Art show of Nazi imagery draws protestors

NEW YORK, March 18 (UPI) -- The most controversial New York art show since the 1999 "Sensations" at the Brooklyn Museum opened Sunday at the Jewish Museum, testing the limits of irreverent usage of Nazi imagery in portraying evil.

The opening drew more than 100 shouting, placard-carrying protestors who tried to dissuade visitors from entering the museum. Police kept the pickets across the street from the entrance, and there were no arrests.

Pre-publicity about the exhibition, "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," scheduled to run through June 30, brought howls of protest from Holocaust survivor groups who say it trivializes the horrors of the Third Reich and misappropriates history. All of the works are by artists born after World War II, only four of them Jewish.

Sensitive to these protests, museum director Joan Rosenbaum put up a sign two galleries into the show that reads "Some holocaust survivors have been disturbed by works of art beyond this point," and states that an exit door has been placed nearby for those who are offended and do not wish to see the rest of the exhibition.

The art in galleries beyond the sign include Polish artist Zbigniew Libera's Lego kit for building a model concentration camp, American Tom Sachs' battered canisters of Zylon, the gas used in Nazi death camps, labeled Chanel, Hermes, and Tiffany & Co., and British artist Alan Schechner's photo of emaciated concentration camp inmates with a superimposed image of himself holding up a can of Diet Coke.

"This is art with a message, political art," Rosenbaum told United Press International. "It's art that provokes discussion. We're reporting on a trend. We're interpreting the work. We're endorsing the goals of the work, not the work itself, to make us think how easy it is to put distance between our lives in the present and what occurred in the past."

She said "Mirroring Evil" could not be compared to the Brooklyn Museum's "Sensations," because it presents a "complex set of ideas" rather than a collection of unrelated contemporary art. A painting of the Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung in the Brooklyn show offended Catholic organizations and resulted in an attempt by then Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani to cut off museum funding by the city.

There is no chance of mayoral intervention this time. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former vice president of the Jewish Museum, has said his policy will be, "If you don't like an art show, stay home."

Rosenbaum charged the "Sensations" show was an attempt by the Brooklyn Museum to increase its attendance, and noted that the Jewish museum could do that by mounting more shows like its recent popular Camille Pissaro and Marc Chagall exhibitions rather than one with a controversial curatorial viewpoint.

However, were it not for the shock value, "Mirroring Evil" would hardly be worth the effort of a visit to the museum. As art, this is pretty insignificant stuff.

To the music of "Springtime for Hitler," one of the zany dance numbers in the current Broadway hit show, "The Producers," a viewer can wander through a serpentine hall hung with photographs of 145 actors in Nazi military uniforms. They were selected from scores of Hollywood movies by Polish artist Piotr Ulanski, who claims to have learned about the Holocaust from movies and television, not from his family or teachers.

The show links Ulanksi's display to that of another Polish artist, Maciej Toporowicz, whose selections of film clips from the 1930s to the 1990s mirror society's fascination with fascism that has been associated by psychologists with a widespread sexual fantasy about authoritarian figures. Toporowicz cites erotic Calvin Klein ads for "Obsession for Men" cologne as a latter-day example.

The Nazi program to seduce innocent children to its philosophy is the inspiration for French artist Alain Sechas' five Disney-like figures of a cat with Hitler's hair and moustache holding a baby rattle topped by a swastika. The figures are mirrored endlessly, an allusion to the power of Nazi propaganda to overpower the public through exhaustive repetition.

Scottish artist Christine Borland has created a room-size installation of six busts of Josef Mengele, Auschwitz' death doctor, and photographs of him alongside testimonies by people who knew him that he was the handsomest of the Nazis and reputedly the most charming. Borland intended this as a study in contrast to Mengele's terrifying deeds and titled it "L'Homme Double" (Double Man).

None of the exhibits are more frightening that British artist Mat Collishaw's series of light-boxed 3-dimensional color photo images of Nazis who committed suicide in Hitler's bunker in Berlin and Israeli artist Roee Rosen's nightmare cutout art depicting Eva Braun's death at Hitler's hands. Rosen's exhibit is accompanied by a lurid text, some of which he eliminated at the request of the museum.

The museum is offering a concurrent exhibit of emotionally powerful paintings of Jewish cadavers in Nazi death camps by Zoran Music, a 93-year-old Slovenian artist who was a political prisoner at Dachau. Music painted them in the 1970s from sketches he made during his two-year internment. Music has given the same names to all the paintings -- "We Are Not the Last" -- a title proved prophetic by events in Cambodia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, and Afghanistan.

A catalog of the "Mirroring Evil" show with extensive essays on the Holocaust is available at bookstores nationwide (Rutgers University Press, 164 pages, $65, soft cover $30).