Adolf Eichmann was one of the most despicable human beings of the 20th century. Not only was
he a Nazi, but he was one of the Nazis who engineered the Holocaust. He was in charge
of the logistics behind the genocide. He escaped Germany after World War II,
but in 1960, he was arrested in Argentina and put on trial for his crimes against humanity.
The trial was of course heavily covered by the media. What will he say? How delirious is he? How
unhinged is this psychopath? Everybody wanted to see Eichmann’s face, they wanted to see a monster.
Yet, quite disappointingly for many, Eichmann looked like a regular guy.
Hannah Arendt, a political theorist of Jewish decent who had fled Nazi Germany after being
imprisoned by the Gestapo, reported on the trial for the New Yorker. Her commentary would
later become a book: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The phrase
“the Banality of Evil” would remain powerful to this day. Arendt argued that Eichmann was
“"terribly and terrifyingly normal", that he probably didn’t have any malice and that he
wasn’t some kind of fanatical ideologue. He was an average apolitical man who was just trying
to elevate his social rank. The banality of evil doesn’t imply that Eichmann’s actions were banal,
but that the motivations behind his actions, the reasons why we call him evil are unexceptional.
The reason why Eichmann was evil wasn’t because he was malicious or because he was
a monster. The reason why he was evil is because he simply complied with the laws,
the culture and the power structure of Nazi Germany. There lies the banality of evil.
Just a couple of years after Eichmann was put to death in 1962, Philip Guston, also
of Jewish decent, started painting figuratively. He was mostly known as an Abstract Expressionist,
alongside Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and, of course, Jackson Pollock, who was Guston’s friend
in high school. His shift to figurative art was highly criticized by the abstract expressionists
to the point where they would, as Guston put it, excommunicate the artist from their group.
Guston would paint very banal subjects: books, clocks, light bulbs and, of course,
shoes. These shoes are what we’ll be looking at in this video.
We can first consider them for their plastic qualities. Guston
became somewhat obsessed with shoes: “Some of the [1968] drawings are just
one or two lines. And they’ve never been shown. […] And then reacting against that, with a very
deep desire to paint tangible things. And it began with just the forms around me. I mean,
my shoe on the floor. That’s just the underpart of the shoe. Books. I did lots of shoes and lots of
books. What’s the matter? It’s a book. I must have done about a hundred paintings of books.
And lots of shoes. I focused on shoes and books. Lightbulbs. Just common things around. I wanted
to wipe the whole slate clean.” (Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations)
This fascination for shoes was perhaps best illustrated in his 1977 painting Pyramid and Shoe,
where Guston contrasts the banal, ephemeral, insignificant shoe next to the monumental,
immortal and significant pyramid. What the artist is doing here is put both cultural
objects on an equal footing. Not only are they presented on the same plane,
but they’re also roughly the same size. In a way, Guston is
criticizing the disregard and indifference which artists have for everyday objects.
“I got stuck on shoes, shoes on the floor. I must have done hundreds of paintings of shoes,
books, hands, buildings, and cars, just everyday objects. And the more I
did the more mysterious these objects became. The visible world, I think,
is abstract and mysterious enough; I don’t think one needs to depart from it in order
to make art.” (Philip Guston: Collected Writings, Lectures, and Conversations)
But we could also read some kind of social commentary through the use of these shoes.
Guston admitted to going back to figurative art partly because of the violence and suffering going
on in the 60s. Leon Golub, which I also made a video about, had a similar thought process as
he would paint figuratively to denounce injustice in the 60s and 70s. 1968 is the first year Guston
turned to figuration and we can already see some social commentary. The painting Boots,
made in 1968, portrays military combat boots splattered with blood. Of course,
this could be a critique of the ongoing Viet Nam war or, perhaps, of World War II.
Keep in mind, Guston was already in his 30s when the Nazis were finally defeated. As an
artist of jewish decent, Philip Guston, whose last name was originally Goldstein,
was heavily scarred by the atrocities of World War II.
Indeed, a way for Guston to answer Eichmann’s banality of evil,
was to portray the banality of shoes. Shoes, though they’re everyday objects,
had a great symbolic significance during the Holocaust. When captured
and put into concentration camps, jews were robbed from their shoes. During the war,
Germany was running out of leather and it couldn’t produce enough shoes for its population. It would
therefore take the prisoners’ shoes and redistribute them to the german people.
When the Soviet Union liberated Auschwitz in 1945, over 40,000 pairs of shoes were found.
Piles of shoes became a powerful symbol to portray the Holocaust as they weren’t graphic or explicit,
they were suggestive. Seeing a pair of shoes on its own is banal, but seeing a pile of them,
knowing that these were once worn by victims of a genocide, is much more powerful.
In his 1975 Waking Up, which is a reinterpretation of his 1972 Painting,
Smoking, Eating, we see Guston waking up, perhaps from a dream, or even a nightmare,
with a pile of shoes next to his bed as if they were haunting him.
In his 1976 Pit, we see a flaming apocalyptic scene with, at its center,
what could be interpreted as an oven. In front of it, a hole in which lie many
shoes and a figure facing down could be the representation of the Holocaust’s mass graves.
That same year, in 1976, Guston made Monument. The title itself, in a way,
can suggest a memorial and, knowing the connection between shoes and the Holocaust,
this could very well be a monument to remember the Shoah,
an allusion to the piles of shoes found at Auschwitz, Dachau or at Bergen-Belsen.
In 1967, a year before Guston started painting figuratively, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno
published Prisms, in which you can find the essay titled Cultural Criticism and Society. In this
essay, he controversially wrote “to write poetry (or to make art) after Auschwitz is barbaric.”
His statement is often misinterpreted. He doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do art after Auschwitz,
or that making art after such a tragedy is somehow betraying the memory of those who suffered.
What he meant, put very simply, is that by creating art with the same language,
the same history, the same culture which brought about Auschwitz, we are reinforcing this culture.
Art is an expression of a culture and expressing a culture which can enable genocides is barbaric.
Guston seems to have also adopted that point of view, or at least,
we could interpret one of his most famous paintings through Adorno’s lens. In 1969,
Guston painted the Studio in which we see a hooded figure painting itself in a studio.
The hooded figure is the representation of a member of the KKK, a subject which, like shoes,
Guston would paint repeatedly. In fact, he painted this subject long before he started painting
shoes, as demonstrated by his 1930 Drawing for Conspirators. In 1970, he painted Dawn where you
can see two bloody klansmen casually driving a car, smoking and carrying corpses represented by
long disembodied legs. But, in the Studio, Guston doesn’t show anonymous right-wing extremists like
he does in Dawn; he’s showing himself painting a self-portrait. He’s shockingly representing
himself as a member of the KKK which, for someone of jewish decent, is particularly surprising.
Perhaps, Guston is admitting the inevitable complicity between the
artist and the culture that brought about Auschwitz. He might be conceding that,
even though he may have denounced the Holocaust, he’s participating and strengthening the culture
which made it possible; the culture which allowed a banal man to commit atrocities.
Thank you for watching! I hope you enjoyed the video, and if you did,
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