Laurie Beth Clark

«Klanglos Verschwunden» Installation

For the last twenty years, I have produced large scale, site specific installations and performances concerned with social and political issues. Recurrent themes in my work are labor, gender, identity, and objects. Generally, a single project is produced over a period of several years and involves many members of a community and a large volume of physical material. The invitation to be part of Vogelfrei presents me with a set of exciting creative challenges that put me on unfamiliar footing.

As the product of a post-WW II „never again“ Jewish education in the United States, my imagination has been filled for me with images of the holocaust since I was a child, although my own Jewish identity has not previously been the focal point of my work or my life. I have tremendous admiration for the work being done by contemporary artists who are working to come to terms with Germany's past but I would not personally feel comfortable as an outsider to speak didactically on these issues, even at the same time as I could not possibly leave them out of the work I will make. Morever, my commitment to self-interrogation on a cultural as weil as a personal level means that I would hesitate to speak about another nation's genocidal past, or its xenophobic present, without also addressing the racism and imperialism that my own nation perpetrates. Furthermore, while one of the most interesting things about the Vogelfrei projects is that they are situated domestically, it also means that as a responsible artist I must make choices that my hosts can, literally, live with.

This may mean that sounds must be less djssonant and content less confrontational than I might otherwise produce I do not consider any of these issues to be obstacles but rather creative parameters that will push me to make work in ways that I have not previously considered. It has lead me to consider manually produced sounds and more subtle signifjers. Moreover, my very limited knowledge of German has made central tothis work the analogy between that which is difficult to express (because one lacks the vocabulary) and that which is difficult to acknowledge (because it has been psychologically or socially repressed).