Roy Strassberg : Ceramics

When I started making work referencing the Holocaust in 1992, my greatest challenge was to find an appropriate metaphor for examining mass murder as a subject for artistic expression. Throughout my career I have often returned to imagery that reflected upon my cultural background and my reaction to some of the unfortunate events that have occurred throughout our his-tory, specifically the destruction and murder of the European Jews. In the early 1980's I made a group of guard towers and concentration camp roll call pieces; simple white structures with abstract surface markings and in-stallations of geometric forms suggesting standing figures. When I decided to undertake the series that ultimately became the Holocaust Bone Structures, I was determined to find a simple symbolic language in that the images used were easily identifiable, but placed in contexts that were eccentric and/or peculiar to ordinary experience. The bone image emerged as a way of suggesting that this work, when seen in context, could ultimately be construed as a symbol of death on a gigantic scale; in a word, genocide.

The work is consciously ambiguous so as to avoid specific narrative, but the complex assembling that occurs in most of the pieces is reflective of this huge undertaking. There was a great degree of cooperation with the government that conceived and executed the plan, the business community, many of whom were immensely profitable as a result of the use of Jewish slave labor, and the general population who for the most part turned a deaf ear or were intimidated into ignoring the events that occurred. The use of color posed an interesting question in the work. Perhaps this is a general cliché but my understanding of the Holocaust is in black and white. It seemed inappropriate to make the work "attractive" in a traditional sense. As I have stated to my students on occasion, sometimes you have to give yourself permission to make "ugly" work when it is driven by events that are not particularly appealing.