Nowe kontrowersje (Re. Zacheta)
Leszek Andrzej Kleczkowski
notka z LA Times:
Marilyn, Holocaust painting causes stir
By Lisa Richardson Los Angeles Times, 4/27/2001
OS ANGELES - To some, the name alone - ''Marilyn at Auschwitz'' - pretty
much says it all. After the name come the outraged gasps, the accusations
of insensitivity, of anti-Semitism, of artistic freedom used to rub salt
in half-healed wounds.
To others, ''Marilyn at Auschwitz,'' the words curling in blue neon light
across a painting that plops the gleaming icon of sex into the barracks at
an infamous concentration camp, is a cultural critique. It sums up a
culture of celebrity worship that dominates, trivializes and obscures even
the most heinous human acts.
At any rate, a popular downtown restaurant/bar/art space called 410 Boyd
has been the scene of furious debate, and sometimes just fury, as
politicians and garment district workers, film students and journalists,
Superior Court judges and graphic artists argue about the Holocaust,
artistic license and Robert Reynolds's painting over their hamburgers and
ahi tuna salads. ''Marilyn at Auschwitz'' is one of a number of the local
artist's works hanging at 410 Boyd until Monday.
Most people have already seen the two famous images that are juxtaposed in
the painting: Jewish concentration camp prisoners and Marilyn Monroe on a
grate. Now just picture them together.
Reynolds re-creates the gaunt stares of the men in the original photo, but
instead of the lone standing man, a luscious, fleshy Marilyn swings her
floaty ''Seven Year Itch'' dress around her thighs, dominating the
foreground. The restaurant has stopped turning on the painting's neon
light at lunchtime, finding that complaints dropped off sharply when the
canvas is unlighted.
After lunch, however, the light goes on. And the comments resume:
''You are spitting on my grandfather!''
''I will not be coming back here until that painting is down.''
But, says 410 Boyd's Ulrich Schnetter, ''it is not for me, a restaurant
owner, to judge what is art and what is not art.'' His role, he says, is
to support local artists by letting them express themselves on his walls.
He is not personally offended by ''Marilyn at Auschwitz.'' ''What it says
to me is, we're idolizing the superficial and losing sight of what really
matters,'' Schnetter says. ''But I can understand the pain of people who
had their grandparents or parents go through that.''
A group of businessmen leaving the restaurant the other day slows down to
look at the painting, which is about 5 feet by 4 feet, on the way out.
''What's the big deal? We've seen it all before,'' says one. ''It's
Marilyn.''
''Wait, aren't those concentration camp refugees all around her?'' asks
another. ''I don't think I've seen that before!''
''What was the artist thinking?''
''What was the artist drinking?''
''Those guys are probably dreaming about her, that's how I see it,''
adds another.
This is not the first time the painting has caused a controversy. When
it hung on the walls of the Julie Rico Studio in Santa Monica last year,
patrons complained in droves, and several alerted the Simon Wiesenthal
Center.
The Wiesenthal Center fields a regular flow of fearful and sometimes
furious calls from Holocaust survivors around the world, reporting real
or perceived threats, desecrations and outright menaces, says Rabbi
Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center. Among them, officials have
received calls about the Hitler Bar in Pusan, South Korea, as well as a
discotheque near the Auschwitz death camp (which Polish officials agreed
to close last week) and also about Reynolds's Marilyn painting.
''We're not art critics, and it's not our job to serve as art critics,''
Cooper says. After talking to Julie Rico about the painting, Wiesenthal
officials decided that no anti-Semitism or malice was intended. ''As we
understand it,'' says Cooper, ''the artist is depicting the values of
American pop culture, and when it comes to the point of issues like
genocide, they're overwhelmed by America's fixation with celebrity and
pop culture.''
Which does not mean Cooper likes the painting. It does serve, however,
to illustrate a tension that will increasingly challenge the Jewish
community, he says. ''This matters because we're in a transitional time
in history, where the collective memory of these events is rapidly
receding, so people are ready to deal with this more in an abstract
way.''
This disconnect is forcefully present in ''Marilyn at Auschwitz,'' where
even Auschwitz is not really Auschwitz, but Buchenwald. The 1945 photo of
slave laborers in the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany was taken
on the day of their liberation by the American Army. One of the prisoners,
Elie Wiesel, would later become an icon in his own right, winning a Nobel
Prize for literature and popularizing the word ''Holocaust.''
Holocaust images divorced from their real meaning are popping up in
far-flung locales, particularly Asia, Cooper says. ''There's a restaurant
in Taiwan that uses historic visuals from the camps as its wallpaper.
Then there is the Hitler Bar in Pusan, South Korea. That's not a society
that has a profound understanding of Nazism.''
''Oh, that's just bad taste!'' blurts K.N. Henry, a University of
California, Berkeley administrator, as he arrives at 410 Boyd for lunch.
''It says a lot about pop culture - that we probably spend more time
thinking about Marilyn Monroe than Auschwitz, but I'm having a hard time
marrying both images.''
Meanwhile, artist Peter Ladato, eating a hamburger at the bar, is one of
the few to critique the painting purely in terms of artistic merit. ''It's
all rehashed stuff, and the artist is going for shock value,'' he says.
''It's very self-conscious.''
A day earlier, Reynolds is sitting at the bar after the lunch rush and
admiring it: ''It's one of my favorites.'' Describing any work of art,
he adds, is to ruin it, but he allows that he likes the juxtaposition of
extremes.
Reynolds, 58, knows he is difficult to peg as an artist. While some of
his work includes unexpected pairings, such as a Lee Harvey Oswald and
Jackie Kennedy series of paintings - meant to mildly mock conspiracy
theorists - other pieces are spare and abstract.
When asked whether he understands how his painting causes some people
pain, he demurs.
''No, I don't see pain,'' he says, eyes fixed on the picture. ''I mean,
the painting is based on a photo of these men being liberated. These are
the people who lived.''
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Smart questions to stupid answers
Pisz z sensem - rob dwie spacje po kropce