Battle-Star has been extracted from the installation
Facing Murder, Matter, which was shown at JAUS Gallery in Santa Monica in 2010. The sculpture features five hundred hand-carved totems imbued with fragrance notes from the pre-WWII era: rose, jasmine, galbanum, orris root, vanilla, vetiver, carnation, patchouli, sandalwood, violet, musk, and others, which form a scale model of the Holocaust memorial in the Bikernieki Forest outside of Riga, Latvia, where over 40,000 people were killed. It is also a kind of time-travel object, as the scented totems recall popular perfume notes from the era before the war, and allow something of the living moments of the people who died tragically to have another life in the memories of those living today. The piece also references a floating city, such as a space ship or “battlestar” like on the 21st century version of the classic TV science fiction series,
Battlestar Gallactica. This long-running television series is of particular interest as it has significant aspects of Jewish history woven into the show, including the search for a lost homeland, surviving genocide, race relations, assimilation and “chameleon” behavior, and the complicated relationships between victim and victimizer that develop in the fog of war.
In the 2010 installation
Facing Murder, Matter the architecture of the Holocaust memorial and its central monument were highlighted to bring out a more personal and autobiographical dimension of the work. My great grandmother Olga Beck and her daughter, my great-aunt Claire Beck Loos, were likely murdered in the Bikernieki Forest in 1942. Claire was an artist, writer and photographer and was the third wife of the influential early Modern architect and cultural critic Adolf Loos, whose theories about graves and monuments are well documented and in this context, chilling. He saw in them a call to architecture to humanize the world. Yet the memorial itself imposes the violence of the Modernist grid over the mass grave. This seems both obscene and appropriate; there is no way to represent violence without the violence of representation.
Of the little we know about Claire, a surviving cousin remembered she loved perfume. Learning this was in effect the genesis of the piece. I have been researching Claire’s life and work as the editor of the first English translation of her book
Adolf Loos Privat, which was published in German in 1936, 1985 and 2007.
(See Adolf Loos - A Private Portrait, DoppelHouse Press: 2011.) She originally wrote and published the book to help pay for Loos’ own tomb as he died penniless in 1933. It is her drawing of his self-specified tombstone that was used to finally build the tomb in the 1950's. What would Loos have made of Claire's burial place? Reconsidering Modernist aesthetics of purification in this context is a way to rethink the failures of Modernism and the narratives of progress and deliverance that form the subtext to all the great 20th century fascist movements, which also are the central factors driving the reactions and resolutions of much of post-apocalyptic fiction in the 21st. We have not yet imagined a Brave New World.
