‘I see their hatred’. Ethics of witnessing and The Missing Image – an intervention in Austria’s Holocaust memory space

ABSTRACT

The film installation by visual artist and filmmaker Ruth Beckermann, The Missing Image (2015) uses historic archival footage to re-configure the meaning of a contested memorial in central Vienna, Memorial against War and Fascism (1988–1991) by Austrian artist Alfred Hrdlicka. Based on first-hand research, field observations and interviews with contemporary visitors, this article interprets The Missing Image as representative of a counter-archive memorial intervention which facilitates ethical acts of witnessing and which, in their turn, help re-frame and correct public understandings of compromised war monuments. The article offers an account of how viewers create meaning out of their experiences of witnessing difficult visual material. In doing so, I emphasize the importance of empirical reception studies to understand more deeply the impact of public art and of memorial art interventions on contemporary audiences.

KEYWORDS:

• National Socialist Austria
• Alfred Hrdlicka
• Ruth Beckermann
• ethics of witnessing
• performativity
• audience reception

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Ruth Beckermann for her generous support of this research. This article forms part of an extensive research project which examines the performativity of memorial art and the effectiveness of such art to prompt audience members to think, to feel, and to engage while maintaining a critical perspective. Earlier versions have been presented at the international conference ‘Performative Commemorations of Painful Pasts’ at Stockholm University (Stockholm 2016) and at the British Association of Holocaust Studies conference, UCL (London 2016). This paper is thematically linked to an article dealing with Alfred Hrdlicka’s Monument against War and Fascism co-written with Tanja Schult (Stockholm University) and published in Articulo. A Journal of Urban Studies. The primary research work is an output of the research project ‘Making the Past Present: Performative Holocaust Commemoration since the 2000s’ financed by the Swedish Research Council.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Diana I. Popescu received her PhD in Holocaust studies from the University of Southampton. Her field of research and teaching focus on public history of the Holocaust, and its representation in contemporary art, museums and memorials. She is the author of various articles and book chapters in the field of Holocaust public memory and visual art, and co-editor with Tanja Schult of Revisiting Holocaust Representation in the Post-Witness Era (Palgrave, 2015), and of the Special Issue ‘Performative Holocaust Commemoration in the Twenty-first Century’ in Holocaust Studies, A Journal of Culture and History (2019). She currently serves on the editorial board of Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal (GSP).

Additional information

Funding

This work is sponsored by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) [grant number 421-2014-1289].