By design, the all-white nature of the panels made them difficult to read. So, visitors often needed to spend time squinting or navigating their own body in order to better read the text or see the image. “Sometimes,” says Hirshbein, “visitors intuited that. They would say things like: ‘Oh, this is difficult to read,’ and then look at me and go: ‘Oh, because it’s difficult material.’”
Continue reading at The Smithsonian Magazine
The realization that evidence can have a greater political impact when it is aestheticized, monumentalized, and memorialized, has redefined the potential impact of art as a political operative. Not coincidentally, the development of evidence-based artistic practices substantially benefited from the codification of Holocaust studies in universities and museums.
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The architectural details, including a ladder and door for delivering gas pellets and a metal tube with wire mesh that defused the gas, foreground the idea of intentionality: Someone designed, planned and made these things for a specific purpose.
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The ghostly, all-white installation also utilizes materials such as steel and wood and features three, full-scale building elements, dubbed “monuments,” that were part of the original killing rooms at Auschwitz. There’s a gas chamber door, which notably hinges outward and proves that architects revised the entryways of the on-site morgues to become gas chambers. There’s also a wall hatch and ladder, which guards climbed to throw the cyanide gas down into the chambers. Lastly, on view is a floor-to-ceiling gas column through which the deadly pesticide Zyklon B was routed down into the two underground chambers.
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In these shifting venues the piece has taken on a range of textures and meanings moving between architecture, history, art, memory and commemoration.
Read more at Jewish Philosophy Place.