On Sunday, November 9, at 7:00 p.m. the Museum of Tolerance commemorated the 65th anniversary of the infamous 1938 Nazi “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht) pogrom.
The Wiesenthal Center's observance of the 65th anniversary of "Kristallnacht" was highlighted by the presentation of the work of Gottfried Helnwein and the screening of "Ninth November Night," a documentary about the artist's commitment to remind the world of the Holocaust. ...

On Sunday, November 9, at 7:00 p.m. the Museum of Tolerance commemorates the 65th anniversary of the infamous 1938 Nazi “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht) program which targeted 1,000 synagogues in Germany and Austria and marked the beginning of the end of European Jewry.
The commemoration will be highlighted by the screening of a documentary by renowned Austrian artist, Gottfried Helnwein, 9th November Night, who has committed himself and his art to reminding the world of the Holocaust. The documentary is based upon his 1988 exhibit of seventeen children’s portraits that were displayed in commemoration of Kristallnacht in Cologne, Germany. Just days into the exhibit, these portraits were vandalized.. “The fury with which the neo-nazis reacted to these portraits is understandable inasmuch as it is the very same fury with which they have for years been fighting against The Diary of Anne Frank,” said famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal. “The murder of children rouses abhorrence and conflict in every human, whether they are motivated by ideology or insanity. The urge to destroy has survived; the portraits bear witness to its rage.” ...

In fact, his work is insistently open-ended. Like Goya's Disasters of War, his art queries time and again, "How can this have happened?" Sometimes viewers reply, assaulting pictures of innocent children, worshipping those of a murderous dictator. Yet such reactions can only bring us to inquire again, louder and with greater urgency, "How can this have happened?" At last we recognize that Helnwein asks questions not in order to solicit answers - hate has no reason - but rather in order that we might begin to pose our own.

Helnwein belongs to no movement. He is enslaved by no genre or aesthetic. His primary obligation is to be human. He's able to change people more as an artist than he could as a baker or a plumber. But one gets the sense that, were plumbing what the world required, and were that within the reach of his talent, he would, without a moment's hesitation, trade in his paint brush for a pipe wrench.
As it is, he uses an unusually broad range of tools, producing work of the first rank in painting, sculpture, performance, photography. The last of these he used as the basis for one of his most ambitious works to date: Ninth November Night, originally installed in Cologne in 1988 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

"I didn't want to use these historic photographs which are used too often," he has said, "those mountains of corpses that mean nothing anymore." He recognized that, as a society, we'd grown numb to them: Paradoxically, the more often we saw the Holocaust's human remains, the more indifferent we became. From Kristallnacht, there are many lessons to be learned, but one of them, perhaps the first, is that violence and apathy operate in a vicious circle, and that it takes precious little to start that cycle. Using the attempted assassination of a German diplomat by a Polish Jew as an excuse, Nazi Party officials sought to condemn the entire Hebrew race by giving German citizens a night of amnesty during which they might personally take revenge on any Jew in their midst. Homes were destroyed, Synagogues burned to the ground. Collectively culpable, the German people learned to overlook the excesses of one another and the criminal acts of their government. Violence begot apathy begot violence. For the attempted assassination of one German, the price was between five and six million Jewish lives.

That, of course, is an oversimplification. Yet it does not exaggerate the degree to which Nazi acts, following Hitler's behavior, were arbitrary. Rather than piling up bodies, Helnwein took that uncertainty, and used it to attack indifference in the present day.
Specifically, he photographed seventeen local children, all between the ages of six and seven, Jewish and Gentile, German and foreign. Some looked impassively at the camera. Others let their eyes fall shut. All had their faces smeared with a white powder, as if dusted with a deathly pallor. Their photos were printed on banners, each four meters high, set side-by-side on a hundred-meter-long train platform between the Cologne Cathedral and the Ludwig Museum. At the end was a white banner on which was printed in black the German word "SELEKTION". Next to it were a couple anatomical drawings taken from a certain Text Book of the Sub-Human, showing the difference in the shapes of the feet and buttocks of the "lower" and the "higher" race.

The implication was inescapable. Here, along a railway line that had once run trains to the concentration camps, was a selection of seventeen children, chosen for who-knows-what-reason, condemned to die. According to Helnwein, selektion "is the key word that describes the Nazi ethos: the idea that a small group of people can select or decide who is subhuman and who is superior." His memorial to Kristallnacht dramatizes that. ...

"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it.
I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does.
Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas.
A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this.
This level of work is earned."
Sean Penn ...

* Gottfried Helnwein, artist, born in Vienna, 1948
* Theodor Herzl "founder" of Israel, lived most of his life in Austria
* Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933-1945, born on April 20, 1889 in Braunau am Inn ...

Helnwein’s 20-by-60 foot outdoor installation “Modern Sleep 2003”, as well as photographs from his collaboration with Marilyn Manson, are included in the show, which opens with this evening’s gala and is open to the general public Friday through Sunday at Santa Monica Airport’s Barker Hangar.
“Modern Sleep 2003” (digital print) is the latest in a series dating back to the 1980s and reflects Helnwein’s use of children in questioning the human condition. It includes two images of a girl. In one, her skin is pale white, and she is dressed in black. In the other, she is black, dressed in white. In both images, her expression is death-like.
“They have open eyes, so modern sleep doesn’t mean they are just sleeping,” says Helnwein. “It might mean something else.” ...

Installation "Modern Sleep", 2003, digital print on vinyl, 20 by 60 feet
in front of the Barker Hangar at the Los Angeles Art Show 2003,
3021 Airport Avenue at Santa Monica Airport. ...

Helnwein:
I always thought – how did I end up in a place like this? What was I doing here? The only thing I knew was that this was not home – I didn’t belong here. But who was I then? Where did I come from?
I was a stranger, whose spaceship had crashed on an unknown planet and so was stranded with no possibilities of ever leaving again. Not only did I seem to have lost my orientation through the impact of the crash, but my memory as well, because I had forgotten who I was and where I came from. There was only one thing I was certain of: that this was an alien world in whose merciless embrace I was now caught. It was like the aftermath of a sloppy end of the world, where the few people that had survived, now continued cautiously to vegetate amongst the ruins, hoping to remain unnoticed by the Eternal Judge.
What I didn’t know then was that I had been born shortly after my stupid ancestors had lost the second of the two world-wars that they had caused within the last 30 years – which had turned 1000 years of culture into ashes and annihilated the lives of more than 50 million people
And when I found the photographs of my father, my grandfathers and my uncles all in uniforms of Hitler’s army, I started to ask questions.
Unfortunately, I was speaking either in the wrong tongue or they also suffered amnesia, because I never got any answers. But I was a very insistent child and I never gave up asking, despite the fact that it didn’t get me anywhere.
And then there was this one miraculous moment when I turned 18, this instance of revelation - suddenly I knew there was a way out: I had to become an artist. And I started to paint. I didn’t know much about the art-world and other artists, and I didn’t care about styles and techniques. I just began to formulate my old questions now as images, and step by step I developed my own visual language.
But I was not prepared for the avalanche of emotional reactions that my little watercolor-paintings triggered, I was quite surprised to realize that suddenly I seemed to be in possession of a superior magic language, capable of cutting through everything and reaching deep into the hearts of people and moving and touching them. And to my amazement this nation of mutes started to talk, to respond, to shout, to cry and to whisper. And I found myself in a very emotional and powerful dialogue with a growing number of people, that never stopped and became the momentum and destiny of my life.
When I started to paint I didn’t feel I had any message, my art was not an answer – it was a question. ...

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