AMSTERDAM – Two famous designers from Antwerp have announced plans to erect a
flashy, Holocaust-themed fence here featuring a crematoria and replicas from the
Buchenwald concentration camp. Designers Job Smeets and Nynke Tynagel revealed
the project after a Dutch museum rejected their “inappropriate” works on
Auschwitz.
The fence, which Smeets, 40, and Tynagel, 34, designed, had
been commissioned by a Dutch art collector for the collector’s estate, Smeets
said during a performance on a prime time Dutch television show on December 7. He
said he would not reveal the collector’s identify. The fence design includes a
translation of the German writing on the gates of Buchenwald – Jedem das Seine
(“to each his own”).
Smeets and Tynagel – described in a
New York Times
profile piece as “the poster boy and girl of the new expressionism in design” –
designed for the same collector a dining set with a mass-grave motif. They also
sent the Groninger Museum prints of tablecloths with an Auschwitz-Birkenau theme
to be displayed along with other works by Smeets and Tynagel in the museum’s
reception room.
However, the museum – among Holland’s finest contemporary
art museums – refused to show the tablecloths, which display an overview of the
compound and a heap of reading glasses in the middle.
Willemien Bouwer, a
spokeswoman for the museum, said the hall is sometimes used to host parties and
dinners.
“Placing such tablecloths struck us as inappropriate,” Museum
Director Kees van Twist said.
“I cannot treat beauty unless I also treat
evil,” Smeets said about his Holocaust works. As an artist, he added, “I try to
bring not only good news.”
Merijn Bolink, an acclaimed Dutch visual
artist, said he did not oppose controversial treatment of the Holocaust, but
said it should also be meaningful. “Smeets’s work seems provocative but
hollow.”
“Those responsible for such disgusting works may be just seeking
attention, or it could be something more sinister,” Michel Freilich,
editor-in-chief of the Belgian Jewish paper Joods Actueel, said. “In the latter
case, the authorities should look into the matter. In Germany the construction
of such a thing would definitely be prevented.
In Belgium –
maybe.”
CIDI, a Hague-based watchdog on anti-Semitism, wrote the alderman
of the city of Amsterdam, urging him not to issue a permit for building the
“offensive fence, which is an attempt to attract attention regardless of the
pain their actions cause.”
Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish
Congress said of the proposed design, “Trivializing the Holocaust in such a way
minimizes its importance and relevance for the current generation.”
He
added that while EJC “safeguards” freedom of speech, “there must be standards of
decency and morality in the public sphere. The annihilation of six million Jews
and millions of others must not become a tool to merely titillate and outrage in
the name of art.”