Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing

by Dora Apel

Dora Apel analyzes the ways in which artists born after the Holocaust-whom she calls secondary witnesses-represent a history they did not experience first hand. She demonstrates that contemporary artists confront these atrocities in order to bear witness not to the Holocaust directly, but to its "memory effects" and to the implications of those effects for the present and future. Drawing on projects that employ a variety of unorthodox artistic strategies, the author provides a unique understanding of contemporary representations of the Holocaust. She demonstrates how these artists frame the past within the conditions of the present, the subversive use of documentary and the archive, the effects of the Jewish genocide on issues of difference and identity, and the use of representation as a form of resistance to historical closure.

241 pages, Paperback

First published June 13, 2002

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

The compelling theoretical approach in Memory Effects -- combining memory and secondary witnessing by artists born after World War II with a careful analysis of art by such artists that depicts the Holocaust – makes for an extraordinarily original critical project. By selecting artists that employ a broad range of creative strategies in their works on this subject, Apel is able to study how the present infuses the past in these artists’ efforts both to commemorate and to create.