The Gate Archives - Nicholas Hedges

Authenticity of the Alienation

October 15, 2014 by Nicholas Hedges

Returning to Otto Dov Kulka’s book ‘Landscape of the Metropolis of Death,’ I want to look at another passage which I’ve copied out below:

“… many works of cinema, theatre and art, offer a way to understand and experience Auschwitz, its universe, the ghettos, that final stage, that reality. And everyone reads these books — they sell thousands of copies — so they obviously speak in a uniform language to all those myriad readers. Yet I cannot find in them what they seek to convey! It’s a completely different world! The only response I feel able to express is alienation; all that is authentic is the authenticity of the alienation.”

The ‘authenticity of the alienation’- an interesting phrase. As an artist working with subjects like the Holocaust, one has to place that sense of alienation – one’s removal from the fact – at the forefront of any work. It is the lens through which the work is seen, becoming, in my case, the work itself; i.e. how, given that sense of alienation, we can empathise with those who suffered. Kulka continues:

“Therefore I ask: in what am I different? Something is wrong with me! And then, as so often, as almost always during periods of distress, I escape to Kafka, either his diaries or his other works. At that time, I again opened at the ending – I always open randomly – I opened at the ending of the wonderful story of the man standing before the Gate of the Law. This man who stands before the Gate of the Law actually asks the same question -and it is one of the last questions he asks, driven by his insatiable curiosity, as the gatekeeper jests. He asks: ‘Tell me, after all this is the Gate of the Law, and the Gate of the Law is open to everyone.’ To which the gatekeeper says: ‘Yes, that is so.’ Then the man says (if I remember the text correctly): ‘Yet in all the years I have been sitting here no one has entered the gate.’ And the gate-keeper nods his head and says: ‘Indeed.’ The man asks him to explain this puzzling fact, and the gatekeeper does him this one last mercy and says: ‘This gate is open only for you, it exists only for you, and now I am going to close it.’

Accordingly, everything I have recorded here – all these landscapes, this whole private mythology, this Metropolis, Auschwitz – this Auschwitz that was recorded here, which speaks here from my words, is the only entrance and exit — an exit, perhaps, or a closing — the only one that exists for me alone. I take this to mean that I cannot enter by any other way, by any other gate to that place. Will others be able to enter through the gate that I opened here, that remains open for me? It is possible that they will, because this gate that Kafka opened, which was intended for only one person, for K., Josef K., is actually open to almost everyone. But for him there was only one gate into his private mythology.”

On reading this, I was reminded of a text by Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel which I used in relation to a piece of work I made in 2009.

“I would bring the viewer closer to the gate but not inside, because he can’t go inside, but that’s close enough.”

There is no way into Kulka’s Auschwitz – his own private mythology. But there is a way into Auschwitz.

To try and empathise with those who suffered in, for example, Auschwitz, we should perhaps consider the camp as being like the Gate of the Law in the parable above; something that was, or rather is, open to everyone. Furthermore, we should think of the famous gates (the Arbeit Macht Frei gate or the gate tower at Birkenau) again like the Gate of the Law, as being gates made for specific individuals, through which only they can enter; serving to illustrate that this was a human tragedy – an individual tragedy repeated (in the case of Auschwitz) well over a million times.

I remember clearly how strange it felt to be standing on the infamous ramp at Birkenau having walked in beneath the gate tower; how was it I could stand freely in that place where so many had perished? I think of it like this; the gate through which I walked was open only for me, it existed only for me at that particular time. To borrow from Kulka: I could not enter by any other way, by any other gate to that place. For over a million people, their only way in – their gate – led to a death camp. For me, the gate led to a memorial.

The Gate – A Reflection

April 11, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Today I made what one might term an ‘intervention’ in the Larkin Room of St. John’s College as part of the Travel and Trauma Colloquium which is being held there today and tomorrow. The work has been written across two large glass doors and throughout the day I’ve been reflecting on its meaning in light of answers I have given to questions posed by delegates and also in light of the papers delivered as part of the colloquium.

When I started to create the work in the morning, the weather was beautiful; blue sky, sun – a perfect Spring morning. Yet very quickly the day changed and as I was writing about the bad weather on 26th March (that being the day on which I wrote the text: see Work in Progress – The Gate) so the heavens opened and the rain (and hail) began to fall. And at once I began to think about the weather and history (as you do). History (with a capital ‘H’) is of course full of accounts of bad weather (storms, droughts and so on) but what one doesn’t read (for perfectly understandable reasons) is accounts of average or day-to-day weather conditions in relation to less than average events. There are of course numerous historical exceptions to this, such as in the diaries of Samuel Pepys whose accounts of the weather serve to bring the seventeenth century alive, but as the rain fell, just as it had over two weeks ago, I began to wonder what the weather was like at times of less than average – great – historical events. In my text I wrote:

“It’s stopped. The rain, but all around, the colours are by a few degrees darker.”

And I wondered, how were colours similarly changed in the past?
I was talking with a delegate about how it is such small things which tell us the most about the past, and knowing how the weather was on certain notable days in history would help paint a better picture of the past. There isn’t much weather in history, some yes, but there should be more! Anyway I digress… suffice to say, what the similarity in the weather showed me, was how from year to year, century to century, rain is always rain, sun is always sun. They both come and go along with fog and snow. They help fill in the outlines of facts with colour (the outlines in my case were the words I was writing).

Going back a moment, to Wednesday when I typed up the transcript (the text of what I had written on 26th March) I found the version I was typing was almost a dreamlike replica of the actual event. It was very different to remembering the event, for the remembered event doesn’t follow the same temporal pattern as the memory inspired by the typed text. The memory (not that inspired by the text) of that time is limited to a few images which blur and blend together to create an homogenous view of the hour I spent in the Larkin Room; on remembering it, I have by no means the sense of any linear time. Writing it out word for word however was like re-living that moment, but time was changed to the time it took me to type it up again; the hour became more like two – but it was linear all the same.

After a few of the speakers had delivered their papers I began to consider what I could see as a connection between tourism and history. One of the questions raised in the colloquium was why we are tourists? (The question emerged from a discussion about 19th century tourists but it still holds today) What are we doing when we visit other places? One of the answers which emerged was that we are somehow comparing the places we are visiting with that from which we’re from, usually unfavourably. We go away in order to return grateful for what we have, we travel, in part, to confirm that where we live is better. Of course this by no means universal – far from it, but travel often augments are sense of home.

As I wrote in my introduction to the project, for me, it’s the individual tourist’s resolution of a disquiet resulting from a shift in the status of a place – the act of leaving or being able to leave – which in some respects makes such places popular today (heightening as they do our sense of existence, of life).” Just as we return from our holidays with a heightened sense of home, so we return from the camps with a heightened sense of life.

We are I believe, in History, tourists of the past. History is a place, a foreign country which we can visit and leave. It goes without saying that those in the past cannot. When we write or read about the past, we are making our own barbed-wire fence to keep the past in. We look as Wiesel says but go no further. We observe but cannot participate, we see from a distance. The barbed wire keeps us out just as it keeps the past in. But as I have written lately in regard to another project (Umbilical Light), to read history, to know it properly – to understand it – necessitates our own non-existence, we have to tear down the wire and enter the past into which we must then dissolve like smoke in a grey sky. The text of history books is therefore an armature by which we are shaped, it makes us the living and those behind the dead. But what about the not-yet-born? Are they also to be found behind the text, or like the dead within the words itself? As I have already written, “to know it properly necessitates our own non-existence” and in our conscious minds that becomes the very image of death. Does that not mean therefore that we exist amongst them?

As one can see, the creation of this work today in the context of the colloquium has thrown up many more questions. But to summarise… the historical text in respect to trauma acts as a fence to keep that trauma at bay, we can read of the trauma in words and glimpse a world behind them, but as when one reads the words on the window, we cannot see the world very clearly. If we focus on the world behind, we lose sight of the text, of the past. Standing in Auschwitz-Birkenau I could of course see the world as it is now, but the words I had read seemed vague, I could not correlate the two – my mind simply couldn’t conceive it. And now, when I return to the words, my memory of the place in which I’d stood is vague, as vague perhaps as the images I have of the past and all its traumatic events. I have gone to the gate but no further.

The Gate

April 9, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

The project I am working on for the Travel and Trauma (Dark Tourism) conference (11-12th April) is now – in light of Elie Wiesel’s comments regarding the Holocaust’s visual representation – called The Gate. I shall be writing on the windows of the Larkin Room at St. John’s college (see photograph below) using text I wrote whilst sitting and looking out the window for a period of one hour on 26th March 2008, between 12 and 1pm.

The text to go on the glass is as follows:

Looking outside the windows I can see the following. A modern complex straight ahead in front of which is a lawn. The bells are chiming twelve o’clock. The lawn is uneven, partly covered with weeds and daisies. To my left are a few shrubs, most bare except for the first green leaves of Spring. A small tree grows beside it and through the brambles I can see that the sky has turned dark; I expect it will rain soon, or even given the recent weather it may even snow. Beside the shrubs are a few daffodils which already seem weary. Last years leaves are mixed with the pebbles just by the bottom of the windows and the earth is peppered with acorns. Ivy grows up the exterior wall. To my right – another tree and more shrubs which are looking in a somewhat healthier state. Again a few meagre daffodils seem uncertain as to whether they should come out or not. The shrubs have been pruned here and the leaves are moving slightly in the breeze. Across the path grows a much older and larger tree – I’m not sure of the type – is it an oak? That might account for the acorns. Surrounding it is a large flower bed – more shrubs, another tree and a much larger crop of daffodils. I start to wonder about the wall; a number of people walk up the path and disappear from view from behind the concrete pillar. I can hear voices and also the rumble of traffic from town. There’s only voices and the sound of birds. I return to the wall and wonder about its provenance. How old is it? Did it mark the boundary of something? A man with glasses and a bald head walks down the path. Someone outside is coming down the stairs – there are two of them, a man and a woman. They disappear and the birds start singing again – not that they really stopped. The wall runs round the perimeter of this garden, except on one side where it has become a part of the modern building – concrete pillars, girders and glass. A small strip light is on and seems very ugly in this place. A girl walks past checking her phone. She walks without looking as if she knows this place so well she hardly needs to look – like a ghost following the trail of their lives. There are two litter bins; one is made of concrete and has a lid – the other is dark grey – plastic and much smaller. I think it must be a blackbird I can hear – much louder than any other. Next to the modern building is another – a different design and just as ugly. It’s hard to tell its age, whether it’s newer or older than that which faces me, or even that in which I am sitting. There is a long grey piece of guttering running down its entire length; I notice as I look at it that rain is beginning to fall; not as heavy as I thought it might be, just a veil of rain. Following my eyes to the left of the gutter , I find myself looking at a row of houses. From the design and the brick work I imagine that they’re nineteenth century. Strange how they seem much more human than those ahead of me and that behind which I am sitting. A girl walks past with a purple scarf and a bag – dark hair – she’s gone. A door slams somewhere behind me. In the corner of this garden (here comes the man I mentioned earlier, bald with glasses; he’s carrying a book) is another tree; strange how they seem to appear, how I didn’t notice them earlier. Another man in a short-sleeved shirt walks past. I see his reflection in the windows as he walks behind me. I think I can see a shield engraved on one of the windows ahead of me; is it the crest of the college? I can’t tell what it is – it actually looks like a cockerel. A pigeon wanders about on the grass – another tree! A silver birch sapling. I can hear footsteps and I see someone’s reflection in the window. A girl with a dark jacket, hand in pockets head bowed against the rain. I notice now, that the roof of the building straight ahead (another man in a t-shirt – then a couple, a man and a woman wearing a hood – then one carrying an umbrella) is made from what look like old tiles. Was there a building here before from which they were taken? If not, where have they come from? A bird flies across in front of me, I didn’t notice what it was. I see now that the wall around the garden is actually breached by a passage which goes somewhere – I’ve no idea where. Also, just next to the large flower bed (a man in a blue sweater walks past, his keys or something clanking with each step he takes) there is a flight of steps. They must lead to a raised pathway. The girl I mentioned earlier with the purple scarf walks across carrying a large pink bag. There are voices just outside . They greet each other? The couple – the girl with the hood and the young man walk back. An aeroplane roars overhead as another shadowed figure drenched in a wet coat walks past. More footsteps and again I cannot see where they come from. Then I see a young woman with a purple hat. Her steps echo as she walks through the passage to my right. A young man with glasses saunters past carrying a bottle of something, he walks around the lawn and down the passage I didn’t see earlier. The pigeon takes off and flies over the wall. In the windows of the building opposite I see the pale grey sky and the reflections of the older buildings. Two reflections just like ghosts appear in the glass ahead of me then disappear just like the rising tide of the traffic. And suddenly, for the first time since I sat down, I can hear the sound of a clock ticking somewhere in the room, counting of the passing time, just as the words of the those who walk around the lawn. Another aeroplane – or is it thunder? The sky is much brighter now although the rain is falling no less hard. As I speak however it starts to come down harder. I can hear it now, before it fell and didn’t make a sound. Now I can hear it scratching at the glass – I can see how it makes people run whereas before they were happy just to walk. I notice a drain cover down to the left – on it more acorns. A young man runs down the path to my right. Someone is talking behind me. The path is now reflecting the world through the fact it is so wet. The concrete pillars opposite are fragmented in the pattern of the slabs, as is the concrete bin. A couple walk past – the girl is carrying a pinkish patterned umbrella. The rain comes even harder now; I can hear it on the leaves of the shrubs, it drowns out the clock, as if each drop is a second and all the seconds that came before are returning to the earth. The drain cover has a distinct puddle now. Someone bangs something. Voices come behind me. I see their reflections in the windows, but I don’t see them. The sky appears to be becoming blue now, but yet it continues to pour with rain. I can hear the clock but I can’t see where it is. I just know time is passing without knowing how much. Someone is whistling; there is no tune to speak of, just a vague collection of notes strung together with a breath. There is, I realise another – what looks like a flower bed to my left, surrounding the tree. I wonder how it looks in the summer. My eye holds the image of a young man in a luminous jacket. He’s gone now but I can still see him. Where does everyone go, I can’t tell from where I am sitting. The rain is easing now, and the sound of the traffic intensifies, pricked by the footsteps which echo behind me. I can hear words but do not understand them, they are shapeless. I can see another light – a round, globe light in the building ahead and to the left; there’s something so depressing about them – lights on during the day. It’s stopped. The rain, but all around, the colours are by a few degrees darker. , the pathways reflect the world around them. A door opens to my right with a creak and closes. Footsteps. The sky is brightening up and the sun picks up the wet branches of the trees,, as if the sky itself has been cut to shape and laid upon them. And some are decorated with small droplets – of course now it’s started to rain again. What’s beyond the wall? There is the drone of an aeroplane, the percussion of rain and footsteps. Harder and harder it comes now. I can see it strike the path ahead of me. It’s actually hail. The rain seems to fall as lengths rather than drops. In front of me, on the step just outside, I watch the drops strike the puddle which has formed like the arms of an old typewriter striking the letters on the page. A few hailstones leap upon the lawn, as if they have been spat from the ground rather than fallen from the sky. The pigeon takes flight – a blue and green umbrella – one with a proper wooden handle. Three people walk past. They laugh through the passage. The girl is wearing a pink coat. I wonder what they are laughing about? A man walks but I couldn’t hear what he said – now I can – his friend is talking about something with flowers on. He laughs and they’re gone. The puddle on the manhole cover gets bigger, but the drops are falling slowly now; the typewriter is slowing down, the world has a little less to say. Funny how the walls surrounding this garden seem so unmoved by the rain – how much rain has fallen upon them in the years they have existed? Who have they seen walk past? Are we a blur to them? Do we pass by so quickly that we are not seen? I see a reflection walk slowly past in the glass, as if the glass is ice and the image is slowed to the speed of its molecules. Abstract patterns in the glass ahead of me like modern stained glass. A girl walks past and into the building. I see her through the windows at the top. I see her walk all the way to the left before she is swallowed by the dark of the glass as if she was never anything but a reflection. The clock strikes the hour. One o’clock.

Dark Tourism Conference II

February 29, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

Having thought about the ideas raised after my visit to St. John’s College, I decided to try the idea out in my studio space at Brookes. I began by copying the entry on St. John’s College from the Encyclopaedia of Oxford which, using a water-based marker I then wrote out (in part) onto one of the windows. The windows are not the right shape for the project but I got a good idea of how it would look nevertheless.

Having used the text of the history of St. John’s I decided to write on another window, all that I could see as I looked through the glass, and, having done this, I considered the significance of the two.
The text delineates the surface of the glass and so defines it more readily as a barrier; the text itself is not a physical barrier but rather a conscious one. One is able to shift one’s focus from one to the other but can never see them at the same time – at least not clearly. With regards the text describing the scene beyond the window I found that this created an interesting, temporal exchange. Looking through the text one can see the world as it is ‘now’, whereas when reading the text one can only see the world (albeit in words) as it was. You have to read/view one or the other – you can’t do both.

Reading the text traps the viewer for a moment in the past and obscures the reality of the world. It follows therefore that seeing the world as it is outside hides the past. Reading the text describing the scene outside as the text was written, one can flit between past and present but can see by doing so how some things remain the same. A building for example described in the text might well be the same as when viewed through the glass, whereas someone who was walking beyond the glass when the text was written will exist in words but will not be visible to the viewer when looking (reading) between lines. Of course it might be that words used to describe a person in a somewhat vague fashion in the text may be applicable to someone beyond the glass when the viewer’s focus is shifted; for me, this is a good way to represent the continuity of life and also acts as a warning that the past can always repeat itself.

How does this work resolve with the issue of Dark Tourism? Let’s assume we are in Auschwitz-Birkenau. As tourists we are exposed to a place of trauma; we constantly flit between the past (that of which we’ve read in testimonies or seen in films and photographs) and the present (the reality of the world around us). Often we cannot make a connection between the two. We may well have read about one million dead but standing where we stand in the present, we simply cannot imagine it. However, when we do see something that fits the ‘text’ and the world around us, when we find a correlation (such as the gate tower), the past with all its trauma is brought into the present and vice-versa; there is in effect an exchange. But of course we are always safe behind the barrier; the barbed-wire-text fence doesn’t keep us in, but keeps the past at bay.

So why do we visit places of trauma? Perhaps it’s because we can always leave, we can move between past and present, yet know that we can always go home. Perhaps that’s why we go to places such as Auschwitz; because we know we can leave – leave with our existence all the brighter because of it, framed by the shadow of the past.

In the end, words (whether describing the experience of a tourist or a victim) can only take us so far. As Elie Wiesel wrote: ‘I would bring the viewer closer to the gate but not inside, because he can’t go inside, but that’s close enough.’ We can walk up to the ‘barbed-wire’ (text) fence, we can see the wires (read the text) and see through them, but we can never go any closer – not would we want to; that is, as Wiesel says, ‘close enough.’

Dark Tourism Conference

February 26, 2008 by Nicholas Hedges

This morning I went down to St. John’s college to view a room in which I’ve proposed to exhibit work during a conference to be held there in April. The conference is titled ‘Travel and Trauma: Suffering and the Journey’ with a sub-heading; ‘A Writing Journeys and Places Interdisciplinary Colloquium,’ and therefore I wanted to show something which would fit in with this theme. Even though much of the work on my MA has already dealt with this subject and would be entirely appropriate for this event, I have in mind to do something new. And so, I went to view the space to see what possibilities it might afford me.

The space itself is a room in a modern block and what I noticed right away was that there was a lot of glass with, and as a result, a good view of the outside. I asked if the outside might be used and there seemed to be no objections to this. However, the more I thought about the space, and the more I thought about the conference title, the more I saw myself writing – creating a work with text. I thought of some of the work I’d done in the past, and the painting I made after my visit to Auschwitz gave me an idea.

The text written across the painting and resembling wire immediately made me think of writing in a similar style across the large windows in the room (perhaps with a black chinagraph pencil). But what would I write? Whatever it was would have to be relevant to the space and the idea of tourism and after thinking for a while I considered again the view beyond the window – the reality of what was on the other side of the glass. I thought of writing a history of St. John’s college but then considered instead, the idea of writing a description of what was actually there outside, framed by the window at which those reading the text would be standing; reading and yet blind to the reality of what was in front of them.

So what would this mean: people reading the text describing the reality of what was there ahead of them, blind to that reality because of the text/wire behind which they are held? For me it signifies the impossibility of getting near to the reality of an event through writing/reading about and expriencing a place, but saying that, it wouldn’t be a work suggesting the futility of such experiences – far from it – but it would hopefully raise questions about our role as tourists.