The first in an occasional series.Ten: Predatory seating.

Why do normally civil Stockholmers turn French when they set foot inside McDonalds? All the tables are usually taken, but not by people eating — no, they’re taken by people hoarding tables with a view to eventually eating, when their accomplices are done queueing for food. Because of these predatory seating tactics, the tables are occupied twice as long as necessary, which means there are only half as many tables available, which means everybody scrambles to find a table as soon as they enter because there is a shortage.

Cleary, there is a better way. Everybody should look for a table only when they have food in hand. There would be twice as many tables available, hence no shortage, hence no incentive for this race to a patently suboptimal solution.

But try to sit down at one of these hoarded tables and have a reasonable conversation with its usurper as to why their behavior is noncollaborative, parasitic and, frankly, rude, preferably while you start eating your Big Mac. They call you rude! Clearly, we have different ideas about what that word means.

To be fair, Stockholmers only seem to express this selfish meme in cafeteria situations. I can think of far more egregious behavior elsewhere in Europe. In New York, smoking in a non-smoking area is rude; but in France, asking somebody to stop smoking in a non-smoking area is rude. In London, cutting the queue is rude; in Rome, telling somebody off for cutting the queue is rude.

I suspect that the French and Italians behave this way because they balance individual freedom and the public good differently. To massively overgeneralize again: Southern Europeans expect and tolerate more selfish behavior in social contexts, whereas those of the anglo-saxon persuasion expect and tolerate their behavior being constrained for the common good. Which makes for a counterintuitive conclusion, given the far stronger libertarian roots of American politics, especially when set against the socialist heritage of large chunks of Europe.

Blogged Wednesday afternoon:Historiska Museet’s cafeteria abuts the courtyard where Snövit is installed, and I am sitting there now, with an unimpeded view of the installation through the window.

What I saw earlier: The courtyard is much bigger than I expected. A cold snap (-10°C) and snow showers have greatly altered the installation’s surroundings — it’s covered in trodden snow, and the pool is a red slushy soup with a crust of broken ice sheets. The raft with its picture for a sail is stuck at a sorry angle, stained with red. Three standing spotlights illuminate the pool. Bach’s cantata plays, and is beautiful, though the lyrics are incomprehensible. Against the wall, behind me, in Swedish and English, is the text, printed in black and red on white, which everyone reads studiously. There is a bronze nude statue at one end of the pool, being entirely upstaged. Two very cold guards stand between the pool and me, arms flapping for warmth, ogling my satchel, and I respond by looking as suspect as possible. Could I make it to the pool if I dashed? I reckon I could. But I’m really not inclined to. It’s really cold.

A couple of things are clearer to me now that I am here.

Snövit‘s message suffers if discussed outside of the context of the exhibit. At the entrance to Making Differences, huge white on red writing announces that the theme is Lämnad ensam med sin egen svaghet, är människor i stand till vad som helst. — Man, left alone with his own weaknesses, is capable of almost anything. As a theme to accompany an international conference on genocide, it offers one perspective on the origins of evil — perhaps a controversial perspective, though one whose merits are usually only broached within the confines of seminaries and ethics tutorials.

This is the mindset you are invited to inhabit as you approach Snövit. It becomes clear that all the installations are meant to be concretizing instances of this perspective. The female suicide bomber actually figures twice in the exhibitThe poster in the subway is from “God made me do it“, a collection of works including one where the bomber’s picture appears on the front page of the Oct 6, 2003 edition of the International Herald Tribune, stuck against a wall (Yep, it’s art.) and I assume that her story is taken to be archetypal in some way. Nearby is a video loop of Geraldo Rivera interviewing various mass murderers including Charles Manson, Swedish papers from 1909 headlining a bomb attack against a Stockholm post office, an account of William S Burroughs shooting his wife through the head in a drunken prank gone wrong, a photograph of a mafia hit in St. Petersburg, and then some straightforward photojournalistic reportage from Laos now and Cambodia then, documenting genocide now and then.

Placed in this context, you cannot say that Snövit intends to glorify the suicide bomber. She is floating atop a bloodbath of her own making, and it is an image that is not conceivably triumphalist in intent, not with Charles Manson in the same boat, as it were. In tandem with the other works, the installation does purport to ruminate on how such a heinous act came about; but if you believe in a secular origin for evil, then this question is a valid one, if only for the sake of preventing future recurrences.

The argument that evil is born from human weakness is easier to stomach if you have the luxury of being at an emotional remove from the terrorist attack, because it is but a bland, psychological explanation. Yet it is perhaps a wiser tack than the black-on-white alternatives, which are that all Palestinians are temperamentally inclined to terrorism, or that the Israelis asked for it, or that she had always been mentally deranged, devoid of free will.

My visit to the exhibit, then, answered some of the questions I raised previously about the accessibility of the art’s message, and next time I’ll try to shut up until I see that which I’m supposed to have an opinion about. I’m convinced the message is in good faith, even if its content is something about which reasonable people will disagree.

But there remains the problem of the medium. The strength of the impression left by a pool filled with (half-frozen) blood, red and glistening under spotlights, is hard to overemphasize, even as a simulacrum. It is powerful imagery when used in horror films, where the characters are fictional. But with snövit, the blood is not of the fictional or the anonymous; it represents the blood of 21 real, named victims.

It’s colored water, yes. But if the function of art is to sublimate reality for the viewer, much like religious conviction can turn mere bread and wine into blood and flesh for the believer, then you have to conclude that what we are meant to see is — palpably — the blood of specific people. I got the sense that I was intruding on something private, something unsuitable as fodder for art, and made just so by the transformative power of that art.

You need not be a convert to capital-A Art for this sensation to creep up on you. You might know the restaurant in Haifa. You might know some of the people that died. You might even be their ambassador here in Stockholm, intent on cloaking their blood with darkness.

The piece is in poor taste. It has a right to exist.

The sky darkens, and the blood grows slicker and fresher under the lights. Just before the museum closes, I walk around the installation one last time. It’s just me and the guards. The wind nips at the the sail and it twists violently. Good, I think. With this weather, I don’t see the mast lasting the night.

I tried to go see the exhibit containing “Snow White and The Madness of Truth” todayFirst, read this morning’s post.. At the door, I was told, “it is monday,” and denied entry. Silly me.

Just now, while turning on the lights in my laundry room, an idea for a compromise occurred, one which would allow Israel, Sweden and the curator to save face:

Make the installation piece interactive. Put switches on the three standing spotlights, and let individual visitors decide, for a few minutes at a time, whether individual spotlights should be on or off. If you want to participate, you take one of those little numbered papers that comes out of a machine and wait your turn.

The ambassador, retroactively, is made the first participant in this interactive piece. He chose off, on the assumption that it glorifies suicide bombers. Other visitors might disagree on the message, but still feel that the work is in bad taste, and hence has no place “in the spotlight,” as it were. Yet others might think just the opposite — that the work is a condemnation of suicide bombings, and deserves to be seen, or that the woman suicide bomber does command some understanding for her actions, or that it is anti-Israel and hence worth promoting. Whatever your perspective, you get to command one of the three switches for a little while.

The beauty is, you will probably never quite get your way. I might turn my switch off, but you might simultaneously turn yours on. The result: A work of art at the mercy of an ongoing debate. What it means if the artwork remains mostly dark, or mostly lit, can become the grist for further analysis.

So now, if it’s no longer vandalism, would you turn the light on or off?

Israel’s ambassador to Sweden triggered a major diplomatic row between the two countries this weekend when he disrupted an installation piece depicting a Palestian suicide bomber at the opening of a Stockholm exhibit related to an international conference on preventing genocide. PM Sharon defended his ambassador’s behavior and demanded the work be removed, while the Swedish government quite simply said it does not (and cannot) censor art. Though the spat is far from over, both sides are trying to come to an understanding so that Israel’s participation in the conference is not jeopardized.

The facts: The piece is called “Snow White and The Madness of Truth”. The artists are a couple — she Swedish, he born an Israeli Jew, now also Swedish. On the blood-red water of a museum courtyard pool floats a small raft upon which is affixed the image of a female Palestinian suicide bomber responsible for the deaths of 19 21 Israeli civilians last October. A text accompanies the piece, as well as a Bach cantata called “My heart swims in blood““My heart swims in blood since in God’s holy eyes, the multitude of my sins makes me a monster.”. Standing spotlights around the pool throw light on the installation piece, as it still gets dark early in Stockholm. It is one of these the ambassador threw into the pool, short-circuiting the installation — or which accidentally fell in after the ambassador unplugged the lights, depending on the nationality of the paper you read.

Foto: Sven Nackstrand/AFP

The spin: Of course it is sometimes right to deface art… if the function of a piece is to incite violence in addition to being art. Propaganda art is the primary example that comes to mind. While I would not recommend that you try it, I would certainly applaud if you defaced Nazi propaganda posters during WWIII would not applaud if you defaced them in a museum today, however, because their power to incite violence has been superceded by their value as historical evidence.

But doesn’t defacing art also fall under the noble rubric of non-violent protest? If you find a piece supportive of a greatly offensive cause, should you not be able to justify damaging it as part of the greater political conversation the artwork is clearly part of, if you also are willing to face the legal consequences of your actions? Here I hesitate, already. Say yes, and you are on the verge of justifying the destruction of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan that so terribly offended the Taliban. But there is a further reason to defend offensive art from defacement: You may be dead wrong about what it means.

Case in point is the furore caused by Chris Ofili’s Madonna adorned with dung, exhibited at the 1999 Sensation exhibit in NYC. A convent of Catholics took offense at the painting, and mayor Giuliani jumped on the bandwagon looking for votes. To westerners, items covered in shit are desecrated, but in the African tradition channeled by Ofili, dung consecrates.

This explanation did not mollify the outraged. Eventually, the fact that the art could be perceived as offensive by people unaware of its context was reason enough for some to justify its removal. Then there was the suspicion that Ofili was playing some kind of clever trick, using ambiguous symbolism to disguise an offensive aim with an innocuous cover story.

How analogous is the Snow White installation piece? Ofili did not aim to be ambiguous — his Madonna belonged to a long series of similarly themed pieces whose dung symbolism was well documented. Snow White seems more intentionally ambiguous, or else not successful in imparting a clear message, if that was the intent. Whose blood is in the pool? Israelis’? Palestinians’? Both? Does it matter when deciding whether the floating image of the suicide bomber is being consecrated, or desecrated, or both?

The name Snow White hints at innocence, but the lyrics of the cantata hint at guilt. The attached text intersperces similarly conflicting writing. The artists have told Ha’aretz the work condemns terrorism, but to whom do they ascribe the label terrorist? Is this artwork a case where we should suspect the ambiguous symbolism for the subversive message it might carry — specifically, suicide bombings are sometimes justifiable?

The other option is that the message is unintentially muddy because the art is bad. The offense, then, would come from the fact that the art could reasonably be interpreted as a justification for suicide bombings by those already leaning towards that conclusion. The intent may have been a plea for reconciliation, but the effect is one of justifying terrorism.

There is an additional consideration: As a mental exercise, try replacing the image of the suicide bomber with one of Mohammad AttaSwedes can replace her image with that of Mijailo Mijailovich, and then put themselves in the place of Anna Lindh’s husband for a similar effect.
Update 19.05 CET: Somebody beat me to the punch:
 
. Imagine him sailing smilingly atop a pool of the blood he’s shed. It offends, at a gut level, because we are not used to seeing his image (or that of Hitler, or a Swastika) depicted without a clear condemnatory context. If you are a family member of one of the victims, you may well feel outrage at having your pain be appropriated for the production of art that on a gut level appears to trivialize evil. In other words, it is in poor taste.

So: Does Snow White offend on account of its message? The Israeli Ambassador probably thought so. Is it in poor taste? I think so. Does this justify defacing it? Not by a long shot. But I do think the curator is a fool for letting such clumsy work through the door.