ROY EDROSO

Regarding Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art at the Jewish Museum, much has been written since the show's opening on March 17. Indeed, much was written about the show before its opening. "Art Snobs Pit Jew Against Jew," shrieked the March 12 headline of one of Andrea Peyser's rants in the New York Post. After the opening, another Peyser headline supplied an update: "The Art Stinks, Too."

Better-credentialed observers have been more thoughtful but, ultimately, not much more insightful. Many of them seem more concerned with the lobby signage than with the art itself. At the New York Observer, Ron Rosenbaum quotes the Museum's promotional and curatorial materials extensively, and is displeased to find a passage from his own book, Explaining Hitler, included among them. He denounces the exhibition's "moral equivalence," even inferring that its self-promotion as a "dangerous" show serves, by congratulating visitors who have the stomach to actually view it, "to disparage the comparative lack of courage of Holocaust victims." Along the way, he beats up Charlie Chaplin and Roberto Benigni, neither of whom, I should add, are in Mirroring Evil.

I have no dog in this fight. For all the heat generated by the present discourse, the Holocaust itself remains about the least controversial subject on Earth. It was very bad. Everyone who has seen the show, and everyone who made it, knows this. And everyone who doesn't--every one of the Holocaust deniers, anti-Semites, and plain fools--doesn't count. They are beyond the reach of any art and any argument. If Osama bin Laden somehow contrives to defeat the United States and, on his way to decapitate the Mayor of New York, drops by the Museum to take in Mirroring Evil, his point of view on Jews will not be affected by it.

I have seen the show, and most of the art, per Peyser, stinks. How does it stink? Look at it this way: What do we expect from any work of art? In the crudest terms, we seek to see an old thing in a new way. Sunshine is available to anyone with the sense of sight or touch; but poetry can reimagine it for us, so that we experience and appreciate it anew, and we are grateful for it even if actual sunlight is streaming through our window to illuminate the pages from which we read the poetry.

This applies to dark topics, too, and one would hope that Mirroring Evil would show us the Holocaust phenomenon anew. This is, of course, hoping a lot. Most Holocaust art serves the documentary function of showing the unenlightened just how very bad this bad thing was. Once we have sufficient experience of this, what is there to add? Art can find something; it can find it in sunshine and in utter darkness. But you have to do more than document the subject. Can you say more than the pile of shoes in Night and Fog? Can anyone?

Mirroring Evil tries--nobly, one might say, were the results not so disastrous. The famous Lego concentration camp by Zbigniew Libera provokes a little spark: Of course the (dare one say Germanic?) passion for mechanical order that informed the camps' machinery of death can also be seen in Lego kits. But the spark never catches fire, because the Holocaust is about more than a passion for mechanical order. (Were it not, the Nazis might have contented themselves with the Volkswagen, and not built the camps at all.) Libera's Tiffany Zyklon-B canisters, and a swastika made out of a matzoh box, don't even take us that far.

Some works are simply inept. A large, supine cross projects film images from each point onto the floor, to form the extra angles that make the cross a swastika. I was told after viewing this that the images were from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but these can hardly be made out, unless you have previously made a game of guessing the identity of great German expressionist films from improperly projected fragments.

The closest thing to a success is Roee Rosen's Live and Die as Eva Braun, pieces of an (alas) truncated second-person narrative of the life of Hitler's girlfriend, accompanied by drawings, silhouettes, and cut-paper images. These images are deliberately juvenile--like the illustrations from children's books of the 19th century--but executed with care and craft. Many of the scenes are interesting conflations of lurid and nostalgic imagery. But what this to do with...well, with anything? Maybe the whole Braun story would get us there. But it has been edited, severing whatever lifeline Rosen may have provided to an epiphany.

And so on, through portraits of Hollywood actors as Nazis, busts of Mengele modeled from verbal accounts of the infamous torturer's appearance, and film clips of Hitler on the stump, VJed together, forcing the Fuhrer to make an outrageously inappropriate comment. They all point the way somewhere, but don't go much of anywhere themselves.

Perhaps the plentiful writings associated with the show draw a diagram to the works' intended ends, but I came for art, not promo copy, and did not read them. I did go through the guest book at the show's terminus. Some of the comments therein were derogatory (though none, fans of civil discourse will note, were as savage as Peyser's Post writings), some were laudatory, many were nonplussed. ("Kristine" and "Malinda," 11 and 12 years of age respectively, found the show "somewhat confusing.")

My favorite was written by a fellow who used the letter "H" inside a circle to denote the word "Holocaust." Why, he did not say. Might he have been in the camps? "This is the future," he wrote, and drew an arrow to a dot on the page. "We are here, 57 years after liberation. The art form will be great 500 years from now. The exhibit has flashes of creativity. Most of the artists have used the [Holocaust] for some kind of self-liberation. The [Holocaust] has not yet been dealt with..."

Mirroring Evil will be at the Jewish Museum through June 30. The museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue.