Memories and Metaphors, The Moving Art of Murray Zimiles

Giles Auty, National Art Correspondent for The Australian
Sydney, Austrlia
November 1997 

Writing about Murray Zimiles' art has led me to an unsuspected realisation about myself. While I have never experienced difficulty in imagining what it would be like to be involved actively in a war, my imagination has baulked previously at picturing myself as being faced with an enemy hell-bent on the destruction of my entire race.

The leap of imagination required here is to put oneself in the shoes of a Jew of Eastern European extraction at the time of The Holocaust. I do not find war so hard to imagine partly because, as a small child, I regularly witnessed massed formations of German aircraft passing up the Thames Estuary on their way to bomb London. I have dreamt about such sights periodically ever since. But what Murray Zimiles' art helps make clear to me is the essential distinction between physical and metaphysical horror. Genocide falls squarely into the latter category.

When I reached the age of 18 I spent many months of my compulsory military service in the bleak forests of North Germany which directly bordered the Russian Zone. One of our regular military manoeuvres was what we had to do in the event of a sudden Russian attack.

Murray Zimiles is a Jew of Eastern European extraction. Poland and now Ukraine form the traditional centre of the sandwich between Germany and Russia and have a history of military depredations by both. But the experience of Eastern and Central European Jews in the Second World War was one of peculiar horror. It is an awareness of this past horror which underpins much of Murray Zimiles' art.

The artist was born in Brooklyn, USA on 7 December, 1941 on a day which not only saw the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, but also the first step in Hitler's "final solution": 700 Jews were transported on that day to a death camp at Chelmno. Have you ever heard of Chelmno? When I was a child, adults would refer to skinny children as being "like something out of Belsen". Belsen is now imprinted forever in Jewish history with other infamous names such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The artist's own father escaped this genocide. So did his stepmother who was given a ticket to America, at the last minute, by her father in 1938. He and all of the stepmother's sisters, all but one of her brothers, her grandparents on both sides, and all of her uncles, aunts and cousins perished at Nazi hands.

Murray Zimiles feels not only an acute awareness of such a heritage but also of the privileges he has enjoyed in escaping from his immediate background in one of the poorer areas of Brooklyn. Escaping what he describes as "the ghetto" enabled him to develop a degree of objectivity and artistic skills. Through the good services of an uncle and aunt who were both artists, the young Zimiles was sent initially to America's Mid-West and then to an Ivy League graduated school. His studies at the University of Illinois, Cornell and the École Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in Paris equipped him, as a painter and printmaker, with the graphic armoury he would need in the future. At first, he found no particular direction for his art but, with the birth of his son, came an awareness that the odyssey of discovery through prolonged reading and travel. His voyagings took him to Jerusalem and Auchwithz-Birkenau. In a sense, both were pilgrimages and journeys toward a new enlightenment. To see Auschwitz-Birkenau is to begin to comprehend the horror of what was attempted; Auschwitz is laid out like an orderly housing estate, concealing its shameful purposes. Apparent physical normality accentuates rather that diminishes the the acuteness of the metaphysical horror encountered. At the very moment when young children elsewhere were strolling or cycling to school - I would have been one of them - children in Auschwitz were walking to their deaths. Instead of lessons, school milk and breaks for play they face premature and horrible extinction.

Many Jewish artists have felt that The Holocaust was too big and too incomprehensible a subject for mere, mortal comment can be found here. Yet even a simple comparison can form a necessary part of telling of the tale. By seeking to refine his art, Zimiles acknowledges the necessary role of artistry in the relating of human experiences. Artistry forms the bridge between inchoate ideas and their final expression and also between artist and audience. Feeling is not everything, even the most profound and justified feelings of outrage need channelling.

Murray Zimiles conceived that he would tell a story of his personal understanding of The Holocaust through his Fire Paintings and The Book of Fire. The oppressors burned not only a people but their history trying to extinguish both as though they had never existed. Here Zimiles' lifelong interest in folk architecture and the history of buildings led him to discover and resurrect another vital part of his people's heritage: the intricately-crafted synagogues built by the skilled artisans from local wood. All these intriguing and singular buildings had been put to the torch, yet an obscure book he discovered alerted the artist to their original appearance. To record something of their former golry is part of his process of fighting fire with a combination of art and memory. His chosen means is a potent and moving one.

For his new exhibition in Adelaide, South Australia, the artist has embarked on a number of new paintings and drawings, many of which feature familiar symbolism involving domestic animals. Such use reminds one of the anthropomorphism present in George Orwell's brilliant study of totalitarian politics, Animal Farm. The animal kingdom provides an excellent source of metaphors for the brutalisation and dehumanising of mankind. Pigs grow rich, make cynical political alliances and parade their stuff, as brute exemplars of naked power. Further down the scale, ferocious dogs delight to do their masters' bidding under a masquerade of "simply doing their job". Here are the intimidators, enforcers and prison-camp guards. Where dogs and dog-handlers once met the death-trains, dogs now stand in pictorially for both roles. By training their charges in ferocity and obedience, the dog-handlers echo their own symbiotic relationship with their masters. Dogs which can be "man's best friend" are persuaded by training and propaganda to turn savagely against unfortunate sections of humanity. Here are unleashed, warlike dogs which have forfeited all human sympathy for being the willing servants of brutal masters. Here are dogs which snarl and bluster, but which can be put to flight themselves in the face of true human resolve.

By contrast, goats are the traditional Judaic beasts of sacrifice or atonement. The role of scapegoat for the collective ills of humanity is present in Old and New Testaments as well as in Christian iconography of more recent origin. The artist's symbolism is never obvious nor heavy-handed and probably provides a wise alternative, at times, to purely human narratives. Zimiles does not encourage us merely to dwell upon past events, but to try to understand their lasting significance.

His latest work takes on a new universality in its metaphors and is also sensitively and beautifully painted. Zimiles' animals march, scamper or flee through atmospheric landscapes. Each of their movements is anatomically exact. Zimiles is yet another artist who owes a debt to the 19th century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. The world the artist creates is imaginary, yet its topography and inhabitants are convincing. Art has the capacity to move us not just by its message, more importantly still, by its skills.