"No hope, only imagination..."
―Eli Milewicz
By Tom Sleigh
When the movie, Schindler's List, came out, I remember sitting in the audience, and about half way through, wanting to stand up and start screaming obscenities: at the hyper-real color, at the oh-so-faithful recreation of the Warsaw ghetto, as if the cinematographer and the prop shop people were all shouting, ATTENTION!: THIS IS NOT HOW IT LOOKED, BUT HOW IT ACTUALLY WAS! I kept bridling at Spielberg's notion that all you have to do to credibly represent historical atrocity, in which, say, a concentration camp commandant shoots camp inmates for sport, is to hire a good-looking, blond actor with lavishly gelled hair, to play a concentration camp commandant who shoots camp inmates for sport.
Of course my reaction was unfair: but what I'm getting at are the pitfalls of realism in treating historical atrocity. After all, most of us have seen hundreds, maybe thousands of corpses, in newspapers, on TV, and in the movies: the picture of a corpse, the actor pretending to be a corpse, have almost no emotional import anymore—and if you doubt this, then compare the real corpses you've seen to the corpses on CSI. Which is why, when I saw Ron Milewicz's paintings of bricks, shovels, an overcoat laid out against a grid (of matzoh, so it turns out), and multiple paintings of the same leaf, in which each painting depicts a further stage of the leaf's decay, I was taken aback: were these paintings as fraught with historical overtones as I felt them to be? And if they were, it seemed almost a miracle that they also felt personal, with an oddly oracular power that bypassed the hand of the painter completely, despite the painter's obviously extraordinary skill.
I don't want to get bogged down with a lot of theorizing about the limits of representation, or the problematic nature of realistic painting. It's enough to say that Milewicz's images are suffused with a kind of metaphorical double vision. Bricks tumbling down the canvas or wrapped in a veil, or a painting of a clear plastic bag containing colored spools of thread inside it (Milewicz's father, Eli, was a tailor), its opening knotted shut so that the color is trapped inside, all hint at horrific visual correspondences: the bricks like heaped up bodies or bodies falling into a mass grave; the plastic bag suggesting death by asphyxiation. And these images also have more abstract resonances: the veil-covered bricks could be the Nazi obsession with keeping the mass exterminations a relative secret, or the Holocaust's hidden psychic costs borne by successive generations, or the difficulty of truly comprehending the sheer enormity of it. And the plastic bag could read as a transparent barrier between what a camp survivor like Eli Milewicz might feel about his experiences in Auschwitz, and what his son would be able to comprehend—the difference between having lived through historical atrocity, and experiencing it second hand. But whatever the literal object in the painting, that object is both itself and something more.
And that something more is always disturbing, not in some vague way, but in a way that feels deeply personal to the painter, meditated over, wrestled with, approached head on, then edged away from—as if the images were as much a psychic invitation, as a psychic threat, to both painter and viewer. So a shovel laid out on a plank of wood, the blade's rust and abrasions, nicks and scars, even the blade's helmet-like shape atop the vertical shaft, suggests a starved corpse laid out in a coffin; or a mock memorial to the slave labor of concentration camp victims; or a deteriorating, sick, and aged body hovering above the plank's map-like grain, as if an individual life had risen momentarily above the vast ebb and flow of historical circumstance.
These paintings make serious demands on the viewer. They are at once symbolic, historical, and personal. They refuse to stand aloof from biographical circumstance, but demand that viewers come to them prepared to intuit some deeper private resonance. Most importantly, they disdain Spielberg's one-to-one ratio of representation, in which one Nazi commandant = one blond actor with product slathered in his hair.
But once you know that these paintings refer both to the public fact of the Holocaust, as well as the private fact of Eli Milewicz's individual suffering, it isn't enough to let the mind glean "the unsaid off the palpable," as Seamus Heaney once put it. That the painter's father is a concentration camp survivor of Auschwitz, and that he told his son, when he was 97 years old, that the camp taught him that there was "No hope, only imagination," is as profound a challenge to humanist assumptions about the redemptive nature of art as I've ever heard.
First off, isn't the power of the imagination premised on the hope that our minds can make more of an oven than just a crematorium? So how can there be imagination without hope? Well, as Milewicz's father explained it, he never thought he'd get out of the camp alive, and so as he shoveled, and shoveled, and shoveled, and kept on shoveling beyond the point of broken-backed exhaustion, he imagined bread—five loaves, to be exact. And so the painting of a loaf of challah, as iconic as the shovel, or the spools of thread, or the overcoat painted on a grid of matzoh, demands that the viewer both resist the spiritual desire to see the bread as the redeemed body that has gone through fire—the fire of an oven, with all the contradictory associations of the crematorium folding into the delicious smells of hot baking bread—and yet affirm that desire for redeemed experience, as if it too were as basic a need as our daily bread. While Eli Milewicz's exhaustion increased with each "no-hope" thrust of his shovel blade, he nonetheless held fast, inside his brain, to those imaginary loaves of challah.
So the signal achievement of these paintings, aside from their act of historical imagining wrapped up in a personal mythology, is to show how this dynamic relation between hope and imagination can still respond to almost impossible psychic pressures. Of course this requires that the artist who responds to these contradictory claims maintain fealty to them both. These paintings neither slight our need to redeem experience from its barbwire enclosures; nor do they capitulate to our suspicion that redemption is nothing but a humanist mirage, a mere spiritual vulgarity.
As an artist who is stretched between "No hope" and imaginary loaves of challah, Milewicz believes with W. B. Yeats that the "Soul exceeds its circumstances." But unlike Schindler's List, which manipulates the horrors of the Holocaust so that the audience can have a "feel good" ending, Milewicz understands that the claims of the soul, and the direness of the historical circumstances, require a much more equivocal reckoning. Milewicz's need to show "an affirming flame," in W. H. Auden's phrase, doesn't banish from his art the other associations that we have with flame and smoke. For him, the Holocaust and the individual soul aren't weights in a balance scale, in which the individual soul outweighs the mass of collective suffering. Nor are they part of an aesthetic game in which suffering and redemption can be tallied in such a way that redemption gets the most points.
After all, as Eli Milewicz told his son, soul or no soul, faith or no faith, the circumstances of the camps often reduced people to animals. So to be faithful to his father's experience, as well as to credit his father's ability to endure, the power of Milewicz's images inheres in how he tactfully refuses to go in for the big teary-eyed gestures, and how ordinary objects like shovels, overcoats, and spools of thread, are invested with deeper meanings, but without insisting on them. Milewicz's gifts as an artist are so lavish that he can afford to limit them. And that restraint, by tactfully acknowledging the difficulty of making art about historical atrocity, makes the images more credible as emblems of the soul.