Un-Work: David Miller's “The Museum”

How one writes about cruelty without being cruel would seem the right question. Memory must
always be complicit with what it remembers. The Museum and the litany celebrate our losses even
as they mourn them.
[Adam Philips; review of "Speak You Also: A Survivors Reckoning" by Paul Steinberg; London Review of Books, vol 23 #14, july 2001]

Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want a poem to be not only pleasurably
right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a re-tuning
of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive like the impatient thump which
unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the
fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in
Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin’s
regime and asking the poet Anna Akmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to
it.
[Seamus Heaney--Nobel Prize Lecture: “Crediting Poetry”, 1995--]

In his 1995 Nobel Lecture, Irish poet Seamus Heaney invokes Ossip Mandelstam, Anna Akmatova
and Paul Celan among others in attempting to delineate how poetry can respond to the extremes of
brutality and “the decisive operations of merciless power” which characterize the modern era and,
more specifically to his experience of “the troubles” in Northern Ireland and the Republic for the
greater part of forty years. He outlines a passage from alienation to a modern relevance for a poetry
both of witness and of reflection, “an active escape from the quicksand of relativism... poetry that
would merit the definition of it... as an order true to the impact of external reality and... sensitive to
the inner laws of the poets being”. He also elaborates a yearning for lyric poetry where truthfulness
becomes recognizable as a ‘ring of truth’ within “the buoyancy generated by cadence and tone and
rhyme and stanza”, a note “tuned to its most extreme” by Celan. In short, truth is conjured through
beauty. Here I propose to hijack Heaney’s notion of poetry and apply it, rather roughly, to
photography. Photography is undeniably beautiful, seductive and magical. It is a condensation of
precious light, of things in the world and a myriad of ingrained references. The mapping of light
onto the emulsion surface is a corollary of lyricism in poetry. Perhaps photography is the poetry of
the late twentieth century. But photography is also something else. It is the documentary tool of
evidence, the instrument of scientific record and the suspect implement for the political or
commercial propagandist. What do we do with the corrupted poetics of photography, never
completely believable, never completely untrue? Unlike poetry it can never stand fully away from
the current, protected by the scrim of language. Photography is essentially complicit in the violence
of the modern era. Perhaps in the right hands it can unravel itself just a little bit and recuperate,
precisely because of its complicity, a relevant poetics.

When asked to write about the photographic work of David Miller, I asked the artist’s permission to
write about a work not yet fully formed, tentatively titled “The Museum”. It is a suite of more than
a hundred photographs, mostly black and white, taken over a period of five years principally in and
in the environs of Holocaust sites in eastern Europe (in Poland, Germany and the Czech Republic),
though not predominantly ‘of’ these sites in a documentary sense. This work, according to the artist,
may ultimately be configured into a bookwork, with or without text, or parts of it fractured off to be
components in other works, installations, exhibitions, etc. (as has already been the case). These
aspects of presentation and of focus have not yet been finalized, and we cannot assume at this point
how, or if, they will be. My interest in unfolding my own thoughts around David Miller’s practice
through this “not-yet-work” or “un-work” follows two main streams. Firstly, in my labeling this
body of images with an invented notion of the “un-work”, there is a desire to engage a point where
the work is still vulnerable enough to open into a conversation whose own process is analogous to
(and possibly interdependent with) the process which the work embodies rather than the work being
the subject of an exegesis after the fact with this writing appearing to be an authoritative unpacking
of what is contained within a 'work' defined by the formal bounds of contemporary art-making; of
authenticity, objecthood, sole-authorship, genius, commodity, etc. In short to privilege process over
end-product in defiance of a mercantile model. Secondly, the specific content of this work, or
perhaps more accurately, the geography in which Miller wanders, necessitates a consideration of
how art, specifically photography, engages the profound violence of the modern era. What is it’s
capacity to do so? What is the necessity to do so? And to what extent does such an engagement
inhabit a work whether explicitly intended to do so or not? To a certain extent the first stream gains
permission or place for the unfolding of this second more vital set of questions. Certainly these
questions could be raised in regards to ‘finished’ work. To claim to move with Miller through this
geography, thoughtful on many levels, is a little trick to avoid the requirement for conclusion or
valuation and a slight polemic about how I would prefer to think through and with the work of
others about the world we confront everyday.

This little box of a hundred or so work prints which David has lent me and, in my memory, other
prints he has shown me over time record a pilgrimage of sorts. The path in question is a subjective
wandering through (and selecting via photography) of sites of the Holocaust in eastern Europe;
Auschwitz, Majdanek, Warsaw and others. There are images of archival photographs,
representations, museum displays, rooms of stacked archives in cardboard boxes, fragments of
Hebrew script on the walls of buildings, kitsch representation of Jewish culture and samples of
contemporary racist graffiti superimposed upon historical sites as they themselves are framed by the
processes of remembrance, monumenting, museifying and rendering sacred. There are many
images of people caught in relationship to static historical displays. Still others, simply, of people
bundled against the cold of a contemporary northern winter, with no reference to a specificity of site
(though they are flavoured by the images that precede and follow them), of birds in a low grey sky
or a saturated rust-colour winter path through the forest. There are images of streets, shop fronts and
tobacco kiosks that seem part of the moderately bleak everyday of northern European, former
communist life. Many images resonate with the familiar to anyone who has lived bathed in the
visual culture of the twentieth century. For example, the high concrete posts, curled over at the top,
supporting on insulators once-electrified wire disappearing post-after-post in plunging perspective
toward the horizon. In the foreground a photograph is on a display panel; an equally familiar image
of this fence in action, hemming in the victims.

Every photograph is the framing and perpetuating of the stare. In Miller’s case the stare is always
oblique, the point of concentration slightly away from where you would expect it to be, distancing
these photographs from the thousands that have already been taken. The image of the horrific photo
in the display includes a contemporary observer looking in a completely different direction. The
image of a glass display case includes dramatic reflections of the cruciform windows. Another
shows a passing clutch of visitors, who disappear in the next photo. An image of the familiar
architectural profile of an Auschwitz block includes local workers delivering flats of soft drinks.

Pilgrimage
A feature of any pilgrimage is that others have followed the same path in a process of reflection and
that the path is conditioned by those who have passed before. A passage through Holocaust sites is a
ritual in which a Theodicy, a confrontation with evil in our world, meets a whole range of proposed
conclusions, agendas, significances and interpretations. With Miller that Theodicy encounters an
intuitive post-modern scepticism, a kind of apophatic feeling out of these truths though negation,
simultaneously a stare and a veering away from proposed truths, questioning and questioning again
the stability of what it is we see. There is also another pilgrimage of sorts, through the history and
uses of the discipline of photography -- a challenge to any contemporary artist to deal with this most
profound territory. How does one use this material? Are the tools of the contemporary artist
adequate to this inquiry. Or can approaching this field ultimately only prove the poverty of the
discipline through failure? Are the artist’s intuitive bag of tricks and gleaned knowledge up to the
task. As with the question posed to Anna Akmatova in Leningrad the answer can only be “No, of
course not. I am full of doubt.” and simultaneously, “Of course”.

What is it to make a pilgrimage to a place where something devastating has happened. What are the
motivations for this activity? To stand as witness to a previous generation; to prove something was
true, to find further facts, to 'know' through presence? Going to a place because something
happened there at another time is a very specific type of activity. It is different from going to a
holocaust museum in Washington or in Israel, or opening a history book. How is the process
different from a remembrance not located in place, such as the Passover Seder where simple
objects, texture, tastes, having no direct connection to the events have such power as part of a ritual.
Here the meaning does not reside in the things, but in the shared ritual in which meaning is
conferred. Holocaust pilgrimage has elements of this kind of ritual (including a narrative of
persecution and exile), but is very different in its relation to modern signifiers of truth and belief in
scientific evidence where material reality is a container of truth rather than metaphor (or is it just
younger, less rounded by ritual repetition). How do the years displace the reality of a particular
event? How doe the re-inscription of the site change it? What is the 'truth' of a place? How does a
place ‘mean’ something? We go to a place in order to think about something or perhaps to put
ourselves in a position where we cannot think of anything else, an isolation for the purposes of
meditation. But as time goes by one is forced to deal more and more with the re-presentation of the
site (as monument, museum, ruin or erased reality). It is impossible to isolate the 'essence' of
historical events from the flood or rearrangement, at least in the material world.

Other Work
In looking at some other works of David Miller we can see some of the sensibilities which are at
play in the un-work of “The Museum” and the fascination about the function of photography, on
many levels, which collides with the complexities of dealing with representations of the most
documented and studied genocide of all. Living things are rarely central in Miller’s photography but
life is. Desiccated remains, husks, empty settings: evidence of fleeting passage is everywhere–as
reaffirmation of life, as acknowledgment of death, as meanderings in the existential unfairness of
passage. Photography is ideally suited to these tasks. The photographic image itself, as trace of the
passage of light, evidence of animation, of illumination, is like the dried leaf or seed husk that is
evidence of decay and the rekindling to come. For years David has collected the fallen chaff of the
natural world, seeds, pods, shafts of grass, flowers, insect parts, leaves, dead birds, feathers, etc. and
from them has built a set of photograms which are the basis for two works; “Legend”, a vast grid of
images, each a tiny white object centered on a black field and "Natural Causes", a series of large
colour blow-ups of photograms where the profile shapes of natural objects overlap and build up in
complex layers of colour and shape.

“Night” is another set of black and white photograms. They are made from earth or cremation ash,
titled with a proper name (Kathy, Dion, Adam, Aldis) which references the source of the material
from which the image is made, in some cases actual cremation remains, in others earth from a
specific location. These grains of earth or ash are laid out meticulously and exposed to make a
photogram which looks like nothing other than a photograph of the night sky. Only the title give a
clue to look deeper into these images to find that a one to one imprint of material gives rise to a
representation that is utterly specific as the shadow of a being recently passed and at the same
instant imbued with the universal wonder of gazing at the open night sky. All of the above works,
being photograms, avoid the specific use of the camera as apparatus but at the same time are deeply
preoccupied with photography as conversion of light into matter, of representing light / life and its
absence on the surface of the paper’s emulsion both in its literal and metaphorical dimensions.

“Execution I” and “Execution II” [published in Pataphysics "Psychomilitary" Melbourne, 2002]

consists of two images published as facing pages in a magazine). Their source is an image from Yad
Vashem, a reproduction with the aesthetics of a copy many generations removed of a photo of a
group of prisoners standing against a wall before a firing squad. The photographer and camera
shares the space of the perpetrators, the camera shoots to capture the moment on the edge of the
abyss, freezes the temporal flow of the other inevitable shots to come so that it cam be played and
replayed ad infinitum, as glory, as gloating, as inditement or perhaps in the end as disconnected
visual toy. That is the left-hand image. On the right is an identical image, except the prisoners have
been released. The photo has been retouched so that the stone wall is continuous. The people have
gone. Invisible mending. The artist has let them out of the representational loop. Or rolled the
imaginary film a few frames forward. They have been rescued by being allowed to escape into the
abyss of death, which was always their fate. In doing so somehow Miller has restored their
specificity, released them from emblemhood into the abyss. Retouching is simply another
compositional tool in the range available to the image crafter. The revelation of the fictive ‘before’
and ‘after’ is a reflection on the fallibility of the image as evidence, as science, as truth and an
opening up of the image as a site for a poetic leap.

In Miller's work the camera is the tool of the collector. The box of the camera is a morgue. A
fascination imbues these photographs which is akin to the fascination of a child staring at the
microcosmic world of insects, or pools. Why does anything move – the leg of the spider, the tiniest
protozoa. Through the magnifying glass comes the stare of fascination. The child grows up. The
stare of fascination meets the historical complicity of photography. There is no escape.

The Complicity of Photography

Above I conjectured that photography is essentially complicit in the violence of the modern era.
What is interesting or useful about this statement? Photography is certainly intrinsically related to
modernity, to post war global visual culture. It formulates the world we perceive as real. The
photograph is the modern form of representation. As the opening quote says "memory is complicit
with what it remembers", so is photography complicit with what it records and its relationship to
memory, as so richly unfolded by Barthes, one of multi-layered intimacy.

Much documentation of the Holocaust is photography and film. Much representation used in
museums, displays, didactic programs, etc. has its source in Nazi documentation of its own actions.
As WW2 brought an acceleration in the development of the technology of war in the application
and perfection of industrial processes and managerial techniques to the annihilation of human
beings, it also brought an acceleration in the methods of documenting them (camera guns on
airplanes, colour film, hand-held movie cameras, etc.) and an unheard of sophistication in the use
of the image for propaganda and for satisfying the revisionist vanity of those in power. Because of
this nexus of technology of which photography was an intimate part (the first fully documented,
fully propagandized war, in the modern sense of commercial, image-based culture) the vast
documentary remains of WW2 have had a defining impact on visual culture since that time--a
plateau we have yet to see beyond. In post-war photography the visual cues of what signifies horror
has been indelibly affected by the inadvertent aesthetic of holocaust documentation (for example
that horror belongs in a bleak northern landscape photographed in black and white) and as it
permeates commercial culture, these signs break completely free of their historical source and float
in the market place of images as commercial texture (as incidentally does installation art’s spin-off
aesthetic of repetition and the litany). This overdetermination is one further layer that must be
peeled back by any photographer approaching the Holocaust. The photographic material collected
for the Nuremberg Tribunals entered post-war visual culture as the basic body of images of the
Holocaust, repeated, recaptioned, reorganized in hundreds if not thousands of contexts. Nazi
documents such as the Stroop Report, detailing the destruction of the Warsaw Jews, were
immaculately illustrated with photographs whose technique, composition and sophisticated
construction of meaning are one with the techniques of any photographer.

One image from the Stroop Report is a useful example. It has become a widely reproduced icon of
Nazi atrocity. A group of men women and children, hands raised in surrender, are coming out of a
building surrounded by soldiers, a small boy stands slightly separated from the group in short pants,
cloth coat and cap staring slightly to the right of the camera (presumably, if we should presume, at a
gun aimed in his direction). In a rich and composed image the child occupies the right third of the
composition. The boy at once appear fearful, stoic, baffled, knowing. The photographer chose this
image, the meaning constructed in it, the representation if this child as a sentimental image of
boyhood, on the verge of the abyss, must have been very conscious in the 'eye' of the photographer.
It is the same sentimentality that is turned over and borrowed in the photograph’s use as evidence,
in indictment of those who did this, the same sentimentality that repeats with each use. This is a
phenomenally complex image, never a document of true facts but a document of its own
representations, forced over and over to reproduce the same moment. As with the photo that David
borrows from Yad Vashem for “Execution I & II” the boy's fate is to never escape the sealed
temporality of this image. Even when the image turns and becomes evidence, an indictment of the
actions of this photograph's perpetrators and still later an emblem of the atrocity they were part of
" this photograph sets the child aside as one who is spared at gun point, as one who is protected
through an inverse sadism wherein a sentimental notion of childhood plays a role." (Herman
Rapaport "Of the Eye and the Law" in ‘Is There Truth in Art’, Cornell U.P., 1997)) He is frozen at
the edge of the abyss. The complicity of this photograph runs through all its uses from its original
revisionism to its use as evidence at Nuremberg to the present moment.

In the use of photography as evidence there is the desire for a verifiability exemplary of the modern
world. A picture is proof. Scientific, un-doubtable. The camera is a scientific instrument. A lie-
detector. Photography, then, has a dual attribute; that of science and evidence, and that of poetry.
Barthe’s Camera Lucida, explores the photograph as a kind of mnemonic device, a complex of
signification intimately related to memory and death. So every photograph carries with it the
baggage of its potential as scientific evidence (proof of a cartesian "this is this") and its intimate
potential as lament, as poetry. Every photograph is burdened by the history of photography as
poetry, as scientific proof, and as the visual hyperbole that is the background texture of modern life.
Every photograph is, within itself, a 'museum', a complex collection of evidence, signification,
explicit and inadvertent inclusion, narrative strategy, prejudice, and historical reference that can
never fully be controlled. Every museum is a reduction of these parameters and factors to the point
where an intended narrative becomes apparent, but every museum always has its unintended, or un-
tended, narratives: telltales of a vast undertow.

What is at Stake?
So what is at stake when an individual turns a creative ‘eye’ explicitly towards the violence that
marks our century, and specifically towards the very western, very modern convulsion that is the
Holocaust? The work must flow through many layers and undertows, both personal and cultural,
including accounting for the desire to investigate individual and collective identity, record and
reflect on the issues of truth, beauty and representation, of technology, of the place of the invocation
of meaning. In short what is at stake is of our implication in this world, our interdependence, our
conversation with those others with whom we share a brief consciousness. David’s process
intuitively (skeptically) shies away from completion, from implication. It does not want to be
caught in one of the possible narrative closures, perhaps not caught up in the uses others would put
it to. These can include the pitfalls of artistic conventions, sensationalism, etc. (one does not want to
be guilty of hijacking the aura of holocaust in some sensational way for artistic success, all too
common in photography and installation practice). Once again, are the tools of the contemporary
artist adequate to deconstructing and synthesizing this field of enquiry? Can approaching this field
ultimately only prove the poverty of the discipline through failure? This is an appropriate and
necessary doubt. Once again, we have to return to the queue in Leningrad with Akmatova and her
nameless interlocutor. David Miller's work does much to open up the ground for a journey through
this territory. I would say that this "un-work", far from being a work not yet completed, is a work
not yet begun. It is a work simultaneously accomplished in the most rigorous terms of its discipline
and a gesture on the cusp of abandoning a conventional meaning of ‘art work’ in favour of an
integration of the artist’s being with the world through which he moves, in all its complexity and
reciprocality. It is a participation in a conversation that permeates modern being, not a work but
something more. I’ll end, without too much elaboration of its significance, with the poem that
Seamus Heaney made part of his Nobel lecture and which to me shares some of the song evident in
David Miller’s work....
It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

A comet that was lost

Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

And I sometimes see a falling star.

If I could come on meteorite!
Instead, I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a slingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

How did I end up like this?

I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing

My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

Rain comes down through the alders,

Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

The diamond absolutes.

I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, a grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,

Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

Who, blowing up these sparks

For their meagre heat, have missed
The once in a lifetime portent,
The comet's pulsing rose.

("Exposure" from Seamus Heaney, North: Faber & Faber, 1975)