Fallen Leaves

The piece "Fallen Leaves" by Menashe Kadishman at the Jewish Museum is hands down the most effective and moving piece of commemorative art I have ever encountered. I felt that there were two perspectives in the work that mimic the dual perspectives one can have regarding the Holocaust. There is the wider perspective that you get when you approach the piece and stand in front of the sea of 10,000 faces, a perspective that provides us with a kind of emotional removal, considering the whole of the event instead of the individual parts. Then there is the perspective you get once you enter the piece and begin to decipher the individual faces that make up this tremendous work. You notice that no two faces seem to be the same, and smaller faces, faces that you could fit in the palm of your hand, seem to leap out from the masses. Though it is the intention of the piece to be interacted with, walked upon, the feeling of those faces shifting under my shoes, clanking together with loud metallic sounds, made me feel somewhat irreverent, as if I was walking upon actual mounds of human remains. Often, with any tragic event that claims the lives of many, we find it easier to discuss the event from a holistic perspective. It removes the personal, it hides the individual lives that were lost under a statistical number, a manageable figure that we can make sense of but never fully comprehend. Looking out over the mass of individually created faces, stepping across those 10,000 faces and looking down to see the subtle differences in each, I was met with the full scale of the atrocity, the loss of not a group of 10,000 people, but 10,000 individuals.

http://www.jmberlin.de/main/EN/01-Exhibitions/04-installations.php