A Picture of Mourning: Commentary on Paper by Jeanne Wolff Bernstein

I will begin by gathering some of the threads of the fabric that Dr. jeanne wolff bernstein weaves in her remarkable paper on Shimon Attie's The Writing on the Wall. My commentary involves an effort to enter into conversation with a work of photographic art. The art in turn is an attempt to create an adequate response in the medium of photography to the artist's inarticulate feeling state evoked by all of the human suffering and human atrocity that are collected under the painfully inadequate word Holocaust.

Bernstein plays beautifully with the paradox that the most serious work we can do with our response to an event, to a set of feelings and memories, is to engage in play, in serious play, with them. Attie's The Writing on the Wall is a work of art in which the nature of the playing going on is, in large part, the act of creation of an experience of mourning. Implicit in Bernstein's paper is the notion that mourning the victims of the Holocaust, if it is to be adequate to the people who have been lost, must create something—a set of photographs, a poem, a song, a psychoanalytic paper, a conversation with one's spouse or child—something living that in some important way meets all that has been lost as well as the experience of loss itself.

Bernstein dexterously explores the ways in which a “memorializing place” is created by Attie's work. She stresses that, in making a memorial place, a “potential space” is created in which the viewer/ reader/listener has an opportunity, perhaps even a responsibility, to create his or her own response. A memorializing place is a creation of photographer and viewer, writer and reader, musician and listener. Few have described the act of cocreation involved in the experiencing of a work of art more succinctly and more beautifully than Borges (1964)