Springtime for Hitler

Is it possible for an exhibition of fundamentally banal artwork to refine our understanding of the Holocaust? This is the only truly provocative question posed by “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” the show that opened on March 17 at the Jewish Museum in New York. Accompanied by a catalog of the same title (it contains a dozen essays and illustrates most of the art), the works in “Mirroring Evil” depart from usual exhibitions of art related to the Holocaust by aspiring to take the point of view of the perpetrator rather than the victim.

And they endeavor to go further still. As Norman L. Kleeblatt, the exhibition’s curator, explains in the catalog, published by Rutgers University Press, these 13 artists, all of whom are in their 30s or 40s and thus one or two generations removed from the Holocaust, “use Nazi imagery--the ultimate signifier of evil--to mirror moral and ethical issues that resonate in contemporary society.” Not content to seek the perpetrator alone, these artists endeavor to seek the perpetrator within us all.

Nervy? Temerarious? Ambitious? Sure. Offensive, as protesters have maintained? Only if you are offended by the shallow, the slick and the sensation-seeking or by the one-line joke or gesture that has a good deal more to do with the history of contemporary art than the history of the Holocaust. Revelatory of shifts in thinking about how the Holocaust might be studied, taught and addressed artistically? Yes--but only to a point.

Ways of thinking about the Holocaust change with every generation and will go on changing, no doubt, as long as we wrestle with its difficult and essential history, and with every new “we” that comes along to do the wrestling (“wrestling” means, essentially, teaching, because art that responds to the Holocaust is fundamentally didactic; this is true even for a broad parodist such as Mel Brooks, whose “The Producers,” still ruling Broadway, now inadvertently mocks “Mirroring Evil” and Nazis).

In the decades following the war, the Holocaust came to be considered a singular experience, “a special case and kingdom of its own, above or below or apart from history,” as Terrence Des Pres wrote in “The Survivor” in 1976, a work cited in one of the catalog’s stronger essays, Ernst van Alphen’s “Playing the Holocaust.” Des Pres further enjoined that representations of the Holocaust be accurate, faithful and factual (“without change or manipulation for any reason--artistic reasons included”) and that it be approached as a “solemn or sacred event.”

Nearly 25 years later, Peter Novick offered a bracing corrective, taking offense in “The Holocaust in American Life” at the “perverse sacralization” that had developed around the Holocaust and at the idea of it as a uniquely Jewish experience. He found deeply suspect the way the Holocaust has emerged as one of the strongest connective themes in assimilated American Jewish life and questioned many of its pedagogic applications, in particular the notion that it is “morally therapeutic” to visit a Holocaust museum or watch a Holocaust movie. Interestingly in view of the goals of “Mirroring Evil,” Novick observed that “the behavior of normal Americans in normal times” can teach us more about how people become vicitmizers than “the behavior of the SS in wartime.”

As Van Alphen points out, it has been an “unassailable axiom” that documentaries, memoirs, testimonies and monuments are better teachers of history than works of art; if the past is concretely known, the prevailing thinking goes, the future can be controlled (“Never again”). But overexposure to brutal documentary images and attempts to master the Holocaust through study or memorization of facts, Van Alphen argues, risk turning the Holocaust into “just another school subject”; victimhood, he writes, echoing Novick, cannot control the future, whereas finding some way to identify with the perpetrators makes “one aware of the ease with which one can slide into a measure of complicity.”

This is a notion with merit: We might learn something (preventive) about the Holocaust, and possibly ourselves, by exposing, investigating and apprehending the mentality of the perpetrators--providing we can get to them, or even a piece of them, through a contemporary sensibility and from a vastly different world view.

Kleeblatt’s artists are scarcely the first to happen onto the idea. More senior--and in some ways subtler--artists have for years been appropriating Nazi themes and iconography, among them Gerhard Richter (who has painted blurred portraits of his German relatives in Wehrmacht uniforms), Anselm Kiefer (who has made photographs of himself performing Hitler’s sieg heil salute in front of German monuments), Christian Boltanski (who rephotographed family albums of Nazi officers at play for his book, “Sans Souci”) and Art Spiegelman (whose graphic novel, “Maus,” dared to draw a portrait of a victim of the Holocaust who was highly unsympathetic).

If the work of these artists succeeds, it may be because (Spiegelman aside) they were content with the small, suggestive, elegantly embodied visual gesture. By contrast Kleeblatt’s artists--or rather the worst of their justifiers in the exhibition’s wall labels and catalog--make extravagant claims for the objects they have produced. “Each artist puts the viewer in the uncomfortable terrain between good and evil, seduction and repulsion,” Kleeblatt contends; Ellen Handler Spitz, another of the catalog’s contributors, reports that the works leave her feeling “sick, stirred, titillated, sullied, betrayed, contaminated and embarrassed.”

Not all of the essays in the catalog are quite so breathless. Other writers help demystify the artworks, provide historical and art historical context and anticipate the artists’ potential missteps. In “‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ Revisited,” Lisa Saltzman locates the work in the tradition of Pop, appropriation and conceptual art; she feels that it “uses kitsch to frame an encounter with the very [Nazi] history that exploited the aesthetic of kitsch with devastating historical consequences.” She cites and reviews all the canonical thinkers on the subject (Clement Greenberg, Susan Sontag, Saul Friedlander), but in doing so perhaps accidentally stumbles on one of the key entangling problems with “Mirroring Evil”: “The challenge of the work ... is that it makes manifest that the representation of the Holocaust can be too easy.”

Indeed. The disjunction between the stated goals of this exhibition and the works themselves often comes down to precisely this: It is all just too glib, too facile and visually far too underimagined.

Consider Zbigniew Libera’s “Lego Concentration Camp Set,” one of the pieces most often singled out by protesters. A box of Legos adapted to building concentration camps, shows, Spitz believes, how “evil penetrates unnoticed into ordinary life and perhaps especially unnoticed into the lives of children.” Is this so profound? Haven’t observers of human nature since long before Freud been noticing impulses as dark and thanatotic in children as in adults? Like much conceptual art, “Lego” relies heavily on its swiftly, niftily delivered idea. But when the intellectual falls with such a thud, the visual had better rise spectacularly. Libera’s jaded, tweaked toy box does not.

What about Tom Sachs’ “Giftgas Giftset,” where Chanel, Hermes, and Tiffany packaging is refashioned into gas canisters, or his “Prada Deathcamp,” where a soiled Prada box serves as the base for a model concentration camp? “The unabashed conflation of supposed ‘good’ and outright ‘evil’ tests our sense of propriety and our ability to separate aesthetics from history, morality from lifestyle,” writes Kleeblatt. “I’m using the iconography of the Holocaust to bring attention to fashion. Fashion, like fascism, is about loss of identity,” said Sachs, in an interview with the New York Times magazine. Americans of a certain class are conspicuous and status-conscious consumers; they buy--and buy into--Prada, therefore they might easily buy into the uniform--or uniform thinking--of Nazism? It’s a specious syllogism.

Sachs’ disregard of the moral differences between shopping and genocide is one of the truly offensive--intellectually offensive--gestures to be found in “Mirroring Evil.” Merely simple-minded and artless are the parallels Maciej Toporowicz draws in his mock advertisement (“Eternity #14”) among Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films, Nazi imagery in postwar Italian cinema and Calvin Klein underwear and perfume ads: This kind of attentiveness to the subliminal messages of advertising speaks less to the dangers of fascism’s fascination (as Kleeblatt insists, drawing on Sontag’s seminal essay on the subject) than the basic suspicion of media taught in a good high school English class.

Do we find the perpetrators within in Piotr Uklanski’s “The Nazis,” a frieze of handsome Hollywood actors who have played movie Nazis over the years? Is the role of the Catholic church in anti-Semitism exposed by Mischa Kuball’s “Hitler’s Cabinet,” a crucifix out of whose tips are projected stills from German films of the 1920s and 1930s, thereby transforming the cruciform shape into a swastika? What about Alan Schechner’s “It’s the Real Thing--Self-Portrait at Buchenwald,” in which Schechner has digitally inserted himself into the famous Margaret Bourke-White photograph, taken after the Jews were liberated from the camp in 1945? In the (black-and-white) photograph Schechner displays a (color) Diet Coke can, which for Joanna Lindenbaum, the exhibition’s assistant curator, “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.” Bulletin to Lindenbaum et al: There is a significant difference between being seduced into buying Diet Coke (or Tiffany, or Chanel) and buying into Nazism.

Curiously--speaking of buying--Schechner’s other piece, “Barcode to Concentration Camp Morph,” at least begins to fit successfully within the exhibition’s thesis, while making a meaningful visual gesture: In this work, Schechner digitally transforms a bar code into a photograph of camp victims wearing striped uniforms. The allusion to the role of nascent computer technology in the Nazi war machine (think Edwin Black’s recent “IBM and the Holocaust”), as well as the inevitable evocation of prisoners’ uniforms and tattooed numbers, has a suggestive, reverberative quality lacking in much of the other work on display here.

There are other ambitious and more successful pieces in the show, among them Alain Sechas’ “Enfants Gates” (“Spoiled Children”), a group of Maus-like, Hitler-mustached pets contained in playpens with swastikas fashioned into them and then multiplied in mirrors. According to Sechas, the viewer is meant to be located “halfway between being a spectator and being a witness to violence.” Maybe; or maybe the piece resonates because it finds a deft visual analogue for repetition and imprisonment in a way that conjures the Nazi mania for systemization in bureaucracy, iconography, record-keeping and genocide.

In “Hebrew Lesson,” Boaz Arad splices together film clips from Hitler’s propaganda speeches to force him to say, in Hebrew, “Shalom, Jerusalem, I am deeply sorry.” The impossibility of this moment doesn’t mirror evil so much as pose one of those hauntingly ineffable, almost dreamlike, what-if questions. So too does Roee Rosen’s “Live and Die as Eva Braun,” an attempt (through narrative and drawing) to inhabit Eva Braun on her last day on Earth (along with some of her afterlife): Is it possible, this installation wonders, to imagine ourselves into the psyche of the woman who allowed herself to become so close to the ultimate perpetrator of the Holocaust?

Alas, Rosen’s cartoonish storytelling vulgarizes and trivializes a bold question, and concept. And as with “Live and Die as Eva Braun” so with most of the exhibition and commentary: Substantial questions are asked but are far too insubstantially, and unimaginatively, answered. These mediocre pieces have been given full-dress museum treatment, complete with warning placards outside of galleries, an explanatory video at the end, and this elaborate, anxious catalog. Altogether it’s an awful lot of dogged mining of veins that deliver what is basically just fool’s gold.