Arbeit Macht Frei, 1984
1984
painting
oil on canvas
Arbeit Macht Frei
I painted this at twenty, before I had any of the words. A man survives the camp by playing — his violin the thin reed of art held against the gate's obscene promise that labor frees. His face has already gone green, half-crossed into the dead he plays beside; the music that spares him is also conscripted by the order that spares him. Salvation and complicity in one bowed note.
For forty years I thought this picture was behind me. I see now it was ahead. Anamnesis: meaning arriving late, the work a question I couldn't yet read. Everything since — the loops, the incubators, art made inside the machine that measures us — was already here, in a survivor who lives only as long as he is useful to the apparatus he serves. The painting didn't depict my practice. It will have been its origin.