Profanity

Nonprofessional efforts to depict the Holocaust, archived in Poland’s ethnographic collections, force audiences to confront a specific genre of “awkward objects.” Viewers may perceive these vernacular representations as brutal, explicit, and voyeuristic. In response to a set of postwar works that Lehrer, Sendyka, Wilczyk, and Zych identified through their research—which they presented at the exhibition Terribly Close: Polish Vernacular Artists Face the Holocaust—commentators and researchers have invoked the categories of “obscenity,” “perversion,” or “kitsch” to describe Holocaust folk art. By exploring how and why Holocaust-related folk (naive) art from Poland transgresses accepted norms of Holocaust representation, the author reveals how these critical concepts darkly mirror society’s perceived violation of shared standards; how “obscenity” transgresses moral norms, “perversion”—sexual conventions, and “kitsch”—aesthetic expectations. Consequently, viewers may easily interpret folk art’s departure from the mainstream visual language of the Holocaust as a distortion or corruption of memory. The author, however, argues that it is more productive and illuminating to understand this kind of art as a unique, vernacular commemorative format that challenges dominant epistemologies in Holocaust studies and Holocaust representation

Aesthetics · Art · Decorum · Kitsch · Literature · Perversion · Political science · Psychoanalysis · The Holocaust · Vernacular · Linguistic research and analysis · Psychology · Swearing, Euphemism, Multilingualism · Translation Studies and Practices · Law