How shall we appreciate this work? In what ways does it interrupt our conventional practices of seeing?
This photograph, along with other works in the "Mirroring Evil" exhibition, were subjected to extensive discussion in the pages of the NYTimes, as shown below.
Alan Schechner
http://www.dottycommies.com/artists/schechner/real1.htm
Artists Seeking Their Inner Nazi
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, NYTimes, Feb. 2, 2002
During the last few decades, a great battle has been raging. It has been fought in the academy, in museums, in popular culture and in Jewish communities. The battle is over how the Holocaust (or in Hebrew, the Shoah), the Nazi murder of six million Jews, is to be understood.
The oppositions are best stated starkly. On the one hand, the Holocaust is seen as a unique event, defying comparison. The villains are considered transcendentally evil, barely human. The Holocaust remains so beyond understanding that it seems to possess a sacred quality. Analogies are to be shunned.
On the other hand, the Holocaust is seen as one horrific event among others, an example of how racism and injustice have left millions in unmarked graves. Its villains are no different from any other people who are capable if not culpable of such crimes. Analogies are to be welcomed.
The longest-running example of this debate has been over Anne Frank's diary. Its Jewish themes were diluted by her father and by dramatizations in the 1950's. Those efforts are echoed in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, where the almost overwhelming effect of seeing the rooms precisely as she described them is muted by attempts to treat Anne's fate as a single example of worldwide violence and injustice. The Holocaust is not minimized, but its Judaic aspect is.
This kind of interpretation, in which the Holocaust is used as an analogy, has also become more powerful in recent years, affecting how the Holocaust is studied in schools and invoked in political arguments. In "The Holocaust in American Life" (Houghton Mifflin, 1999) the historian Peter Novick defended this view, arguing that a "perverse sacralization" of the Holocaust had taken place; he found it "deeply offensive" that the Holocaust had been regarded as a unique, Jewish event.
Now another salvo in these battles has begun with a more peculiar attack on the sacral view of the Holocaust. It consists of an exhibition called "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," opening in March at the Jewish Museum in New York. The catalog has just been published; its contributors include Norman L. Kleeblatt, the exhibition's curator, along with scholars of Jewish studies, art history and comparative literature.
Some works have already inspired controversy: boxes showing crematoriums and concentration camps constructed of Lego blocks; a photograph of Buchenwald altered to include the artist, Alan Schechner, holding a glowing can of Coke (viewable at www.dottycommies.com) and a death camp complete with a Prada logo. No sacralization here.
These works, though, may not be alone in courting scandal. According to the catalog, the exhibition itself is meant to be "transgressive." But aside from violating pieties by turning instruments of murder into toys, what sort of transgressions might take place?
The catalog repeatedly suggests that the exhibition's intent is to make the viewer adopt the perspective of perpetrators, not victims. The victims' perspective offers a comforting sense of moral superiority. But such comfort is no longer available, several contributors stress, if the exhibition establishes a resemblance between viewers and perpetrators. Ernst van Alphen, a professor at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, proposes that the Lego boxes, for example, cause visitors "to envision the possibility of building their own concentration camps."
Of course, the Lego boxes don't do anything like that; a viewer doesn't imagine playing "death camp" games with children. The point of this analysis — and perhaps of the work itself — is the assertion that we might really build these camps, that we really do resemble the perpetrators. The Israeli scholar Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi argues that this exhibition is "self- indicting." And Mr. Kleeblatt says that these works "force us into morally ambiguous territory." He argues that such art is meant "to mirror moral and ethical issues that resonate in contemporary society."
But what sorts of issues? The most obvious ones involve what Lisa Saltzman, a professor at Bryn Mawr College, calls our "media-saturated, commerce-driven world." Many of these artworks are meant to attack what the catalog calls the "commodification" of the Holocaust — the ways in which it has been distorted by commerce. Hence the preoccupations with logos as well as Lego's. This attack is not entirely unjustified; the Holocaust has inspired fetishistic products like Lucite-embedded railway spikes from Treblinka. As one quip puts it, "There is no business like Shoah business."
But according to the catalog, the point isn't to undo commercial distortions; the point is to show that they are exploitative and manipulative and not unlike the activities of the perpetrators themselves. Mr. Schechner's Coke can in Buchenwald, Mr. Kleeblatt writes, reveals "parallels between brainwashing tactics of the Nazis and commodification."
And if the parallels can be made with commerce, why not elsewhere? Ms. Ezrahi, for one, notes how often in artworks Israelis have compared themselves to Nazis — a self-indictment she does not dismiss. Mr. Schechner has blamed Israelis for using Holocaust imagery to justify their conflict with the Palestinians. (There are no mentions of what comparisons are used by Palestinians.)
So overall, the catalog presents an extraordinarily tendentious perspective. It takes an extreme view of the Holocaust debates. Analogies are profligate. It asserts not only that the Holocaust is not unique, but also that in our capitalist, bourgeois world we are, all of us, potential and actual perpetrators.
Oddly, though, the recoil and outrage that are bound to be inspired by these "transgressions" may also have the opposite effect. The Lego set, the Coke can and the Prada death camp may show not that we are like the perpetrators, but that we are not. Whatever our moral flaws, we play with toys and invent ornate aesthetic theories; we do not play with extermination camps. The exhibition may actually show that there are indeed some distinctions worth making, that it is not just "Shoah biz" that can be vulgar, and that there are times when a sense of moral ambiguity can really be moral blindness.
A Curator Defends His Show Exploring Nazi Imagery
By SARAH BOXER, NYTimes, February 6, 2002, NYTimes
Ruby Washington/The New York Times
Norman L. Kleeblatt, curator of "Mirroring Evil" at the Jewish Museum, says, "We have a duty to show new ideas."
Norman L. Kleeblatt, the Susan and Elihu Rose curator of fine arts at the Jewish Museum in New York, is drawn to controversy as a moth to a flame — and almost as innocently.During his tenure Mr. Kleeblatt has organized two of the Jewish Museum's most controversial exhibitions. He put together "Too Jewish: Challenging Traditional Identities," which included hand towels with the monogram JEW and ironic displays of Semitic noses. He was also the curator of "The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice," which included what he called "Anti-Semitica." Mr. Kleeblatt is always looking for new attitudes, approaches, techniques and imagery, or, as he put it, "My antennae are open."
Now the moth is getting his antennae singed again, and he seems strangely perplexed. More than a month before the March 17 opening of his new exhibition, "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," and long before anyone has even seen any of the pieces in the show, the ink is flowing: The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News, Newsweek and The New York Times have all mentioned the exhibition in conjunction with "Sensation," the Brooklyn Museum of Art show that former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani tried to shut down in 1999.
Mr. Kleeblatt has an odd take on this. The problem, he said, is that at this point "the works are shown only in reproduction" in the catalog. And that is the worst way to see installation art and sculpture, which many of this exhibition's works are, he noted. These pieces are big and confrontational. They are meant to engage the viewer, to raise questions. They are incomplete without the viewer in the gallery.
So of course there are misunderstandings. For example, one newspaper implied that the show would include a Lego model of Auschwitz, when in fact, Mr. Kleeblatt said, "there is no Lego model in the exhibition." But there is a work titled "Lego Concentration Camp Set," which is seven empty Lego-like boxes whose covers show pictures of model death camps that the artist Zbigniew Libera made with Lego blocks. Mr. Libera, Mr. Kleeblatt explained, has "some Jewish blood in his family," and his work is influenced by the theories of the French philosopher Michel Foucault.
Or take Alan Schechner's piece, "It's the Real Thing — Self-Portrait at Buchenwald." In the catalog the work appears to be a photograph of Mr. Schechner hoisting a can of Diet Coke while concentration camp inmates look on. It is not, strictly speaking, a photograph, Mr. Kleeblatt stressed, but rather a Web-based piece of art.
"It is a moving work," Mr. Kleeblatt said, especially if you know the context: the artist lost relatives in the Holocaust. "That photograph of the liberation is part of his history," he added. "He wanted to see what it would be like to be in that space. He is collapsing historical distance."
But should one build a show that demands so much context? Shouldn't the work speak for itself?
This exhibition has only a dozen and a half pieces by 13 artists from 8 countries. And already the objects are being swamped by words. There are 20 catalog essays. The exhibition will include a video in which the artists speak about their work. The museum has issued a two-page bulletin about it, "Key Distinctions between `Mirroring Evil' and `Sensation.' " And then there will be the usual panel discussions, lectures, public dialogues, forums and films.
Mr. Kleeblatt, who is the child of German Jewish refugees and whose paternal grandparents and maternal great-grandparents as well as uncles, aunts and cousins died in the Holocaust, said, "I wish I could say that's why I'm doing this show."
"I grew up in a home where I realized that society can turn on you," he continued. "Maybe that is why I am so vigilant about asking questions."
But that was not the impetus for the show. A few years ago, he said, he noticed "the changing face of what we call Holocaust art."
There was, he said, "a certain group of works that incorporate Nazi imagery" and that focus attention for the first time on the perpetrators rather than the victims.
The first piece Mr. Kleeblatt encountered was the Auschwitz Lego by Mr. Libera. In 1996 "it came across my desk," he said. "It was offered for sale by a private dealer representing the artist." Mr. Kleeblatt presented it to the acquisitions committee of the Jewish Museum. "There was an animated discussion, even debate," he said. But in the end the committee members recognized it "as a work of art," he said, and as an educational tool. The museum bought it in 1997.
"It changed the nature of questions about the Holocaust," Mr. Kleeblatt said. With the Auschwitz Lego, he added, "we are confronted with something we have great affection for: Lego."
People see that "we can take the same building blocks that we can use to make houses, resorts and shopping centers and construct extermination camps with them," he continued. It raises the issue, he observed, "of how the Nazis perverted the most human instincts — for shelter, family and beauty."
Soon after the museum acquired the Lego, other works started drifting in. In the late 1990's, Mr. Kleeblatt said, "we noticed similar aesthetic structures" in literature, theater and the movies. There was Bernhard Schlink's novel "The Reader" and Harold Pinter's play "Ashes to Ashes." "Happiness" and "Storytelling," films by Todd Solondz, traversed some of the same territory, Mr. Kleeblatt noted. The viewer, pushed into having all the wrong reactions, is implicated in the work.
These works were raising "tough questions about the images that have become icons of the Holocaust," Mr. Kleeblatt said. But having an exhibition on such pieces did not occur to him until after he went to "Icon, Image and Text in Modern Jewish Culture," a conference at Princeton University. Mr. Kleeblatt recalled thinking, "This is really a new way the Holocaust is being discussed."
The art was already out there, he said. And maybe that was a good enough reason for the Jewish Museum to show it: to tell people that such works are being made and to put them in context.
But what about the reasons for not putting on such a show? "We met with a number of people who thought that it's tough work," Mr. Kleeblatt said, skirting the question. They included educators, clergy members and artists. "We talked about the fact that the work is powerful, that it needed to be contextualized, mediated," he added. "We worked for a year to create a serious, thoughtful context."
And the verdict was that the Jewish Museum was "the perfect place to show it," Mr. Kleeblatt said.
"We have a duty to show new ideas and concerns about the Holocaust," Mr. Kleeblatt said. "We know how to frame the questions in a serious way."
The museum has had other tough exhibitions: not only "Too Jewish" and "The Dreyfus Affair," but also "Bridges and Boundaries," about the relationship between Jews and blacks. If material like this is going to be shown, then "we can contextualize it," Mr. Kleeblatt said. "What's important is that we're really scrutinizing the material, poring over the questions that this art asks or begs."
What questions? Mr. Kleeblatt listed five: "How has popular culture represented Nazi evil? How can the mundane be made dangerous and the dangerous mundane? Who can speak about the Holocaust? How has art helped to break the silence about the Holocaust? And what are the limits of irreverence?"
It turns out that the Lego piece is the least of it. There is, for example, Tom Sachs's "Giftgas Giftset," canisters of supposedly poison gas with labels bearing the names and logos of Chanel, Hermès and Tiffany & Company. When asked which piece in "Mirroring Evil" most bothered Mr. Kleeblatt personally, he said: "I can't choose one." Each "elicited a powerful emotional response," he said. "I might say that there was not a piece that didn't."
Each viewer is offended or touched by different pieces. Take Mischa Kuball's "Hitler's Cabinet," which consists of a large plywood cross. From the end of each wooden beam, lighted projections of German film stills are cast onto the floor, creating the overall image of a swastika. "One person wasn't happy with that," Mr. Kleeblatt said. But one Holocaust survivor looked at Alain Séchas's piece "Enfants Gâtés" ("Spoiled Children") — a series of small white cat figurines with Hitler mustaches that sit in playpens, each holding a swastika in its paw — and identified with the kitten.
"She thought the kitten represented the loneliness of children in captivity," Mr. Kleeblatt recalled.
Certain works were rejected for the show not because they were offensive but because "they didn't fit with the theme," or "they didn't make the point," Mr. Kleeblatt said. He explained that he wanted all the works to engage the viewer directly and that he wanted to "to keep it to a certain age bracket." He chose artists 30 to 40 years old, the second or third generation after the Holocaust.
That is why, for example, he chose not to include David Levinthal's photographs of toy Nazi soldiers that include one Nazi throwing a victim into an oven. "He was the first person I went to," Mr. Kleeblatt said, but Mr. Levinthal was older than the oldest of these new artists. So was Shimon Attie, who projects ghostlike prewar images of Jews on buildings in Germany, and Art Spiegelman, the author of "Maus," a novel of the Holocaust in comic-book form.
This exhibition will also leave out Boris Lurie's "Saturation Paintings," in which sexually suggestive photographs are mixed with pictures of concentration camps, and Anselm Kiefer's picture of himself giving a "Heil, Hitler" salute under a piece of public sculpture in Cologne. They are simply too old.
Not one of the artists in "Mirroring Evil" experienced the Holocaust directly, and this is significant, Mr. Kleeblatt said. "We have come to a point where fewer survivors are around," he observed, and where more and more of the information about the Holocaust is "gleaned from popular culture," he added. This new generation "learned the lessons of the Holocaust," Mr. Kleeblatt said, not in school and not from their parents but from cartoons and films.
Piotr Uklanski, represented in the show by "The Nazis," an installation of old film stills of Hollywood stars playing Nazis, had a grandfather who fought on the German side in World War II. But he "learned about the Holocaust from cartoons on Polish television in the 1970's," Mr. Kleeblatt said. This is very different from someone like Mr. Lurie, a Buchenwald survivor himself.
The central question the new generation asks is: "Where am I getting my information?" These young artists are "vigilant about popular culture and how we encounter imagery," Mr. Kleeblatt explained. They are interested in representations of reality. They want to know why, for example, the Nazis in movies look so glamorous.
The artists may be vigilant about the images that have shaped them, but how vigilant can they be about the effects of their own imagery? And how vigilant can a curator really be? Indeed, how can anyone tell the difference between the work of a real Nazi sympathizer and a hip contemporary artist playing with the fire of popular culture?
"I wouldn't show any neo-Nazi works," Mr. Kleeblatt said, recoiling as if singed by a flame. "I am responsible."
March 2, 2002, NYTimes
Jewish Museum to Add Warning Label on Its Show
By BARBARA STEWART
"Lego Concentration Camp Set," by Zbigniew Libera, will be among the artworks behind the warning sign at "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," an exhibition that will open March 17 at the Jewish Museum.
aced with a storm of criticism of a coming exhibition with Nazi themes, the Jewish Museum said yesterday that it had a plan intended to satisfy Holocaust survivors who have objected to some of the works without alienating ardent supporters of provocative new art.The plan? Keep the handful of pieces that thoroughly offend Holocaust survivors, but plant a big warning sign in front of them. Cut a new doorway so visitors who might be offended can slip out of the exhibition — and the museum altogether — before catching sight of them.
According to a museum spokeswoman, the sign will say, "Some Holocaust survivors have been disturbed by these works."
The spokeswoman, Anne J. Scher, said: "That gives people information so they can decide. If you decide to walk out, you'll turn toward the exit and you won't see them at all."
The exhibition, "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," does not open until March 17, and few of its supporters or detractors have seen any of the works.
But it has already created the kind of uproar not seen in New York since 1999, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art displayed a Madonna with a dollop of shellacked elephant dung, provoking Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to threaten the museum's funding and create a decency panel.
The curator, Norman L. Kleeblatt, has said the exhibition was intended to raise tough questions about commercialization and images that have become icons of the Holocaust. The artworks behind the sign will be those that have drawn the most objections: "Giftgas Giftset," by Tom Sachs, which features colorful poison gas canisters with Tiffany, Chanel and Prada logos, Zbigniew Libera's "Lego Concentration Camp Set," and Alan Schechner's "It's the Real Thing: Self-Portrait at Buchenwald," in which the artist holds a Diet Coke.
The museum's gesture yesterday failed to placate the group of Holocaust survivors that objected to the works at a long and emotional meeting on Wednesday.
"It's moving anthrax from one part of a building to another," said Menachem Rosensaft, a lawyer and founder of the International Network of Children of Holocaust Survivors. "For Holocaust survivors, it's not less morally repugnant because people are warned. What's objectionable is that they're in the Jewish Museum at all."
Other museums have gone down this path, and some have not minded the publicity. Jewish Museum officials knew "Mirroring Evil" would cause a stir, but they say they were unprepared for the fierce objections so early and they reject any suggestion that the controversy is a ploy to draw more visitors. In any event, no advance tickets are for sale.
Warning signs have become an increasingly common solution in cases like this. Exhibitions with sexually explicit works routinely carry them, and even "Sensation," the Brooklyn Museum show with the Madonna, carried a large warning sign, though that seemed intended to pique curiosity more than anything.
So it was no surprise, perhaps, that museum professionals — who often must balance artistic freedom with the desire to avoid upsetting visitors and donors — praised the Jewish Museum's decision to put up a sign. "Solomonic," said Randall Bour scheidt, president of the nonprofit Alliance for the Arts. "A wise compromise, showing sensitivity and carefulness."
An unpaid consultant to the exhibition, Eva Fogelman, a psychologist who is a child of a Holocaust survivor, agreed: "This is like putting `PG' on a film, an acknowledgement that for some, the work is too enraging and trivializing."
A few of the Holocaust survivors agreed that a sign was better than nothing. Sarah Lefkowits, 68, who spent five years in concentration camps, gave the Jewish Museum credit.
"It's better than having them where everyone is going to see them," she said. But, she said, irreverent works like these "won't show the horror," adding, "What is the next generation going to make of the Holocaust if they don't see the horror?"
The survivors' fiercest ire is reserved for Mr. Schechner's self-portrait, in which the artist superimposed an image of himself with a shimmering Diet Coke can onto a famous portrait of emaciated Buchenwald prisoners in their bunks. Mr. Schechner has written that the piece evokes himself, as a well-fed young man, trying unsuccessfully to imagine himself in a concentration camp.
Rabbi Zev Friedman, dean of the Rambam Mesivta, a high school in Lawrence, N.Y., said the image was so offensive that his students planned a protest at the museum next week.
"First of all," he said, "there wasn't any Diet Coke at Buchenwald. There wasn't even any water. This trivializes the Holocaust. These things shouldn't be exhibited — especially at the Jewish Museum."
March 15, 2002, NYTimes
Appropriating the HolocaustBy WALTER REICH
fter months of defending itself against heated protests that an exhibition it was preparing would offend Holocaust survivors, New York's Jewish Museum will finally open "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" to the public this Sunday.
Some works will indeed offend some survivors, who will see them as trivializing Nazi evil or Jewish suffering. Other works, however, won't. More important, the protests have been, in crucial ways, misdirected.
The worst trivialization and distortion of the Holocaust comes not from the Jewish Museum, which in this exhibition attempts to examine portrayals of Nazis and the Holocaust, but from other sources like movies that present false renderings of Holocaust history, as well as governments and interest groups that invoke Holocaust symbols to advance their own agendas. It's these sources, more than the exhibit, that deserve the most vigorous and urgent criticism.
That Holocaust imagery has permeated everyday life shouldn't surprise us. The Holocaust was, after all, a thing of terror and dread, a new definition of evil, a rupture in human experience. Nothing like it had happened before, and nothing was the same afterward. It took decades for that to be fully recognized. Once recognized, though, how could that rupture not become a touchstone of much of what we think, say and do?
The experience of the Holocaust adds a dimension to how we see ourselves, others, nations, technology, intent. We now understand that what seems innocent could be transformed into tools of exterminationist death. After Auschwitz, how could uniforms, bureaucrats, chimneys and railroad tracks ever seem fully free of sinister potential?
Small wonder, then, that Holocaust themes are, consciously and unconsciously, being incorporated into the experiences, activities, products and reflections of life at every level — in movies, television, novels, religion, government, diplomacy, language, dreams, nightmares and art.
The Jewish Museum's exhibition, "Mirroring Evil," doesn't portray the Holocaust itself. Instead it attempts to highlight and present reflections on this process of incorporation — a task that can certainly seem trivializing to survivors, regardless of whether the art is good or bad.
One of the works that examines this process shows head shots of movie stars who've played Nazi officers. Up there on the wall they're a rugged, handsome lot created by the machinery of moviemaking. Other works comment on Nazi themes. Some do it successfully. One, for example, shows Nazis in a Berlin bunker who have died of self-administered doses of cyanide and whose traditionally powerful images are transformed into dissolute ones. A less successful comment is a work that brings the viewer into Hitler's bunker in the last moments of the war, imagines Eva Braun's sex act with Hitler, and presents a fanciful and sentimental narrative of her mental life.
Some of the works seem puerile, as if their only intent is to leach meaning from the Holocaust symbols they use. An introductory text in the exhibition asserts that the artists "use images of the Nazi era to explore the nature of evil, including evil as we may experience it today." But some works don't seem to go beyond exploitation.
In one cardboard sculpture, for example, Tom Sachs presents a schematic construction of Auschwitz laid out on a flattened Prada hatbox. In another he presents a gift box containing three canisters of poison gas bearing the designer logos of Chanel, Hermès and Tiffany.
The exhibition text tells us that Mr. Sachs "draws us toward something appalling by appealing to our love of consumer goods." But is he really using fashion to make a statement about the Holocaust? Not according to Mr. Sachs. He told an interviewer for The New York Times Magazine: "I'm using the iconography of the Holocaust to bring attention to fashion. Fashion, like fascism, is about loss of identity." And he added: "My agenda isn't about making a point about the Holocaust. I don't think any of the artists in the show are trying to make a point about the Holocaust."
That comment brings home the reality that he and perhaps some of his colleagues are not commenting on how Holocaust images have become incorporated into our culture, but instead have appropriated those images for their own purposes. It's not surprising that some survivors are offended by the use of a gas chamber to make a comment about fashion.
But as offensive as some of these works may be to survivors, they don't commit the greater offense of distorting our generation's understanding of what the Holocaust actually was. That understanding is diminished when interest groups try to use Holocaust imagery to convey the seriousness of their cause and when governments use that imagery to pursue political or military goals.
In the popular culture, historical distortion is caused with increasing frequency by misleading movies. The Academy Award-winning "Life Is Beautiful," for example, left many in its vast audience with the impression that concentration camps were clean, that children played games in them, and that prisoners were well fed. That film's director and leading actor, Roberto Benigni, considered it to be a fable that taught the lesson of fatherly love. But, in the way it presented the Holocaust, "Life Is Beautiful" was, in fact, an overwhelming lie. And, because it was seen by millions, it did serious harm to the preservation of real memories and real history.
It's that kind of lie that is a true offense against survivors and against future generations that must learn from the Holocaust's history. And it's that kind of lie, much more than the works in the exhibition at the Jewish Museum, that deserves the most vigilant protest.
Walter Reich is professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University and a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He was the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum from 1995 to 1998.
March 15, 2002, NYTimes
ART REVIEW | 'MIRRORING EVIL'
Evil, the Nazis and Shock Value
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
AS usual in the art wars, the show that has caused months of debate before it opened turns out to have too much trivial art and too many extravagant excuses for why that is the case. "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," which starts Sunday at the Jewish Museum, is dominated by the sort of dry, cool, Conceptual art that a vocal part of the contemporary art world invariably congratulates itself for finding endlessly fascinating. But it is art that leaves much of the public feeling confused, excluded and finally bored, if not pained and offended, which is of course the point.Are you put off by sculptures of Dr. Josef Mengele and a cardboard death camp made out of a Prada hat box? Well, perhaps you don't appreciate how the Mengele sculptures elaborate on 60's Minimalism and Process art or how the death camp is a form of bricolage.
Perhaps you fail to see how your pain and confusion are really a sign of the art's success. In a world inundated by commercial images that anesthetize us and replace truth with fiction, art that causes you pain returns your attention to what is real. A Lego death camp seems to make light of genocide? You miss the quality of its concept that in life the same building blocks can be turned toward good or evil. You never realized that, did you?
And previously you weren't able to distinguish between a Calvin Klein television commercial and a Leni Riefenstahl Nazi propaganda film. But now that we have a video in this exhibition to show how closely related they are in the use of certain sexy visual cues and devices, you will be more circumspect when you next shop for underwear. Now you know that your innate attraction to these kinds of images is a dire warning of the fine line between being enticed to buy expensive lingerie and being persuaded to go along with state-sponsored mass murder.
Feel better now?
I am being grumpy partly, I suppose, because of the anguished e-mail messages from Holocaust survivors and their relatives who tell me how stunned they are that the Jewish Museum would present Tom Sachs (of the Prada death camp). Mr. Sachs, who said in an article in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday that he found the engineering of the death camps "amazing," also said that he was using the iconography of the Holocaust to bring attention to fashion.
"Fashion, like fascism, is about loss of identity," he explained to Deborah Solomon. "Fashion is good when it helps you to look sexy, but it's bad when it makes you feel stupid or fat because you don't have a Gucci dog bowl and your best friend has one." In Mr. Sachs's world, apparently, "if you want to meet everyone you have known in your whole life, you go to the new Prada store in downtown Manhattan." The irony, if that's what it was, was lost on the survivors.
Then I talked to Norman L. Kleeblatt, the show's curator, who seemed to me to be trying hard to look blasé while he demurred that some artists are more articulate than others. This is true. Wandering around the galleries, I next passed Rudolf Herz, another artist, who stopped me to describe his work. It is a room he has papered with alternating photographs of Hitler and Marcel Duchamp, portrait heads that happened to have been taken, years apart, by the same photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Mr. Herz seems to find this coincidence fascinating. The photographs are arranged on the walls in a checkerboard pattern. (Chessboard is more apt, considering Duchamp's obsession with chess, a kind of inside joke Mr. Herz enjoys, having titled the work "Zugzwang," which is a term for a chess position where any move loses.)
Mr. Herz described the work as a comment on modern art: Hitler, the failed artist who banned what he considered to be degenerate modernism, and Duchamp, the ultimate avant-gardist. Mr. Herz cheerfully spoke to me about invading the white cube of the gallery and how the two photographs arranged in the room as a grid revealed the political tensions inherent in the supposedly pure spaces of the museum and in abstraction.
He then handed me a brochure. The work, it explained, "asks about the relationship between national trauma and the understanding of images." It "shows portraits of Hitler and Duchamp," he said, adding: "Not Hitler and Duchamp themselves, even if this is often implied casually. The portraits of Hitler and Duchamp have more in common with each other for the simple reason that they are both pictures, than a picture ever has with the person depicted. This sounds sophisticated but it is exactly the point."
The unsophisticated German media evidently failed to grasp this point before a closely related work by Mr. Herz was to be shown in Berlin, and the show there was canceled. "The showing of pictures of Hitler was seen as the thoughtless breaking of a taboo," the brochure continues, while "these very same pictures are reproduced regularly and uncritically in historical programs on television and in the press in general."
I thought Mr. Herz was charming and he had a point. These pictures are indeed reproduced elsewhere without protest. But I doubt that his explanation, although certainly more articulate than Mr. Sachs's, will mollify people who see his use of Hitler simply as further exploitation, notwithstanding the elaborate packaging as a commentary on the power of photography and the sanctity of museums.
Shall we dispense with false controversy? Unlike "Sensation" a couple of years ago, this show has provoked no calls for withholding public money from the presenting museum. Some unhappy people, including survivors, pleaded with the museum to cancel the show before it opened or at least to withhold some works from it, but there was no First Amendment debate.
Even the most outspoken detractors of the exhibition have made clear that artists can do and say what they wish, no matter how stupid or unpleasant that may be; that art has no moral obligation; that no one, including survivors, has sole authority to speak about the Holocaust. Boycotting the exhibition, as some detractors said they planned to do, is just an expression of free speech. The show is taking place. People can choose to see it or not.
So the issue is not whether the museum can do the show, but whether it has taken minor art, elevated it to the status of significance by exhibiting it, thereby provoking an inevitable reaction, then defended its action as part of its responsibility to show significant art, even if it is offensive to some Jews.
By way of implying at the same time that there is really nothing outlandish about the exhibition — so why the fuss? — Mr. Klee blatt emphasized to me that similar shows had lately taken place in art galleries around town without much comment and, anyway, that contemporary artists have been putting Nazis in art for years. That's right, but museums, unlike art galleries, attract a broad public on the basis of a relationship of mutual respect.
There's the rub. The art world, or the part of it occupied by many of the artists in this show, turns out to be restrictive and distrustful of the public in ways that, for example, the vastly larger, supposedly crasser and more manipulative world of pop culture is not. One of the artists in the exhibition has collected film stills and publicity photos from movies that show handsome actors playing Nazis, to demonstrate that Hollywood glamorizes evil, as if every thinking person in the world didn't already take for granted that Hollywood is not real life.
In pop culture almost anything is allowed because the masses are tacitly presumed to have the independence to distinguish between "Hogan's Heroes" or "The Producers" and actual Nazis. In the art world it is considered necessary to instruct us. The catalog for "Mirroring Evil" is constantly insisting that the art "compels" and "forces" us to feel one thing or another. Should we refuse, we are of course reactionary, close-minded, obtuse. "If we dare engage in their discomfiting art, we are forced to confront the very process of moral and ethical decision making," Mr. Kleeblatt writes about the artists in his show.
Really? Are we obliged?
Even the title seems to tell us what we're supposed to think. "Mirroring" evil, as opposed to depicting evil, implies that we are all capable of evil, that we might all share in the crimes of the Nazis, whether we are perfume advertisers or Holocaust survivors or actors or housewives, which leads to an unasked question: so who are we to point fingers at Hitler? I don't think for a second that the museum meant to excuse Nazism, but I do think there was an unconscious condescension at work, and it doesn't surprise me to find that several works in the show use the metaphor of childhood. They imply that we all have a childlike vulnerability to brainwashing and propaganda.
Some of the works in the show are better than others. A very brief video by Boaz Arad, combining clips of Hitler speeches that make him say in Hebrew, "Greetings, Jerusalem, I am deeply sorry," is haunting. One of those childhood-inspired works, Alain Séchas's sculptures of Mauslike pets with Hitler mustaches in little cribs, lined up and multiplied by mirrors on the walls, stuck in my mind maybe because it seemed more ambiguous, and also vulnerable, than much of what was on view.
And Roee Rosen's "Live and Die as Eva Braun," a text accompanied by black-and- white drawings with deckled edges mimicking German children's illustrations or 19th- century German paintings, asks us to assume the role of Hitler's lover, discomfortingly. It entails a novelistic imagination and psychological ambition that exceeds everything else in the show.
What are the limits of irreverence? the catalog asks. Obviously there are none. The 13 artists in this show, European, Israeli and American, some Jewish, are in their 30's and 40's, so they have a secondhand or thirdhand relationship to the war, partly achieved through popular culture. That is what this art is about. It is about games, movies and fantasy. It is about living at a remove from history, raising as a question how mass murder and mass murderers in just half a century could become the iconography of Conceptual provocations, snappy videos and other art diversions. The image of one of the artists holding a Diet Coke superimposed on a photograph of malnourished inmates at Buchenwald and paired with a striped product barcode, as if to echo the stripes on the inmate uniforms, has provoked much outrage. It is justified by the museum as a commentary by a young Jewish artist about the distance he feels from the Holocaust generation.
Really it's just another twist on Duchamp's painted mustache on the "Mona Lisa," a work of mischievous irreverence, nothing original, with the psychological ante upped by connection with Hitler. The strong reaction to it inflates its value. The strange ritual of the art wars, which exhibitions like this always provoke, is to treat as significant what hardly deserves our attention in the first place.
