“Enfants Gâtés,” detail, by Alain Séchas, installation with mixed media, dimensions variable, 1997, courtesy of Galerie Jennifer Flay and Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris
Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (Jewish Museum, New York, spring 2002) brought together thirteen international artists, all in their 30s and 40s, who appropriate images from the Third Reich or use its iconography. This paper is an effort to understand the controversy surrounding the exhibition by first looking at the various modes in which the Holocaust has been represented – documentary realism and the “reality effect;” allusion, evocation and distanced realism; postmodern irony and appropriation, and then analyzing the specifics of the exhibition – the curatorial framework and the art it contains.
Anja Bock 