Taming the Monstrous

Last week, I introduced the artist Boris Lurie. His art is the sort of difficult and confrontational work that I am comfortable with. And it is precisely a kind of art that is meant to make us uncomfortable – to make us confront aspects of our lives and our experiences that we have a hard time facing directly. So then, who do I think I am that I can say that I am comfortable with this art? Am I honest with myself about my engagement with this art? I would like to think that I am more comfortable taking on hard subjects. Perhaps this is the result of practice, or perhaps it is the result of a certain hardening of my heart that has inured me to further exposure. This is the importance of Lurie’s art - it forces these questions. Lurie doesn’t mean to let anyone off the hook, even, and very much so, not himself.

Lurie was a questioning child, an undisciplined student and a natural artist. During the brief period after the Soviet Union absorbed Latvia where he lived with his family and the arrival of the Nazi army, Lurie’s always successful-in-business father lost all of his opportunities. In this space, Lurie was able to sell artwork to the Soviet Jewish publisher in Latvia and brought in money to support the family. This was a signpost for him in his maturation. Even still, he was told by the publisher that, “my style was too pessimistic, gloomy, and that I should immerse myself in the theories of socialist realism. So maybe the flow of work in the future would stop if I didn’t change. I knew only too well how stubbornly difficult, how impossible it would be for me to draw in a different way.”

While still young, the particular cast of the personality that would motivate his art throughout his life was already there. His family was already caught up in the maelstrom of forces that hung over Jewish life throughout the first half of the last century. His father had succeeded as a businessman during the Soviet era of the New Economic Policy. When that era ended, the family had fled to Latvia. 

When the Soviets arrived, his father was again unable to be a businessman again. Many of the Riga Jews who had been involved in business were deported to Siberian work camps and the Lurie family avoided that fate only by chance. Only then did the suffering that gave form to Lurie’s artistic life really begin.

Much of what happened to Lurie and his family are discussed in the first volume of Lurie’s eccentric autobiography, “Boris Lurie in Riga: A Memoir.”  The first greatest trauma of the Holocaust years was the loss of all but one of the significant female figures in his life in the mass slaughter in the Rumbula forest outside of Riga. (His sister Assya had previously been sent to Italy to avoid political problems she had gotten herself into. She survived the war and from the U.S. was able to locate Lurie and his father and bring them to the U.S.) Among those women was Ljuba Treskunova, Lurie’s first love. What he came to know about their murder was the way that the women were forced to disrobe and stand naked until it was their turn to be shot in the head facing the open pits where they would be buried. For Lurie, his burgeoning sexuality before the Holocaust evaporated during his time in the camps, and didn’t return until after liberation.

The second great trauma within the larger daily horrors was an occasion when his father seemed willing to let Boris be sacrificed in order to save his own life. This feeling of a lack of support, or even betrayal, recurred when Lurie’s father died in 1964 and left the bulk of his estate to Lurie’s sister Assya. That event left Lurie demoralized and brought an end to the intense period of artistic productivity that had begun for Lurie in the 1950s.

In 1946 Lurie did a series of drawings based on his experiences during the Holocaust. These drawings were personal and were not shown until much later. Unlike much Holocaust related art, the purpose of these drawings seems to have been a commemoration of specific memories whose significance are not easily understood by others. These images create an unease in the viewer due to this ambiguity. Unintentionally, Lurie communicates something about the unknowability of the Holocaust experience to those outside of it. These drawings were related to the colored drawings and paintings that he did starting in that period which had clear representations of the emotional state of the Katzetlers (Concentration Camps internees).

Lurie was part of the downtown artistic scene at the Whitehorse tavern and other locations of the artistic map of New York in the post-war period. He was a younger figure to William De Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and other artists now known as Abstract Expressionists. Another project that went on in this period was his extensive habit of drawing dancehall women at the Roseland Ballroom.

Jack Micheline describes the scene:

“He came to the dancehall girls. He came to see the thighs of painted women. He came to sketch the frustrated, torn, deprived outcasts who get their thrills in touch and closeness of a warm body. Old men who saved their dimes and quarters and dollars. This was their racetrack, their skin of dreams. A few hours they would lose their loneliness that makes that the city makes of hunted men. Men beaten down by Menial jobs, busboys and stock clerks in the garment center and sweater factories, day laborers, cooks, longshoremen, horny salesmen, men who jerk off looking at skin in sex magazines. Truck drivers and sanitation men who holler looking at girl’s […]. This was their Roseland of dreams. Girls made fifty cents a dance. Men shimmied up to women, their crotch and legs and dreams of erotic fantasies. Old men with hardons. Women who have to pay rent and feed babies or gigolos or some wild lover who didn’t fit the system. Women without panties on, women who nursed frustration and exploited fantasy. The dancehall was dark with old men and young guys who rubbed asses and bellies and men who used rubbers all their life. Dick and George and Harry and Shurmie and poor uncle Max, old men and young men with dreams. A society where sex and ass are exploited into dollars. The dance hall girls could make forty dollars a night, some embraced misery, some exploited it. Some loved cats and had dogs at home. It was Friday night and the dancehall was jumping. Thirty girls stood on the dancefloor waiting for the doors to open, to get on with their job, to get it over with. The sweating, panting men climbed the stairs and checked their coats. In the summer of their dreams some sought the shelter of winter. The music began with a raunchy trumpet blowing over a distant city. Legs, arms, thighs, ass, eyes, nose, legs. The women waited for horny men to choose them. The dancehall on Fourteenth Street began to move, jump from the action of the music. Belly to belly, ass to ass, dream to dream, pain to pain, cock to cunt howling in the night. Observing the frantic passion of the evening Boris Lurie sat among this humanity of the cities sketching these creatures of the night. His “Dancehall Series”. Boris did his job well. The dancehall is no longer there. I am glad to call Boris Lurie my friend. The “Series” stands in memory, fresh as ever now, after all these years – being part of the history of this city like the mass of humanity that still dwell and holler and whistle looking at a nice ass walking up the street.”

What Micheline describes of the scene, in his deeply gendered but frank way, was true to Lurie’s experience. Desperation and sexuality are mixed. Exploitation runs in every direction. Fulfillment and frustration bleed together. However, Micheline’s experience of New York as the child of immigrants was very different from Lurie’s experience as a survivor-refugee. While Micheline is now seen as the patron saint of Outlaw poetry, a kind of outsider art (See, “The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry,” edited by Alan Kaufman), his vision is grounded in Beat Generation understandings of post-World War II America. Lurie’s vision is a world of universal exploitation and the existential horror of it is grounded in his Holocaust experiences. After the women of the Riga Ghetto were murdered (along with other deportations to death camps of the old and weak) the Riga Ghetto was repopulated with Jewish deportees from Germany. At that time many of the women among them developed relationships with the men in order to survive. This was only one part of what Lurie saw of the experience of women during the Holocaust.

The sexual exploitation of women during the Holocaust has only recently begun to be researched. The trauma of the Holocaust on those who suffered it directly was compounded by issues that raised issues of Jewish collaboration though Ghetto governments and the use of Kapos. Issues related to sexual exploitation added a level of shame and have largely been allowed to be omitted. Starting with Lurie's losses in Rumbula forest and onwards, the issue of violence against women was always in his consciousness. His experience in America only made him feel that this violence and exploitation was a universal, but also, a very American experience. This was complicated by his own feelings of sexual desire. The objectification of women in the dancehall was something that they themselves participated in. His practice of drawing at Roseland Ballroom placed him inside of a blatantly exploitative environment that matched his Holocaust mentality. It gave him what felt like an honest view of America that the popular culture disguised.

During this period Lurie was painting versions of women that he referred to as “dismembered women.” The bodies of these women are unnatural in pose and posture and are sometimes missing parts of their bodies. They are odd and uncomfortable images to look at, but still painted and within the range of the work being done by other artists of the time. Although Lurie arrived at his images in a very different way, these images do have some commonality with surrealist art in their appearances.

Starting in 1959, Lurie began to create collages and assemblages. Many of these include images from pin-up and sado-masochistic porn magazines, and after 1960, include photos documenting Holocaust victims, often with these two elements intermixed. A group of artists that Lurie exhibited with at the March Galerie on Tenth Street and later at the Gallery Gertrude Stein formed a movement called NO! Art. As the Abstract Expressionists who had long been outside of the commercial art market were absorbed into it, Lurie and the others, particularly Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher (along with the female artist Yayoi Kusama, who later disassociated herself from the group and wrote them out of her autobiography and is now locally famous for the Infinity Room at the Broad), vigorously opposed the commercialization of art. Much of the art that they produced was intentionally unsaleable and at the time unexhibitable in the museums of the time or in the uptown art galleries.

The collages that featured pin-ups also included more anodyne or stereotypical images of proper womanhood of the late fifties-early sixties essentially equalizing these images as models of the oppression and exploitation of women. The collages evolved into reliefs meant as floor pieces. In these works the accumulation of women came to resemble the array of bodies on the open pits at Rumbula forest.

Lurie started including the word NO in many of his works in this period. He questioned the degree to which much of the art of the time could be considered a living art. Most of it was, to him, what we would call “meh.” His work was strongly politically engaged. Although many of the artists of the time felt that they were politically engaged it was difficult to see in their work. The NO! In NO!art was the barbaric yawp, the No Pasaran that the group was hurling at the commercial artists and the commercial art scene as well as all of commercialized America.

Most objectionable to him was Andy Warhol and the Pop Art phenomenon. Eventually Lurie and the group began to use the phrase Anti-Pop and there was some feeling that Anti-Pop was the better referent. During the period from 1960-1964 NO! Art received some coverage and most of the major art critics of the time wrote about the NO!Art exhibits, but the work did not sell. The most successful exhibit they had was the NO!Art poster show, a clearly anti-Pop Art provocation. The success of this show was a source of enormous frustration to Lurie and he tried to buy back the posters that had been sold to keep them away from the art market and speculation. The long series of exhibits culminated in the “Shit Show,” which was an exhibit of sculpture meant to look like shit or piles of it, created by Lurie and Goodman. Meant to be the most unsaleable possible work, the entire exhibit found a potential buyer in the art speculator Leon Kraushaar who would have bought it if Lurie hadn’t refused the deal and sent Kraushaar packing with a stream of abuse.

Shortly after “Shit Show,” Lurie’s father passed away as mentioned above. Lurie was paralyzed for a time and the innovations in his work throughout the rest of his life were limited once he was able to begin to create art again. He was never as active as he had been in that period.

After his father’s death Lurie spent a lot of his time accumulating a small fortune through buying and selling penny stocks. While his work was only spotily exhibited until the 1990s, it remained in his hands. Most of the institutions and galleries that exhibited his work were outside of the mainstream of the art world.

He created two later series of works. One was a series where knives are embedded in concrete in various shapes including a Magen David. These meant to show how force could be blunted. Another series featured tree trunks (or carvings meant to look like tree trunks) with axes driven into them. What the iconography of this series meant was very confusing to me until I saw it explained in this way: The ax with the wooden handle is meant to show the implication of the tree in its own destruction. Omitted from this explanation is the symbolism of the stump of a felled tree with a new shoot and a green leaf that was a symbol of the revival of the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. Lurie’s work subverts that bittersweet optimistism.

Lurie died in 2008 and the fortune that he left behind went to establish the Boris Lurie Art Foundation. Since that time, Lurie’s work, again promoted by his gallerist in the 1960s, Gertrude Stein, has become much better known. In time he will be written back into Art History, in a way that he would have approved of, in part. Only if his work can rewrite the narrative of what is important in art and life would any of it ever have made him happy.

Lurie’s work was difficult in the 1960s, but unlike much of the art that was difficult in that time, his art can still be quite difficult. Rabbi Golden and I recently visited the main MOCA collection. While much of the art on exhibit there is interesting, it is displayed like high end valuables are in any sort of luxury retail establishment. Art that could be striking and effective in other contexts is defanged. As I have expressed before, Louise Nevelson’s art can be transformative. The piece at MOCA is displayed in a way that depresses one’s ability to see any of the plays of light and shadow that make her art tick. The only truly striking piece in the collection is a sculpture by Duane Hansen of a junky sitting on the ground propped against the wall preparing to shoot up. As I stood near it a young woman approached close enough to register what she was seeing and nearly broke into a run to get away from it. Lurie’s work can be that effective/heavy-handed, but it is cannier in the way that it draws the viewer in before it sends them packing.

I began speaking about Lurie last week the day after Yom Ha-Shoah and my attention on him is meant to be a reflection on the observance of the day. It is a challenging thing to say what the purpose of Yom Ha-Shoah is. We need closure, to be able to resolve for ourselves our feeling of loss. However, just as much we need to be awoken out of our sleep to know the horrors that have been done to us and that we are capable of doing ourselves. We need to be reminded to be as fearless as we can when it comes to looking hard realities in the face. If we allow ourselves to be forgetful or insulate ourselves so much that we are unable to understand suffering, how can we hope to alleviate it? And if by our nature we are monsters, as I would rather think we are not, how else can we tame the monstrous in our nature?

Sources

Kaufman, Alan, edited by, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, 1999.

Leidhold,Wolfgang and Wronoski,John, edited by, KZ, Kampf, Kunst: Boris Lurie: NO!Art, 2014.

Lurie, Boris and Krim, Seymour. NO! Art: Pin-Ups, Excrement, Protest, Jew-Art, 1988.

Lurie, Boris, Boris Lurie in Riga: A Memoir, 2019. Edited and Introduced by Juli Kissina.

Yamamura, Midori, Yayoi Kusama: Inventing the Singular, 2015.