... The usual naturalist picture, which creates the illusion of three-dimension space, at the same time suggests its ability to function as a window on the past and to portray things that happened as they actually were. In this way, it creates a simulacrum that appears to endow memory with the continuity that lived reality lacks. But it is precisely here that the art of modernism begins, peaking in geometric abstraction. Modernist art makes the flatness of the picture explicit because it wishes to be honest.
Its honesty consists in showing the picture for what it is- a closed gate that separates the present from the past in irrevocable fashion. The window that seems to permit a view of the past closes. The modernist picture demonstrates in quite radical fashion its non-transparency, renounces any illusions.
The picture is not an opening, but a barrier. This moral stringency of the modernist picture, the ethical claim that leads to a thematization of pictorial surface and was advocated in exemplary fashion by Clement Greenberg, 2 has in the meantime been largely forgotten. Figurativism has returned in the frivolos atmosphere of postmodernism, and the break with the past is ironically covered up.
Golan's pictures could at first glance also count as figurative, for they portray something- closed, locked gates. Yet the pictures point unmistakably to their relationship to the tradition of geometric abstraction. This does not mean formal analogies, as apparent as these may be, but an inner affinity that connects these quasi- figurative pictures with modernist, geometric abstraction.
In both cases, the picture is understood as a picture of the barrier that does not capture the past but instead confirms its closedness, its inaccessibility. However, the artist refers to more than the formal level. The real occurrence, the holocaust, is itself understood as this kind of insuperable barrier. It is a collective event that lends individual memory a universal dimension. The mere mention of the Holocaust has the power to silence any false comfort. If we tend as a rule to integrate the losses we experience into an equation that we expect will add up in the end, at least in historical perspective, the holocaust represents loss in such quantity that any such equation immediately seems inadequate, even insulting. It is not about one or another closed gate, but about millions of such gates. Thus Golan obsessively paints one closed gate after another. And in thematizing his own loss, as just one example in a potentially endless series of such losses, the artist succeeds in creating a metaphor that points even beyond the event of the Holocaust-a metaphor of barriers that on one way or another irrevocably separate every single person from his or her past.
Thus each picture becomes a partition. And thus even the modernist picture suddenly takes on a substantive, existential dimension. This picture is interesting above all for what it hides. In one of her essays on modernism, Rosalind Krauss characterize the basic structure of the modernist picture as a "grid" 3. In itself, this stricture, as Krauss correctly finds, is extremely repetitive and boring. But the modernist grid becomes interesting again if one asks what might be found behind it. Thus in his interpretation of the flat modernist picture, Golan lends it unexpected focus by allowing us to assume that the great crime of the modern age is hidden beneath the surface of the picture.
As we know, art about the Holocaust is marked by many and various attempts to compensate for the losses suffered, to "make good" ( wiedergutmachen), to exhume and consolidate the memory of exterminated and buried past, to retrospectively repair the interrupted tradition of Judaism and a "better" Germanness, in order to carry on this tradition. Most of the artistic works devoted to the Holocaust are therefore photographs, inscriptions or stones that look like gravestones and thus arouse hopes of resurrection. Signs of institutionalized remembrance...