Art, Anger, Ambiguity in Bloody Image

I have no idea what a work of art that glorified terrorism might look like, but I don’t believe it would look much like this:

In the courtyard of a museum in Stockholm, a rectangular pool is full to the brim with what appears to be blood. On this red sea floats a toy boat, its sail made out of a photograph of a modestly half-smiling, attractive young woman.

It is the face of Hanadi Jaradat, who murdered 21 people when she blew herself up at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, Israel, on Oct. 4. Her hair is wrapped in a dark cloth, but she wears bold red lipstick.

Meanwhile, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach fills the icy air as blood seeps into the new white snow that presses against the pool.

I think this installation by artists Gunilla Skoeld Feiler and Dror Feiler, called Snow White and the Madness of Truth, is tasteless -- but how could it, given its theme, be anything else?

What I do not think for one minute is that it endorses mass murder.

This is what the Israeli government claims -- that a Swedish archeological museum is championing terrorists and inciting genocide.

When this work was unveiled, it so angered Zvi Mazel, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, that he physically damaged it, throwing a spotlight into the pool. His action was praised by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a “stand against the growing wave of anti-Semitism” in Europe and has led to a serious diplomatic standoff between Israel and Sweden, with Israel demanding that the work be removed and Sweden asserting the artists’ right to freedom of expression.

But Israel’s anger is based on a view of the work that is simply inadequate. This is not a piece of art that incites terrorism or celebrates terrorists. If you wanted to praise Jaradat, you might choose to show her sensitive-looking face, but you wouldn’t place it in the context that these artists do.

No heroic work of art commemorating a warrior, as far as I’m aware, has ever depicted its subject floating on a sea of blood. Saint-Gaudens’ equestrian statue of William Tecumseh Sherman at Grand Army Plaza in New York City has the great Civil War general led nobly forward by Nike, goddess of victory, not cutting a road of destruction through the South. Nor, needless to say, does London’s monument to Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the Royal Air Force chief during World War II who masterminded saturation bombing, have the city of Dresden burning at his feet.

There is no way in which this gory iconography can be seen, rationally, as exultant. The (fake) blood is chilling. To me, the smiling, pretty, made-up face is a document of inhumanity.

This is my interpretation; others will see it differently. They might even feel sorry for her.

That’s the thing about art; it’s ambiguous. It is more than ambiguous -- it is an ocean of potential meaning.

However, one thing about this artwork is indisputable: its tragic character. Long-distance critics, looking at photographs, have missed this.

I was lucky to arrive in Stockholm in glorious winter weather, in a snow-white city touched with gold sunlight turning bronze. The red pool was semi-frozen and the chunks of ice horribly fleshy. The spectators were respectful and quiet.

It was an awkward and uncomfortable experience.

But there was something else. The courtyard was filled with lamentations: a recording of Bach’s Cantata 199 playing in counterpoise to the gross spectacle.

Bach’s cantata is a wail of guilt. “Mein Herze schwimmt im Blut” (“My heart swims in blood”), confesses the female voice, “Weil mich der Sunden Brut / In Gottes heilgen Augen / Zum Ungeheuer macht” (“because the brood of my sins / in God’s holy eyes / makes me into a monster”). A monster?

I would be misrepresenting the artists if I claimed that the artwork’s only possible meaning is Jaradat’s monstrousness. A text in the courtyard points out that she became consumed by grief after she saw her brother, who was involved with Islamic Jihad, shot dead by Israeli soldiers. The work’s co-creator, Dror Feiler, a Jew born in Israel, campaigns for Palestinian rights and insisted to me that “the fact that we try to explain terrorism doesn’t mean that we forgive it.”

Bach’s cantata makes it plain that even if there were reasons Jaradat became a monster, she nonetheless did become a monster. The best you could say of her is Yeats’ terrible truth: “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart.”

Ambiguity alone is enough to undermine Israel’s protest. You say this work of art incites murder. I say it mourns the murdered.

Europeans have it easy, it’s true. There’s a lot of talk at the Stockholm museum about death threats and security, but the blood in the pool is fake, and so are many of our emotions -- pro-Palestinian, anti-Palestinian, it’s easy for us to talk.

That’s democracy for you. Israel, a democratic country, should surely not be aiming blows at this basic principle of freedom of speech on the basis of a blatant misrepresentation of a work of art.