Waffen SS officers, stormtrooper helmets, Jewish children in tweed suits, terror-filled faces, chuckling Nazis, barbed wire, cattle trains, mass hangings — it's the stock imagery of Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
But, to American-Jewish artist Harley Gaber (1943-2011), there was more to his massive collage, "Die Plage," than what newsreels had shown and what survivors such as Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl had described years before.
'Die Plage' is at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, opening Friday, Oct. 14 and showing through Jan. 29, 2023.
Gaber was a minimalist composer who in the 1990s turned to art. He made seven trips from his home in California to Europe, searching German archives and media sources and photocopying images from the Weimar Republic.
For "Die Plage" (pronounced Dee PLAG-a), which means "The Plague," Gaber cut the black and white images with scissors and razor blades, or sometimes tore them, juxtaposing them and gluing them on 14x16-inch panels. He then assembled the panels into grids to make murals.
Gaber had several studios, including one in Newport, Oregon, where he worked on the project with his partner, Christina Ankofska, often while listening to music, including the Minimalism he loved. Sometimes he listened to Rush Limbaugh and informed his friends of what was happening in the rest of America. His project eventually grew to 4,200 panels. Later, frustrated and disaffected, he cut them from their frames and took his own life. The Dan J. Epstein Family Foundation now manages the piece.
This is the first time the piece has been on display since year 2000. Curator Melissa Martens Yaverbaum has arranged this 390-panel version in the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. Gaber conceived the work like a symphony in four movements, with recurring motifs. Although he later painted on the images and used more intrusive text, the version in Portland is more understated.
Yaverbaum lined up the panels she chose to make them digestible and have some narrative content, rather than choose the more chaotic and abstract imagery.
"('Die Plage') considers the role of individuals in the course of history and consequently challenges viewers to examine their responsibility to their nation and to one another in the plagues of our times," said Yaverbaum.
A D V E R T I S I N G | Continue reading below
Gaber wrote: "In 'Die Plage,' I make distinctions regarding how and why people behaved as they did where others see unanimity of intent. The malignant criminality that was increasingly perpetrated against so-called Aryan and Non-Aryan people alike, in the name of the German people, is a fact."
He wanted to know what was going on in their minds as they acted. He explored this though art.
Gaber said photomontage could reenergize historical photographic subjects, humanizing victims and perpetrators. To him the Holocaust was no Black Swan event, it came from humanity and could come again. "I'm asking, 'How did this thing happen?'" he wrote.
Yaverbaum is the executive director of the Council of American Jewish Museums. "It's probably not a surprise to anyone that part of what we'd expect to see at a Jewish museum, at least from time to time, would be content about the Holocaust. (But) the artist didn't intend it to be about the Holocaust."
She said the title, "The Plague," shows it is about something bigger and more universal. A D V E R T I S I N G | Continue reading below
"We worked with the architecture of the room, and it could be reimagined and reconfigured as a much bigger piece. Some of the questions that we pose on the pylons nearby, are the role of individuals in the sweep of history. What plagues society? What is the role of humanity? What events do we have control over? What is our responsibility to children in a time of war in crisis and plague?"
Despite the impactful Dadaist collage style, which has served groups from partisans to punk rockers well, Gaber saw his work as a meditation.
Yaverbaum agreed. "When I encounter this piece, on the one hand, it excites and aggravates a lot of emotion immediately, it's very stimulating. But I like looking at it as a piece both in focus and out of focus. You find so many fascinating details, whether it's about the children, the historical figures, the people that were perpetrators or victims. But if you zoom back, you get another line of intent that it's a meditation on the role of people and humanity."
She added: "We're about to enter a world without Holocaust survivors and primary source narrators. What is left is the record." Without witnesses, the Holocaust narrative will be harder to control.
"The navigation of the visual record, and the oral histories, and the scholarship, is going to be in the hands of people that have no one to turn to, to ask about it. We could only self-reflect on what we know and what others have said or interpreted before," Yaverbaum said. A D V E R T I S I N G | Continue reading below
An explanatory section called "We Are All Collages" explores Gaber's idea that we are all interconnected by our relationships.
"We're all walking repositories of how we see the world how, what we're informed by how we understand media literacy, how we repurpose language, and imagery, in our own agency in the world," Yaverbaum said. "It's looking at that interaction between the inheritance of imagery and heritage and how we make it new again.
"The piece as a whole helps trigger our own instincts and our own memories of what are we looking at and how do we fit into that collage of humanity?"
With new plagues or pandemics, and new wars in Europe to watch, she expects this piece to make American reflect on their role as a society.
"I think it's going to provoke a lot of conversations. It's here in the Oregon Jewish Museum until January. A lot of colleagues are starting to come and look at it and talk about where else it can go (next)," said Yaverbaum.
For more: www.ojmche.org.
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