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.