The following thought experiment was inspired, or provoked, by this year’s art scandale, the “Mirroring Evil” exhibit that opened at the Jewish Museum in March; and in particular by Roee Rosen’s installation, which invites us to imagine that we are Eva Braun having a last night of sex with Adolf Hitler:
Imagine that the exhibit contains no actual art works, a fact that is carefully concealed from the public and the press. The catalogue, issued in advance, describes the supposed works and includes supposed photographs of some items. It announces the intentions of the show–to demystify and appropriate rather than memorialize the Holocaust, to probe the appeal of the oppressors rather than the suffering of the victims. It discusses at length, in a series of essays by curators and academics, the questions and reflections the exhibit means to prompt. (From the Foreword: “As offensive as such work may seem on the surface… is it the Nazi imagery itself that offends, or the artists’ aesthetic manipulation of such imagery? Does such art become the victim of the imagery it depicts? Or does it actually tap into and thereby exploit the repugnant power of Nazi imagery as a way merely to shock and move its viewers? Or is it both…?”)
Predictably, the catalogue attracts a double whammy of outrage, from the culture warriors who never miss a chance to heap contempt on what has come to be called (in various inflections ranging from total earnestness to dripping sarcasm) “transgressive” art, and from the keepers of the flame who see all representations of the Holocaust as guilty until proven innocent. It also inspires, or provokes, a New York Observer article by Ron (Explaining Hitler) Rosenbaum lamenting that the work, which he has not yet had a chance to see, has already been “contextualized” to death by the essayists. They have, he argues, “done the art and the artists a serious disservice, imposing on the work a naïve, one-dimensional, postmodern point of view… that frames it in a single rigid lens that substitutes a simplistic moral relativism for real engagement with the issues.”
Arriving at the museum on the exhibit’s opening day, visitors encounter a further barrage of verbiage explaining what we are about to see and how we ought to look at it (“This art is cautionary… It warns us not to take for granted the symbols of oppression that pervade our outlets of news and entertainment. It conveys wariness about techniques of persuasion, including those we encounter in the marketplace” etc., etc.). Having run this gauntlet, we approach the first gallery. It consists of a large empty space with white walls. Disoriented, we at first think we’re in the wrong place, but another large explanatory placard reassures us: the catalogue, and the debate generated by it, are the real point. Any actual images would simply narrow the range of thoughts and feelings the debate has elicited. Nazism is above all a state of mind that cannot be attached to any object. We move on to a second room, whose entrance has a warning sign: “The contents of this room may be offensive to Holocaust survivors.” This room is also empty, but is surrounded on three sides with wall-to-ceiling mirrors. The fourth wall contains an elaborate explanation of what the mirrors are supposed to signify.
To save time and avoid insulting the reader’s intelligence I will pass over this explanation and move on to the third and final room, in which we can watch a video of the artists who supplied the descriptions and photographs of their “work” for the catalogue, along with curators, art critics, and Holocaust survivors, discussing the show and its import. Finally, in the museum gift shop visitors can buy miniature bottles of Chanel perfume in the shape of zyklon canisters (inspired by one of Tom Sachs’s “works”). LEGO blocks for building replicas of Auschwitz were considered (after Zbigniew Libera’s imagined LEGO “concentration camp set” boxes) but were deemed too expensive to produce. The idea is not, as an extensive wall placard explains, to make money by selling these disturbing objects (all profits are to go to a fund benefiting survivors and their families) but to force people to contemplate the dark attractions of a commodified society through the actual act of buying or resisting the temptation to buy.
My point, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is that the work displayed in “Mirroring Evil” is almost incidental to the issues raised by the show. (For the record, the catalogue and entrance-wall copy quoted, as well as the debriefing video, actually exist. The wall-to-ceiling mirrors and souvenir canisters ought to exist.) Ron Rosenbaum’s generous hopes notwithstanding, the exhibit does not, by and large, transcend the limitations of its relentless preemptive commentary. What we have here is not critics and theorists projecting their half-baked ideas onto hapless artists but something more akin to a group of people who have organized a party and are determined to have a great time even though the guest of honor has failed to show up. The sheer volume of commentary–which extends to posted explanations for every piece; nothing is allowed to speak for itself–is no doubt defensive, prompted by anticipation of the inevitable outcry; but it would also seem to reflect intuitive abhorrence of a vacuum.
The conceit of conceptual art is that it makes aesthetic (or anti-aesthetic) experience of ideas. This means, on the one hand, that it eschews the aura of the transcendent, autonomous art object; and on the other that–since it’s art, not argument–it need not supply evidence for its ideas, or come to any particular conclusions. Rather, its effect depends on the force and resonance and multidimensionality of its conceptions; it must be productive of thought, yet ultimately mysterious, more than the sum of its statements. When a piece of conceptual art is banal or reductive it is not only bad art, like an image that purports to be beautiful but is merely pretty; it also becomes dishonest, hiding behind its aesthetic pretensions (who me? I’m an artist; I’m supposed to raise questions, not answer them) to avoid responsibility for its (inflammatory? impoverished?) intellectual claims.
What are the ideas that govern “Mirroring Evil”? A number of pieces let us in on one or another version of the big news that fascism has aesthetic, even erotic appeal; that it has been glamorized in movies and pornographic images. Piotr Uklanski offers a Warhol-like lineup of 166 photographs of actors playing Nazi roles (your favorite–Marlon Brando? Yul Brynner?–is almost certainly included). Christine Borland, inspired by her discovery that some of Mengele’s victims found him attractive, displays the work of sculptors she commissioned to make busts of the evil doctor based on her description (without telling them who it was). A video by Maciej Toporowicz intersperses images from Leni Riefenstahl films with clips of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, Pier Pasolini’s Salo, and Calvin Klein ads–thereby embracing another prominent theme of the exhibition, a Frankfurt-School-redux equation of fascism with consumerism. In this vein, Tom Sachs’s canisters wrapped in Chanel, Hermes, and Tiffany packaging and his model death camp mounted on a Prada box have deservedly gotten the most notoriety. (Placard: “Do we desire designer labels so much that we would accept anything at all that comes with them?”) Is this what all the trumpeting about new perspectives on the Holocaust amounts to? The repetition of half a century’s clichés about the sinister seductiveness of mass media and mass culture?
I suspect that the problem with “Mirroring Evil” is not simply a matter of some disappointing work by individual artists (perhaps to be expected, given the difficulties of a subject that is at once over-represented, inadequately grasped, and emotionally punishing). Rather, I believe it has to do with the stagnant political and cultural climate in which art is currently produced. When the pop artists invented the deadpan sensibility now hegemonic in the contemporary art world, they were reacting to a romantic utopianism that rejected a world of mass produced, mass communicated consumer goods and images. Mass culture, they aimed to show, had its own distinctive forms of beauty, pleasure and excitement, forms that were worth celebrating. They did not deny that our society had its problems, but they were, for the most part, political fatalists. They saw no choice but to separate the aesthetic from the moral: Andy Warhol’s gorgeous silk screens of electric chairs said it all.
Like or dislike the pop stance, it was, at the time (the mid-`60s), a genuinely no-quotation-marks transgressive critique of the assumption, ubiquitous among intellectuals, that mass media and consumer culture were nothing but a means of seducing a sheeplike population into confusing compulsive shopping with happiness. For those of us who embraced the critique while rejecting the political fatalism, pop pointed the way toward a different kind of utopianism, one that allowed us to be both radicals and rock and roll fans. That was what post-modernism meant in those days. Now, paradoxically, the inheritors of pop use its language to resurrect the old anti-consumerist, anti-media ideology, with all its moralism but without the leavening of any sort of utopianism, romantic or otherwise, at a time when political fatalism is the culture’s common sense. No wonder they look at Nazism and see themselves: the culprit is not “simplistic moral relativism” so much as the academicizing and, ah, decontextualizing of pop irony.
One piece in the show confounds these remarks: Alan Schechner’s much-reviled “It’s the Real Thing–Self-Portrait at Buchenwald,” in which the artist inserts himself, brandishing a Diet Coke can, into a digital image of Margaret Bourke White’s 1945 photograph of inmates at the camp. The catalogue does its best (in this case Rosenbaum has it right) to coopt Schechner’s work for its anti-consumerist brief: “The irony of a robust Schechner among gaunt, malnourished survivors becomes embarrassing in the presence of a symbol of our culture’s self-indulgent body consciousness. We are faced with the fact that we can extravagantly afford to produce purposely nutritionless products for widespread consumption…. The Coke can draws parallels between brainwashing tactics of the Nazis and commodification. Just as much of Europe succumbed to Nazi culture because it was the dominant paradigm, so does our contemporary culture succumb to consumerism.”
Of course it’s starvation, not robustness, that ought to embarrass us, and the parallel between Coke-drinking and genocide is not exactly self-evident, but never mind. Schechner’s image manages to elude this ideological meatgrinder and transcend its own rather glib juxtapositions of hunger and diet drink, Holocaust victim and privileged American Jew, to achieve something richer and more unsettling. The Coke can is alight with what looks like a halo: a radiant, holy object. The inmates appear to be staring at it. The artist frowns. Unnervingly, he seems to become a stand-in for the Allied liberators, offering up to the survivors an icon of freedom. And then, as I continue to look, the scene breaks away from its moorings: it becomes the devastated people of Europe facing toward the beacon of post-war prosperity; the Third World gazing at the symbol of the American dream and of corporate globalization; the perplexed American Jewish artist, representing this dual legacy, willy-nilly in the middle of it all.
In contrast, the idea that Nazism is mirrored in American consumerism comes across as a form of grandiosity, the desire of middle-class artists and critics to see themselves as the fulcrum of history. For in truth, the mirror images of the Nazis, in our time, are not Calvin Klein and Prada but Bosnian Serbs and Islamic fundamentalists and, closer to home, white supremacist militias and assassins of abortion doctors. These, at any rate, are the images with which I would fill my imagined empty room.
From June, 2002