Mirroring Evil

by Kleeblatt, Norman L.

• ISBN13: 9780813529592
• ISBN10: 081352959X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-01
• Publisher: Rutgers Univ Pr

Summary

Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art features works by thirteen internationally recognized artists who use imagery from the Nazi era to explore the nature of evil. Their works are a radical departure from previous art about the Holocaust, which centered on tragic images of victims. Instead, these artists dare to invite the viewer into the world of the perpetrators. The viewer, therefore, faces an unsettling moral dilemma: How is one to react to these menacing and indicting images, drawn from a history that can never be forgotten? The artists represented in Mirroring Evil impel us to examine what these images of Nazism might mean in our lives today.

Essays in the catalogue explore themes of moral ambiguity in makers and viewers of art, institutional responsibility in exhibiting controversial artworks, and the complicated issues of representing or even imagining the perpetrators. Entries about the individual artworks discuss in greater depth the artistic, ethical, and historical complexity of the images that the artists dare to engage.

Author Biography

Norman L. Kleeblatt is the Susan and Elihu Rose Curator of Fine Arts at The Jewish Museum in New York.

Table of Contents

Director's Preface	vii
Joan Rosenbaum
Acknowledgments	ix
Foreword: Looking into the Mirrors of Evil	xv
James E. Young
The Nazi Occupation of the White Cube: Transgressive Images/Moral Ambiguity/Contemporary Art	3	(14)
Norman L. Kleeblatt
Acts of Impresonation: Barbaric Spaces as Theater	17	(22)
Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi
Childhood, Art, and Evil	39	(14)
Ellen Handler Spitz
``Avant-Garde and Kitsch'' Revisited: On the Ethics of Representation	53	(12)
Lisa Saltzman
Playing the Holocaust	65	(20)
Ernst van Alphen
Playing It Safe?: The Display of Transgressive Art in the Museum	85	(52)
Reesa Greenberg
DISTANCED MIRRORS
Reflections on the Works of Art
Keeping One's Hands Clean: Six Commissioned Portraits of a Perpetrator
Christine Borland's L'Homme Double, 1997	99	(2)
Male Fantasies of Hitler: Confusing Gender and Identity
Roee Rosen's Live and Die as Eva Braun, 1995	101	(4)
Transforming Images into Symbols
Mischa Kuball's Hitler's Cabinet, 1990	105	(3)
The Conflation of Good and Evil
Piotr Uklanski's The Nazis, 1998	108	(3)
A Feminist Rejoinder to Uklanski's The Nazis
Elke Krystufek's Economical Love series, 1998	111	(3)
Impersonating the Victim: Consorting with History
Alan Schechner's Barcode to Concentration Camp Morph, 1994, and It's the Real Thing---Self-Portrait at Buchenwald, 1993	114	(3)
Impossible Bedfellows: Adolf Hitler and Marcel Duchamp
Rudolf Herz's Zugzwang, 1995	117	(4)
The Villain Speaks the Victim's Language
Boaz Arad's Safam, 2000, and Marcel Marcel, 2000	121	(2)
Fascinating Fascism: Then or Now?
Maciej Toporowicz's Eternity #14, 1991	123	(3)
Mirrors of Innocence and Violence
Alain Sechas's Enfants Gates, 1997	126	(3)
Toying with Terror
Zbigniew Libera's LEGO Concentration Camp Set, 1996	129	(3)
Fashioning Terror
Tom Sachs's Giftgas Giftset, 1998, and Prada Deathcamp, 1998	132	(2)
Staging Depravity
Mat Collishaw's Burnt Almonds (Gustav and Helga), 2000	134	(3)
Artist Biographies	137	(18)
Contributors	155	(2)
Bibliography	157	(7)
Credits	164