George Segal’s The Holocaust shows 11 figures, one alive and standing with eyes closed and a hand on a barbed-wire fence strung between two thinpoles, and ten dead and strewn on the black floor. The whole was set in a gray-painted room, with a text on the wall giving a statement from Segal about the work and explaining its purpose—a memorial to victims of the Holocaust, to be installed permanently in bronze on a site in Lincoln Park, San Francisco, near the Palace of the Legion of Honor art museum. The figures have Segal’s familiar bleached-out form; they are cast from life, then manipulated into relationships with one another and the environment, until they not only constitute an independent environment of their own but subtly dominate their surroundings. They invade it like extraterrestrials who finally seem to come from within—seem the reflection of forces that are all too clearly of our essence, however alien we experience them to be. (How else is one to experience one’s essence?)
For me, it is a foregone conclusion that the work is only incidentally about the Holocaust. I agree with Elie Wiesel that art is and will continue to be inadequate to it. Just as Plato suspected that there is no pure idea or absolutely intelligible form of shit, on the grounds (implicit) that shit is chaos, so the Holocaust can never be assimilable by art; art is one kind of resistance to the elementary chaos to which the Holocaust returns us. The Holocaust’s industrial method does not count as much as that method’s destructive results; as Segal says, “the sophisticated efficiency of the murder process” signifies “insanity and moral bankruptcy,” i.e., a civilization in chaos, however well-ordered it looks.
The real point of this piece is what it shows us about Segal’s long-standing attempt to create public monuments that have a private quality, that speak to and for all of us—to create a social art, not simply an art of social commentary or social realism. Segal is only ambiguously successful; he is saved from himself by the persistent eroticism of his intentions (in this piece ironically—not at all unconsciously—presented) and by the fact that his pieces open to the environment in such a way that for all their autonomy they are absorbed by it, for all their dominance of it they are defeated by it. In my opinion this is deliberate on Segal’s part; it is a last-ditch, desperate attempt to reach people.
The problem has been with Segal from the beginning, and his Lot and His Daughters in the Krefeld Museum epitomizes it. A “monumental” event is depicted, but the private, erotic character of the event seems to contradict its public meaning. The private eroticism seems more interesting than the monumental purpose. So, in The Holocaust, the relationships between the figures are more interesting than the concentration-camp situation and the greater import it signifies. That, situation is in fact only sketchily indicated by Segal; the figures distract one from it, and Segal’s text gives the social import better than they do. The import more clearly offered by the piece is in the ironic erotic relationships of the dead figures. From our side of the barbed wire—the Nazi side—we see, to the right, a naked female torso, its groin prominently marked and thrust up. A body made for love, Segal seems to say, an unrealized sex object. The figures furthest from us are a young man and woman, his hand tenderly as it were on her head, her hands (bound?) behind her—an embrace withheld, yet an intimacy established. To the left a cluster of four figures interlock, powerfully physical for all the “absence” created by their bleached state. Eros is mocked by Thanatos—the muddy relationship between the two is again signified, but here it is not that the climax of love seems to herald a deathlike state, but rather that in death the body’s potential for love is nakedly revealed. If it does not violate the work to say so, the figures at first glance look as if they are resting after an orgy.
Segal has remarked extensively on his erotic interests, but here in a sense he has outdone himself, for they submerge the ostensible theme of the piece. We are brought back to that theme by the figure at the fence, ambiguously a survivor. He stands confronting us, his dejection concentrating all the death the work articulates. He is the anti-erotic element in the piece. The real taboo that Segal has broken here is to remind us that the dead also have bodies, making them our intimates rather than monuments signifying deeper social meaning. Dead, they are beyond society; the dejected human figure is not, and he cannot in himself carry the burden of meaning of the Holocaust.
The environmental point is subtler. Segal remarks that he was “struck by the European grace and proportion of the plan of the Palace of the Legion of Honor.” He feels that “the phenomenon of the Holocaust is an awful commentary on the exalted art achieved by the European civilizations over hundreds of years.” In the same Dadaist spirit of disgust that emerged from World War I, Segal wants to violate that European grace and proportion, that hypocritical exaltation. He is American in his implicit distrust of it—of all the civilized refinements which he knows are simply power in disguise, an arrogant representation of power. Segal is caught in a double bind: the monumental implies some sort of exaltation, some European dimension or attitude, but Segal militantly refuses any. As an alternative, to have a monumental effect, he locates his work in the stream of human traffic, touchable by every passerby. He makes it something they can identify with rather than something that stands over them as a conventional monument does. This works—for a while; then the figures get lost in our own identity. Segal’s art has succeeded in getting its message across, but has almost ceased to be art. Fortunately, the necessary illusion of autonomy—a deenvironmentalizing distancing effect—is restored by the prevailing “absence” of the figures, their bleached pallor, which one is tempted to regard as greater than the absence created by death. Segal’s Holocaust is reparative only insofar as it is art, not insofar as it represents the Holocaust. And it is also reparative in its muted articulation of Eros, a binding force even in death.
—Donald Kuspit
