Projecting Anne Frank

The progressive Jewish group "Never Again Action" has undertake a striking activist art intervention, in solidarity with detained immigrants held in ICE facilities. As Eoin Higgins reports, activists recently projected text and image referencing Anne Frank on the walls of the JFK Federal Building in Boston and a Federal immigration court in New York City.  The Boston text declares, “Anne Frank died of an infectious disease in a crowded detention center. Governor Baker, release everyone in ICE Detention before it’s too late” The New York projection states, “Anne Frank died of Typhus, Not a Gas Chamber/ If all detainees can’t social distance, Governor Cuomo, Free them All!” Both texts are accompanied by familiar, grainy photographic images of a smiling Anne Frank.

Presumably, the projections cite implicitly the famous project of Shimon Attie 1991-92 "Writing on the Wall" project in which the artist projected 60 year old photographs of former Jewish residences onto the outer walls of the same houses or locations in the Scheunenviertel neighborhood of Berlin. Attie's projections made the absence of those lost in the Shoah palpably, painfully present, activating, as it were, the haunted, uncanny qualities of buildings from which so many were ethnically cleansed and subject to deportation and mass murder.  His flickering, transient projections enabled a remarkable kind of time travel, as viewers found themselves hovering between the present moment and a past careening unavoidably towards horrific extinction.  As Roland Barthes famously wrote in Camera Lucida of a photograph of a condemned prisoner on the eve of his execution, "He is dead, and he is going to die." We are forever, though Attie's artistry, trapped in the film loop of History, painfully reminded that the Holocaust is never really over,  but is forever looming just over the immediate horizon.  In Faulkner's words, "The past is not dead. It isn't even past."

In contrast to the Attie enterprise, the 2020 projections emphatically move the emphasis on "Never Again" outside of the specifically Jewish frame of reference, to stand in solidarity with refugees of all nations.  Yet, as with "Writing on the Wall," they make use of architectural exteriors to re-enliven the city is powerful ways, transforming the metropolis into a curious kind of memory palace that demands moral engagement with a long-repressed past by all city-dwellers who see the images.  This is, the activists are clearly arguing, all the more important in the age of SARS-COR-2, when the primary temptation is to lapse into fear,  to retreat within our separate houses under shelter-in-place, caring only for ourselves and nearest kin, forgetting our fundamental ethical obligations to those were,  like us, once strangers in a strange land.

The use of Frank's photographs calls, at least to my mind, Walter Benjamin's observation in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) that early portrait photographs preserve the ancient "aura" of the image, largely lost or diluted through the mass mechanical (and now digital) reproduction of pictures.  Benjamin proposes that certain photographic portraits, fixing transient shadows for all time,  summon up  older numinous presence along the lines of ancestral ritual images, making, if only briefly, the Dead and the Living mysteriously co-entangled with one another.

Anne Frank, who through her surviving words is perhaps the world's most famous of all Shoah victims,  is through her ghostly projected image now elevated to the status of sacred ancestor of us all.  Her face, illuminated in the dark  upon the modern temples of law and justice,  seems to speak urgently  to us, an eternal candle lit against the dark, commanding us to save our fellow sojourners from the fate that so cruelly befell her.  For a brief moment, the illuminated nocturnal Cityscape becomes an ancestral altar, binding us all to a shared moral imperative at the present moment, in honor of the martyred Dead.