Menachem Wecker on Photographer and Evil Aesthetics
Menachem Wecker, who is based in Washington, DC, blogs on religion and the arts at http://iconia.canonist.com. Though he has reviewed and interviewed many painters with evil inclinations, he finds no artist more evil than Mary Cassatt.
Wecker and I chatted over instant messenger about the larger implications of the film Photographer, what it means for art–and artists–to be evil, and why art shouldn’t be blamed for the Holocaust. The interview has been edited for clarity and entertainment value, if not brevity.
The Docent: So, we’re playing this film right now called Photographer, which is about how the head accountant at the Lodz ghetto, Walter Genewin, who fancied himself an amateur photographer, used the ghetto’s Jewish inmates as his subjects.
Menachem Wecker: Sort of like Dr. Mengele…
The Docent: Like Mengele? You mean experimenting on Jews?
MW: Yeah. Using Jews as models for experiments… I suspect that’s not endemic to Nazis.
The Docent: What do you mean?
MW: We’ve seen the sort of pictures emerging from Abu Ghraib, and I’m not a psychologist, but I tend to think that people in positions of power (as in the Stanford Prison experiment, and the Milgram electric shock one) have a tendency of inflicting hard on their subordinates. Experimenting is just an offshoot of that, I imagine.
I wonder if there isn’t more to it though. And I will be treading on very thin ice here…
The Docent: Go for it.
MW: I absolutely don’t want people to read this and think I’m justifying anything the Nazis did…
The Docent:They won’t think that. You’re definitely a Nazi hater. I’ll vouch for you.
MW: But there does seem to be an interesting component of the artist-model relationship, where there is a true fascination with — let’s call it “lower class models.” The best work I’ve seen on modeling is the recent book “Blue Nude” by Elizabeth Rosner. And there does seem to be a lot of power going on from the artist’s perspective and helplessness or vulnerability on the model’s.
The Docent: Upper class artists painting lower class models?
MW: Yes that happens a lot. Or think of Anna Ticho painting the patients in her husband’s waiting room. Or da Vinci chasing after people he described as grossly ugly.
The Docent: Or Diane Arbus photographing freaks.
MW: Yes. Or this whole fad of photographing homeless people. Adi Ness had done a good deal of that. I’ve always maintained that people who are ugly are easier to draw than good looking people–there’s more to caricature.
The Docent: Do you think that relationship is always an exploitative one?
MW: Not at all. I think there are plenty of models who’ve been able to exploit the artists who depicted them. If I got one thing from Rosner it’s that modeling is an art form, too.
It’s like acting I think.
But to tie this all back to the Nazis…
The Docent: Wait — but when the subject is a captive subject, or doesn’t even know they’re being a “model,” is that always wrong? Answer that, and then let’s get back to Nazis.
MW: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in my religious art writing about evil art. Let’s say a piece that shows the glory of God, we’d call that a good piece from a religious art perspective. And let’s say a piece glorifying a heretic, well that seems bad.
But that’s too literal. What about an evil choice of color or tone or tint. Are there crimes against aesthetics? I’m not sure.
The Docent: Aesthetically evil?
MW: Exactly. So is it wrong to “capture” a model? Doubtful.
The Docent: Which brings us to the next point I wanted to discuss. Evil aesthetics.
MW: I mean if you pull a Skinner move and lock her/him up in a box that’s not so nice. You know Picasso put out cigarettes in women’s faces. There are mean artists. But I’m more interested in crimes they commit against their art. Because the form on the page/canvas never “captures” the model. It creates something new, so it really has little responsibility to the “real” model who is depicted… You know what I mean?
The Docent: Yes.
MW: So, you brought up evil aesthetics. Maybe there is something aggressive about making art. Maybe there is something about the way people respond to artists, almost like the celebrity worship that goes on. They are allowed to do as they please, because they are “ahtists” (said with the accent that works best for “dahling”). I wonder if this is going to turn into an aesthetic nature-nurture problem.
The Docent: There is something to that, did you see that Woody Allen movie Bullets Over Broadway? That’s the argument there - can one be a great artist without bucking social/moral conventions? But we’re getting off track.
MW: I plead guilty. I’m an evil interview subject I fear. Shall we get back on track?
The Docent: Yes, let’s. What I really wanted to talk about was Genewin as a practitioner of a wider Nazi aesthetic. You’ve written about how Hitler was an artist, and was very cognizant of the aesthetic impact of the Nazis.
MW: I believe it was Anselm Kiefer who said WWII was the greatest multi-media event in history. And Hitler put the Bauhaus out of commission, because he hated “modern” art. He has his own quote about people seeing the sky as green and the grass as pink being sterilized.
The Docent: What kind of art did Hitler like?
MW: Well, he was a painter. I think he was not a bad painter at all. There’s this fad to say he was terrible and he hated Jews and launched WWII because he couldn’t get into art school. That’s bunk (I’ll keep it clean).
The Docent: Thank you.
MW: I think our perspective here is key. Many frame the discussion of WWII as a story of the evil tendencies in people. They say: “The Germans were the most cultured people of the time, with their operas and paintings, etc., and yet culture didn’t help them!” So Nazism, then, becomes an attack on culture. As if to say, what good is painting if art lovers can become murderers?
That makes as much sense as saying “Coca-Cola is evil because some murderers drink soda.”
The Docent: But isn’t art what’s supposed to distinguish us from the animals?
MW: Nah. Animals make art. Look at Komar and Melamid’s elephants.
The Docent: Okay, so what’s your response to those people who say the Holocaust shows art’s no good?
MW: That people can be artists and other things too. And they are not necessarily related.
The interesting thing about Hitler is that arguably his art and his politics were linked. That’s unusual I think for evil artists. But that only impacts his art. To say it’s a liability of all art is an abuse of induction. Hitler saw his art and his politics as advancing Germany. And as national acts. Interestingly, I know of no paintings of his that depict Jews or much of anything political. They are all cute landscapes and towns. The book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics shows that Hitler, as he was being cornered, was not talking to military advisers, but to artists and poets. He wanted to retire from politics and build a grand German museum.
The Docent: How do those cute landscapes tie into his politics?
MW: Well, they don’t. His paintings were his own. But his art extended to his rallies. He designed the Nazi flag and uniforms. He was involved in arranging the lights at the rallies. He practiced for hours in front of a mirror so that every movement he made was planned, like an actor or an athlete. If anything, he was aestheticizing politics, not bringing politics into art. So how can that become an attack on art?
The Docent: I’m convinced. But what effect do you think his aestheticizing politics had on politics?
MW: It made it prettier to look at?
The Docent: And on the Holocaust?
MW: Look, propaganda is a fascinating medium. That’s arguably aestheticized politics.
There’s no reason why that shouldn’t be high art. It’s so practical, so conscious of audience, so “minimalistic” almost. And the Nazis were a master of it, as were the Americans in their campaigns to attract soldiers to the war. The “sending a salami to GI Joe” was a wonderful campaign.
And the Nazis were on to something. We are still seeing the artistic implications of their “work.” All these Holocaust restitution cases that are dominating the headlines. They even managed to turn Klimt into a celebrity.
The Docent: “The Kiss” in college dorm rooms all over America, a product of the Nazis?
MW: The big question now is Barenboim playing Wagner…
The Docent: Yes. But don’t you think that emphasis on aesthetics, and on marketing, makes things rather cold and anesthetized?
MW: How so?
The Docent: There’s a lack of sincerity in doing everything for the effect it will make. Not in art, but in life.
MW: How can effect be anything but sincerity? Are you questioning the Nazis’ sincerity? I think they were pretty darn sincere. Propaganda is far more honest than art is.
The Docent: What I’m getting at is the problem of aestheticizing reality.
MW: Oh I see.
The Docent: One of the tricks of Nazi propaganda was to dehumanize Jews, by depicting them as rats, vermin, non-human.
MW: Sure. They probably learned that from the early Christian artists’ depictions of Saracens and Jews. It’s caricature. I’m not so sure I’m convinced it works though. I think dehumanizing art only works if viewers already despise the dehumanized. I don’t think it makes evil people; it just appeals to the choir. I get the impression most people don’t take art seriously at all.
The Docent: Perhaps, but it makes literal what people are thinking.
MW: That’s a good point. So maybe it does reinforce a bit. That’s a fascinating thing about art. Think of those cave people painting the bison on their cave walls in berry juice. Our best guess is that they thought they were “capturing” the beasts, and that would somehow help them at the hunt. Art does take life and cut it down to size somehow. It does dehumanize, because it turns people into color and line and such. But I guess when it’s used for politics purposes, rather than art ones, we get uneasy.
I just wish people would learn an important lesson from this.
The Docent: What’s that?
MW: If you do think that images have the strength to incite hate, then they also have the power to do good things. So when you see art you like, buy it, or talk about it, or educate yourself about it.
It’s so bizarre to me that people don’t give art much thought until it offends them, and then all of a sudden it’s a force to be reckoned with.
If Hitler’s art killed, Cezanne’s probably gave life.
The Docent: Was he Jewish?
MW: Nah. He was a good Christian. But Pissarro was. You see in the museums he’s always Camille, but he’s Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro. And he looked like a Hasid.
The Docent: He dropped the Jewish names? Just like Winona Ryder.
MW: Well Pissarro, however poor, didn’t shoplift. There is a difference.
The Docent: An important distinction. So, the point I was trying to get to, and we’ll see if you agree…
MW: On the edge of my seat.
The Docent: …is that the Nazi application of aesthetics to life creates a kind of disconnect - or a space - between reality and one’s experience of it.
MW: That sounds smarter than what I was saying. Maybe they sought to bring life up to their artistic ideals?
The Docent: Perhaps. But it’s the kind of disconnect that would allow someone like Genewin to focus more on the quality of the light in his image than the starving Jew at the center of that image.
MW: Yes! Well said.
The Docent: Thanks.
MW: But let’s point out to cover ourselves, that this doesn’t justify the starving.
The Docent: No, of course not.
MW: There’s this case now about this artist who got a starving dog off the street into a gallery. And it died in the gallery, and everyone is debating whether he let it die and all. And sure it makes an important point to watch a dog die in a gallery, but that doesn’t justify killing it.
The Docent: What important point does that make, watching a dog starving?
MW: Well it’s something that happens all the time in the street, but maybe people will notice it if it’s in the gallery.
So many people go to museums like they go to church–expecting the profound. The goal is to let them realize that profundity exists in and outside the gallery/church with equal regularity.
The Docent: Ok, do you have any last thoughts before we finish on this subject?
MW: Sure. I think we need to be open to the possibility that art might be the last shred of goodness and creativity that remains in some very destructive people.
Human sacrifices happened on very beautifully made altars. They were simultaneously awful and evil and beautiful. This shouldn’t scare us, and we shouldn’t worry about humanizing evil. I think evil is not to be pushed away as Other.
Art lets us see that very often people who are destructive also create sometimes, and rather than seeing that as a liability of creativity, or as evil creations, we should see it, at least sometimes, as a struggle within that person.
The Docent: So can we say that beauty is amoral?
MW: Well, Wilde would agree with that. I think it depends on the artist in a sense. But yes, if I had to say yes or no to that sentence, I’d say yes.
The Docent: I’ll take it. Thanks so much for the chat.
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