metropolis m

The Third World War

‘Don’t mention the war’ John Cleese – ‘The Germans’, Fawlty Towers, 1975The Middle East conflict will not be solved if one keeps on calling it a choice for or against ‘the Jews’. Supporting Palestinian rights is not the same as claiming that the Holocaust did not exist. Being against the policy of the Israeli government and the occupation does not make one an anti-Semite.In the book Against the Wall (2005), Michael Sorkin (ed.), both Israeli and Palestinian voices contribute to the critique of the ‘security fence’ from a variety of perspectives – architectural, legal, historical and philosophical.The Jewish writer Susan Sontag said in her speech On Courage and Resistance at the Rothko Chapel in 2003: ‘Here is what I believe to be a truthful description of a state of affairs that has taken me many years of uncertainty, ignorance and anguish to acknowledge (…). The decision of successive Israeli governments to retain control over the West Bank and Gaza, thereby denying their Palestinian neighbours a state of their own, is a catastrophe – moral, human and political – for both peoples.’Noam Chomsky, also Jewish, replied in a discussion at Fort Collins in 1990 to those believing that the Palestinians aren’t really suffering but are advertising their misery and only doing it for the cameras because they are trying to discredit the Jews: ‘They do exactly the same thing when there are no cameras.’There are cultural differences in expressing emotions, and the Western world tends to be less explicit in this. I think of our cold funerals where women with fancy dark glasses try not to cry, as if it were in bad taste to spoil their make-up. A Dutch Jewish student (de Volkskrant 17-01-2009) dismissed the photographs of dead children in Gaza as Islamic propaganda, calling it ‘Pallywood’.From the horrors of reality to the fiction of images: ‘kosher porn’, which is what one of the Jewish actors in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009) called that movie. Thinking of ‘revenge’ as a legitimate dream, the film reminded me of Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art (2002), Norman L. Kleebatt (ed.), the catalogue of the show at the Jewish Museum in New York. Focusing on the perpetrators rather than the victims, it included Piotr Uklanski’s work The Nazi’s (1998), 116 photographs of movie stars in Nazi roles. Without the clarifying text, the possibility of attracting neo-Nazis is always present. Which reminds me of the fact that every image needs a text to protect it. What Makes a Great Exhibition, Paula Marincola (ed.), Philadelphia 2006. It includes the essay Wall Text by Ingrid Schaffner. Every text needs someone to decode it. Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma, 1983.Alan Turing was a British mathematician, one of the greatest minds of the modern world. He was the founder of computer science. He broke the German U-boot Enigma cipher in World War Two, thus saving the state, but was later humiliated and persecuted for revealing his homosexuality in 1952. He committed suicide in 1954. On 10 September 2009, Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister, made a personal statement of full recognition, reflection and apology. This leads me to current art that combines science and war yet stays vulnerable, with a touch of something childlike. To use a David Hammons term about his own art practice: tragic magic’. Copy of the first footprint on the moon in 1969, made in a substance called trinitite: a glasslike mass that was formed by the explosion of the first atom bomb (codename Trinity) in the desert of New Mexico in 1954. An artwork that combines two very meaningful historic events: the moon landing and the invention of nuclear energy. Marlene Dumas is an artist, Amsterdam.

Marlene Dumas

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