Jewish Museum in Holocaust "Art" Flap

By MARSHA KRANES

January 11, 2002 -- A controversial art exhibit that makes daring and disturbing use of Nazi images is coming to the Jewish Museum of New York - and generating heated debate before it's even opens.

Part of the debate centers on whether the strong, sometimes offensive images in "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" are sensationalist or thought-provoking. But an even bigger debate is raging over whether the show belongs in a Jewish museum.

Among the works to be exhibited are:

• "LEGO Concentration Camp Set," by Zbiginiew Libera - featuring a LEGO toy box with a picture of a miniature death camp made with LEGO blocks.
• "Giftgas Giftset," by Tom Sachs - a series of poison-gas canisters with designer labels.
• "It's The Real Thing - Self Portrait at Buchenwald" by Alan Schechner - the artist holding a Diet Coke inserted into the famous photo of emaciated Jews being liberated from the death camp.

"Chutzpah," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. "It's not an issue of censorship -- such an exhibit will find a way into the pop culture. But the Jewish Museum should be building a firewall to protect history, to stand with the victims, to help the community at large to understand the sacredness of memory."

The show will run at the Jewish Museum, on Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, from March 17 to June 30.

Website note: Abraham Foxman, wealthy and controversial chief of the Anti Defamation league, likes to refer to himself as a "Holocaust survivor." As a biography on this website show, he was not even born when Hitler invaded his native Poland, and he was looked after by Polish Catholics throughout the war; his parents also "survived".

"It's a very different approach to the Nazi era and the Holocaust -- focusing on the perpetrator and implicating you, as the viewer of the work," said museum curator Norman Kleeblatt.

The LEGO toy box, he said, shows how "innocent things can be perverted and turned into implements of destruction."

The "Giftgas Giftset" piece "shows how you can make something glamorous out of something that is poisonous."

Holocaust survivor Abe Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, says "the exhibit is premature" and will be "as long as there are survivors alive who may be offended."