Riefenstahl

[Eric Meyer <74415.1305@CompuServe.COM>]

To:  INTERNET:leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us

Bogdan Karasek wrote:
  >> "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence"  Wittgenstein

     The following observation may be of only marginal interest if this is a
canned quote in your signature, rather than intended to be topical.  But for
anyone who may not know this, Wittgenstein's remark (like his Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, which it concludes) concerns the inadequacy of language
for metaphysics.  He wasn't talking about ability or willingness to speak, nor
arguing that language can't cope with the world; just that language itself
can't analyze how it does this (the hot topic of modern philosophy at the
time).  I don't believe he would have thought that one cannot speak about the
Holocaust.

     The difficulties are more mundane: many unknowns and uncertainties; too
many facts to deal with easily (especially here); inability to fit all of them
neatly into one or another simple view; and besides, everyone has pretty well
made up their minds already.  It isn't necessarily a bad idea to argue about
Riefenstahl, or Nazi politics and art, or 5 or 6 or 12 or however many million
and of whom, or when the camps became extermination camps, or who knew, or who
else should have been on trial at Nuremberg... it just isn't very productive
in the absence of genuinely new information, or even willingness to seriously
reevaluate one's opinions.

Others wrote:
  >>  ...shocked... also shocked...

     Marc's remarks were sincere and thought-provoking; it may be a good thing
to be so "shocked" from time to time.  Perhaps we need to distinguish two ways
of divorcing art from politics: with reference to a particular work, or an
artist's merit generally.  In the second sense I agree with Marc that it is as
silly to dismiss Riefenstahl's photography as worthless simply because of her
Nazi sympathies as it would be to condemn Picasso's entire oeuvre because of
his Communist leanings.  But on the other hand, I don't think that without
politics one can make sense of a work like "Triumph des Willen" any more than
of "Guernica".

     I'm not suggesting that Riefenstahl is of Picasso's caliber, just that
neither seems to have been a fanatic ideologue.  Where politics is clearly
involved in an artist's vision, we do have to inquire into what (if anything)
her own politics really were, any effect the work had, etc.  Where the same
artist's work may not directly involve her politics, our evaluation of it
needn't either.

              -- Eric Meyer.