Putative Life of Hannah Arendt
About A Putative Life of Hannah Arendt, Exhibit and Symposium
[L]anguage, the only medium through which mental activities can be manifest not only to the outside world but also to the mental ego itself, is by no means as evidently adequate for the thinking activity as vision is for its business of seeing.
[Hannah Arendt, “Language and Metaphor” in The Life of the Mind, Volume One: Thinking, Ch. II Mental Activities in a World of Appearances]
Je mehr Dokumente, je fragwürdiger wird alles.
[Hannah Arendt, Denktagebücher, Heft XXIV Nr. 2]
Miriam Shenitzer’s Putative Lives explore the affective qualities we associate with a certain past, a certain personage, and a certain lost world. The ostensible subjects of her drawings are identified by costume, hairstyle and situations that are both generic and particular. Marked by anecdotal captions and faux-authentic objects, the central figures are represented as the relics of a bygone era. Shenitzer uses the auratic quality of names, such as Hannah Arendt, to allow for a play of the imagination. She recreates what might have been and potentially was.
The childhood scenes, encounters, and objects put before us are seemingly innocuous fragments of memory—the artist’s own and that of others, now part of her own imagination. She invites the viewers to piece together a distant life, while at the same time denying access to it. The images create the impression of a paradoxical trompe l’oeil that foregrounds inauthenticity and hence denies the very identification that the captions playfully suggest.
The May 27 symposium offered conversation on artistic practice, about our attachment to auratic names, and about the work of the imagination in conjuring fragmented and resistant pasts. Panelists discussed how we construct the lives of great thinkers, in word and image.
Invited scholars, artists, and c. 60 guests discussed how we represent actual lives and actual pasts. What are the limits of representation? Why this life, and this past? What can we learn from Shenitzer’s take on memory and forgetting, representation and distortion, knowledge and invention? How does the artist achieve particularization, individuation? What is the difference between academic research and artistic research?
The exhibition will be on view until August 25, by appointment only. If you are interested to see the artwork, please write to Dr. Theresa Cooney, The Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies, Boston, MA 02215 (ewcjs@bu.edu), or call 617.353.8096, to make an appointment.