Following up on this earlier post, I found this report at the Guardian, their Jonathan Jones reports on the scandal around Gunilla Sköld Feiler and Dror Feiler's work Snow White and the Madness of Truth.
It's in very poor taste, if you like, but is there a tasteful way to talk about terrorism? About people disintegrating into bits of flesh? Which is what, to me, that chunky pool suggests. ... Death threats have been made against the artists. Only one of them, Dror Feiler, is prepared to speak in public, but you get the feeling he can take care of himself. Before leaving Israel, he was a paratrooper for three years in his country's army. "My family lives in Israel - why should I like suicide bombers? The fact that we try to explain terrorism doesn't mean that we forgive. It feels ridiculous to have to say it, but we condemn suicidal bombings."
The museum, and with it the Swedish government, has supported the artists, on the grounds that Sweden's constitution protects freedom of speech. The Israeli government has condemned the work and Sweden more broadly. Israel's ambassador to Sweden Mazel (who defaced the artwork) says that the work is evidence of the increasing anti-Semitism in the country.
And now, Salon reports, the Wiesenthal Center has organized an email campaign against the installation and the museum, which has received about 14,000 emails. But these people (at least it seems safe to assume the majority of them) haven't experienced the work in situ. The Guardian's story is important because Jones examines the work and thinks about its consituent parts. One problem with installations is that you have to be there to get it; another problem is that, if you are there, you have to pay attention to all those parts. Jones points out that the music playing in the piece, Beethoven's Cantata 199, is vital to the piece's overall meaning:
The words...ought to have alerted Mazel to the ambiguity, to say the least, of this work of art towards the woman he thinks it praises. The cantata begins:"My heart swims in blood/ because the brood of my sins/ in God's holy eyes/ makes me into a monster."
...
[The piece] may fail to make you think as much as the artists would like, but they have the last laugh on critics who sneer at the work's "banality" without looking up the self-lacerating language of Cantata 199, so crucial to the experience in the cold garden.
One of the artists is, apparently, an activist for Palestinian rights; he suspects that the ambassador's attack was planned, not spontaneous, as a reaction against his anti-Israeli politics. But even if we consider where the artists' larger sympathies lie, I cannot read this work as a glorification of suicide bombing. It seems to me (again, without being there) more about the wasting of yet another life in the endless cycle of killing that shapes both Palestinian and Israeli daily experience.
Posted by Heather at January 28, 2004 08:49 AM