'I, Pierre Seel, Deported Homosexual'

This biography of the concentration camp experience by Pierre Seel has been a useful adjunct to the book 'The Men With The Pink Triangle'. The section of the book I have found most useful is where Seel details life after the camps where the treatment of homosexuals in his native France was still a matter of living in secrecy for many. Seel details the anguish he undergoes as he cannot explain to his family why he has never applied for reparations for his incarceration by the Nazis; The reason being that homosexuals were not eligible. Discovering this fact during my research and being aware of how this impacted on their daily lives has been illuminating. The degree to which homosexuals affected by the Nazis were still being punished after the liberation is appalling. Seel also details the gradual rise of gay liberation and attempts to set their own historical narrative during the early 1970s. Sadly, Seel laments that this change in fortunes will improve the lives of younger men but he feels separated from these changes; The internal homophobia and pain inflicted upon gay men by others was sadly carried with them through their entire lives.

Seel does eventually move himself to speak and with growing confidence 'Outs' himself; his biography is the result; it is forthright and confirms a number of similar experiences that occur to Heinz Heger in the 'Pink Triangle' book. Seel also begins to fight for reparations although the French authorities, for whatever reason, appear to be obstructive to say the least. Finally Seel details the disgusting treatment of gay groups that attempt to take part in the official memorials to the deported mainly during the 1980s and 1990s.
   

Animal Rites - Gee Vaucher

I read about Gee Vaucher's book 'Animal Rites' recently. Vaucher tears and combines old photographs to make collages that reference the relationship between humans and animals - and what that says about us as a species that has undergone 'familial and social conditioning'. The phrase is one used by psychiatrist R.D. Laing who proposes that our socialisation denies us of our own 'subjective reality or free self'. (Binns, 2016). Vaucher has claimed that Laing's theories is an influence on her work in Animal Rites. The tearing and replacing with parts of human faces blurs the boundaries between the two subjects creating a touching but also disturbing dynamic that hints at patriarchy, political hegemony, and the power that humans hold over each other and the rest of the animal kingdom. 'Vaucher has consistently maintained her commitment to animal rights as part of a wider critique of societal power imbalances.' (Binn, 2016).

I've only seen the images online and would really like to see this book in more detail. The work looks very effective and is inspiring to me. The tearing of photographs to make collage is an aspect of art photography that I would like to explore more of. This technique could well be a way to move forward from prop making in my own practice as the staged work with props is not too dissimilar to staged digital or analogue collages. There are also conceptual similarities to Vaucher's exploration of 'societal power imbalances' with my 'Target Practice' work. Whilst primarily a hidden history my body of work does has an overarching theme that references the hetero-normative abuse of power against minorities and less advantaged groups.












References:

Binns, R. (2016). Source. issue 88, Winter 2016.

Andre Serrano - Torture

http://andresserrano.org/series/torture


Andre Serrano's 'Torture' series is a collection of staged tableaux depicting hooded men in often degrading positions. The images are stylised representations of torture that have taken place in many situations like the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, and in Northern Ireland. The work, produced in an old iron foundry, provides a dark and ominous backdrop to the subjects, some of them posed with hessian sacks to partly cover their naked bodies. Their heads are mostly covered by paper or plastic bags depriving or limiting their vision; there is a sense of waiting in the images - time spent contemplating pain, hunger, and fear.

The images are lit in the chiaroscuro style and are dramatic. Serrano uses light to denote a Christian sensibility that references the depiction of saints in Western art. The images are highly aesthetic. This for me is problematic. There is a beauty in the images that almost crosses over into glossy advertising. The foundry backdrop with its depth of detail could easily be used for a fashion shoot and the dramatic lighting builds on this feeling. My impression is that Serrano has made work that emulates the long tradition of art painting. The images are so well crafted that it almost seems that it is possible to empathise with the victims in these situations and to be drawn in to these lifelike simulations. But they are not real. The reality can never really be understood even when viewing documentary photographs.

My own work that I made for 'Target Practice' has also used models with props in an attempt to denote torture. During the creative process I quickly moved away from trying to represent actual places and situations as this felt, for me, facile and unethical. The process led me to folding my images to 'fracture' my simulations and thereby limiting the sense of attempting to portray an impossible to understand reality.

How can people that have not experienced the degradations and tortures but, at the same time, been exposed to very vivid first-hand accounts make art about these experiences? The theoretical reading that I've done surrounding the photographic portrayal of atrocities discusses the concept of post-memory photography; that the work needs to incorporate a metaphorical barrier of some kind that denotes that the work is one step removed from attempts to portray realities that have not been directly experienced. I have alluded to the concept of post-memory in my own work by using an anonymous woodland setting for my Target Practice series. The work also uses this un-named backdrop in another sense; in that it can be understood as situated within the recent tradition of uncovering hidden LGBTQ histories, not part of the mainstream historical narrative and far removed from documentary practise.

Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Postwar Europe - Nancy Wood

This book looks at the discourse around memory and how it is interpreted and contested by different social and political groups in the debate around identity politics. Wood considers 'collective memory' as opposed to individual to be 'performative'.

'Collective, national and public memory [ ] only comes into existence at a given time and place through specific kinds of memorial activity'. (Wood, 1999).

These could be through historical TV programmes, film, commemorations, historical narratives or political debates. Wood uses the term 'vectors' to describe these memorial conduits. The proposed narrative is then absorbed into the national psyche and collectively adopted as part of an accepted historical narrative. Furthermore, Wood states that:

public memory testifies to a will or desire on the part of some social group or disposition of power to select and organise representations of the past so that these will be embraced by individuals on their own. If particular representations of the past have permeated the public domain, it is because they embody an intentionality - social, political, institutional and so on - that promotes or authorises their entry. (Wood, 1999).

Throughout the book Wood examines a number of public debates in the post-modern era that have contested established historical narratives. One of these debates was around two books that recounted the perpetrator testimony of the German Reserve Police Battalion 101 during WWII. This battalion committed atrocities in Poland under orders from the Nazi regime. Although the two books used the same primary sources, different theories were elicited regarding the intent of the perpetrators when rounding up and murdering thousands of Jews in Poland. 'Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust' by Daniel J Goldhagen contends that the officers of Reserve Police Battalion 101 held anti-semitic beliefs that were inculcated into themselves and the general German population as a whole; and that these beliefs were the central causal agent of the Holocaust; that the general population sincerely believed they were carrying out Nazi ideology for the good of the German race and were happy to commit even genocide to achieve Nazi goals. This theory is usually referred to as eliminationist anti-semitism.

Christopher R Browning's book 'Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland' takes a different approach. The emphasis on Browning's account is on the 'capacity of human beings to act in a dehumanised and brutal way when subjected to a specific set of circumstances that induce conformist as a defensive - but all too human - reaction.' This view takes a functionalist approach that regards anti-semitism as just one aspect of the conditions that coalesce into the Holocaust.

'The "German" Holocaust memory thus tends to foreground the circumstances leading to the crime; the "Jewish" memory is concerned with the motives that informed it. Likewise, researchers who lack any direct or indirect affiliation to the collectives involved with the crime tend to universalise its meaning.' (Wood, 1999).

It is clear that LGBTQ hidden histories exist because of the lack of political leverage that a minority group holds in a mostly patriarchal and heteronormative society. All attempts to bring historical accuracy regarding LGBTQ events in history are gradually worn down and disappear. This starts on a fairly innocuous level but over time gay history is regarded less and less until it virtually disappears.
Historians are frequently dismissive that the sexuality of a historical figure has any bearing on their actions. This for a LGBTQ person is patently not true when their very sexuality has been criminalised or oppressed. What historians fail to understand is that to be 'queer' in a heteronormative society is to be fundamentally at odds with 'default' behaviour. For a LGBTQ person it is not just about differences of sexual activity; every aspect of society, be that social, political, or judicial, has to be navigated and interpolated as 'Other'.

This aspect of 'Other' is frequently misunderstood by historians. As part of the power battle for the collective social memory of a society, a minority group will always struggle to make itself heard. I reference this lack of agency in my 'Target Practice' work. I have deliberately placed my installation pieces in an anonymous woodland setting; it stands alone from any attempt to see the work as 'documentary' and placing it as part of the collective social memory of WWII. This approach is a conceptual one that I have chosen and although it may be viewed as problematic this is where I currently am with the work. I do not have any answers to these problems of inclusiveness in the historical narrative; all I can do is note them and try to include some the issues into my thinking and hope that it comes out in the work. Ultimately by foregrounding issues of minority exclusion I am in some small way keeping these histories alive.

  






References:

Wood, N. (1999). Vectors of Memory: Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe. New York: Berg.

Bent - Sean Mathias

This film is based on a play, which in turn, is loosely based on the book "The Men With The Pink Triangle". 'Loosely' is an accurate word as none of the characters, including Josef Kohout, the main subject of the biography appear in the film. I recognised some of the situations; the long train journey to the camps, the soul crushing physical tasks such as hauling rocks and snow from place to place for no reason but to break their humanity - but other than that the work bears little resemblance. It is a complete re-interpretation.

Watching the film with its limited number of sets and occasional monologues it is quite obvious that the film began life on the stage. The opening scene depicting the infamous Berlin nightclubs was transposed to urban ruins - foreshadowing the collapse of the Weimar republic under the Nazi regime.

I enjoyed the unique viewpoint of the film. The director took the opportunity to explore the difference between two gay men, one who wore the pink triangle badge and the other who managed to con his way to a Jewish yellow star instead. This was a clever device used to highlight the fact that there was status in the camps between badge colours (pink being the lowest of the low) and also that badge colour was not necessarily an indication of sexuality. In other words a green criminal, red political, or yellow Jewish star could easily have also been homosexual - just not criminally charged as one. Sometimes it is easy to overlook this fact.

Some of the Nazi guards would have been homosexual too, as depicted in a conversation between the two gay prisoners; the 'jewish star' had given a blowjob to one of the guards in order to obtain medicine for his comrade. After enquiring if the medicine is working it is pointed out that the guard would only have received a blowjob from the yellow star prisoner, never the pink triangle one. Morality aside of having to prostitute himself for his friend's medicine, these situations highlight the utter hypocrisy at work in the camps. But, I guess, that is the least of their worries.

One description from the book that I have thought about trying to visualise in my BoW is that pink triangle prisoners had to sleep with their arms and hands above the covers at all times, all night, with the lights on - for the duration of their internment. This made sleeping difficult. The accusation was that "filthy homosexuals" would touch themselves or each other during the night. As Josef Kohout pointed out in his biography, being used as guard target practice as they hauled rocks during the day kind of puts paid to any emotions other than survival. In the film this 'no touching' scenario is worked out very cleverly. The two prisoners over time had come to cautiously care for each other as they worked side by side moving rocks. Every two hours they are allocated a two minute break where they must stand motionless to attention. The guard watching over them is some distance away and the two men begin to talk sexually to each other as they face forwards. With their minds and words they explore each others bodies, talking up the sexual tension until they reach physical orgasm. I thought this was a fascinating scene; not only for depicting the ability to connect sexually, mind to mind, without physical or visual contact; but also for portraying the utter inhumanity that was imposed on the concentration camp prisoners where touching and even looking was punishable by death. This scene must have been extremely powerful to watch when performed live on stage.  

Photographs, Museums, Collections: between art and information: Elizabeth Edwards & Christopher Morton

This book highlights the history of the photograph through museums and collections and its shifting status over time. Photograph collections in museums have long been uncategorised and often used as an additional element in a display - a bit like a label than a historical object in its own right. The book uses case studies from real collections and traces their trajectory as photographs have been shunted between departments, re-categorised and often de-coupled from their original source material. Copies of photographs often take on a life of their own creating mini sub-collections and the materiality of the photograph is highlighted by the many marks that are made on the backs and borders of photographs by their curators.

This book made me think about the shifting nature of information as it is repeatedly relayed between sources. The visual and written information from my triangle project has shifted and changed through interpretation over time; Josef Kohout, who lived his early twenties in the concentration camps recounted his experiences to Heinz Heger who wrote the book "The Men With the Pink Triangle". Kohout's experiences relied on personal memory, selecting and self-editing as he told his terrible story. Heger had to shape these memories into a coherent and readable form; no doubt his editor and publisher also had input with an eye to a market for a historical commodity. I read the book many decades after it was published through the lens of my own political and personal experiences of LGBTQ life in the UK. I've taken events from the book that stood out, affected me, and re-interpreted them through a visual medium of constructed photography; the images I made have been discussed at peer and tutor critiques and potentially adapted with a contemporary photography perspective. The work will be edited for assessment before possibly being produced as an exhibition in some form as its final output.

Kohout's original memories have taken a shifting and changing course through several artistic mediums and not only my work. I know that a play and a movie has been made (Bent) that uses the original book as its source material. I have no doubt that the work has inspired multiple trajectories from that original account that I am unaware of at this time.  

Family Frames: photography narrative and postmemory - Marianne Hirsch

This book was recommended by my tutor as part of my assignment feedback. It deals with how we relate to family photographs when we look and how looking is mediated through familial conventions and ideologies. The author goes on to discuss strategies that artists such as Christian Boltanski use to subvert these conventions when making art.

One of the most interesting chapters revolved around the architectural and curatorial layout of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington. I was fascinated by the way that photographs rescued from family albums of Holocaust victims and survivors had been used to create a sense of people and place. As viewers moved through the exhibit they encountered the same photographs from both the perspective of the individual (using the conventions of familial looking) and from a distance to indicate that we can never imagine the actual horror or recapture lost lives; when we look at these old photographs and imagine who the people were and what was lost, we are using 'postmemory' to construct an unknown world in order to empathise.

The book goes on to explain the notion of postmemory using the experiences of children born after the Holocaust, that have no memories of the events, but have lived them through the re-telling of stories by their parents. Sometimes the postmemories are so vivid and so often retold that they seem more real than reality itself.

Postmemory as a term has also broadened out and includes art practice that makes work that sits in the disconnect between real and re-imagined events. The book goes on to talk about the ethics of making art via the filter of postmemory. Why it is important to recognise the disconnect to "preserve the shadows" and incorporate it into the work. This phrase "preserve the shadows" really struck me when I read it. It neatly encapsulates what I was trying to explain to members of the TV student group recently. I was trying (badly) to explain why I don't want to anchor my triangle work in a real location like a WWII site; and why I wanted the work to be partly anonymous or 'hidden'. By re-photographing my props and images in an anonymous woodland setting I am removing them from the documentary genre and acknowledging the shadows of postmemory.

Martin Heidegger

"Being and Time" by Martin Heidegger was suggested to me by my tutor as part of my assignment 2 feedback. He also recommended an accompanying book "Heidegger Re-framed" by Barbara Bolt as a key to unlocking this difficult philosophical read. I must say that I struggled with both texts which appeared to write about "Das Sein" Heidegger's German term for those moments that catch us unaware and make us realise the strangeness of the world we live in - the things we accept as normal about our lives when they are in fact anything but. I had to get to grips with other terms, such as, "Das Nichts" meaning that we are heading towards "the nothing" and also the concept of being "thrown" into the world where we are forced into social and ideological situations from birth that have little to do with who we are as individuals.

The Barbara Bolt book also looks at Heidegger's thoughts on making art. That by handling, using, and becoming familiar with the tools to make art we can perceive the inherent message of a piece that utilises praxical rather than conceptual knowledge. In other words, by thinking of a concept before attempting to make an art piece the inner message will be hidden until we pick up the tools and handle the piece of work. Only then will thoughts and ideas occur to us that will help unlock the ideas within that would never have occurred to us just by thought alone. There is a lot of truth in this statement and the first few assignments of this module are based around creative play, which indirectly adhere to these concepts.

The Heidegger text is known to be a very difficult read and in the end I had to enlist the help of other OCA students. My Facebook post asking for help provided a link to a set of youtube videos explaining the work of Heidegger and broke down his ideas into easy to understand chunks. I was then able to go back to my reading and figure out the more complicated texts.

I think the attempt was worthwhile although I will definitely need to go back and re-read the texts again.


Heidegger - youtube short video

Primo Levi - If This Is A Man

For my research I've just finished the famous autobiography of Primo Levi, an Italian Jew, who wrote eloquently about his experiences in the Concentration Camps during the Nazi era of WWII. The book is useful for an overview of how the camps were organised and run. The capacity of human nature to endure in such conditions and the internal stresses and squabbles that break out among the camp's inmates are enlightening. I found Levi's description of the 'drowned' and the 'saved' poignant; how new incomers could swiftly be assessed by the long timers; between those who could adapt quickly using all possible resources to survive, and those marked for almost immediate mental collapse - leading to death within days... weeks...

I did mention the point at a recent Thames Valley Group meeting that Levi describes three categories of triangle prisoners - green for criminals, red for political, and the yellow star for Jewish inmates. He completely ignores the pink triangle prisoners... Though there are fleeting references in the book to homosexuals in the camp. Levi's writing implies that there are no other categories. Whether this is intentional or an oversight I do not know.

Just for clarity here are all the categories of prisoner including the ones that Levi omitted:

Nazi concentration camp badge system.


I've come back to edit this post with some further thoughts I had overnight...

If we are going to categorise people by their sexuality (as the Nazi regime did by strengthening laws against homosexuality) then it is worth analysing the situation in the camps to this effect. In the book The Men With The Pink Triangle by Heinz Heger, the pink triangle prisoner Josef Kohout described his time during incarceration. The prisoners convicted of homosexuality were strictly watched at all times and Josef recounts how at night they all had to sleep with their arms placed above the bedclothes. The lights were left on all night (unlike all the other huts) and frequent checks were made to ensure prisoners were not 'touching themselves' or each other...

Josef recounts the ridiculousness of this obsession that heterosexuals have with homosexuals having sex; because as he states in the book, and this is in fact baked up by Primo Levi too, that homosexual acts were taking place in the camp by the non-pink triangle prisoners. Guards were having sex with prisoners; prisoners with each other, and some of the civilians they came into contact with too. This is for various reasons; leaving aside the convicted pink triangle prisoners it is obvious that there would have been homosexuals in all the other groups too. They would have been convicted not for so called 'pink triangle crimes' but because of their political views, been professional and petty villains or of Jewish origin. As well as the homosexuals in these other groups there would have been bisexuals who would have been having sex with other men. Then there are the group of men who did not consider themselves homosexual (nowadays called 'men who have sex with men') but will resort to homosexual sex when there are no available women (it is important to note this category is not the same as bisexual men). Another category would be men seeking to gain an advantage of some kind (despite their heterosexuality) and be prepared to have sex with other prisoners, guards, and civilians. This would be to obtain better food rations, clothing, easier jobs, and ultimately to attain a goal of survival under the harshest conditions imaginable.

So, as Josef rightly points out, to put a searchlight on the pink triangle prisoners was absurd and a waste of time considering the behaviour of many prisoners not convicted of homosexuality. As in society then, and to a certain extent even today, there is a hypocrisy at work in the prevailing culture that allows for homosexuality to be tolerated as long as it is not spoken about and discreet, the beliefs of the heteronormative culture are upheld in public  - and you don't get caught...

This hypocrisy is also doubly cruel when you consider the beatings meted out to the pink triangle prisoners (who generally weren't having sex in the camps anyway) such as assignment of futile jobs like wheelbarrowing snow or rocks from one side of the camp to the other for the purposes of breaking their spirit and early death.

Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski has made an number of installations that speak of memorialising the dead. But unlike actual memorials, Boltanski's installations are made up of ephemera; rusted biscuit tins, electric lamps, old clothing etc, are grouped together into very powerful installation pieces. Some of the pieces are small; a number of empty tins stacked against a wall with a few photographic portraits of children placed on top. Each portrait has an electric lamp pivoted to shine a light directly into the face, partly obscuring the image. The empty tins a metaphor for some unnamed tragedy, the photographs plucked from obscurity, having little connection to real life events. Other installations are on a much larger scale. The work 'Personnes' uses old clothing placed face down into sectioned off grids to represent the dead or missing peoples from history. At the end of the gallery space a huge mound of clothes are sifted by a large claw.

Boltanski uses the technique of post-memory to make his work. The viewer does need to see real evidence of trauma and tragedy to know that it exists in the world. Besides, documentary practice can be highly biased with underlying agendas not immediately apparent to the viewer. Evidence can be selective to push a certain outcome that portrays history from a particular political angle.

It is worth noting that any attempt to question received wisdom around historical events can lead to very dangerous ground - such as Holocaust denial. It is important to distinguish between hate crimes like Holocaust denial and revisionist history, where attempts are made to re-evaluate facts in order to gain an insight that may not have been apparent or ignored or covered up by original historians at the time. An example of this is LGBT history, often obscured and ignored by historians and likewise colonialist and women's history where collective acts of political struggle or individual sacrifice are left to languish in the shadows.

Boltanski grew up after the Holocaust. The child of a Jewish father who had to hide under the floorboards to escape Nazi detection, Boltanski has no memories of these events except as passed down to him via his parents - post-memories. This fact does not stop the work from being highly emotive and thought provoking. The 'Past Lives' chapter in the book 'Family Frames: photography narrative and postmemory' by Marianne Hirsch states that:

"Boltanski's early work... is devoted to uncoupling any uncomplicated connection between photography and truth".

and goes on to say,

"Boltanski's lessons are not history lessons, they are lessons about mass destruction and the need to recall an irrecoverable past in the absence of precise knowledge about it."

My reading around the concept of post memory has brought to my attention the notion of an opaque barrier between memory and post memory. Post memory has difficult access to the events of the past when even documentary truth is disputed. For post memory work to be effective it needs to highlight this barrier. Boltanski's use of anonymous imagery and clothing takes this stance and reminds me of the work I am making into LGBT hidden Holocaust histories. Hardly any records of homosexual prisoners exist; all that survives is anecdote in biographies and scant documentation (some of which has been wilfully misinterpreted by past historians to eradicate their place in history).

Post memory is valuable tool when making work of this kind and I will continue to use it to explore the narratives when making new work.

The Relationship Between Installation Art Practice And The Presentation Of History With Particular Reference To The Nazi Oppression Of Homosexuality 1933-1945 - Nigel Hurlstone

This PhD thesis by Nigel Hurlstone was provided to me by my tutor Keith Roberts as part of my feedback for assignment 1. I was most surprised that a document existed that could be so closely aligned to the subject matter that I am proposing for my body of work. Of course, I shouldn't be, as by now I know that most topics have been covered in Art. I am really pleased that a document so rich in ideas and references to the subject matter has come to my attention so early in my research. Many thanks to my tutor Keith for providing access to it.

This PhD thesis has covered a number of points that I hadn't considered when dealing with a sensitive subject matter and has proved most invaluable:

The thesis explores the concept of 'Historicising Installation artwork' and Hurlstone states that "The politics of difference dominate..." and that "The deconstruction of an arbitrary history based on white patriarchal power is the shared objective of artists practising in this medium" (pg2).

This statement aligns with the work I've undertaken in my last few projects that deal with the notion that it is impossible to write history from a neutral and objective viewpoint. My 'Rubber Flapper' work in particular has a fictional curator that controls the flow of artifacts for the telling of my fictional hidden history. Keith Jenkins book "Re-Thinking History" has greatly influenced my views on how history is sifted and interpreted from a biased and skewed viewpoint. As Hurlstone's thesis states, Installation art is complicit in "exploding the myths of history as fixed and unchanging [and] undermining the artificial constructs which support exclusionary views of culture." (pg2).

The thesis goes on to examine a number of conceptual pieces of historicising installation art. Three pieces, 'Gaze' 'List' and 'Reliquary' are Hurlstone's own work - alongside the analysis of other artist's particular to the genre. The analysis of all the pieces plus the documented artistic practise of Hurlstone was useful in terms in broadening out my own understanding of how installation art is conceived, researched and produced. As I have only completed a single read through of this document I shall no doubt return to this section for more insight and for potential leads to research the highlighted artworks in more depth.

One of the chapters deals with the social and political background leading up to the imprisonment of homosexuals in internment camps. These references are most useful for establishing the prevailing morality and reasoning behind many of the decisions behind the strengthening of the law against homosexuality. The system of discrimination using the pseudo science of Eugenics was very popular across the Western World prior to WWII. "He (Himmler) feared that instead of fulfilling its 'candidature for world power and domination', Germany would sink into insignificance within fifty years because some of its 'racially pure' and 'sexually capable' male population did not want to have sex with women." (pg61).

Before I'd read this thesis I was already prepared for a difficult subject matter. I knew I would be reading difficult historical documentation and biographies such as 'The Men with the Pink Triangle'. Although there is one aspect on the sensitivity of the topic of the suppression of minorities in patriarchal culture that I found disturbing; it is that the researcher/artist's research or artwork can be trivialised or found offensive. This section in Hurlstone's thesis was most informative. He recounts the discussions and feedback when viewers have engaged with his own art installations in public and gallery spaces. "Researchers may find their work trivialised or viewed as undermining what is 'natural' or 'sacred', of subverting traditional values or of being advocates for particular sexual practices." (pg37).

For myself I find it quite encouraging that I am working in a subject area that is currently not that well covered and has a lot of scope for research and creativity. Hurlstone claims that historicising installation art is often used by artists that deal in minority or underrepresented subjects as a means to explore issues that have traditionally been overlooked in the gallery space. I find it interesting that for my current project I have been drawn to this method of working and have been thinking about the display of my work in places that are unseen or unnoticed by the public, like woodland - perhaps using photography to record the work.

Strangely, I began work of this kind with the Citadels that I made with my partner as we travelled across America in 2016. The idea of the Citadels eventually led to a conceptual framework for the triangle project that grew into installation pieces rather than photography alone. As I analyse where I am in my artistic and creative process at this point in time it feels like I have come full circle.




Future reading/references:

Grau, Gunter. Hidden Holocaust? Cassell, London 1995

Marshall, Stuart. 'The Contemporary Political use of Gay History - The Third Reich', in Bad Object-Choices (ed) How Do I look? Queer Film and Video. Bay Press, Seattle 1991 pp90-97.

Video:

We Were Marked With A Big A: Lesbian & Gay Holocaust Survivors.

Marshall, Stuart. Bright Eyes, Ch4 1984. 
Marshall, Stuart. Desire: Sexuality in Germany 1919-1945, Ch4 1989.
Marshall, Stuart. Comrades in Arms, Ch4 1990.
Marshall, Stuart. Over Our Dead Bodies, Ch4 1991.

Pink Triangles, Cambridge Documentary Films, 1986.

Installations:

Hurlstone, N. Reliquary 1996.
Hurlstone, N. Gaze 1998.
Hurlstone, N. List 1999.

Private Holocaust libraries:

Wiener Library, London.
Lesbian & Gay archive holdings, Hall-Carpenter Archive, University of London.
Lesbian & Gay Archive, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington.

Documenting Nazi Persecution of Gays: Josef Kohout/Wilhelm Kroepfl Colle...

The Men with the Pink Triangle - Heinz Heger

The Men with the Pink Triangle (Heger, 1989.) is the first biography that tells of the atrocities committed on Homosexual men in concentration camps during World War II. The narrative is told from the perspective of Josef Kohout who at 22 years old was imprisoned under paragraph 175 of the Nazi's newly strengthened laws against homosexuality. His sexuality had been discovered because of a message Josef had written in a Christmas card to his lover. Kohout answered a knock at the door of his family home to a Nazi official, was ordered to report to a local interrogation centre, and was not seen by his mother again for over five years; by this time he was a broken man, both physically and mentally. His parents were ostracized by friends and neighbours because of their sons supposed 'crime' and Josef's father eventually committed suicide because he was unable to cope with the long suffering abuse. As a young man, full of hopes and dreams of becoming an architect, Josef left the house that day never to see his father again.

Once Josef returned home to his mother he had to again suffer under the identity of a 'homosexual degenerate criminal'; one enforced on him by the local people and he endured the shame of the judgement of others; people that had most likely participated (even by being neutral) in the Nazi regime in some form or another.

Josef was lucky. Many men convicted of homosexuality were returned to prison after their abuse and torture in the camps - their time having no effect on the length of sentence served. For these men there was no liberation after the war. This is a crime against humanity perpetrated by democratic countries and the war crimes tribunals who refused to even acknowledge that homosexual men had suffered as a group under the Nazi regime.

Many decades later Josef related his time in the camp to a close friend, detailing what he saw and experienced there. The book written under the pseudonym of Heinz Heger and making no mention of Josef's real identity was published in 1972. This is only a few years after the decriminalising of homosexuality (1969) in West Germany. It was important that Josef's identity even 30 years after these events unfolded be protected.

The 1970s was a time of political awakening for many LGBT people; after decriminalisation Gay people were openly coming together and taking a stance against majority cultural oppression and brutality. Dissemination of collated gay life experiences were helping to inform a political LGBT identity; they shone a light on the injustice that many had suffered and who had no-one to tell their tale. The Men with the Pink Triangle is a very important hidden history and I will be returning again to the events that took place in the camps to make images that will inform my body of work.



Heger, H. (1989). The Men With The Pink Triangle. London, UK: GMP Publishers Ltd.