Exhibition Review: Shimon Attie’s The Neighbor Next Door, Block Museum, Evanston, IL.

by Rhoda Rosen

A passerby walking along the Prinsengracht canal in Amsterdam in 1995 may have happened upon or, more correctly, happened into one of Shimon Attie’s now legendary site-specific installations from his decade-long series in a number of major European cities entitled Sites Unseen.  Viewers of the Amsterdam piece, The Neighbor Next Door, were often unaware that the work was there.  Like the other works in the series, The Neighbor Next Door was a “guerrilla-style” installation and didn’t frame itself or mark itself off as art in advance.  A viewer would simply have stepped into and entered the scene of the video images on the pavement, projected from the buildings above where Jews, including Anne Frank, were hidden during the Second World War.  The work comprised archival footage taken by Jews in hiding who, despite the risk to themselves, held their cameras to window ledges and cracks in walls to record what was taking place in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.  This visual record was held up to the immigrants living their own complicated set of oppressions on the Prinsengracht of the mid-1990s as well as to other passers-by and offered them a visual legacy of every day life under Nazi occupation, not shying away from the fact of Dutch collaboration.  Attie juxtaposed this unauthorized historical record with the image of a marching scene from another archive of official Nazi propaganda.   Attie’s collapse of time between the Prinsengracht of the Nazi and post Cold War eras, his tacit questioning of mid-90s Dutch immigration policy through the placement of his work, his reinstatement of former citizens, albeit through their concealed cameras, his opening up of the sanctioned view of Amsterdam as having been occupied by presenting images that show clear collaboration – all of these presented passers-by with a blunt, powerful, immediate confrontation of the complexity of history and place. Layered over this was the context of the 50^th anniversary of the war, when previously sealed archives were being accessed across Europe and new, alternative, knotted histories were emerging. Given the replete, drenched, historical moment that this was, how then to reinstall the work seventeen years later in a university museum context in Evanston, Illinois, devoid of this particular context and history?

By contrast to the messiness and uncontrolled viewing environment of the street, Attie has carefully managed the viewer experience in the gallery-context; has cautiously refused the easy experiential displays of Holocaust museums; and has presented a sharply focused encounter that encourages a highly intellectual exploration of history rather than the direct confrontation with history that occurred on the Prinsengracht.  Here, in the sparse, naked gallery, he has directed viewers into a narrow, corridor-like space, broadly evoking the constrained space of being in hiding, and in this space he further contains the viewing experience by only allowing viewers to see the work through three “peepholes” in the gallery’s walls.  By presenting an incomplete viewing experience, he explores the view from hiding – and suggests for the viewer the danger for a person in hiding where looking and seeing could also mean being revealed.  The partial work that viewers strain to see from these vantage points is, moreover, not the original piece, but rather Attie’s documentation of the Prinsengracht work, so cars that were parked on the street in the 1990s now make it into the revised work.  So, too, do taxis driving past and passers-by rushing through the experience.  This understanding of history as an accretion that cannot be revisited seamlessly because it isn’t universally accessible turns this iteration of The Neighbor Next Door into a deeply moving intellectual reflection.  It is such a refreshing counterpoint to the excess, bordering on obscenity, of Holocaust displays that pretend that more horror equals greater understanding.  It is precisely Attie’s distancing strategies that make this a powerful and successful musing.  While it had to be experiential on the streets of Amsterdam and derived it’s intensity from that, it is an intellectual, meditative event within the gallery walls in the U.S. and this, in the simplest of terms, is the forcefulness of this work.

Sites Unseen was Attie’s first series outside of graduate school and, for an American Jew, it offered Attie the opportunity to explore one of two defining pillars of contemporary American Jewry: the Holocaust.  His most recent large-scale work addresses the other defining pillar of American Jewry: Israel.  I write this in the aftermath of Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defense in November, 2012. I also write this immediately after the U.N. recognition of Palestine as a non-member observer state. Further, Attie was working with the Block Museum on the installation of The Neighbor Next Door while working on the various installations of MetroPal.Is, therefore it is worth describing this compelling piece and to wonder if, for Attie, its making has further tinged his Holocaust pieces; to wonder, indeed, if it raises for him as it will for some viewers, how two generations later, the children of those absent heroes of history are oppressors too, adding yet another complicated layer to the The Neighbor Next Door.  MetroPal.Is also suggests yet another way in which history can be expressed and, in this way too, is a fitting endpoint for this conversation.

While none of his works can be reduced to polemics, the fact that these two defining pillars of contemporary American Jewry bookmark his career so far allows us to open the conversation of how an artist, revisiting one of those pillars seventeen years later, rethinks the piece through the lens of the other pillar.  MetroPal.Is   speaks to Attie’s astonishment on reading the Israeli Declaration of Independence written by David Ben-Gurion alongside the Palestinian Declaration of Independence written by Mahmoud Darwish and realizing their similarities for the first time.  He was caught so unaware by this similarity.  In his words, “I couldn’t believe…this circular firing squad. Everyone killing each other for wanting the same kinds of things.”  He spent months creating a hybrid declaration of independence out of the original two declarations.  About a quarter of the words are from the Israeli declaration, about a quarter from the Palestinian document and half the text of his hybrid version were identical to both. His 11 minute, 8 channel, in-the-round, video installation focuses the camera on twenty four New Yorkers – all of whom had some acting experience – who perform this new declaration.  Twelve are Israeli New Yorkers and twelve are Palestinian New Yorkers.  Like the hybrid document, all of his actors also have hybrid identities – Middle East/New York – and Attie wanted to explore whether “this shared secondary hybrid identity, that of being New Yorkers, creates a certain kind of space – oxygen in this frozen narrative between these two communities.” While foregoing archival footage in favor of a prepared script for trained actors is new for Attie, this work is marked by the same attention to the immersive viewing experience.  The large plasma screens hang above eye level to recall, as Attie remarks, the Roman Senate, “to create a situation of the viewer being in the middle of a conversation and caught in the cross hairs of it.”

Shimon Attie has an unparalleled understanding of how to call to mind historical events.  In the context of Amsterdam, in the shadows of buildings where Jews hid, a potent experience is offered; in the context of an American university museum, that same history is rendered intellectual and, in the context of the charged, contemporary, historical moment of Israel/Palestine, he seeks to make space for new ways of being, an essentially ethical project and a strategy of enactment.  Shimon Attie’s The Neighbor Next Door at the Block Museum, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, runs through March 24, 2013.  The museum is closed December 10, 2012-January 10, 2013.

Block museum details

Rhoda Rosen is an independent curator and adjunct associate professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute, Chicago.