Posted on 01/21/2004 9:50:38 PM PST by maui_hawaii
To me, her smile is grotesque. She floats there, the Mona Lisa of mayhem, her photograph forming the sail of a little toy boat on a pool of blood. The pool is half-frozen, and the blood seeps into the pure white snow covering the courtyard garden. People gather in quiet, serious groups; TV cameras attend the Swedish minister of culture as she, too, looks quietly, seriously, at the gory pond.
Personally, I want to laugh. I would love to laugh. Because this is the stupidest story you will ever hear about art, outrage and international diplomacy. Only it isn't funny.
On Friday night there was an incident in Stockholm that rapidly involved Ariel Sharon and the Swedish government in an international crisis that shows no signs of being resolved. Zvi Mazel, Israel's ambassador to Sweden, tells his side of the story unapologetically. Along with other diplomats and VIPs, he was invited to the opening, at the National Historical Museum in Stockholm, of an exhibition at this and other venues called Making Differences, linked to a conference on how to prevent genocide.
"They said to me, you've got to see this," Mazel tells me. "They led me into this inner courtyard. I could not believe my eyes - to see this sea of red blood and then the smiling face of this suicide bomber. I thought to myself, What does it mean, that there's this sea of still-fresh blood and she's smiling, and then I read the title and I saw that she's Snow White, meaning her sins have been washed away - and this is the blood of my brothers, my people."
The floating photograph is of Palestinian trainee lawyer Hanadi Jaradat, 29, who murdered 21 people at the Maxim restaurant in Haifa, Israel, on October 4 last year. She also died herself. In the photo she is made up and gently smiling.
Mazel continues: "I spoke to the museum's director and said it's not acceptable; it's inciting murder, it's the encouragement of genocide. He wouldn't close the exhibit so I said, 'I'll do it,' and I pulled the plugs of the spots out of their sockets. Then I pushed one of the spots into the pool."
Rage rose in him like a sea of blood. "An ambassador was overtaken by his feelings," as he puts it. It was, he acknowledges, a release for his larger frustration with European attitudes to Israel. "We are being attacked every day for everything we do. You should read the report published in Sweden two months ago by the Swedish committee on anti-semitism. Last year there were 130 complaints by Jews to the police of harassment by Arabs; Jews are hiding the star of David under their shirts. Swedish schools started teaching about the Shoah recently, but when the teacher talks about the Shoah an Arab boy will stand up and say no, it's a lie, we admire Hitler ..."
Art vandalism is always a good story. Art vandalism by an ambassador against an artwork in the country with which he is employed to maintain diplomatic relations is something rarer - a new story. And this one just keeps growing. Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister, has publicly supported his ambassador, with some enthusiasm. "I think Zvi Mazel behaved in an appropriate way," Sharon announced. "I called ... and thanked him for his stand against the growing wave of anti-semitism."
Passion is always attractive; reports around the world, especially in the Israeli and American press, have found in Mazel a popular hero, the undiplomatic diplomat, the man who decided to do something more committed than have a quiet word behind the scenes over the smorgasbord. The Jerusalem Post added a nuanced art-critical element by arguing that Israel's ambassador to Sweden should be acknowledged as a performance artist, and that his action was a "moral" work of art worth far more than the "banal" installation he damaged.
But none of these people has gone to Sweden, to look at the installation Snow White and the Madness of Truth by Gunilla Sköld Feiler and Dror Feiler, and see what all the fuss is about. So here I was, in the snow, trudging up to Sweden's equivalent of the British Museum ("But a lot smaller", its director admits). It is not some confrontational contemporary art space - in fact it is best known for its display of Viking rune stones. And so the first thing that strikes you is the excitement in the air. The place is embattled, exhilarated, with artists, publicists, directors and government ministers running around, while Swedes in droves have come to see for themselves why the museum has been declared an enemy of Israel.
The offending installation - rapidly restored after Mazel's attack - is out of doors, in a courtyard garden. The garden is rather beautiful. A tree, winter flowers still in bloom and, at the centre of the enclosed retreat, a rectangle full of blood.
The icy air heightens the impact of what might otherwise seem a fragile work at best. Bach's Cantata 199, Mein Herze Schwimmt im Blut (My Heart Swims in Blood), fills the courtyard with its keening. The beauty of the music completes the bizarre nature of the scene - and I don't mean only the installation, but ourselves as participants, wearing appropriate expressions, wondering what is a suitable response to a pool of blood. Someone explains that the de-icer in the liquid hasn't worked properly, but the lumps of red ice add to the effect.
It's horrible, it's sick, but I can't for one moment accept that it is an apology for a suicide bomber. Everyone interprets art differently. That's what makes it art. If this were a propaganda work, the museum would have a case to answer - maybe. But it's not. 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.
My feeling about the face at the centre of all this, that of the bomber, is one of gross irony: that she is more famous than the people she killed. That photograph was circulated widely after the atrocity in Haifa last October; we've all seen it before. The flimsy cosmetic prettiness of the picture is what jars. That lipstick.
Possibly this is all to do with not listening to the music closely enough. The words of Cantata 199 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."
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."
Feiler is as stoked up as the ambassador, and perhaps not entirely displeased by the hubbub. He is a political man, a prominent pro-Palestinian rights campaigner in Sweden. He, like everyone else at the museum, believes that far from being a spontaneous outburst, the high-level "hooliganism" was planned. He thinks his reputation drew attention to the piece: "I am a harsh critic of Israeli government policies."
Far from the ambassador carefully unplugging the lights, says Feiler, they short-circuited when he threw one in the water. "I said to him, 'What did you do!' He said, 'This is incitement to the murder of Jews.' I said, 'We have freedom of speech. If you don't like it you can go away.'"
Israel has demanded the removal of the exhibit. This will not happen, insists the museum, unequivocally supported by the Swedish government. "Difficult and controversial works of art should be shown in public institutions like ours," the director, Kristian Berg, tells me. That Friday night, he ordered the ambassador to leave his museum - "mildly, of course".
Outside, TV crews huddle over their equipment as Dror Feiler shows his work to Marita Ulvskog, Sweden's minister of culture. She doesn't say much, just looks gravely at him, then at the pool. They shake hands. Sweden's spin doctors are more relaxed than ours, and she gladly agrees to talk to the Guardian.
"Our position is that we cannot accept that an ambassador or someone else is violently attacking a work of art. We can understand why somebody is angry or depressed by a work of art, but we cannot accept that you meet that anger with violence." She's a lot less forthright when I ask if she personally likes the work. "I can only say that I have full respect for people that react strongly [against] this work of art, but at the same time we have to clearly defend our constitution."
But what about Mazel's accusation - backed up by Sharon - that Sweden is rife with anti-semites? "In Europe," she says, "and in other parts of the world, you always have to be vigilant on anti-semitism because that's an old illness. But I wouldn't say that Sweden is worse than other countries."
While all this is going on, the terrorist still looks immaculate on her little boat. As the light gets bluer, the scene dreamlike, for a moment I top the Israeli ambassador's suspicions with a paranoia of my own. It is as if Hanadi Jaradat, or the Islamic Jihad organisation that persuaded her to strap on explosives while she was grieving for a brother shot by Israeli soldiers, authored this picture, these people here, all the cameras, the security men. It is as if violence were such a powerful force that it is the only culture left to us; as if violence were so eloquent that it could silence all ambiguity, all reason.
You can empathise with Zvi Mazel, if he really did think he was confronted with a celebration of mass murder. But it's difficult to comprehend how he thought that. I tell him I saw the work differently. Using the diplomatic skills that - despite Friday - he possesses, he ignores this.
But even if we were to grant that he made a hot-headed mistake, the subsequent support of his act, with a formal government-level call for the work to be removed, has no basis: the piece is clearly not what he took it for. It 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.
I ask Mazel about the follow-up story that Israel's embassy in Stockholm is moving because of fears over its security. No, no, that was a confusion, he says. The embassy may have to move because its landlord has other intentions for the site. It's an unrelated story. So where did it come from? I check at FreeRepublic.com, "a Conservative news source", which quotes the Jerusalem Post, reporting on an interview Mazel gave Israel radio on Monday. He said the move is part of "the general atmosphere of hostility towards Israel all around Europe - Sweden included".
So the stories circulate, and in a small museum in Stockholm, a breeze blows, and a sailboat falls over.
I posted it because FR was mentioned by the author.
Well, doesn't everybody read FREE REPUBLIC? 
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'Final Solution,' Phase 2 ~
This attitude is the reason art has suffered so badly in the past century. Art is a means of communicating, not a means of obfuscating. The goal of the artist is to share his visions, which are so complex that a mere narrative recitation will not suffice. In the physical work, the artist produces the means whereby other people will share his perception of reality.
Those who look at something that is plain and simple and attempt to make something "complex" out of it merely show the world how completely shallow they are.
People who get a thrill out of a grizzly spectacle like this are people who have totally empty and useless lives.
This jerk should definitely not be covering cultural events. This is unmistakable propaganda, and to deny that is to deny that art exists.
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