Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory

9. Suturing In: Anne Frank as Conceptual Model for Visual Art

254 Looking beyond the iconic smiling girl portrayed in a handful of widely circulated photographs of Anne Frank, contemporary artists have used diverse strategies to clear a path through the dense thicket of cultural construction around Anne Frank for a more personal and direct reconnection to her. Together, the diary and images offer a profound way into the Holocaust for European and American artists who have no personal or familial connections to the horror, but who were deeply affected as adolescents by their encounter with Anne Frank and her diary.1 Indeed, for some of them, Anne Frank and her diary became indistinguishable from their own hopes, fears, anxieties, and concerns, prompting them to seek formal means to gain distance from Anne Frank and her diary. While some artists revalue Frank as a creative artist in her own right —as an active authorial voice and compelling subjectivity that could serve as a model and catalyst for their own creativity—or as a human rights icon, others focus on Anne Frank’s iconic image and the images with which she surrounded herself. However different the media or motivation for their works, the artists discussed here engage with Anne Frank, her image and her diary, through a path of identification, disengagement , and selective reintegration. Image: Anne Frank as Celebrity The sense of personal responsibility for the fate of Anne Frank runs strong in works by European artists born after World War II. German Felix Droese, born 1950, evokes Frank’s body through diaphanous in9 Suturing In: Anne Frank as Conceptual Model for Visual Art Daniel Belasco Suturing In 255 stallations that suggest the dematerialization of flesh into saintly status. His paper-cut installationIch habe Anne Frank umgebracht (I Killed Anne Frank), created for Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1982, fuses the informal materials and techniques of post-minimalist sculpture with powerful historical content.2 Through this work, Droese expresses German guilt and perhaps asks for forgiveness by exalting Frank as martyr. Droese trained at the Düsseldorf Art Academy with Joseph Beuys, who taught the working methods of social sculpture, which integrates the political, the personal, and the material in actions, installations, and time-based productions. Perhaps Droese responded to the sense of inerasable complicity of his teacher, a former Luftwaffe pilot who claimed to have undergone a mystical transformation after being shot down over Russia. By birth Droese certainly is not guilty of any crime; but as an artist who must grapple with tradition, he, like many German artists of his generation, such as Anselm Kiefer, sought reconciliation of his own identity with a national one defined by historical crimes. Active public memorialization of the Holocaust, which made awareness of those crimes ever present, had begun to emphasize an abstract vocabulary during the 1980s. After the war, the victims of Nazi oppression gained moral authority . European artists, living in proximity to the scene of the crime, felt closer to Frank’s fate as a victim, yet they also inherited national histories clouded by wartime complicity. Like Droese, Lotte Konow Lund, a Norwegian artist born in 1967, makes both the trauma and the collective guilt personal by identifying with them. Lund, like many postwar Norwegians , identified with Frank, as their country faced wartime depredations during the Nazi occupation. She says, “I grew up in a time and a place, where Anne Frank symbolically represented both the ultimate innocence and sacrifice. Even in Norway, [which,] as you probably know, was occupied during the WW2 [sic], there was a trauma to treat.”3 Her suite of six drawings Self-Portrait as Five Dictators and a Victim (2007) explores her unease with the narrative limitations of the conventional portrait. In five grotesque drawings (figure 1), she merges her own face with each dictator in turn: Adolf Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Francisco Franco, and Idi Amin. The hybrids of male and female, aged and youthful, dead and living, disturbingly personalize 256 Daniel Belasco her relationship to faces commonly identified with evil. Each drawing is small, roughly 6 × 4 in., and the suite is conceived as an installation hung on a pink painted wall, the small scale and soft color an ironic twist on the authority of the official portrait. The act of drawing has a provisional , exploratory feel, as if the series is an experimental thought-piece that develops through intuitive association without a defined ethical position. About Anne Frank, the one representative...