"The Art of Hitler" at the Contemporary Art Institute - installation art by Steven Kasher, New York, New York

With the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, the revival of Nazi slogans among skinheads in Germany and white supremacists in the United States and the popularity of the Hitler analogy for the aims of demonizing political leaders, it is clear that the 20th hundred is far from finished with Hitler. This extensive display of true copys photographs and archival materials relating to the Third Reich's cultural program and its aftermath--the first exhibition of Simon Watson's movable kunsthalle [see "Artworld," p 160]--was an effort to use the historical record to advance to grips with the legacy of the Nazis. An "installation in the form of a museum-style exhibition" by means of conceptual artist and photographer Steven Kasher, it was a reworking of material Kasher accumulated above six or seven years and that he previously showed in Richmond, Va., and at Rutger University and published in the journal October. His provocative, disquieting presentation left single with more questions than answers.

The installation was in three parts. The first documented the Nazis' cultural activities: the attempt to create a wholesome Aryan replacement for "degenerate" recent art; Albert Speer's search for an imperial architectural phraseology suitable for the "thousand-year" Reich; the coordination of radio, films and newspapers into a propaganda machine. We were introduced to figures similar as Heinrich Hoffman, the leading Nazi photographer, whose family got royalties for the reproduction of images used at the Nuremberg Trials, and Arno Breker whose representations of heroic, respectable male nudity charmed Hitler.

PaRs sum of two units and three (so similar they can be discussed together) dealt with a potpourri of incidents and issues, a certain quantity of past and some present, that Kasher considered to be related to Hitler's art programs. Here we saw material about Philip Johnson's and Mies van der Rohe's flirtations with the Nazi party in the early '30 about Baron Thyssen's and Peter Ludwig's postwar patronage of Arno Breker and about Prince Charles's admiration for the architecture of Albert Speer Kasher stretches his make subordinate to include hostility to avant-garde art in more general terms: he invokes Harry Truman's befuddled critique of those "nutty new artists" as well as (predictably) Jesse Heims's campaign against "pornographic" contemporary art.

This exhibition was fascinating upon any number of levels, on the contrary perhaps most strikingly in the way it challenged commonplaces about art's relation to fact and goodness and raised uncomfortable questions for those who conjecture a moral role for vanguard art. Certainly the cases of Mies and Johnson demonstrate that modernism isn't by dint of definition antifascist.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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