Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics: Book Review

Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory,
Aesthetics: Book Review


Peter Muir book review from PHILOSOPHY NOVEMBER 2010 VOLUME
25, NUMBER 4 ISSN 0887-3763 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 0887-3763
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Shimon Attie's "Writing on the Wall: History, Memory,
Aesthetics

Muir, an art historian and Open University lecturer, analyzes Shimon Attie's "Writing on the Wall" as installation in the Scheunenviertel of Berlin and as a photographic exhibit. These photographs of Jewish life in Berlin from the 1920s and 1930s were shown in 1992 projected upon the buildings by which they were originally taken. The images were then photographed. Muir bases his analysis on recent critical theory and Benjamin's "On the Concept of History." The metaphors of space and memory are employed to show the many layers of this work. Muir does not ignore the sense of tragedy deriving from the knowledge in the viewer that all these people and places were destroyed in the Holocaust. As a comparison to the evocative images from 1992, Muir includes his own pictures of the same sites, taken in 2009. He has created a fine
explication of how art, historical context and emotion combine to project a meaning greater than any one component. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)