Unprecedented forms of cruelty and carnage call for unprecedented forms of expression. Ordinary language fails us in the wake of horror – existing in a petrified form that lingers somewhere between the pre-event innocence and post-event knowledge. Waldek Dynerman’s new exhibit at UW-Milwaukee’s Union Gallery tackles the problem of conveying something for which ordinary words and images fail: mass genocide, particularly during the Holocaust. In this case it’s the genocide of children that’s thrown into sharpest relief.
Resting on ledges that jut crudely from the exhibit walls like the stumps of bookshelves ripped from their brackets, or on plinths dotted about the dimly lit space, are contorted and corroded objects - conglomerations of children’s toys, household items and rough-hewn construction materials. Some are sculptural, other more like sketchy models of theater or film sets. Almost every one of them creates an uncomfortable juxtaposition of scale. Each captures impossible postures, and creates a harsh disjunction between the innocent association of children’s playthings and their violent treatment.
The exhibit profits from the gallery’s strong longitudinal axis and cell-like bays to create a sense of being in the nave of a church bestrewn by the evidence of barbarism. The impression is amplified by the eerie and repetitive background music and the large mannequin erected at the far end of the room like a featureless Christ drawing us into the space. He’s part of the Train Project, the main focus of the exhibit. Here, on two painter’s tables set lengthways, the plasticy swollen mannequin rests on the edge of chair around which a toy train marks out a slow and circuitous path. On the other end of the table sits a scale-model of the Eiffel tower made by the artist’s grand uncle and serving as a kind of misplaced phallus taunting the impotent figure. A large wall projection of the view captured by a camera attached to the train gives us a ground view of the sparse and deserted fairground terrain the train traverses. The viewer is invited to sit in a makeshift control booth that brings to mind a bishop’s seat and adjust the speed of the train. The piece relays the sense of habitual and unnamable torment that pervades the exhibition, but does so less potently than the willfully corrupted forms set about the museum space.
While some of the objects display a narrative like the small grave-like box in which little plastic figures are scattered – others look at first like objects left behind by those fleeing an incoming torment. On closer inspection however, they come to resemble the unnatural fruits of sustained subjection to pain or imprisonment – the malignance that flowers in the unholy shadow of deliberate cruelty. While the artist began the endeavor as a look at his own family’s history during the Holocaust, and his grand-uncle’s escape to Israel, its ironic that for me the first calamity the melted, soot-blackened toys bring to mind is the recent carnage in Gaza and the alarming evidence of flesh-melting phosphorous wounds found in the war’s young victims. Art of any time and place takes on a life of its own –who knows what memories it will conjure up, and for whom? We are all tainted by association.
“Train Project” runs through Feb. 27 at UWM’s Union Gallery.
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