Forum for Holocaust Studies

Gustav Metzger Interview with Alison Jones

AJ

 Your work has been aesthetically uncompromising to date and you've described what you were aiming for as an 'aesthetics of revulsion'. It seems in the new work, the 'Historic Photographs', you've moved away from that to a much more complicated presentation. You use mass media images cloaked or obscured from the viewer. Is the implication that our capacity to be moved or shocked has been blunted by the proliferation of shocking imagery in the mass media and that you're creating a distance between the horror and the viewer?

GM

 Well that is part of the strategy, part of the intention. I suppose I should say what is behind the project of the Historic Photographs. Behind it and within it are a range of possibilities, a range of objectives some of them will no doubt be contradictory or difficult to follow through in some detail but what you've said is a part of the intention but not the whole of it . We could go on looking at different strands of possibilities, but to follow up on what you said, I don't want to go on looking at images of horror. I don't want it and I know a lot of people don't want it either. Well that's an expression of that part of me and that urge within others not to go on and on and on looking at horror, looking at the revolting, looking at the extremely dangerous. That's part of it, but there are so many other objectives in hiding the image, and it connects with the basic view that I have about art today, that it needs to be complex in the ever-expanding, ever more complex, social situation that we are in. Art needs to be sensitive to this and to some extent because it never will be able to achieve the complexity of reality -never, never, never- even the greatest artists couldn't confront, couldn't embrace and contain what is actually happening world-wide, globally. But the drive within the artist will be to attempt this. So with these works what I am seeking is a range of possibilities that open up to the viewer because that is what in the end it comes to. I am hoping that because they are difficult, because as you said earlier they are repellent, they block off the approach of the spectator. Because of so many other things within the works that are different to what has been done before, I am expecting quite seriously and quite positively that there will be a great range of possible reactions to the work, and that I would regard as successful, because the greater the range of reactions the more the aim of representing complexity and challenging people to respond to complex reality through art may be fulfilled.

AJ

 They are very difficult, especially the floor piece 'To Crawl Into' which is a very large photograph of Viennese Jews scrubbing the pavement, laid out on the floor and entirely covered by a cloth. In order to view the image the viewer has to get down onto the floor and crawl under the cloth.

GM

 Yes that's part of it, yes, and it's an attempt to recreate the scene, to actually recreate it in performance, people necessarily recreating it in performance, imitating it, adjusting to this position that is in front of them. I've tried it with a cloth and when you are in it you have a very very limited vision. You can only see what is in front of you, like if you are on top of the face you can see the face and hardly anything else because once it's covered and you are in it, well it's just covered, it's quite tricky.

You start by lifting and looking under the cloth but the idea is that you ride across the vast expanse. The idea is that you explore the picture but to see it you have to go right across it because you only see so much at a time, the rest is covered. You keep on pushing your way through to see the picture which is a laborious activity, which obviously of course not everyone will perform.

AJ

 So it's impossible to have a distanced or disinterested perspective on the image?

GM

The only two straightforwardly visible photographs in the Oxford exhibition will be the pictures of the ramp and train arrivals at Auschwitz and the only modern picture will be of Twyford Down. This picture will be in full colour about two metres across. The others will all be completely hidden or visible by crawling into or occasionally like a flash coming up where you can see the picture. The Vietnam picture will be hopefully seen every ten minutes by lighting it with a stroboscope and then becoming invisible again.

Another image in the Oxford exhibition is the Oklahoma bombing. This is a fireman rescuing a tiny girl. This was on the front page of The Times and all over the world and no doubt on television and I think it was shown again and again especially on American Television. This is a really famous image and this one will be completely sealed and hopefully in a concrete block with a light within the block illuminating the image and the block and coming through on the side. But this is totally invisible in the exhibition.

AJ

 How does the viewer have any idea what's going on?

GM

 There will be a free sheet handed out in the gallery where the photographs will be produced on a very small scale like a ground plan. People going through the exhibition will see each picture reproduced as small as possible but quite clearly identifiable.

AJ

 Time and history seem particularly pressing issues in the Historic Photographs. The theoretical trend of postmodernism in the 1980s and 90s was that there is no way of looking at history coherently and any perspective on history is as valid as the next regardless of where it comes from. It proposes that there is no one way of determining what happened in history and it seems that in your project of Historic Photographs you are really asserting that there is a history that did happen, and the lessons of history have to be learned.

GM

 And its ongoing, yes. Well I'm very glad that you bring this up. That is clearly the case and I've been conscious when preparing these, thinking about them, planning them, that this is exactly the position I am asserting; a stand against the general trend of these last, quite long years actually. It goes back to the 1960s actually the origin of postmodernism, and I am standing strongly like a rock, if that isn't too bombastic, by in fact saying these Historic Photographs - you can't escape them and you can't escape their historical reality, their interaction, their integration in history, and that is one of the reasons I am doing it, yes, to stand against the trend.

AJ

 Postmodernism opened the door to revisionist histories and also Holocaust denial and saying that the Holocaust was just one version of history or as Jean Marie Le Pen describes the Holocaust as 'a mere detail of history'.

GM

 And it's ongoing, and that's one of the reasons why I've included the Twyford Down photograph - to prove that its ongoing and that great photographs and powerful photographs are being made now, and they're not just historic in the sense that one has to dig them out from years and years back.

AJ

 Your first work that took the Holocaust as a subject were photocopies of all the laws passed by Hitler against the Jews. That was a text piece and you did it in the 1980s. I wondered about your use of images, whether there was a particular length of time that you had to put between the Holocaust and your use of the photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto or the arrival at Auschwitz.

GM

 I think again the answer is implicit in your question. The time it has taken for me to actually do this work perhaps had to happen. The idea of making Historic Photographs came in the latter part of 1990. It came as something that had to happen, and it was a case of having to do it. It wasn't that I sort of looked around and thought now what shall I do next. I wasn't even working as an artist, I was researching Vermeer, I wasn't contemplating making art. I had this realisation that the Historic Photographs could be done, and they were directly linked to the Jewish subject in a broader sense, and in a second sense to the Holocaust, to Poland, the camps and so on, and certainly had it been possible or necessary, this could have arisen years and years before. So I think the implication in your question is if time had to elapse, and I would say the answer to that is certainly yes. Just as it took me a long long time to consider the possibility that my parents died in the concentration camps. For decades I said to myself and to others 'No it didn't happen like that.' Now I am prepared to consider the possibility that they did die in a concentration camp. We actually don't know to my knowledge, we don't know. So there may be this link between the two issues, yes.

AJ

 You needed to do this work but you needed distance in order to face up to it?

GM

 Well from an inner point of view as an inner necessity yes.

AJ

 And the means with which it has been possible to speak have been different over time?

GM

 Yes, as you said the photocopy work was 1981 and then there was a big gap between that and 1990 when I conceived these works. But the realisation only occurred in the end of 1995. These first works at workfortheeyetodo included the photograph of the boy in the Warsaw Ghetto and Hitler in the Reichstag. These were the very first actual realisations of the idea, so a long time was passing, and I should add that the 1981 works of Hitler's laws against the Jews were based and connected with my living in Germany, in Frankfurt, where I faced, had to face up to, the past and anti-Semitism in the current Germany in a way that I never had to before. Living there, following political developments in the papers and on the radio forced me to enter this project and exhibit it in Switzerland in spring of 1981. Before that I thought a great deal and I was obviously very concerned with the imagery that one inevitably sees over a period of time. It always must have influenced my artistic development over the years, from being a student onwards. One of the greatest deepest experiences was seeing the Picasso and Matisse exhibition after the war in London, where war-time subjects came through, particularly Picasso's painting of the charnel-house. It was often shown in relation to actual imagery of the concentration camps - bones and skeletons would be juxtaposed. That had a tremendous impact on me, so you could say that my use of imagery of the Holocaust which happened fairly recently must link up with Picasso's charnel house and other works by Picasso during and after the war, and of course the actual photographs that we were confronted with.

AJ

 Has there been an ethical problem for you in using photographs of the Holocaust as art?

GM

 No, I can fully justify their use, and of course I'm not using them, I'm presenting them in the mind of the spectator. In as far as the actual photos are concerned the original two works were completely sealed. The later photographic works shown in Paris were partially obscured, people have to fight their way in to them if they wish. Everybody is free to say 'I don't want to see these images' and I'm sure a lot of people have done that and will continue to do so. That is I think very critical to our discussion, that the way I finally chose to show the imagery is completely separate from a so-called normal way of presenting the imagery, and that no doubt has to do with time - the time it took to get there. But obviously it shows a certain reserve I have towards showing these pictures. I am of course very conscious of this reserve and its a reserve which I built on and say it is a positive path and a questioning attitude towards this imagery.

AJ

 I was thinking about the images that you have to crawl over, you are actually standing on top of the Vienna Jews. I was wondering whether that would have been possible before fifty years distance had been put between us and the event?

GM

 For us, you mean the public in general? Yes, I think that's true. Had this been done after the war it would have been a kind of sacrilege I imagine, stepping on these already downtrodden people. It would, I imagine, have been a kind of taboo situation. Yes, that's something that hadn't occurred to me but it is relevant. But of course as far as I'm concerned it's not a matter of stepping on them, it is more to with reverence towards them. That is to say I'm inviting people to come as close as possible to this actuality in order for them to penetrate as deeply as possible, and I hope in a charitable open-minded and generous manner, towards these suffering betrayed people on the floor. That's my approach and that is what a lot of people will adhere to, conform to and integrate with, I'm sure. But one waits to see the response in Oxford because, as you know, in Paris I was never in the room with people who were crawling around. I've never seen the work in action, but I'm told a lot of people went in to it.

AJ

 Some of the other pictures use a rhetoric of power, images like the pictures where the original intention was the aggrandisement of Hitler and the Third Reich.

GM

 Yes. That will always be an ambiguous situation necessarily. You can never escape certain doubts and you can never escape the possibility of being criticised for using an image of Hitler or any image of the Nazi as we saw in London with the controversy around the exhibition 'The Nazis' at the Photographers Gallery, where stills were presented from Hollywood and British films of actors in Nazi uniform and regalia and so on. So using that photograph of Hitler in that first section set of works I was aware that it was a bit dodgy and it is open to controversy and perhaps criticism and that's inescapable, especially if one works in Germany itself. I think if I had made these works in Germany they would have been even more controversial, there would have been more tension around their use, but of course ultimately it is better to face up to historical fact than to escape it, and here I believe in this work I am facing up to a very critical phase of European, well, world history, because this photograph was taken I think on the 17th of July 1941, a day or so after the capitulation of France, when Germany was on the point of conquering the world. So the juxtaposition of that image with the utter defeat of Poland and of the Jews represented by the opposite picture was for me a statement that could be fully justified from every possible point of view.

AJ

 Is that a part of the complexity that you are aiming for in your work?

GM

 Oh yes that is for me and I have been saying this for quite a few years in the recent past. The central aim of art is to bring complexity to a height and the pendant to that approach is to say that you will never ever be able to compete with the complexity that is reality. I think Lenin made a famous statement along these lines that you can never compete with the radicality of the real, and so this is my ideal, to bring together a large number of possibly divergent and possibly conflicting positions in a work in order to increase the potential to work toward a maximisation of complexity which hopefully can stimulate people to an awareness of the complexity of their reality and perhaps ease their apprehension of this reality through entering a work of art.

AJ

 The way that you talk about complexity makes me think of Lukács on great art - that brings together all the dynamic and contradictions of society and presents them to people in such a way that it makes sense to their present and gives them a hope of moving forward and acting on their present .

GM

 Yes that's very much my position. He became a hate figure in the latter decades of his existence. He almost became a non-figure for many people on the left. But then he's simply one figure of many who have had an approach that facing up to reality and engaging in struggle is the path for the artist and the intellectual and for most people. That's a path that I started on when I was sixteen or seventeen years old living in Leeds during the war, and it's a path I believe I've adhered to, one way or another ever since.

AJ

 As a Jew who escaped the Holocaust do you feel that you have more authority to use this as subject matter than someone who was not personally connected?

GM

 Well, I give people the maximum freedom possible, so that's the general reaction I have. I go into the Wiener Library periodically and look at the shelves of new books, biographies and autobiographies of Holocaust survivors. They are usually quite small modest books of personal accounts, and they are endless. You keep wondering how is it possible that so many people are writing these personal experiences, but they keep coming up. Well certainly they are the first who should be given the freedom to write whatever and however they wish, or make books of drawings of their experiences and have them published, very often privately published or by an unknown publisher or even self- published. So in that sense, of course, I feel I have the full freedom to work in this field and I take the liberty of criticising the Jews. I would be prepared to criticise the Jews in that period who collaborated with the Nazis or acted in slave camps for the Nazis. I haven't done so but I feel free to do that, and I feel particularly free to stand up against Jews in Israel who are now manipulating all kinds of situations for their egocentric purposes, and behaving in an exceedingly dangerous way which could lead to the next world war. I do criticise them in the different ways that I can, and I have more freedom to do so because I am not only a Jew, but I'm a Jew who escaped the Nazis, yes, who managed to escape and go on living.

AJ

 This point of speaking personally about the Holocaust makes me wonder how you situate yourself, say, with regard to an artist like Boltanski who presents a very personal point of view, children's toys, photographic memoirs etc. Although the Nazis had a devastating effect on your personal history, you speak from the opposite position, from the general, the broad overview of the big historical moments, whereas Boltanski comes from his individual perspective.

GM

 Well again he is fully justified in exploring and he is endlessly exploring this area and some of the work is excellent, outstanding, and I wish him well. There is of course the danger now that he is becoming too commercialised. Showing in top galleries I think is a risk when you are engaged in this kind of recuperation, so we'll have to see how he develops. It may now go towards the questionable but we wait and see. But I'm sure he'll go on making significant works whatever happens - he's too big a person and he's now of course highly capable of managing this material.

AJ

 Is there a problem with the commercialisation of the Holocaust there for you?

GM

 Oh yes. There's nothing wrong with artists selling their work - its perhaps the only way for very many to survive and it gets the work attention, and it gets circulated, but we do now know that there is such a thing as 'KZ chic', yes? That uniforms worn by concentration camp inmates, or by contemporary prisoners for that matter, do fetch money and have a certain appeal to a certain part of the fashion world or the art world scene, and if art to do with the Holocaust becomes integrated with that direction there could be problems. And it could happen and I suppose it has happened here and there already. But then we don't want to put limits on people's freedom of expression or their selection of what to wear - I would hate to do that.

AJ

 I know from your writings that you aren't polemical at all about art - what's right or wrong art - but I am interested to know what your reaction to Schindler's List was. As a Hollywood film that took the usual liberties, was sentimental, had a happy ending the central character was a capitalist, etc. but at the end of the day it reached millions and educated them with a story of the Holocaust.

GM

 Yes, I didn't see it - I deliberately didn't see it, but I read all about it. I hardly ever go to films, and I avoid it as much as possible, in fact I completely avoid American films anyway. I can't stand them anymore. (... Armageddon is a film I'm very curious about but I don't think I'm going to see it), so I can't directly speak on Schindler's List. But you've raised problems with it, and of course there are big problems with it no doubt, yes.

AJ

 I suppose the argument there is that if you have something important to say to people, which you have to speak to millions of people about, as Spielberg has, mass communication is a great thing. The downside is the concessions to commercialisation and the risk of prostituting the subject. The opposite is the avant-garde position, where you are, where you don't make any concessions at all but your audience is much much smaller.

GM

 Oh yes much smaller, but then I could have chosen film, but it seriously has never occurred to me to do so

AJ

 Is accessibility for the general public an issue for you ?

GM

 In my work? Yes, there again I am in agreement with a lot of people on the left. We believe that that is the concern of art - to reach people - and people of different levels of society including the people who have very very little. So that is certainly my concern to reach people, to reach many people, and that was the central point of my Auto Destructive Art projects - that they would be public works, large ones, which would have been incontrovertibly there, and tens ands tens of thousands of people would have seen them. They were never made, but this was at the very centre of my change from painting to Auto-Destructive Art and public art. The two are linked in my mind and in my writing. It just hasn't happened, but that's another matter.

AJ

 In your interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist you are very adamant that art can, and must change peoples' ideas. It must interact with the world, and this is crucial for you. Can you say which are the works that have changed the world for you?

GM

 The most immediate name is Picasso, and if I had to name one artist, and I have sometimes been asked this, I would immediately say Picasso. I know a lot of people over the last twenty years would say Duchamp, and he is very important to me. Duchamp has certainly been a tremendous influence on my whole development since my student days. But it's Picasso who most influenced me, and of course Guernica. Guernica is at the very centre of the art that changes the world, and that has changed the world. During the war he stayed most of the time in his studio in the rue des Grandes-Augustins and he would be visited by German officers and army people, and there is a story that one of these soldiers pulled out a postcard of Guernica and showed it to Picasso and said 'Oh, you did this?', and Picasso turned around and said, 'No. You did this!'. Now this is 1943-44 when the German army is occupying most of Europe and this is the conversation. Well, if that doesn't prove that Guernica changed the world, one doesn't need more than that one small story to prove the point. But Picasso changed the world in heaven knows how many other ways, apart from being a politically active person. Obviously he was politically active before the war and during the war, and before he officially joined the Communist Party he was a political animal. He mixed with anarchist circles in Spain and with radical artists all his life.

AJ

 What about between the wars in Germany? I was thinking about those political artists like John Heartfield and Georg Grosz. Did artists in those circumstances have the potential to intervene in the wider world?

GM

 Yes well they did - Heartfield had an enormous impact in Germany in the 1920s when he was active and during the 1930s and he had to flee Germany as soon as Hitler came to power and he went straight to Czechoslovakia with his brother. They immediately set up alternative publications and they continued the RJSet, this famous left wing illustrated magazine, that was smuggled into Germany and distributed throughout the world. They set it up and it continued to function in Czechoslovakia until they were invaded. And in wartime England where he fled just before the outbreak of the war, he continued being involved with the Communist Cultural Centre in Hampstead for the duration of his stay in England which went on until the end of the 1940s. Then he went over to East Germany where he continued political activity in some form or another. In fact the communists over there didn't want him to do much political activity at that point, they rather wanted to push him into a corner. He had outlived his usefulness to the party at that stage, so they thought. Heartfield has been a tremendous concern in my life, especially since the early 1970s - and Grosz too. But Grosz never had that continual political application that Heartfield had all his life of course. It changed the way I understood what art was capable of.

AJ

 Those artists in Germany describe that situation in Germany so incisively from our perspective, but what was their effect at the time?

GM

 Oh tremendously effective. Heartfield was at the top of the lists of the Gestapo when they took power, right at the top, and understandable of course, he was so punchy, his aggression towards the Nazis was non-stop, and he had this medium - the publication RJSet.

AJ

 Art was tremendously important to Hitler wasn't it?

GM

 Oh yes, in all kinds of ways. It was a dominant part of his experience, and Goebbels' also. Goebbels was actually a collector of expressionist art. Between the two of them art was right at the top of all their thinking. Art, all the different manifestations of it, for them positive, or negative aspects was central to their conception of the Nazi state. I've been very, very, fascinated by the artistic cultural and political side of the Nazi machine, and that fed into the idea of having this first international conference on Nazi art in 1976 organised with Cordula Frohwein.

AJ

 Sartre said that said there can't be such a thing as a good anti-Semitic novel, and I was wondering whether you think there is such a thing as great Nazi art, say the films of Leni Riefenstahl?

GM

 Well if you adopt that as the condition for defining good art you would have to destroy a vast amount of museum goods which are universally regarded as great high art and amongst the most precious human contributions. That's my first general response. As regards Nazi art, I do believe some of the work by Leni Riefenstahl is right at the top of film art and I can't see anybody converting me from that attitude towards some of her work. It's inspired, its inspiring, it sort of lifts you up, it takes you along, even against your will. You might say, 'Oh, I hate the Nazis, I hate these uniforms' - but her art, her intuition, her control and technical mastery sweeps your reservations away again and again. But there is also the matter of the subject matter, this is eventually how the Nazis will be petrified. Well, that is important, you know in 200 years we will be grateful that somebody came along and fixed that symbolism, that potential, in celluloid in a work of art. We came to realise that we had a position which radically differed from many of the people who came to discuss, who on the whole regarded Nazi art as kitsch, as something to be relegated to the secondary plane. We, on the other hand, took the line in the conference that this attitude is not acceptable, it is neither intelligent nor politically responsible, and so we were prepared to see quality in certain aspects of Nazi art, and that is still my view. That is the case we need to explore - the aesthetic potential in Nazi art and not just simply say that because it comes from a violent and inhuman society then therefore it cannot be classified as art. This argument has raged in Germany since and a very large number of studies have been made that reject this wholesale negation of quality within Nazi culture and cultural production. A lot of it, like the posters or the literature or the films was sheer propaganda, an attempt to dominate their people and to be nasty to their enemies, to be offensive to the rest of the world, to that world that didn't support them.

AJ

 Yes the Nazis really understood the power of images.

GM

There is one other general point. I appealed specifically to the mostly German people who came to our conference 'Art in Germany under National Socialism' in September 1976 in London. I said 'Look - Germany will only succeed in dealing with the Nazi past if it is open, if it is honest, and if it is courageous, and if it is prepared to fight.' I accused those people of being kind of liberals in as far as they were not doing that. And when we now look at how Germany has developed, the fears that I expressed then - that if they didn't exercise courage, if they didn't honestly face up to the Nazi past in Germany, there would be a hell of a trouble in Germany. That has come about hasn't it? The rise of Neo-Nazism is the result of people like that, who when it comes to thinking about the Nazi past refused to be either honest or courageous. And the point was that if they faced up to the Nazi past and admitted that there was something in this Nazi past that is understandable, that possibly can have some kind of value, or at least let us try to understand, as far as we can, instead of saying 'It's kitsch - because it's Nazi it's not worth bothering with - because it's Nazi it has to be evil'. Well that's not the way for art historians to work, but that's the way they have worked. That was the general trend of art historians in Germany in that period - the 1960s and 1970s when all this took place, and that meant an escape from reality, from the complexity of reality, and an inability to face up to the truth, and that makes you weak. It means you can't fight politically, and they weren't fighting politically. There were so many Germans at that time who had the chance to turn it around, but because they weren't prepared to really grapple with the past in a deep sense and fight for the future, we now see the result of this.

AJ

 Yes, it is very important to investigate what is it that appeals, that connects with people in those images.

GM

 Indeed - motherhood, country, nation.

AJ

 In the photographs of Hitler in the Reichstag and in a car passing by the Hitler Youth the order imposed by a strong leader is powerfully aestheticised. Were you interested in the appeal of this to the viewer as a propaganda image?

GM

 Yes. That is part of the intention and of course again it's sealed in. This picture will only be seen on a minute scale, a few inches across as a reminder. That is part of the complexity. Indeed one of the key drives behind the project of the Historic Photographs is to internalise the image, to throw the image where it is anyway, but where it only can be, not the eye but the mind, and by throwing it into the mind of the spectator then the unpredictable can happen, which is the purpose. It can ricochet and what comes out is subjective. We don't know - each person may have a completely different response to that blank piece of metal in an exhibition hall. But that is what it is about, and it can be positive, it can be negative, it can be liberating, it can be damaging, I don't know, but one isn't responsible for the subjective response, and at that point the work, the situation, is so complex that my responsibility comes to an end. The work provides a stimulus and I think people should be grateful for that stimulus, and if some people don't react at all then it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter at all, because it is difficult. I stress the difficulty that people will have in dealing with this, and then I go on to say that it is this difficulty, the consciousness of difficulty is one of the objectives of the work, to suggest that the work is difficult. It is difficult for the observer to relate to it, it could make them think that life is difficult, that politics is difficult, that daily life is difficult, and that is exactly the real situation. So that if people say, 'Well I don't know how I am going to penetrate this' and 'I don't understand it - it doesn't mean anything to me', as far as I am concerned, it is a communication that relates to success. It relates to the inability of the person to deal with life in a general sense, and so the inability, the frustration, by seeing a blank work which should be a photograph but isn't - all that to me is real, is complex, and therefore presenting this kind of work, difficult work, to a difficult world is a success. I want people to stretch their mind around the apparent impossibility of penetrating a blank surface behind which there is a photograph of some significance.

AJ

 In Oxford the Historic Photographs section of the exhibition begins with Auschwitz - what's the significance of that?

GM

 The basis of that was technical. There's only one entrance and there's only one exit at the other end of that very large room. From the very beginning, even before this project started, I had the idea for the Auschwitz photograph that people would walk along it. Now the only way where people would be forced to walk along it is if they entered at the quite small doorway whose shape, by the way, is exactly like one of the gates of Auschwitz - exactly. So we've got a picture of Auschwitz which includes the gateway, so people having come through, when they see the photograph they will say 'Oh my god - I've just come through that shape.' And then they come through and they can walk along it, but if we put the picture anywhere else they wouldn't automatically have to walk along it, we'd have to construct a pathway, and so its quite obvious and necessary that it has to be in the front, so that people have to pass it. That's the intention of course, and at the same time, because it is the most important Historic Photograph that I am showing in this exhibition, at least to me, it's right that it should be at the beginning. It's out of structural necessity, but it works extremely well, it works best if it is in the beginning. So it all falls into complete place that it is the very first work that people will see, and in a way the most shocking work.

AJ

 And also performative because of the viewer's physical relation to the Jews in the photograph and the recreation of a ramp that they will have to walk up.

GM

 You are passing it, yes in that sense it relates to the 'crawl into' piece, that you are as close to it as can be.

AJ

 You haven't isolated the Holocaust as a subject?

GM

 No, not in the exhibition in Paris, and not in Oxford either. Definitely not. Do you want to continue this point?

AJ

 If you have something to add?

GM

 I can imagine doing an exhibition only on the Nazi persecution of the Jews, it's quite possible, so in other words because I haven't done it does not mean that I have excluded or that I am excluding it, I could well see that this could be a very very significant presentation in the future, just as I might make a presentation of the Vietnam War or the Northern Ireland crisis. All that is possible, yes, that one takes the subject and puts it on its own in an exhibition space - or Nazi Germany. But it could all come to an end fairly soon because it's very tiring work, it's a tremendous strain, it's an ongoing strain. One doesn't, one can't, let it go whilst one is doing it, so I'm not at all sure how long in fact I will physically make this kind of work.