Arbeit
Macht Frei, 2001
133 - 8" diameter convex circular plastic mirrors
approximately 5 feet high by 45 feet long installed
I have been thinking about group trauma, the sort of repeated and ongoing trauma that leaves whole communities devastated, decimated, such as the AIDS pandemic, or the Holocaust. In particular, I have been reading about Auschwitz.
I have been wading through the data presented in Auschwitz 1940-1945, five volumes of documentation published by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Musuem. I have immersed myself in this swamp of detail, wanting to address Auschwitz, and all that it stands for, without knowing how I could do so, or how I could bring it into the present, into the presence of my own life and times.
One morning I awoke with a vision complete in my mind: digital lettering, each letter the size of my own body, each pixel made of a circular mirror, and spelling out the slogan: ARBEIT MACHT FREI. The mirrors are from my youth, the convex mirrors with which I constructed my earliest self-portraits. The slogan is that on the portal to Auschwitz, the slogan with which each inmate was greeted; it also captures the Protestant and North American work ethic: "work will set you free".
In my mind's eye, the mirrors are not lit; rather, the spectators are lit. The spectator becomes the ultimate subject: the piece is quite literally a reflection on the viewer.