New Exhibit

There’s really no need to go to the MET or the MOMA for the 900th time when you are in the mood for a museum, I'm continuously surprised by how many good, creative and almost unheard of cultural spaces the city has to offer. Latest discovery is El Museo del Barrio (on 5th Ave and 104th st.), this Latino cultural museum that is having an amazing new exhibit from now through June called “Los Desaparecidos,”or “The Disappeared.” Basically, in the last 40 years a number of totalitarian regimes in Argentina and other Latin-American countries went berserk and decided to kidnap, torture, shoot, push out of planes, and drown, literally thousands of their countries’ intellectuals and political dissenters (close to 30,000 in Argentina alone). The vast amount of people missing came to be known as the “disappeared,” and they left trembling and traumatized populations in their wake. It’s strange because having grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust, it’s hard for me to believe that so many educated, wealthy, free people could remain silent about a huge crime committed against them relatively recently. But thats begun to change, and thus a number of artists got together to collaborate on this traveling exhibit that vigorously tries to develop some kind of meaningful cultural idiom or language for remembrance. I think it’s really worth seeing, not only to feel educated or ethical, but because its so cool to see art in action-actively sensitizing people and helping them see and feel things they wouldn’t or couldn't have felt before.

The Argentinian case (known as the “The Dirty War” ) is especially eery because in some ways it functions as a disturbing postscript to the Holocaust. After World War II a number of high-ranking Nazi officials escaped to Argentina, some with the help of the U.S., because of their proven experience with fighting communism. A substantial number of Jewish refugees also landed in Argentina, and the Dirty War atrocities were often conducted with Nazi undertones, and directed against the country’s Jews alongside its political reformers. Scary to think that despite all the Holocaust commemoration that began to happen in the 1960’s (with the Eichman trial), concentration camps and torture facilities could be erected in Argentina in the 1970’s, and filled with a good number of Jews, without most of the world blinking an eye. Of course the cases are quite different as well, and looking at these things primarily through a Jewish lens is narrow and problematic, but the vividness and creativity of the exhibit serve as a terrific antidote to the kind of jadedness that repeated exposure to Holocaust memorials can engender. We needn't only construct hierarchies of suffering, different kinds of genocides require us to extend our sympathies in different directions, and there's no limit to it I think. So see the exhibit, and if you like, you can go across the street afterward to this beautiful part of Central Park that is also often overlooked.