the person. I want to alter the method slightly though, I think I'm going to experiment with creating a sense of emotional connection through distance, exploring how layers and text can make an intimate place. picture or explicit sense of 'death' more removed from the audience, allowing them the option to wade through layers and history to try and connect with the subject matter.

I'm going to be using symbolicly rich imagery and recorded sounds, speeches and historical references and  found images of trees in aushwitch, my own photographs of poland and concetration camps, susan hiller's j street proj, empty spaces etc empty, life flowers and butterflies, how colour manifests itself and portray's an emotion: black-death and white - pure/peace.

putting a face to the name

So I've been researching mainly the personal approach/influences in what I know of the Holocaust, reading and flicking through various books such as 'Auschwitz and the Allies' by Martin Gilbert, but whilst visiting a Jewish library in North West London, I came across various files with lists and lists of names. Having visited Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Israel which is the largest Holocaust memorial museum and exhibition, there is spherical room with a high dome shaped ceiling, and the entire room is covered entirely with black and white pre war images of it's victims. No names, just hundreds and hundreds of pictures. I felt that there was a serious emotional distance between the images and myself and that sense of ''en masse'' is what in a strange sense, conveyed enough of a message, to understand and reflect on how individually important each image is, and how many people would in my own life, grieve over the death of a loved one, nevermind a murdered innocent love one.  So with this concept already planted in my mind, I came across a list of names, no photographs, unlike the aforementioned, the complete opposite, just names. I think using this distance of the unknown subject in war images of the deceased and maybe names and stories also I'm going to explore the differences or the connections/relationships between the face and the name.

character assessment re: physical features

so, inspired by susan hiller's j.street project i saw at the tate last week, i've decided for my FMP, as mentioned briefly in the previous blog, to explore the holocaust as historical event and have begun conducting studies and research.
there is huge amounts of information and images available on the internet and just typing in the world holocaust all sorts of horrifying images come up.
but i've decided to take more of a personal approach, and a more implicit message rather than just throwing harrowing images and stories at the audience.

we were talking in class last week about the shock factor of an image and what has become over the last century or so, socailly acceptable, with sexual and controversial elements becoming more and more commonplace in today's society, nothing seems to be out of place or deemed 'unacceptable' anymore. with artists such as sandy kim documenting her menstruel cycles and art becoming a vehicle with which to push and stretch boundaries; we've gotten, as a culture and a generation preoccupied with physicality. but although art and advertising are consumed with sexual desire and appearances, vanity and controversy are not rooted in this generation, they're age old.

again as documented in my previous post of various found quotes and diagrams that i found interesting. i've found various websites and books that predate the war era, that focus on physicality and the aryan race, but seem to approach it from a so called ''rational'' point of view, with an intellectual slant, such as the aforementioned book ''Vaught's Practical Character Reader.''

the aryan race was a portrayal of  what hitler wanted from an entire country/world. his idea of perfection.

These are some images from Vaught's book, dating 1902

http://resources.ushmm.org/film/search/index.php

decomposition (Vaught’s Practical Character Reader.)

the narrative of destruction, in faith, in culture, in variety. the destruction of a character through age and manipulation, propaganda, manipulated minds.
Like the video of grandma's wedding, a culture who appears seemingly normal, destroyed through unnatural means of process of selection, ''natural selection'' evolution.
Hitler was the tool of erasure. He was determined to manipulate and eradicate a race he considered fungal and parasitic in nature.
Unless you take out the root, you can't destroy a weed. Truth is our root, ahava is our root. It's roots are not of a physical nature, not defined by pigment.

The Perfect Race


what is Aryan?
depicted the aryan race in black and white imagery.
take a selection of pictures of blonde haired blue eyed non jewish girls. all dressed the same. give them maybe a black shirt to wear. (for example)
take the same selection of pictures of blonde haired blue eyed jewish girls.
compare them.
analyse them.
measure their facial appearance spatially.

“The Aryan race is tall, long legged, slim. The race is narrow-faced, with a narrow forehead, a narrow highbuilt nose and a lower jaw and prominent chin, the skin is rosy bright and the blood shines through .... the hair is smooth, straight or wavy - possibly curly in childhood. The colour is blond.”

Description of a ‘pure’ Aryan. From a leaflet ‘The Nazi Race’, 1929.

In Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality, Joane Nagel talks about the role that the intersections between ethnicity and sexuality play in nationalist projects–that is, how they are used as groups define who is and isn’t part of the entity defined as “the nation.” Those who are part of the nation are part of “us,” and those outside it are the Other. She brings up the example of Nazi Germany. Clearly ethnicity played a huge part in definitions of nationhood as the Nazis saw it. But as Nagel points out, it went beyond that; individuals were also included or excluded from membership based on other characteristics, including sexuality. Specifically, homosexuals were marked as unworthy of inclusion and were also sent to concentration camps.

This image, found at The Pink Triangle, illustrates the intersection ethnicity and various categories, including sexuality. It shows the various markers Nazis used to identify prisoners.

The bottom row of seven triangles clearly represents different categories of Jews. The fifth column of triangles (they look tan but they were pink) identified homosexuals. The third column (blue) was for immigrants. I believe the first column (red) was for political dissenters, but I’m not certain. We see other specified groups of Jews in the three partly-yellow triangles at the bottom, as well as triangles for Poles and Czechs. I don’t know enough German to figure the others out.

It’s a great example of a nationalist project: we can visibly see here the clear effort to define some groups as Others and the way that both ethnicity and sexuality (and the intersections) can be an important part of that, and even mark individuals as multiply stigmatized.

UPDATE: In comments philoserine and xac offered translations. Here’s xac’s:

[Columns]
red: political
green: professional criminal
blue: emigrant
purple: Jehovah’s Witnesses
pink: homosexual
black: work-shy Reich (not 100% sure wether the meaning here is “rich” or “member of the Third Reich” – more likely the last one though)
black: work-shy
[I thought I read somewhere that black might stand for antisocial, so maybe work-shy was how they defined that?]
[Rows]
1. row (triangles) base colour
2. row: label for reoffenders
3. row: penal camp
4. row: jews
5. row:
yellow triangle/black bordered triangle: jewish race desecrator
red circle with white border: under suspicion to escape
grey ring: ?? prisoner
6. row: left: Example: political jew, reoffender, penal camp
middle: special campaign Wehrmacht (?)
7. row: Pole
Czech

Thanks!

The pink triangle was used by the Nazis in concentration camps to identify and shame homosexuals. This symbol, which was used to label and shame, has been embraced by the gay community as a symbol of pride.

However, in the 1930s & 1940s there was nothing celebratory about the pink triangle. Gays were forced to wear the pink triangle on their breast pockets in the concentration camps to identify them as homosexual to set them apart from other prisoners.
Triangles of various colors were used to identify each category of "undesirable": yellow for Jews, brown of Gypsies, red for political prisoners, green for criminals, black for anti-socials, purple for Jehovah's Witnesses, blue for immigrants, and pink for homosexuals.
The pink triangles were slightly larger than the other colored triangles so that guards could identify them from a distance. It is said that those who wore the pink triangles were singled out by the guards to receive the harshest treatment, and when the guards were finished with them, some of the other inmates would harm them as well.
At the end of the war, when the concentration camps were finally liberated, virtually all of the prisoners were released except those who wore the pink triangle. Many of those with a pink triangle on their pocket were put back in prison and their nightmare continued.
One of the groups that was targeted for extermination by the Nazis continues to be under attack to this day, not just verbally but physically, all over the world: homosexuals. The fact that gays were put in German concentration camps is not known by many. The stories of the survivors reveal an unimaginable cruelty and suffering. It is the same kind of senseless, irrational hatred that still haunts Gays, Jews, Blacks, and other minorities today.
The Taliban in Afghanistan required non-Muslims to wear identifying badges on their clothing, just as the Nazis required their "undesirables" to wear identifying logos so long ago. History repeats itself.
The list of systematic, deliberate and well-orchestrated exterminations is a long one. The Armenian Genocide of 1915 - 1918 in the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and the Sudan, and numerous other genocidal campaigns are testament of the world's complacency.
It seems the lessons of the Holocaust and the Pink Triangle have been lost on many. Because "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it" we continue to display the Pink Triangle atop Twin Peaks. It is important to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust victims and to remind everyone of the consequences of unchecked hatred.
The Pink Triangle display is also intended as an instrument to initiate discourse about hate crimes. We want to help prevent others from experiencing the results of hatred that Matthew Shepard, Allen Schindler, Brandon Teena, and countless others have been subjected to. If we can help prevent additional crimes like those committed against them, we will have been successful in our attempt to inform the public.

"[The Jews'] ultimate goal is the denaturalization, the promiscuous bastardization of other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the highest peoples as well as the domination of his racial mishmash through the extirpation of the volkish intelligentsia and its replacement by the members of his own people"

The book sold over five million copies by the start of World War II.

< After the Second World War, the book was made illegal to reprint or sell new copies in Germany and Austria. It is not illegal to own a book, and it is also not illegal to sell or buy such books second-hand.