Ellen Rothenberg

Gallery 312, Chicago
Through March 24

Ellen Rothenberg's stirring portrayal of the Anne Frank chronicle commences in 1944, the year of Frank's tragic death in Bergen Belsen concentration camp. The sprawling installation neither memorializes Frank's indomitable spirit, nor recreates her two desperate confinements—the one protective and the other filled with peril. Instead, the anne frank project resembles a requiem.

Rothenberg minimizes likenesses of Frank to maximize the effect of her terrible absence. The dissolution of her body is artfully conjured through an image of an old undershirt photocopied on to translucent bamboo paper. Glowing with light from a bare bulb, it embodies the awful fragility of life. Other free hanging works contain fragments of text, official identification papers, and an intimate diary passage in which the young Anne, poised to enter womanhood, discovers the wondrous complexity of her own physiology.

Absence is further evoked by the bookshelves left vacant by the untimely death of their author. Rothenberg documents the legacy's continued entanglement in cultural and national politics. In the 1980s, a Neo-Nazi faction denounced the Anne Frank diary as a fraud. Their accusations forced a Netherlands Institute for War Documentation to undertake an elaborate forensic analysis of the document. Authenticity, it concluded, was "A Probability Bordering on Certainty," presented in the installation as enlarged handwriting from the diary. Transferred to translucent velum, these gestural markings resonate like ghostly apparitions.

Another post-mortem breach violation against Anne Frank was, ironically, perpetrated by her own father who deleted evidence of his daughter's emerging sexuality and their family conflicts. Thick black lines not only obliterate diary passages, they underline the tragic silencing of their author. A third section of the anne frank project refers to the German obsession to document the physiology of those who so offended the Aryan ideal. It is represented by a maze of measuring devices (hanging rules, thermometers, pocket watches, weights, and scales).

Finally, the installation addresses the artist's personal relationship to this legacy. At age twelve, Anne Frank supplied Rothenberg's definitions of valor and forgiveness. As an adult, Anne Frank exemplifies the complex relationship between nostalgia and horror.




Linda Weintraub