In describing victims of the Holocaust who were trapped and tortured in concentration camps, many different eyewitnesses use similar images and language. Words such as shadow, ghostly, shapeless, withering, grey become the common vocabulary to characterize them. Denis Avey, a British POW who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, writes: “The whole site was crawling with strange, slow-moving figures, hundreds, no thousands of them. All dressed in tattered, ill fitting striped shirts and trousers that were more like pajamas than work clothes. Their faces were grey; their heads were roughly shaven and partly covered by tiny caps. They were like moving shadows, shapeless and indistinct, as if they could fade away any moment. I couldn’t tell who they were, what they were.”
The victims Avey describes in his compelling memoir The Man who Broke into Auschwitz, were barely recognizable as human beings. They ceased to appear as people. It is this theme that Joel Bonk explores in his three-piece work Disposable People.
These mysterious renderings, both opaque and transparent, appear much like Avey’s description of Jewish Auschwitz prisoners as “moving shadows, shapeless and indistinct, as if they could fade away any moment.” Who are these creatures? What are they?
To create these works the artist configured disposable trash bags, copied them with a copy machine, and then transferred them with paint thinner onto paper. He set them away for some time, forgetting their existence. Months passed before he discovered them again. This time, when the artist looked at his once disregarded pages, human forms began to emerge. With each look their presence became more visible. He knew the work was incomplete and set about imbuing his new vision onto the paper with strong, black ink, giving definition to these people he now could see.
These works appear like an x-ray, penetrating surface material to show what lies hidden beneath. Just as x-rays are used to diagnose the cause of illness and expose that which is unseen, in the same way Disposable People suggests the sickness and evil of spiritual blindness and its resulting impact, a literal inability to recognize another human being.
Disposable People invites us to see through and beyond what we routinely dispose of, so that we might behold the divine buried beneath.
