Saltzman, Lisa. “‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ Revisited: On the Ethics of Representation.”

In this chapter from the Mirroring Evil catalogue, art historian Lisa Saltzman reflects on the exhibition Mirroring Evil using Clement Greenberg’s 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” as a starting point. In this essay, Greenberg stresses the importance of a separation of art and politics through an art of abstraction in light of the political climate at the time. However, from the 1960s onwards, artists started using all aspects of the outside world as source material (e.g. Pop Art). Art became “one more act of representation, repetition, or reproduction of a set of culturally available and assimilable signs” (Saltzman 2001, 54). Mirroring Evil as an exhibition fits into that tradition, but in addition uses a very specific cultural referent which in itself is already highly mediated: “This is a body of art that gives us history, but history as something already represented, something already mediated by the media of culture” (55). Greenberg discusses his ethical concern about kitsch in his essay, as kitsch is exploited for propagandistic purposes under fascism and makes history “all too assimilable, digestible, consumable” (55). The art in Mirroring Evil allows for a confrontation between kitsch as exploited under fascism while using kitsch to frame the history of its own exploitation. Moreover, the works demonstrate that “such a history, despite the ethical presumption of its radically unassimilable nature, has been assimilated, packaged, consumed” (55). The exhibition thus also reflects on and asks critical questions about the act of mediation in relation to history.

In the second part of the essay, Saltzman addresses the controversy surrounding the Mirroring Evil exhibition by placing it into a broader art historical context. She refers to both Saul Friedländer’s Reflections of Nazism (1982) and Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism” (1975), who shared an uneasiness at art that uses (the public’s fascination with) the aesthetics and erotics of fascism without engaging critically with the historical and ideological context. However, Saltzman ultimately concludes that Friedländer and Sontag’s uneasiness comes from a different type of work. Saltzman ultimately concludes that the artworks in Mirroring Evil are not as controversial as they might appear, but that they are instead “a repetition of motives and motifs that have already entered the cultural domain” (62), whose artists are merely following the trajectory of the 1960s neo-avant-garde (who in trying to “resuscitate the transgressive project of the historical avant-garde” incorporated taboo topics such as fascism into their art (57)).

Author of this entry: Lotte van den Eertwegh

Saltzman, Lisa. “‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’ Revisited: On the Ethics of Representation.” In Mirroring Evil, edited by Norman L. Kleeblatt, 53-64. New York: Jewish Museum, 2001.