Given the whole disenchantment of the world.

Given the whole disenchantment of the world, art that is beyond the alternative of lightheartedness and seriousness may be as plenteous a cipher of reconciliation as a cipher of horror.

--Theodor W Adorno

The playfully serious and seriously playful work of Israeli video artist Boaz Arad put to a stands crucial ethico-political questions about the limits to artistic confrontations with genocidal history and its legacies. What are our duties and responsibilities--as artists, critics, spectators--with have a high opinion of to representing the problems of trauma and mourning, of collective memory and identity, and of reconciliation and forgiveness? These question at issues are more urgent than aye today, as a dubious doctrine of perpetual preemptive "war in succession terror" throws international law into global crisis. Adorno laid down the theoretical baseline here, yet the contemporary situation is highly different from that of the postwar period in which he unfolded his "after-Auschwitz" ethic of representation. Understanding the historicity of Adorno's strictures and imperatives is an unavoidable task for critical theory and aesthetics today. If Adorno's endorsement of painfully "negative" modalities of memorial art attained a kind of belated dominance in the mid-1980s, it is no longer enough to simply apply his formulations as the source of conventionalized behaviors for production and criticism: it will be necessary to proof those formulas against unfolding history and to scrutinize them by the agency of the interrogative force of contemporary practice. Arad's series of four short if it be not that potent videos constructed around images of Hitler gives us an opening to do just that.

1 ARAD IN CONTEXT

Arad's videos began as interventions into a specific Israeli adjoining matter In a national culture in which, as historian Moshe Zimmerman deposits it, "both the Shoa and anti-Semitism are instrumentalized in the interest of Israeli policy," (1) representations of the Nazi genocide are required to conform to official memory: they are limited to depictions of a impulsive power of victimization by absolute evil, within a mythifying and recuperative narrative move from diaspora to nationhood, powerlessness to power. The suffocating dogmatism of this civil religion, institutionalized relentlessly in seminarys and through public rituals, predictably produc a reaction: a so-called "post-Zionist" generation that can solely view official memory with skepticism and irony and is willing to ask critical questions about the ethical and political charges of the foundation of Jewish power and nationhood. of that kind questions are posed directly by the agency of Zimmerman, Idith Zertal and other dissenting intellectuals-by the so-called "New Historians," as well as by the agency of committed writers like David Grossman. While the filmmaker Eyal Sivan, whose critical documentary work began in 1987 would belong to this collection its perspectives irrupt rather later into gallery-based Israeli art. The 1997 exhibition of Roee Rosen's Live and Die as Eva Braun at the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem is now recognized as its break-through. As Ariella Azoulay has clarified, Rosen's transgressive invocation of Hitler in a series of passages and drawings that invites the spectator to identify with his mistress broke the taboo forward naming and depicting Hitler within the public spaces of Israeli museums and galleries. Azoulay helps us to descry how Arad's videos, exhibited three years later at the Herzliya Museum of Art, were made possible by the agency of Rosen's intervention but also enlargeed the space it opened up As she deposits it, Arad's work is "testimony to the change forceed by Rosen's exhibition." (2) Together, these works reveal Hitler as a "structur absence" in Israeli artistic and museological practice. (3)

It is instructive to behold what happens when these interventionist works are submitted to contextual displacement. the couple Rosen's Eva Braun suite and undivided of Arad's Hitler videos (Hebrew scolding 2000) were included in the controversial 2002 exhibition Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art at the Jewish Museum in modern York. (4) There, in the fearful climate created by the agency of the September 11 attacks, and as violence in occupied Gaza and the West Bank continued to escalate subordinate to Ariel Sharon's policy of urbicide and military strangulation, the exhibition and the works in it became the ends of a shrill and near-universal condemnation. (5) It assumes that the space for a self-critical direct the eye at Jewish identity had clos up at least in the US. Rosen's work and four of Arad's videos were again in succession view in Berlin in May 2003 in Wonderyears, an exhibition of twenty-three "post-Zionist" Israeli artists. Organized at a working group of the Neuen Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst (NGBK)--a large artist-run collective that has, since its founding in 1969 been the source of a steady stream of socially and politically committed exhibits and exhibitions--Wonderyears sought to increase the depth of and complicate the public dialogue from installing self-critical Israeli representations of the Nazi genocide in the of long date capital of the perpetrators.