A new exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU, Evil: A Matter of Intent, examines the exigencies of cruelty — what it takes to create it and the
methodology that allows it to exist. Evil is not, the artists here
purport, something intrinsic to humanity, not by birth, anyway. Acts of
evil are deliberate. Evil is a choice.
Before traveling here, this
exhibition was previously at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute
of Religion. There, it didn’t include the blood-red KKK King Kleagle
robe, a kind of pièce de résistance for the Miami show. King Kleagles
oversee a given geographic area of the Klan and are responsible for
recruiting new Klansmen, and this particular robe, from the 1940s, comes
at an unnerving time, on the heels of the white supremacist
demonstrations in Charlottesville.
The rest of the exhibition is
huge, with more than 70 works (painting, sculptural pieces, photographs,
ephemera) from 1940 to the present, with each addressing evil in its
various incarnations: racism, abuse, slavery, rape, murder, acts of
terrorism, systemic violence, and the destruction of cultural heritage.
There’s a poster for the American Committee for Relief in the Near East,
circa 1918, regarding the Armenian genocide in Turkey. The poster reads
“LEST WE PERISH” and an accompanying plaque notes that it’s still
illegal to discuss the World War I-era massacre of Armenians. (*)
Children’s drawings collected from refugee camps in Chad (by organization Waging Peace)
depict the genocide of non-Arab, black Africans in Darfur. Homes
rendered in crayon burst into flames; soldiers shaded with colored
pencil shoot at the bodies of running passerby. The child artists are
named and quoted; a girl named Aisha says, “It is very kind to send us
food, but this is Africa and we are used to being hungry. What I ask is
that you please take the guns away from the people who are killing us.”
Sometimes
evil is less obvious than the murder of children; it can be systemic
and hidden, and Hedy Pagremanski’s pencil drawings of homeless New
Yorkers portray them as victims of a system that allows the mentally
ill, those who’ve lost their homes to unaffordable housing, and war
veterans to end up on the street. Other sorts of evil are more
insidious and subtle. Trix Rosen’s “SIN STREET,” a sendup of a pulp
fiction film poster, reads “THE BEAUTIFUL BRUNETTE HAS A FACE AND FIGURE
THAT COULD LEAD A MAN … TO MURDER,” implying that women’s sexuality is
itself guileful.
Women are common victims in Evil. Steps
away from the KKK robe is a cluster of delicate silk belts by Andi
Arnovitz, each stamped with quotes by women who’ve suffered domestic
abuse. Titled “Beaten out of Them,” they come in an array of colors. The
red belts feature quotes by women who are no longer alive. One reads,
“surviving the violence was easy, he didn’t want to kill me,” which is
unsurprising enough to still be nausea-inducing.
Global
or universal examples of evil are useful, but an American exhibit ought
to be self-reflective. Luckily, it is. Leonard Meiselman’s oil
painting, “Hiroshima, a Child’s Shirt,” is a reminder of our own
government’s role in these sorts of atrocities. Faith Ringgold’s
seemingly cheerful lithograph, “Here Comes Moses,” is bright and
primary-colored, featuring a young slave making his way toward “freedom”
(a house on his path is literally emblazoned with the word). Text
surrounds the print: “Aunt Emmy said he’d find us one day … He lost his
mother and father on the way. ‘They’ll never find me in this storm but
we will all find freedom. God willing. We were born to be free. I will
never give up,’ said Moses.”
The
age-old question of evil is brought to task, too: How are we
implicated? It would feel unproductive (though admittedly cathartic) to
display cruelty as cruelty, a thing that simply exists. Jacqueline
Nicholls’ “Who Is Righteous?,” part of a series in which she draws one
page of the Talmud each day, draws upon page 55 . Here, it is said that
the righteous will be branded with a tav (the last letter of the Hebrew
alphabet) in ink, and the wicked with the same letter in blood. But who
is truly righteous, asks God’s attribute of justice, if they cannot
prevent wickedness in the first place? Who is without sin? Ben Shahn’s
lithograph, “Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By,” illustrates the Biblical
quote Elie Weisel often called upon — Leviticus’s “Though shalt not
stand idly by while your neighbor’s blood is shed.” The blind eye turned to evil, this kind of denial, is mentioned throughout the exhibition as evil’s potential equal.
There is a great deal of honesty in Evil,
particularly in its assertion that atrocity is rooted in both a fear of
the other and a need for power. That said, I do wish that, given the
exhibition’s placement in the Jewish Museum, there had been work
contending with the state of affairs in Israel and Palestine.
The
museum is housed in two former synagogues that once served as the first
Jewish congregations on Miami Beach; the Kleagle robe is surrounded by
sacred Hebrew symbology, trapped by that which would spur its wearer’s
hatred. There’s poetry in placing a symbol of white supremacy and hatred
exactly where it ought to be: in a museum, vulnerable and exposed.
Evil: A Matter of Intent continues at the Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU (301 Washington Ave, Miami Beach) through October 1.
"Hyperallergic" (https://hyperallergic.com/397781/from-the-kkk-to-darfur-reflecting-on-evil-as-a-deliberate-act/), September 17, 2017
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(*) The bold letters are ours ("Armeniaca").
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