The Evil That Museums Do

A few days after seeing “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art,” the widely publicized exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum, I was talking with an artist who expressed a keen lament. The show assembles work by 13 artists from eight countries all under the age of 50, and according to a text printed on the museum’s entry wall, they all use Nazi-era imagery to make art that explores the nature of evil. The artist I spoke with sighed, “It was such a good idea for a show, but it’s a shame that most of the art is so bad.”

I am in full agreement with one part of that assessment. Almost all of the art in “Mirroring Evil” is indeed quite bad. Typical is “L’Homme Double” (1997), a Conceptual project by a young Scottish artist named Christine Borland. She commissioned six forensic sculptors to create portrait busts of the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, based only on eyewitness descriptions of the man plus two grainy photographs that she provided. The resulting clay busts, all quite different in visage and rendered with differing degrees of skill, are displayed with the documentary material that inspired them.

The piece is ostensibly an inquiry into the distinction between representing evil and participating in it, according to another text printed on the museum wall. Actually, it’s just a retread of “Commissioned Paintings,” a pioneer work of Conceptual art that John Baldessari made 32 years ago. In that work, the California artist hired a number of amateur painters to render pictures based on documentary photographs he gave them.

Since then, several others have employed the tactic to assorted ends. “L’Homme Double” is thoroughly academic art, cranked out according to a formula and an established set of rules, and it amply illustrates a recurring feature of this inane exhibition: the banality of art about evil. There are lessons to be learned from the Jewish Museum show, but none of them has much to do with understanding the nature of evil through art.

But back to the artist I was talking to. What gave me pause about her comment was its presumption that a good idea for a thematic show of contemporary art might ever be generated in the absence of excellent art.

Don’t good ideas for museum shows come from seeing great stuff? If a curator notices that a number of mediocre artists are independently making mediocre art that shares a particular image in common--Nazi paraphernalia, say--is that fair cause to organize a show? Probably not. The most obvious lesson of “Mirroring Evil” is the futility of attempting to make a productive exhibition from lousy work.

The fact that an otherwise savvy artist was suggesting the possibility, though, is worth considering. Artists are used to making silk purses out of sows’ ears. It’s their stock in trade. They gather up oily pigments and pieces of cloth and chunks of plastic and lengths of videotape and castoff junk and other inert stuff, and then they try to make it live.

So from that perspective, getting a good show out of next to nothing might seem plausible. The apparent problem is that museum curators sometimes seem to think they are artists too. They’re mistaken.

At least two other worthwhile lessons can be gleaned from “Mirroring Evil.” One is that the 30-plus-year reign of International Conceptual art dwarfs anything we’ve seen in Western culture since International Gothic held sway throughout Europe between the 1380s and the 1420s. International Gothic was a courtly style that appealed to an aristocratic taste for rarefied self-aggrandizement. (The famous French manuscript illuminated by the Limbourg Brothers, “Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry,” is ostensibly a solemn prayer book, but its luscious ornamental elegance mostly says how nice it was to be the duke.) The same with International Conceptualism. It ornaments the smug, clannish institutionalization of contemporary art today.

It can get pretty ludicrous. “Mirroring Evil” claims to document an emerging trend. In the past, the subject of the Nazi era has mostly been limited to two areas of visual art: memorials to the Holocaust and works made by survivors, which stand as evidence. The new trend is said to be art that is cautionary, rather than memorial and evidentiary. It warns us not to take for granted the Nazi symbols of oppression that pervade popular culture. Fascism is presented by this show as a mirror for the gruesome evils of entertainment and the commercial marketplace.

It’s Heil, Hitler meets Hello, Kitty. And no, I’m not joking. That’s exactly the farcical hybrid offered by French artist Alain Sechas, whose multiple toy figures of stylized cartoon cats sport Adolf’s signature mustache and hair, and clutch swastika rattles in their tiny paws.

Sechas lines up five of these freakish little creatures on pedestals between mirrored walls, which reflect the souvenirs into an infinity of mass reproduction. Prada, Diet Coke, Lego and Calvin Klein underpants collide with canisters of Zyklon-B, Buchenwald, the SS and Nuremberg rallies elsewhere in the show.

In case you missed the connection between fascism and commerce, British artist Alan Schechner spells it out. He’s made a digital work in which a product bar code morphs into a photograph of concentration camp inmates. A number tattooed onto an arm is here likened to the number printed in code on your supermarket purchase.

Actors playing Nazis in 145 movie stills create a wallpaper border around the entry gallery. A work by Polish artist Piotr Uklanski, it lets you know right off that your deepest experience with totalitarianism is brought to you by Hollywood. (Surely you’ve never read a book.) To underscore the point, the photographs are installed just above your head, so you’re forced to look up to these pseudo-Nazi movie stars.

Later, Germany’s Rudolf Herz pairs a 1932 photograph of Hitler with one of avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp--coincidentally taken 20 years earlier by the same photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who became the Fuhrer’s official portraitist. Herz covers a gallery room with their alternating images, recalling Andy Warhol’s series of “Most Wanted Men” and his famous “Cow” wallpaper (albeit in sober black-and-white).

A nearby museum wall text wonders, “Do we desire designer labels so much that we would accept anything at all that comes with them? When does our conformity to popular norms become dangerous?”

I’d say the answer is that our desires become dangerous when hack artists who conform to designer notions popular in the academy are held up by art museums as risk-taking adventurers in the precincts of cultural virtue.

That clannishness is part of what makes the third lesson of “Mirroring Evil” possible: Art predicated on the assumption that the audience is composed of a bunch of ignorant, unaware boobs who march in goose-step to the spectacles of Madison Avenue and Dow Jones is ripe for tabloid treatment. (Call it the revenge of the uninformed upon the beautiful.) It’s not hard to manufacture a phony controversy about art today.

In fact, it was a business bible that kicked off the ruckus over the Jewish Museum show. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on the front page of its second section on Jan. 10, nine full weeks before the exhibition opened. It began: “An art exhibition headed for New York could become the next art-world ‘Sensation.’ That 1999 exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum of Art featured a painting of the Virgin Mary splattered with dung, drawing fire from Catholics, including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, among others.”

As a rule of thumb, news stories report what did happen, not what could happen. A sensational story saying that “Mirroring Evil” could become a media scandal is what is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The story, in addition to reporting conjecture, didn’t even report correctly what did happen in 1999. The painting of the Virgin Mary in the Brooklyn show used dung--a reverential symbol to the artist--but it wasn’t “splattered” with dung. The “splatter” fib, with its erroneous connotation of desecrating an icon, was launched into the public consciousness by William Donohue, polemical head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, whose October 1999 newsletter incorrectly complained that a painting in “Sensation” had “elephant dung splattered all over” it. The tabloid New York Post dutifully repeated the factual error, almost word for word, followed by right-wing talk-radio hosts from New York to L.A. The false splatter-story has been ricocheting through the mass-media echo chamber ever since.

Donohue also compared the “Sensation” exhibition to events in--yes--Nazi Germany, exclaiming, “No wonder Hitler was accepted as an artist.” (Uh, no, he wasn’t.) For the Wall Street Journal, the potential for offense in a Jewish Museum show of recent art that employs Nazi imagery was apparently too much to resist. The day after the scandalous story appeared, the New York Post and the Daily News ran with it--and here we are.

A story about third-rate academic artists who think mass entertainment and commercial culture operate according to principles of fascism, which is the main (nutty) theme in “Mirroring Evil,” probably couldn’t get much media traction. Holocaust survivors being asked to look at cheesy busts of Josef Mengele and a hobby-shop model of a concentration camp made from a Prada box, on the other hand--now that’s a story.

Or is it? Suppose Holocaust survivors were asked to look at a contemporary artist’s drawings of Jews depicted as mice and rats, drawings that derive from racist Nazi literature that relied on the anti-Semitic stereotype of Jews as vermin. That actually happened in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art back in 1991--to near-universal acclaim. Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a brilliant, two-volume comic-book masterpiece on the Holocaust, didn’t bear witness or memorialize victims. Instead it looked evil squarely in the eye and in a devastating manner that almost nothing in “Mirroring Evil” dares.

The single exception at the Jewish Museum is a stunning, 15-second video called “Hebrew Lesson,” by Israeli artist Boaz Arad. The artist spliced together tiny fragments of documentary films of Hitler’s propaganda speeches, producing a brief, jumpy montage that changed his German syllables into a Hebrew sentence. “Shalom, Yerushalayim, ani mitnatzel,” sputters the jerking, dissonant, discombobulated dictator. “Hello, Jerusalem, I apologize.” Because a victor always gets to write the history, Arad’s creation of a powerful, moving phantasm transforms victimhood into survivorship.

The generation that experienced the unspeakable events of 1933 to 1945 will soon be gone. Arad, who is 46, plainly knows that the big hand-off is well underway. Survivorship has a second important meaning, which is the right to claim the legacy of one who dies. Younger generations will henceforth pick up the voice of those who could speak from experience. Arad claims survivorship in “Hebrew Lesson,” which is the most significant lesson this show has to offer.

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Christopher Knight is The Times’ art critic.