Artists Seeking Their Inner Nazi

[Dave Monroe]

>From Edward Rothstein, "Artists Seeking Their Inner
Nazi," Saturday, February 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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/02/arts/design/02CONN.html



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