Not Good. (Reviews).

Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art

The Jewish Museum

New York, New York

March 17 -- June 30

As historian and literary scholar James E. Young suggests, the massive volume of facts, images, references and taboos surrounding the Holocaust have transformed it into an "archetype" or a figure for subsequent pain, suffering and destruction." (1) The Holocaust is separated from its historical reality and abstracted in the minds of artists and viewers that are generations removed from its reality but highly familiar with its images. Writers like Judith Miller have commented on how excessive use and reuse of Nazi imagery turn "Europe's most searing genocide...into an American version of kitsch." (2) "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum professes to demonstrate that for today's generation of Jewish artists the Holocaust is not a nightmare but a myth. Yet most of the art in "Mirroring Evil" only exemplifies the type of misuse that causes the malignant disassociation the artists claim to comment on. The artists in the show are not symptoms of desensitization, but rather creators of more distracting and simplistic theory as well as incoherent art.

In most cases, the work in "Mirroring Evil" reflects the failures of conceptual art more than a Jewish response to the memory of Nazi horrors. Conceptual art often risks substituting didactic visual shorthand for complex intellectual theory. That creating a visual counterpart to a concept is not the same as reading the founding text or understanding Its nuances is often ignored in contemporary conceptual practice. When art desperately needs to be returned to language before it can function conceptually, perhaps it ought to consider itself simply an illustration of its own reviews. Most of the work in "Mirroring Evil" only makes sense or becomes moderately interesting after one reads the wall-notes, catalogue or critical reviews. This failure is evidenced by Christine Borland's installation "L'Homme Double," which consists of a series of malformed, uninteresting busts sculptured by various artists from eyewitness descriptions of the Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele. The project was conceptually interesting but visua lly dreary, and the sculptures' lack of sensory impact utterly undermined their conceptual strength.

Most of the exhibit fell into conceptual art's other trap, by offering merely an elongated, tangential, enactment of a simple idea. The question, "what if you were Eva Braun?," is asked in Rose Rosen's bloated installation, "Live and Die as Eva Braun" (1995), which weakly resembles Kara Walker's skillful and nuanced silhouettes. Art like this perverts the nature of Holocaust inquiry, not just because of the questions asked, but because the means of expression are so meager, misguided and weak that it cheapens any serious discussion with its material tropes.

"Mirroring Evil" bills itself as a survey of internationally recognized artists who "use imagery from the Nazi era to explore the nature of evil." In curator Norman Kleeblatt's introduction, "The Nazi Occupation of the White Cube: Transgressive Images/Moral Ambiguity/Contemporary Art," the works in the exhibition are described as the conceptual children of Christian Boltanski and Art Spiegelman. In the catalogue essay "Acts of Impersonation: Barbaric Spaces as Theatre" Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi places the work alongside Charlie Chaplin's film The Great Dictator. But removed from this professed intellectual parentage, most of the works in "Mirroring Evil" actually look as though they were made by apathetic children. Zbigniew Libera's LEGO Concentration Camp Set (1996), Tom Sacks's Prada Deathcamp ([998) model and Alain Sechas's Hitler-Kitty installation "Enfants Gates" (1997) apparently all use childhood motifs to address the way the Holocaust is marketed and taught. While Sechas's work is witty, sleek and effectiv e, the predominant elements in Sacks and Libera's pieces are their sloppy construction. Closer to grade-school dioramas than museum quality discourse, their appearance overshadows their Intentions by revealing that neither Sacks nor Libera felt the topic warranted more than sensationalistic concepts, literally held together by clumps of hot glue. This is not work dealing respectfully with a serious subject through the medium of the helplessness, confusion or insight of children, but art made by spoiled brats thumbing their noses. Clearly intimidated by the seriousness of the subject, Sacks and Libera defaced its importance with self-absorption, lazy display and pouty posturing.

Ellen Handler Spitz tries to reconcile this infantalization in her excellent catalogue essay "Childhood, Art and Evil" by stating, "In their art [the artists in Mirroring Evil] 'act out' and attempt to 'work through' this past, which remains present, and they attempt to take us with them. We must try to go there." Spitz's sentiment plainly embraces artists like Boltanski, Spiegelman and Chaplin, whose final speech in The Great Dictator approaches evil with sobering utopian innocence. In "Mirroring Evil," Boaz Arad's Hebrew Lesson (2000) comes closest to this ideal. Mad reconfigured clips from Hilter's speeches to force the dictator to speak an apology to Israel in Hebrew. This sweetly innocent gesture underscores the viewer's inability to ever forgive or forget the acts to which the apology applies.

Unfortunately, most of the work in "Mirroring Evil" does nothing to revive a child's perspective on atrocity and evil. Regardless of its use of childhood imagery, it embodies the sensibility of an arrogant adolescent, who simplistically embraces evil as a convenient and unqualified binary. The artists in the show are insistent on proclaiming their originality as a generation eager to deject the seriousness of previous inquiry and desperate to distract viewers from pampered naivete and derivative modes of expression. While Sylvia Plath was often condemned for comparing her private hell to the Holocaust, most of the artists here felt justified in comparing their personal stylist insecurities with genocide and terror. One of the questions repeatedly raised in works ranging from Sacks's labeled camp to Alan Schechner's digital bar-coded victims in Barcode to Concentration Camp Morph (1994) is whether fashion is a form of fascism. Maciej Toporowicz's Eternity "14 (1991) addressed this question most lyrically in on e of the show's strongest works. Toporowicz adroitly linked images from the camps with excerpts from The Night Porter and an early 90s Calvin Klein Obsession commercial showing Kate Moss's stunning, wild fragility. It is true that fascism can provoke erotic fascination just as George Bataille links sex to death and eroticism to suffering. It is also true that today's global capitalism can cause mass-scale oppression likely leading to atrocities. But Toporowicz's artful juxtapositions trivialize the issues behind both fashion and fascism, rendering them equally as empty concepts and glossy mirror images of radically different "evils."

NOTES

(1.) James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative Consequences and Interpretation (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1990), p. 118.

(2.) Judith Miller, One, By One, By One: Facing the Holocaust (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), pp. 224-225.

ANA FINEL HONIGMAN is a freelance critic based in New York. She is a frequent contributor to Time Out New York, Sculpture, Contemporary and Flash Art.