SPECTRES OF MODERNISM'Das Seine'- a visible evidence of discoveries

Through the run of 21st Century it is obvious that we cannot thematically unify Contemporary Art's standpoints. The division of disciplines and means of expression is comprised of overlapping insights and sometimes an adequately profound strategies. The ambiental exhibition 'Das Seine' by Rafael Jakubowics and Nikola Radic Lucati bears a questioning operation in it's subtle autorship of two artists. Within the genealogy of Modernist experience an exploration into past cultural and artistic ventures can lead to redefining of certainties. Thus, the paradigm of experience emphasises the complexities of artistic intuition. It's layers of results often reveal linguistic and material significance of the assumptions that the past actions and results have delivered to us.The indirect historical figure from the past of 'Das Seine' is a genuine case of Franz Ehrlich* whose Bauhaus Dessau formation and architectural artistic relevance has lead toward unexpected assumptions. Architecture stands as an articulated social reality and within its utilitarian and formal but also ideological framework the sensitive visibility plays a major role. While common premise of architectural creation determine the character of materialized projects, the revolutionary experiments within Bauhaus movement do provide a width of meanings: a complex historical period from early Modernist architecture and design holds the evolvement of a language of spatial concepts and used material that led to a program of a wholy international style of habitats and building principles. Ehrlich's past became in the redifining querries of the contemporary age an activity that surpassed the coordination of revolutionary school principles and it's consistent aesthetic modules from the late twenties and early thirties. His training in design of forms and typography provided by Joost Schmidt* must have been a starting point for a famous Bauhaus facade logo and the font that led a thorough examination by Rafael Jakubowics. The created syntax in a contemporary treatment of the same modernist font expresses more than the subliminal age of re-examination determines. Word 'Fiasco' in it's entirety is a /////////////

Joost Schmidt (1893-1948) was a teacher or master at the Bauhaus and later a professor at the College of Visual Arts, Berlin. He was a visionary typographer/graphic designer who is best known for designing the famous poster for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar, Germany.

Ernst Neufert. New industrial commissions for his studio led to his decision to remain in Germany. In 1939 he was appointed by Albert Speer to work on the standardization of German industrial architecture.

the curator is in the front line of a big battle ofmeaning under conditions of uncertainty. We all seemed to agree. It has also become a

frequently repeated quote amongst curators. This fight about meaning that you spokeabout is now, a decade later, even more intense that it was then. On the other hand, thefocus in the art world has been transferred from artists and curators to collectors thosewith money and the recent art fairs and biennales have become something like a

///fight the endless war about the substance of arts and their mode of being-in-the-world

the greatest misfortune that might befall culture(more precisely, the arts) is a complete and finite victory over its antagonist: culturesuffers damage when it is planned and administrated; if it is left to itself, however,everything cultural threatens not only to lose possibility of effect, but its very existenceas well.In these words, Adorno restates the sad conclusion at which he arrived when working(with Max Horkheimer) on Dialectics of Enlightenment: that the history of the oldreligions and schools like that of the modern parties and revolutions teaches that theprice of survival is the transformation of ideas into domination. This lesson of historyought to be particularly diligently studied, absorbed and put into practice by the artists,the professional culture creators who carry the main burden of the transgressing

propensity of culture, making it their consciously embraced vocation and practicingcritique and transgression as their own mode of being:

//////////That triumph is difficult to tell from a debacle.Aesthetics has triumphed - but over its own object Aesthetics won throughtrivialization of beauty by sapping the status of the works of art as precious andrare, invested with aura and magic qualities, unique, refined and sublime. Theaesthetic is cultivated, diffused and consumed in a world emptied of the works of art////////////

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/////////obim je c. najavljen: 4naslov i podnaslov su:

SPECTRES OF MODERNISM'Das Seine'- a visible evidence of discoveriesuz sve, alisvedene !reference, radi razumljivosti zahvata i postavke izlozenog/ likovno uradjenog, mojatzv. kunsthistoricarska teza je na kursu predstavaljnja fotografskog snimka (tvojih poredbenih fokusa int. stila arhitekture Tel Aviva i Bg Semlina) kao modernistickog duha zudnja za novim sistemom ili cak kvintesencijom materijalnog postojanja/ stanovanja/ zauzimanja prostornog polozaja.I otud svakako, simbolicke sablasnosti (vidi naslov) koji su nam sistematicno postavljena nada i zelja progresa porazno pokazali.

linear timeframe of Modernist project, or more evidentltly a school of Bauhaus influx.

///////Zygmunt Baumaninfluence and punctuate mass communication systems///////we are in the agonizing process of seeking to learn how to create such a society. Despite the despair and frustration about the intransigence of racism, what is being attempted in this country has not been attempted in Western Civilization. We are trying to articulate a new definition of Order that will have as its premise the concept of a common and shared humanity. This is a dream that has been a part of the Western air only since the American Revolution. It is a dream which seeks to establish that the means by which humans will be measured will not be race, gender, or religion but merely the fact that we are human and our humanity makes us civic equals. ////Keep faith with the beginning, whose genesis is still to come Ernst Bloch: Man On His Own

//////In a society no longer believing in progress or the future,utopia indeed stands a poor chance because utopia has always constituted the horizontowards which our dreams and aspirations for the present and the future moved.

One of the most vociferous and most recent proponents of the demise of utopiathesis is Russell Jacoby who in The End of Utopia asserted how we have enteredthe era of acquiescence, in which we build our lives, families and careers with littleexpectation the future will diverge from the present. To put this another way: theutopian spirit a sense that the future could transcend the present has vanished(Jacoby 1999:xi).Jacoby, Russell (1999): The End of Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

Even more recently, Jacoby observed how the anti-utopian ethoshas swept all intellectual quarters. Utopia has lost its ties with alluring visions ofharmony and turned into a threat (Jacoby 2004:136). Equally recently, HenryGiroux offered the following gloomy diagnosis:The impoverishment of intellectuals, with their increasing irrelevance, if not growingrefusal, to speak of addressing, if not ending, human suffering is now matched by thepoverty of social order that cannot conceive of any alternative to itself Neoliberalismstrips utopianism of its possibilities for social critique and democratic engagement Moreover, anti-utopianism of both right and left can be found in those views that reduceutopian thinking to state terrorism and progressive visionaries to unrealistic, if notdangerous, ideologues (Giroux 2003:99).///////////The gamekeepers services rest on the belief that things are at their best when they are nottinkered with; in premodern times they rested on the belief that the world was a divinechain of being in which every creature had its rightful and useful place, even if humanmental abilities were too limited to comprehend the wisdom, harmony and orderliness ofGods design (Bauman 2007b:99).

Bauman, Zygmunt (2007b): Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty.Cambridge: Polity Press./////////////////

As a consequence, characteristics of solid modern gardening utopias were theirfinality and their territoriality: they were tied to territorial claims (e.g. in the Nazicredo of Blut und Boden) and they were conceived as coming true Baumans own inner ambivalence towards utopia at least potentially in this world (Bauman 2002:225-226)Bauman, Zygmunt (2002): Society Under Siege. Cambridge: Polity Press.

The statement, however, also illustrates Baumans own inner ambivalence towardsutopia utopia can equally be positive, if it does not materialize, and disastrous, ifforced into being.3

//////////////Because our perception of evil is limited to the dramatic, we have lost the capacity to recognize it. Evil has become so prosaic in appearance, manner and style that it is now woven into the fabric of the normal like smog, acid rain and K-mart. Hannah Arendt maintained that the horror of evil in the Third Reich was that it had "lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation." The racist evil of contemporary America is as charismatic as an empty can of cat food. In her Gifford lectures, Hannah Arendt attempted again to describe the figure of Adolf Eichmann and what had so horrified her about him: I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer...was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only noble characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as his behavior during the trial...was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness....It was this absence of thinking - which is so ordinary an experience in our everyday life, where we have hardly the time, let alone the inclination to stop and think - that awakened my interest. Is evildoing (the sins of omission, as well as the sins of commission) possible in default of not just "base motives"...but of any motives whatever, of any particular prompting of interest or volition? Is wickedness, however we may define it...not a necessary condition for evil- doing? What Arendt saw in Eichmann is true of American society/////////////////

It needs to be made explicit that the way in which personal backgrounds have intersected with professional experiences has for some time been a central concern of the social sciences. It is also an approach particularly in harmony with understanding the nature of fieldwork in anthropology Canons derived, in part, from literary criticism judiciously applied to deconstruct ethnographies of the other can provide a needed alternative to the notion of the observer-researcher as completely objective presence. While I personally have reservations about this approach, and think its importance can be exaggerated, I do see its applicability to some aspects of my own research. ////////////////Views from the Balkans Catholic Croatia and Orthodox Serbia In the final part of my paper I want to discuss two communities in the former Yugoslavia in which I did research and in which questions of religious identity were of very significant and tragic importance. My first example is from the Croatian village of Lekenik, which is within easy commuting distance of the Croatian national capital and its major city of Zagreb. Actually, Lekenik is now located only a short ride away from the citys international airport. Yet when I first went to do research in the village in the early 1960s it was still very much a rural community with a viable agricultural base although there were many commuters within the village. At that time much of the villages traditional wooden architecture was then still very much in tact. It should then not be too much of a surprise to learn that when the film Fiddler on the Roof was being made in the 1960s this village was chosen as the locale for filming, forming as it were a living stage set in which to depict turn of the 20th century shtetl life. The fact that the real pale of Settlement of East European Jewry was a thousand or more kilometers to the East in Galicia and part of the Judaic Studies and Me Joel M. Halpern 461

contemporary Ukraine was obviously deemed a geographic detail. Cold War attitudes were then at their height so that on site filming would have been most difficult if not impossible. By contrast Yugoslavia was relatively open to western filmmakers and apparently the price was right for filming rights to use the village as a backdrop. Ironically, during all the time I spent in the village in 1962 (before the filming) and despite my inquires about its history there was never a mention of the village having had a small Jewish community prior to World War II. It was only in the 1990s that I discovered the actual situation. A young colleague of mine from the Southeast European Institute at the University of Graz did an historical study of that village for his doctoral dissertation. His research involved extensive archival work. Only then did I learn some vital facts. He discovered in the Zagreb State Archives extensive information about the Jewish families who had lived in this very village before World War II. It was in the second half of the 19th century when they first appeared in the area and settled in the village.(They were of Ashkenazi origin migrating south from the Pale of Settlement within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) Subsequently some of them became leading figures in village life as traders, pub owners, storekeepers and moneylenders. Lekenik was then a bit of trading center since there was at that time an active timber industry in the area and the village itself was on the railway line. A few of the Jewish residents played a role in village organizational life. One member of this community Julius Mann was the founder and president of the Fire Brigade. He also sponsored the newly established soccer club. He was said to have been a moneylender, one of the most prosperous men in the village and was very influential in all communal questions. (His name does not appear in a history of the village fire department that I solicited from a villager who had served as a local historian.) At the time of the beginning of the war the Kornfeld family had a grocery store, the Fischers a butcher shop and a small store and the Manns had a pub and were also active in the wood and iron trades. In 1941 these three resident Jewish families were deported by the Croatian fascist Ustashi, presumably to the concentration camp of Jasenovac. No one returned to the village after the war. At present I am still pursuing the question of this forgotten part of village history with my colleague from the university of Graz. At this point I do not know if local Ustashi sympathizers played an active role in the deportation of these families. (During World War II the Croatian state was controlled by the Ustashi and, in fact, this mini state declared war on the U.S.) Presumably the producers of Fiddler on the Roof either did not know this history or were indifferent to it for the credits only acknowledge the people of Lekenik and their aid to the filmmakers. The Hollywood ambiance of this film, which reflected another time and place was obviously manufacturing a memory, an illusion to which the details of local events were irrelevant. Certainly it is more than conceivable that these resident families also came from the Pale of Settlement, the homeland which was created in this English language film for Americans whose parents or grandparents had originally been immigrants. Such links are, of course, only a matter of speculation. But this microcosm Judaic Studies and Me Joel M. Halpern 462

of Jewish history is now only one of a multitude of small, dispersed footnotes to a lost world. By contrast my encounters in the Serbian village of Orasac were not based on archival records but on personal recollections proudly given by the people directly involved. Orasac, the village which I studied, and in which I resided for a year in 1953-54, is located in central Serbia in the rolling hills south of the capital of Belgrade. It was here that I carried on my most intensive study of a Yugoslav community beginning in 1953. My wife and I initially lived in this village for a year with the family of the Secretary of the Village Council. My researches in this village have been well documented in a series of articles and books. After we became friendly with the family we learned of their wartime adventures in sheltering a Jewish family. As the head of the household related the tale to me, during the first few days of the war he was at a town fair to which he had come to sell some ducks. There he encountered a prosperous Jewish family from Zagreb desperately seeking a place to stay. He invited the family, father, mother, son and daughter home with him. Their home then was a wattle and daub house but one located far from the road. The strangers were then gradually made over into Serbian peasants. The parents even had their gold teeth yanked out. The story is an improbable one. Why would a Serbian peasant, presumably possessed, as he was, of some intelligence take the risk of inviting home a Jewish family that would obviously stand out in the village community? Secreting such a family would obviously pose grave risks and consume food that was hard to come by. But despite the justifiable skepticism this event did happen and the surviving family in Israel with whom we spoke on a visit there provided further details. At this point in time it is more than likely that both sides have romanticized the encounter. The son became a general in the Israeli army but they remembered their Yugoslav friends and aided them in the difficult postwar years. But if this event is considered along with the many other stories of Jews having been saved during the Holocaust some of these facts may not seem so strange. Concluding Thoughts It is not easy to draw these diverse strands together but this reflexive approach to incidents in my academic career illustrates the connectedness between ones research experiences and ones own family environment and history. Being Jewish can be thought of as a religious commitment, a state of mind, a way of viewing the world, a heritage or some combination of these factors and, for some, a burden perhaps to be discarded. But reflecting on ones identity in a series of diverse cultural environments does forcibly illustrate the deep connectedness between ones observations and the lenses we develop to view these observations.