Paper collage, pencil and varnish on photo emulsion on linen
18 x 27 In.
If only one of Boris Lurie's works were to be representative of his entire oeuvre, this would be it. It's like a solar plexus punch - an attack, an outcry....
If only one of Boris Lurie's works were to be representative of his entire oeuvre, this would be it. It's like a solar plexus punch - an attack, an outcry. No esthetic reasoning possible any more. The picture directly appeals to our moral sense. Only an artist could get away with such an unprecedented breach of taboo - an artist who had suffered himself in concentration camps, who had lost loved ones in the Holocaust.
From the very start, collages were suitable means to turn breaches, conflicts and contradictions into pictures. That's why Lurie also had a penchant for using this technique. In the present case, he needed just two pictorial motifs to tap both the unsettling and the enlightening potential of the collage: the rear view of a pin-up girl taking off her panties and a flatbed truck full of emaciated, naked corpses. The photo was taken at the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp on April 16, 1945. A member of the U.S. Signal Corps, Walter Chichersky, had taken it. The photo shows, in the inner courtyard of the crematorium, a truck trailer loaded with the corpses of prisoners who had died there. The title of Boris Lurie's Railroad Collage erroneously considers the vehicle to be a railroad car.
This is certainly the result of his knowledge about the role of the railroad system during the Holocaust. The pin-up photo is mounted in such a way that the girl seems to rise from the pile of corpses. The girl's nudity has the effect of ridiculing the nude dead people. Lurie's intention remains open: Was it a reminiscence of the fact that even his mother, his grandmother, his sister and his sweetheart had to undress before their execution? Or sort of a mirror in which viewers can look at their own voyeurism? Was it his visualized question of what is really obscene: the sex photo or the mass murder? Or is it, after all, the juxtaposition of life and death? Or in psychoanalytical terms: of eros and thanatos. Or autobiographically a superposition of the artist's two life issues: sexual obsession and the trauma that haunted him all his life? Quite incidentally as a side effect - and it definitely need not be phrased as a question: It was a slap in the face of New York's self-centered and solipsistic art scene. And it was Lurie's denial - fully in line with the NO!art movement.
One revealing detail is easily overlooked, all the more so since it is outside the photo on the upper edge of the worksheet: Four locks of hair which might be from a flyer for a hair coloring product. Identical numbers of such locks also appear in Lurie's Hard Writings work PLEASE; there even with their color designations. Reference must be made, in this context, to the camps' practice of shearing people's hair - disfiguring especially the women and thus humiliating them. And all of a sudden, even the long, luxuriant hair of the woman displaying herself for all to see will appear like a sensual rebellion against the inhuman and dehumanizing terror.
Shortly before, Boris Lurie had once already used that same photo from Buchenwald. At that time, he had left it entirely unchanged. The provocation was the caption added by the artist: "Flatcar, Assemblage, 1945 by Adolf Hitler". Genocide as art. The pile of corpses as an assemblage. Hitler as the artist. The concentration camp photo as a readymade. Boris Lurie takes the avant-garde's reflections on the relation of art and life to the pinnacle of absurdity. He would probably have talked of truth because that was all he cared about in his art.
Dr. Thomas Heyden, Chief Curator of the New Museum Nuremberg