itourist?

spoke to a journalist today at the jewish chronicle. asking me questions about the project over the phone. for some reason i got rather tongue tied – perhaps because there were no easy answers. at least nothing that came to mind, right there and then. no juicy soundbites. so i asked her to email me the questions which she kindly did. they’re the obvious kind of questions really, but they really proved very useful to me. i wonder what they’ll do with the replies?

here’s the interview:

Here are the questions I’d like to put to you:

What inspired the project?

originally I had a very vague idea about the notion of ‘jewish space’ – spaces which, historically have in some way become associated with jewish experience and identity. As such I began my travels in israel and palestine but ended up in eastern europe. I could just as easily have gone to north africa, iraq, india or florida I suppose. another time maybe.

What is the reason for the sorts of images you’re using? What kind of reaction do you hope them to inspire?

I’m not sure what I hope to ‘inspire’. A conversation perhaps. An argument. An exchange of ideas. I can’t think of anything better than that really.

What do you hope to achieve with the project?

this is difficult. I’m not sure that a project like this can really ‘achieve’ that much. If it can achieve anything at all then perhaps raising some potentially awkward questions about the ways in which we represent the Holocaust to ourselves -= how we do it, why we do it the way we do might be one thing. Raising questions about the nature of consumer culture, the ways in which it aestheticizes an event as traumatic as the Holocaust and the ethical consequences of this might be another.

How did you go about setting it up?

I proposed a billboard project to numerous galleries and john hansard gallery in southampton, together with the parkes institute, and the czech center for contemporary art kindly agreed to support it. middlesex university have also been extremely supportive, prof. Adrian rifkin in particular. since then I’ve been frantically liaising with billboard companies, working with syd shelton on the design, organising the conference – jorneys through the holocaust – which coincides with the campaign as well as doing the day job. I’m a lecturer.

Which Holocaust sites have you visited? What was your response to them?

I spent 3 weeks during summer 2004 travelling around germany, poland and the czech republic. During this period I visited various places associated, in one way or another, with the Holocaust – wannsee villa, hitler’s bunker, auschwitz-birkenau, chelmno, sobibor, belzec, madjanak and theresienstadt. In visiting these places it became clear to me that all of them have, to varying degrees, become important tourist destinations (auschwitz and theresienstadt in particular). As such I became interested in precisely how and with what consequences places like these – which seem to completely militate against any ideas of ‘leisure’ and ‘pleasure’ – might in some perverse way actually accommodate or even positively sustain such ideas.

my own response was very complicated indeed, which is to say rather fragmented.

First of all, I visited these sites as a ‘photographer’ or ‘artist’ and in some ways my identity as a ‘photographer’ coloured my responses to these spaces. First off, I was walking around with a photographer’s head on – a convenient distancing device perhaps. I wasn’t wandering around thinking about the atrocities that occurred there, or at least I don’t / didn’t think I was!.

in fact, what did occur there is actually so profoundly foreign to me, probably because it is so unimaginably terrible, that to actually imagine what went on…well, why on earth would I be doing such a thing? Why did I do such a thing? And if I did – which I probably did – in what ways did I find it satisfying? After all, if I – like many others – did imagine such things then presumably I needed to do so. Why is that? What kind of ‘pleasures’ did I derive from such thoughts, from such an experience?

Perhaps any ‘pleasure’ I did derive is not entirely removed from the ways in which these places are represented – or narrativised. There is certainly something of the horror movie about these places which is hardly surprising given how, and how much, they have been discussed, visualised etc. Curiously, for me going to auschwitz was a bit like going to new york. Like stepping into a grotesque fairy tale , a movie set. why? Because my understanding of these places depends to a large extent on all of the movies and books about these places that I’ve encountered. Sophie’s choice, schindler’s list, holocaust etc. And when things are translated into popular stories and films they invariably rely on certain formal devices to sustain the viewer/reader’s interest; suspense, excitement, heroes, villains etc., all of which are, paradoxically, completely irrelevant when it comes to what I imagine was the reality of a place like auschwitz. A reality I tend to base on the writings and films of people like primo levi, lawrence langer and claude lanzmann.

for some reason – which i’m not entirely sure of – I don’t think I would have felt comfortable with myself had I indulged those kinds of thoughts and imaginings. (I say this now, but I probably felt very comfortable doing so then.) Of course, you can’t help but do so at places like these. In fact thanks to the ways in which most of these places are administered you don’t have much choice. So I guess, like everyone else, I did. (this is what I mean about a complicated response – I think I thought or felt something then but now, in retrospect, I realise that perhaps I didn’t, or did, or both)

Likewise, perhaps because I wasn’t directly implicated in the Holocaust, I think I would have felt equally uncomfortable then about being excessively moved or upset by such places. Or at least being seen to be so. Paradoxically there seems to me to be something profoundly disrespectful about the parading of one’s own grief at places like these. (I should stress that i’m not talking about survivors or their immediate families and friends. This, I think, is a very different category of experience.) at least now, sitting here, I think that’s how I should have felt. I know this probably sounds a bit odd, but for me experiencing such feelings would – I think now – in some way suggest – perhaps to myself – that I am as much a part of the exterminations, the horror etc. as the people who actually were. As such I’d feel like some kind of emotional carpetbagger – exploiting their experiences, their tragedy etc. for my own rather weird reasons. I’ve no wish to do that. In fact I can’t think of anything worse. Or perhaps the reason I didn’t feel moved (if in fact I didn’t) was because I refused to let myself be moved by what, in my own mind, had for a moment become completely eclipsed by the idea of ‘auschwitz the movie set’. How could I allow myself to be moved by a mere ‘movie set’? Which of course it isn’t, yet is. Whether I want it to be or not. I don’t know, but I’m glad you asked the question!

I already had in mind the fact that I wanted to produce a body of work that would in some way allude to the contemporary cultural uses of the Holocaust. In other words, I didn’t want to comment on the Holocaust itself – what happened at these places 60 years ago – but rather, on what is happening there today. Several writers have commented in some detail on the ideological uses of the idea of the Holocaust since the end of the war – peter novick and james young, for example – and I guess this project is an extension of that. Except here I’m deliberately framing the Holocaust in relation to the commodity or entertainment form (which in many ways it now is) – the images themselves and the spaces they appear in obviously reference the world of advertising. However, this is not to say that I think that the commodification of the Holocaust – turning auschwitz into what the historian tim cole calls, ‘auschwitzland’ – necessarilly means that the ways in which visitors or tourists’ experience these places is tainted. In fact I’ve no idea. I’ m not sure that i know what a ‘tainted’ experience of these places might be. (I’m sure that many people would be apalled by the nature of my own experience). In the same way that I don’t know what an authentically ‘jewish’ experience of these places might be, now at the beginning of the 21st century. I suspect that both types of experience are extremely complicated and I guess that might be the point of this project – to complicate matters. In much the same way that primo levi (with his concept of ‘the gray zone’ in the drowned and the saved’ and charlotte delbo, for instance, complicated our understanding of what exactly went on in these places 6o years ago.

I understand there is to be a publication in 2007 – what will this consist of?

I’m still working on this but basically it will be an artist’s book consisting of images of the billboards, a revised version of an essay I wrote for ‘informal architecture’, a canadian publication; some material from the itourist? Website – visitor’s blogs – and various other bits and pieces.