Professor in the Honors College and the Department of Visual Arts, Ellen Handler Spitz spoke with Tom Moore for Insights about the exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art, which is on display at the Jewish Museum in New Yorkthrough June 30, 2002. When the exhibition generated substantial negative criticism in the press, Spitz's replies were published in The New York Times, The Baltimore Sun and other publications.

Tom Moore: You've been in the news because of your connection to the exhibition Mirroring Evil, organized by the Jewish Museum in New York. Tell us about the exhibition and why it has attracted so much attention.

Ellen Handler Spitz: Well, that's a complicated question. The show has attracted attention for a host of different reasons. One of them has to do with its site. It is in The Jewish Museum in New York. However, there are thirteen artists in the show, and only four of them are Jewish. So, there were questions as to why and whether The Jewish Museum should be putting on a show in which so many of the artists are not Jewish. Furthermore, any art that deals with World War II and its atrocities, in particular, the Holocaust, attracts attention and criticism, because the topic is so fraught, so emotional and upsetting for so many people. No matter how you deal with it, there will be those who will protest and feel that it isn't, that it cannot be treated adequately or fairly. I think another reason the show became so controversial is that its timing coincided with what happened in our country--the devastation of September 11th. And our President had used the phrase "axis of evil," which is a reference to the Axis powers--the Nazi/Fascist regimes--so that there was, in the air, a subtle parallel between what happened a half century ago and something that had just happened now and directly to us. People were (and are) deeply troubled, frightened, and concerned. I think the show mobilized such feelings, and that they were then displaced onto the objects in the exhibition itself; also, we used the word "evil" in its title. These are some of the reasons why I think the show became so controversial. Also, there has been an especially great concern on the part of survivors and the second generation as they watch horrified to see the iconography of the Holocaust appropriated and trivialized by popular culture. For example, there was that movie Life Is Beautiful, by the Italian director Roberto Benigni, which used the Holocaust as a background, and the Broadway show, The Producers. And on and on. Many people are sensitive to these cultural confiscations of the Holocaust and feel that these are violations that affect them directly; I think that, similarly, they may feel that our exhibition is just another example of indignity. These are some of the reasons why people have been concerned. And some of the art in the show is very, very disturbing, raw.

TM: Tell us about your role in the exhibition.

EHS: I was invited by Norman Kleeblatt, a brilliant curator. The first show that put him on the map, so to speak, was his Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice (1987). Wonderful exhibit. That really established his claim to be considered an outstanding curator. And then he did another show called Too Jewish, a very controversial one that probed ethnic Jewishness. Some people felt embarrassed by it; some people felt alienated, but it was highly interesting and provocative. And then he did this one. He approached me in California (I was teaching at Stanford at the time) when Too Jewish opened in San Francisco, and he said, "Ellen, will you work with me on my next show? It's going to involve Nazi images." And I asked, "Why do you want me?" And he said, "I want you because you are really interested in children, and you've done a lot of writing about children. One thing that fascinates me is that a lot of these artists I've seen in Europe and Israel are making pieces that involve childhood and making art that references childhood, and furthermore they are too young to have been a part of this war. I thought that might interest you as well." It did. So he began to fly me east to a series of scholars' and staff meetings in New York, where we debated the complexities of the show and its themes and tried to decide which art to include. And then, the summer before last, I spent a month or so at the Museum, just holed up in a little cubicle looking at all the materials, realizing that I had to write about it, always asking myself whether I really wanted to or could write about it, finding it extremely difficult to think what I might say. Gradually, I began to find a way. And, in the end, I feel I said exactly what I wanted to say in my catalogue essay, which I called "Childhood, Art, and Evil."

TM: Are the negative comments from critics because they're offended by the exhibition, or because they've misunderstood the intent of the artists? Or a combination of the two?

EHS: There have been different kinds of critics, ranging from very naïve people--for example, there was a picket outside the Museum on opening day, an elderly gentleman who was holding up a sign that said, "Art and Genocide Don't Mix." This is extremely naive...I mean, think of Goya's great painting of the Executions of May 3rd! Think of all the representations of war and violence that have been produced by artists from ancient times until now. So you have that kind of very simplistic critic who's expressing his own strong feeling of being of being violated and who doesn't want anyone to take his anguish and put it into an exhibition. All the way to very sophisticated New York contemporary art critics, who attacked the show because, according to their tastes, the art wasn't quite up to snuff, a move which I personally read as a displacement from their inability or unwillingness to deal, as you implied, Tom, with the deeper issues the show is raising. At the end of May, I have to lead a public discussion at the Museum with a rabbi from the Upper West Side in connection with the show, and our topic is "Ambiguity in Representations of Evil." This is crucial. Part of what the show is about is the fact that all of us have the capacity to be cruel, to hate one another for no good reason, and also to be indifferent to one another. As long as we simply think of ourselves as good, and the other guys as bad, we will never be able to have a peaceful world. We'll never be able to build a lasting sense of community. It's only when we can recognize our own capacity to descend to those depths that we will be able to reach out and make some kind of rapprochement out of a deep sense of humility about the human condition, its inherent contradictions, temptations, and its possibilities for transcendence and hope. And that I think is what the show is about. It's about forcing its viewers to look at tough art and to face ourselves. The critics weren't addressing that.

TM: Going back to your comments about children--in your essay for the exhibition, "Childhood, Art and Evil," you draw a correlation between children who are the innocent victims of crime and the powerlessness of adult victims of crime. Can you speak to us more about that?

EHS: What I tried to suggest is that for a very, very long time, nobody wanted to think about what happened to the children. Nobody wrote about what happened to them. It was too awful. As adults, our first duty to children is to nurture them and protect them. They are our future. For the mother, her role is to feed the child, clothe the child, keep the child warm. The principal role of the father is to protect his child from harm. This is, at the most basic level, what parents do, what adults do. And any anger, any aggression we feel toward our children, we as adults must carefully control and suppress. Any instincts that we may have to hurt them, we as adults must master. This is the way of the world: this assures that the young will grow up and that there will be a future, a civilization. As an aside, it seems to me one of the most terrifying aspects of life in the world today is the sacrifice of children in the Middle East, where youngsters, who couldn't possibly have any formed political ideas, are being sacrificed by adults who should know better, to political ends--children. Anyway, in this situation, what I felt was happening was that the Jews were being infantilized in those camps...they were being robbed of every aspect by which they could identify as adults. They were unable to feed themselves. They were prevented from initiating actions. They were robbed of their names. They were robbed of their clothing, their possessions. They were denuded of their professional lives. They were rendered completely helpless, and then they were destroyed. This seemed to me a hideous kind of perversion. And the artists, the young European and eastern European artists who have been making this art grew up in a post-war Europe, where they--in some cases, children of perpetrators and bystanders who never spoke about their own role in the war--are suffering the toxic effects of secrets and lies about all this history. Just as there were so many things that were never able to be said in the Jewish families, so it is and was on the other side. You have Germans, Poles, Austrians, of the young generation now, people in their 30s, who were taken as children to see the sites of the concentration camps, yet were always quietly wondering in their minds, "What was my father doing?" and never being told. And being haunted by these questions. And then growing up and making art.  Why would an artist, in the year 1998 or 2000, need to be making art about something that happened back in the 1940s, way before he or she was born, unless he or she were haunted by it? This is what I wanted to explore--those aspects of the work.

TM: In your essay, you speak about artists who use our fascination and curiosity about evil to entrap us. In one of your sentences, you say, "Through our spectatorial power, to look at our powerlessness in being unable to resist their seduction, we become momentary doubles for both the perpetrators of evil and its victims." Do you think this exhibition breaks new ground in this regard, and is this issue of voyeurism part of what's making people upset with the exhibition?

EHS: That's a wonderful question. I think it might do it for some viewers. But, like everything else, experiencing art is a two-way street. You have to come to the exhibition with a desire to learn something and to open yourself up to that possibility. If you don't come with that, you won't. If you do, I think you may at certain moments feel shaken and shocked. And let me say something else, Tom. About the iconography of the Holocaust--I'm planning to teach a course here at UMBC on this material, and I've done one other course at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I was asked three years in a row to do it and was scared but finally ended up going through with it and learning immensely with the students--the thing is that the same images of emaciated bodies, piles of shoes, eyeglasses--those images, those iconic images, after they've been seen now for decade after decade after decade, can go all too easily into a fixed category in the mind. It's not that they're not shocking, but they're filable in a category. This show, on the other hand--what I felt about this show--is that it's giving us some new images. And in that sense it does break new ground. And, also, another thing which a lot of the artists are doing is relating their themes to contemporary life. For example, take Zbigniew Libera, the artist who did the Lego piece. When you buy Legos building toys for children, the box is always decorated with suggestions, so that the child sees pictures of what he can make with those Legos.  Libera's Legos portray the possibility of making a concentration camp with a crematorium, a gas chambers and little Nazi soldiers-torturers. When somebody asked this artist "When you made this piece, did you think ever of the victims?" he reflected and then he said, "Yes. I thought of the victims. But even more, I thought of the victims of the future." So, he tried to make a piece that would force us to think about what is it that we give children to play with. What are we teaching our children with the toys we are giving them? Today, not only a half century ago. The show is very much about what we are doing today.

TM: Is there anything else you think we should know about the exhibition?

EHS: No, except I hope that people will come to the show, because I feel that--just as you suggested in your question (that wonderful question)--it is a show different spectators will get something different from. If you can go and reflect a little, I think it could be a very fruitful experience, especially perhaps for us in the US today. I will say one more thing.  It has to do with Mischa Kuball, the German artist who did the piece that's reproduced on the front of the catalog--a huge cross which is turned by light projections from above into a swastika. As an American woman, when I saw that piece, my first association was to the Ku Klux Klan and their burning crosses. When Mischa Kuball was asked, he said, "You know, I made this piece in Munich ten years ago, and it had all kinds of meanings for me as a German artist exhibiting this piece. Now, exhibiting it in the Jewish Museum in New York after the events of 9/11 and surrounded by a Jewish audience, suddenly, I see the piece take on all kinds of new meanings." So, I hope people will go to the show because I think it's taking on new meanings all the time. And that you will bring your own meanings to it.