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PDF FormatThe ambassador, moreover, denied that Snow White and the Madness of Truth was anything more than trite propaganda. “For me it was intolerable and an insult to the families of the victims. As the ambassador of Israel, I could not remain indifferent to such an obscene misrepresentation of reality.… This was not a piece of art.… It was a monstrosity.”5 Speaking to Israel Television’s Channel 2, Mazel called the work “a complete legitimization of genocide, the murder of innocent people, innocent civilians, under the guise of culture.”6 For this reason, he added, “I have no regrets whatsoever…. I acted according to my feelings. You saw the installation and what happened. I could not have acted differently.”7
Doron Luria, a curator at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, concurred. He said he understood Mazel’s act and deemed the artwork an inferior piece of provocation. “The piece is simply not worth all of the excitement,” he told the press. “I sympathize completely with the ambassador’s actions. There is no place for such an idiotic piece in Stockholm.”8
But in Sweden, the ambassador’s actions were widely assailed. While stopping short of endorsing the work, the Swedish prime minister told Swedish television’s TV4 that “Artists have their freedom.” Kristian Berg, the museum’s director, said that while he realized the installation may have been emotional for Mazel, destroying art was unacceptable: “If you don’t like what you see, you can leave the premises.”9 Yet both Persson and Berg distanced themselves from the art’s content, refusing to take a stand on something about which ambivalence itself is startling. Asked what he actually thought of the work, as opposed to the abstract principle putatively protecting it, Persson replied: “I neither liked nor disliked it.”10 Berg was more forceful. “You can have your own view of what this piece of art is all about,” he opined, “but using violence is never, ever allowed, and it is never allowed to try to silence the artist.”11
As if the issue were one of the right to an opinion: The ambassador has his, the artists, theirs. In a caricature of much of today’s European Left, Berg offered the possibility that perhaps if everybody were to get together for a discussion, the politics of life and death, justice and injustice, could give way to mutual understanding: “We will display this entire exhibit for the length of time that was initially planned, including this installation.… But on Monday we will also send an invitation to Israel’s ambassador to come to an open discussion about this piece of art, about his actions, and about art and freedom of expression.”12
Then there were those who berated the ambassador’s poor taste, lamenting his inability to understand a simple work of art, and accusing him of gross misapprehension. “The whole problem,” argued Sweden’s ambassador to Israel Robert Rydberg, “is by and large based on a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation of a piece of art which may very well be in bad taste…. The piece is about a Palestinian woman having murdered innocent civilians. It mentions the names of the tragic Israeli victims in Haifa. It is not a justification of suicide bombings. It is, in my view, an example of bad taste…”13
Now, there is surely something amiss: On the one hand, art aficionados the world over have promoted the concept of “political art,” art that is meant to be a political act, an intervention into the public or political sphere, and not merely a museum item; and yet, the moment political art meets with a political response, they hide behind the bourgeois museum and the liberal idea of freedom of expression. After all, what was the Israeli ambassador doing if not breaking the facade of good taste in order to engage politically with the message of this work? Even in a European Union beyond politics and theology, one can’t have one’s apple and eat it too.
II
The bride of blood meets Christian symbol. For what is essential to the piece is the Lutheran symbolism of Snow White, a symbolism lost on no one in Sweden. Snow White, often found in glass around the Christmas tree, is a symbol of innocent sleep, waiting Christ-like for redemption, waiting to be awakened by a mystical kiss. Thus the work is really a translation of Islamic martyrdom into the terms usually reserved for Christian salvation, a translation of Islam into Christian symbolism. Desert turns to snow in an act of artistic domestication.
What we witness in Snow White and the Madness of Truth is a theological symbol used aesthetically, which is to say sentimentally. Walter Benjamin has taught us about the deterioration of such symbols: A certain kind of secular art aspires to contain the sacred within the aesthetic realm, without any recourse to God. Benjamin writes in his notoriously difficult The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928):
For over a hundred years the philosophy of art has been subject to the tyranny of a usurper who came to power in the chaos which followed in the wake of romanticism. The striving on the part of the romantic aestheticians after a resplendent but ultimately non-committal knowledge of an Absolute has secured a place in the most elementary theoretical debates about art for a notion of the symbol which has nothing more than the name in common with the genuine notion…. The unity of the material and the transcendental object, which constitutes the paradox of the theological symbol, is distorted into a relationship between appearance and essence. The introduction of this distorted conception of the symbol in aesthetics was a romantic and destructive extravagance which preceded the desolation of modern art criticism. As a symbolic construct, the beautiful is supposed to merge with the divine in an unbroken whole. The idea of the unlimited immanence of the moral world in the world of beauty is derived from the theosophical aesthetics of the romantics…. What is typically romantic is the placing of this perfect individual within a progression of events, which is, it is true, infinite but is nevertheless redemptive, even sacred.14
In the case of Snow White,the sentimental symbol of the beautiful face of the dead, the digitized face of Hanadi Jaradat, was aggressively glamorized, and therewith aestheticized, which is to say, made unreal, inhuman. Here she is emphatically not a person but a symbol, infinite and redemptive—the symbol of beautified terror.
To be sure, the Snow White of contemporary Christmas trinkets is a symbol that is by now without a theology. The translation of the shahid into a theological symbol happens in the context of a Europe depleted of God. There is a sense in which the translation is supposed to awaken the original theological symbol that has now fallen into a vacuous sentimental shell for Christmas trees. This is an act of translation, as if the Christian symbol can be brought back to theological life by linking it mystically, aesthetically, with the shahid. In other words, reborn through sacrifice. The symbol of the lifeless land of snow, of the “whites,” can be brought to life when wed to the “black” shahid. With the aesthetical symbol of Snow White, what was originally a powerful theological symbol has sunk to the level of a vacuous sentimental symbol, a mere bit of as-if theology. The original theology is drained, leaving only an empty shell. What can a symbol of Christ mean in a Europe depleted of God? How can it still be the site of something sacred, moving, powerful? What can bring back its original power, its original shock, horror, and promise? How to resurrect the dead, to bring back God, the sacred sacrifice? Answer: Revive the corpse—the corpse of theology, the corpse of feeling—with a bang.
There is a whole theology lurking in this translation.
The translation of the shahid,the martyr in an Islamic holy war, into a Christian symbol is meant to function aesthetically within the religion of art. The lifeless image of Snow White is brought to life by the theology of sacrificial murder. The two images of rebirth, quickening, the kiss of redemption, are set in motion by a fantasy of a Christian symbol without Christianity.
Hanadi Jaradat is thus the symbol of beautified terror. The real issue is what it means, in the face of such aestheticization, to refuse to play the aesthetic game? This is the meaning of the ambassador’s gesture, of defying sentimentalism and taking politics seriously.
