Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Chicago, November 16–18, 2001

Pam Korza
2001
Challenge Session: The Jewish Museum, Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art
This session was part of the Animating Democracy Learning Exchange held in Chicago, November 2001. In this Challenge Session, one Lab project had the opportunity to put forward challenges they were encountering in their work and seek comment and feedback from peers to help them with the challenge.

Participants:

  • Norman Kleeblatt, Curator of Fine Arts, The Jewish Museum
  • Joanna Lindenbaum, Curatorial Assistant, The Jewish Museum
  • Carole Zawatsky, Director of Education, The Jewish Museum


Project Summary
The exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, featuring transgressive artworks by young artists two and three generations removed from the events of WWII, will offer a springboard for dialogue about complicity and complacency toward evil in today’s society. The museum will show work by 13 artists who have eschewed the deeply entrenched Holocaust imagery that focuses on the victim. Instead, they use images of perpetrators—Nazis—to provoke viewers to explore the culture of victimhood and the seduction of power as well as contemporary manifestations of evil in the form of bigotry, war, and genocide. Exhibition design will facilitate dialogue.  An opening video will provide historical and cultural context through transgressive images from television, film and popular culture, and offer questions for dialogue that visitors can consider as they view the artworks.  A second video at the end of the exhibition will capture opinions and points of view from artists and diverse members of different communities reacting to the exhibition. The museum will partner with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School University, Facing History and Ourselves, the Center for Learning and Leadership to design dialogue opportunities both in and outside the museum that connect deeply within the Jewish community and to a broad public of all faiths and cultural backgrounds.

Introduction
Museum representatives showed slides of works that will be included in the exhibition, including:

  • Lego Concentration Camp Set by Zbigniew Libera. Using Lego building blocks, Libera built models of concentration camps, photographed them, and then used the photographs, along with the Lego emblem, to create boxes that appear as children’s merchandise. By initially appearing as benign consumer products, the sculptures demonstrate how easily innocent toys can be perverted into images of evil, the pervasiveness of violence in children’s consumer products, and how messages of evil were effectively disseminated to Nazi youth.
  • Live and Die as Eva Braun, by Roee Rosen.  Rosen’s Eva Braun works ask the view to take on the role of Braun, Hitler’s mistress during the last moments of the Third Reich. The viewer is places in the morally questionable body and psyche of Hitler’s girlfriend, forcing the viewer to personally experience evil and banality of it.
  • The Nazis, by Piotr Uklanski.  Polish artist Piotr Uklanski assembled 166 film stills or publicity shots of famous actors in the role of Nazi officers. Taking these photographs out of narrative and out of context, his work shows how pervasive images of Nazis have become in popular culture. He demonstrates society’s elision of perpetrator and hero, and reveals its attraction to glossy, lush, and attractive images despite the roles of horror and destruction that they represent.

Past exhibition of these and other works by museums around the world have been controversial and media debate. Exhibition of Roee Rosen’s work at the Israel Museum sparked controversy about the role of the Holocauset in the visual arts. Pressure was put on the museum to remove the exhibtion, but the museum did not concede. The exhibition raised questions of:

  • the appropriateness of these images to place
  • sexuality and its appropriateness within a venue of public culture
  • the right to interpret events from where one is…removed from the generation that experienced the Holocaust.
  • Response without engagement. “Don’t touch my Holocaust.”
  • Who has the authority to speak about the holocaust

The Jewish community reacted strong to Uklanski’s work exhibited at the Photographer’s Gallery in London, asking that the installation be exhibited alongside images of Holocaust victims. Insisting that the artwork was about the entertainment industry and not the Holocaust, the artist and gallery did not concede.

Challenges
Museum representatives outlined three key challenges in presenting this exhibition.

  1. How can our institution display provocative art that can put us under attack and, if it is controversial, how can that attack be converted into constructive dialogue? Museum staff elaborated:
    • It is a fundamental intent of this exhibition as well as a challenge to have the audience confront their own moral complicity in these events and other acts of evil in society.
    • The exhibition offers an opportunity to discuss how understanding of the Holocaust for a whole generation of Jews is largely shaped by popular culture, by fiction, rather than fact. Through this lens, the exhibition also questions the way the Holocaust has become sacred in the Jewish community.  “The Holocaust is the only secure identity for the American Jew. What other consensus of identity is there?  There is a decline in the connection with the Israelis. How can one expand the base of identity?  How is this history and morality used?”
    • Understanding how these art works have been received elsewhere, the museum is examining ways to present and interpret them and facilitate dialogue around the work itself and issues of evil and complicity.
    • The museum asks: Does civic dialogue have to be civil? Is dialogue about only bringing people to your points of view, or is its intent to reflect the diversity of voices and perspectives? 
    • Planning this exhibition with these questions in mind has necessitated greater collaboration between director, curator, and education personnel. 

Participant discussion:
A participant challenged, “If work is made to illuminate or offer insight or create moral ambiguity, then it is not possible to control an individual or an audience’s response? There is somehow an expectation that if we do a good job, then there is no controversy. We have responsibility, but should not take responsibility for others’ responses.” 

The museum responded that it can try to better understand what audience members come to the museum with and help those “not savvy about contemporary art with tools such as the videos to understand the intentions of the work. “We are also letting people know that it is OK to have reactions, but help them to further contemplate these responses.”

One participant suggested structuring one-on-one listening/dialogue, instead of the group dynamic connoted by “civic dialogue.”

  1. How can we make art accessible?  How can we stimulate dialogue using conceptual art with an audience that is not versed in the art historical frame, but yet is connected with the images of the art? Museum staff described its use of video within the exhibition as a key interpretive tool aimed help viewers reflect on their own individual responses to these images and the historical event.
    • A video at the beginning of the exhibition will pose the questions that the artworks and exhibition as a whole pose. 
    • At the end of the exhibition, a talking head video will present a range of perspectives and emotions from artists and staff members to survivors and children/grandchildren of survivors. The intent is that these perspectives will help make the work less enigmatic. Maurice Berger, noted art critic and advisor to the exhibition, will discuss art, popular culture, and history; how these images are in the public domain and how the Holocaust has been deconstructed in television, films, etc.

Participant discussion:
Participants expressed conflicting feelings whether and how to prepare audiences for potentially controversial work, understanding the reluctance artists often have to doing so but also the producer’s need, particularly if civic dialogue is a goal. One participant suggested the solution is not whether to prepare audiences or not, but to empower participants to make their own choice. Offer an optional session or space that gives interpretation and frameworks for considering the work. “Let the audience determine what their needs are and act in accordance. The museum can provide the resources.”

Jewish Museum staff further reflected on choices, “The museum is caught in a quagmire of moral ambiguity in its presentation of a work, as well as the exhibition, itself. The success of the presentation of this work is to be reverent to the aesthetic context of the work as well as our mission. I would like to weave a narrative for the work along the path of the exhibition…perhaps text from one work to the next (each prepares you for the next).  The comparison however, is sometimes the most powerful and the space between works is also crucial. Meaning can be changed through display/presentation.”

  1. How does the institution control the media’s interpretation of the exhibition to ensure communication of: its own intentions in presenting this work; the artist’s intentions in creating the work; the use of the work to support the intentions or interpretations of others?

This question was not directly taken up in the session.