An Unfathomable Distance

"Can you imagine," a friend asked me, "if your grandfather were in that picture, and it was appropriated like this, even to make a fascinating point?"

My friend was reacting to a

in which computer artist Alan Schechner superimposed himself, Diet Coke can in hand, on top of a famous Margaret Bourke-White photograph of Holocaust survivors in their bunkers at the Buchenwald concentration camp.

I would be horrified. I would certainly feel the apprehension that my friend and most others feel over seeing this piece of art, called "It's the Real Thing--Self Portrait at Buchenwald"--the sense that this photograph somehow diminished Holocaust victims' experience. But my real horror would stem from a better understanding of the piece. Though the work has been described by art critics as an attempt at "collapsing historical distance," I would feel horror because it is such a provocative reminder of how unfathomable that distance is--between now and 50 years ago, and between my own life and the lives of my maternal grandparents, both Holocaust survivors. I spend my twenties living comfortably in my Manhattan apartment, drinking plenty of Diet Cokes. My grandparents, at about my age, lived in a Displaced Persons camp after World War II, figuring out how to start anew after their families, the lives they had known, and the majority of the rest of European Jewry had been destroyed.

"It's the Real Thing" is just one of a number of equally provocative works of art in

, called "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art," at New York's Jewish Museum. Most art created in response to the Holocaust has dealt with the themes of victimhood, of tragedy, of survival, and of the painful aftermath.

The works in this show are different. Many of the pieces depict the perpetrators and the means of destruction, rather than the victims and their experiences. The exhibit includes other works like "Giftgas Giftset," a collection of Zyklon-B canisters with luxury brand labels, and a "Lego Concentration Camp Set."

Detractors of the show say that it is too early to produce or exhibit anything at all provocative about the Holocaust because it is insensitive to the survivors and their families. Our memory of the Holocaust is created and maintained through images, as the museum's exhibition catalog points out, and through the stories of survivors. It is understandable to want to ensure that these images are valid representations, so that what memory we have of the events does not get distorted. Others believe that artwork like this has no place at all in a Jewish museum, or in our understanding of the Holocaust.

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