The LEGO concentration camp

[Dimentio]

There was a Polish graphic artist who purchased LEGO on display in Poland in 1996, to create the now infamous "LEGO concentration camp". It is not intended as a toy, but rather as an artistic interpretation of the horrors of the Holocaust.

http://www.raster.art.pl/gallery/artists/libera/libera_lego.htm

LEGO did of course sue the artist, but dropped it after it just gave him more publicity. In Poland, it has been sensitive as well. Nevertheless, it has actually been purchased by Jewish museums.

What is your opinion? Is this to belittle the Holocaust or rather to emphasise its banal brutality and the sickness that human beings could inflict on one another? May people turn everything they want into art?

http://www.raster.art.pl/galeria/artysci/libera/lego/libera_lego_01.jpg

[ellipsis]

I think that it is art. He also did more with guantanamo, waterbording and other forms of imperialist torture. For me lego are just a medium and it doesn't matter that they were originally toys. His works bring attention to fascist atrocities.

[spiltteeth]

Although it is art, I think it trivializes the holocaust, legos do not make it more poignant, but zaps alot of the horror out of it.

[Dimentio]

I think it is actually making it more horrible by presenting it that way.

[LeninBalls]

This just looks ridiculous.

http://www.raster.art.pl/galeria/artysci/libera/lego/libera_lego_wykroj_03%20.jpg

Smiling skeletons? A pile of skeletons dumped together in a hole in the ground? Sponsored by LEGO?

It's fine as an idea and all, it just looks really daft. :laugh:

[Dimentio]

It has not been sponsored by LEGO in any other sense than that the artist used LEGO to make it.

[New Tet]

I think that it is art. He also did more with guantanamo, waterbording and other forms of imperialist torture. For me lego are just a medium and it doesn't matter that they were originally toys. His works bring attention to fascist atrocities.

Without the least desire to minimize the horror of systematic atrocity such as took place during the Nazi Holocaust against humanity, I wonder if exploring an anti-fascist theme with Legos is necessarily a criterion for calling something art.

Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to be persuaded that this extraordinary construction can be art. Propaganda art? Okay. Art with a capital "A"? Excuse me if I turn into a snob...

[New Tet]

Although it is art, I think it trivializes the holocaust, legos do not make it more poignant, but zaps alot of the horror out of it.

It's surreal, for sure. But if every surreal scene I've experienced is art, then I'm living on a canvas in somebody's expensive living room!

Surreality in and of itself is not art. Besides, the holocaust and its repugnant instruments have been satirized in many media since at least the mid 1950s. So, on that count, we cannot attribute originality.

Propaganda art, good propaganda art, is subliminal and obvious at the same time; its content ought to be greater than its outward appearance suggests at first, second and third glance. Its form should demand from the viewer a first, second and third glance.

Propaganda art should be as beautiful to the eye as it is functional to the mind.

Assuming one thinks that Legos are beautiful (which I don't) this work can be beautiful to behold. But that's where our aesthetic enjoyment would end. The scene it portrays is ugly, rigid and full of suggested cruelty.

That is not beautiful. Even to my cynical and jaded eye it is ugly, repulsive and, yes, gratuitous. More so gratuitous because it is constructed with the innocent playthings of a child.

[Dimentio]

It is just that it is ugly that makes it art. And especially since it is constructed with children's toys.

[New Tet]

It is just that it is ugly that makes it art. And especially since it is constructed with children's toys.

How so? I mean, how is it that ugly+toys=art?

[Dimentio]

It is obviously creating an emotional reaction in the viewer. Then it is a form of art.

[New Tet]

It is obviously creating an emotional reaction in the viewer. Then it is a form of art.

A baby falling out of a fifth-story window will evoke an emotional reaction from me. Should I consider that experience a work of art?

[Dimentio]

http://www.thelocal.se/21934/20090907/

[spiltteeth]

A baby falling out of a fifth-story window will evoke an emotional reaction from me. Should I consider that experience a work of art?

As you probably know, at least two surrealist's have committed suicide as 'an act of art.'

As an artist myself, I no longer try to defend a definition of art in general, but I do define a difference between 'Art' and 'art'.

Proper Art should, as critic R.P. Blackmur once said of poetry,

"not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality."

True art achieves a “fresh idiom” by twisting and posing its materials in such a way that meaning flashes out and we suddenly learn something new (which is usually something old) about the world.

The positing of the horror of the Holocaust with the innocence of a child's toys, done correctly, might indeed give a new intuition of just how horrible the Holocaust was.
This piece does not do that. It belittles the horror, it does not show it in a new light.

New Tet, there once was a performance piece where the artist threw a baby out of a 2nd story window while the mother looked on horrified. No onw knew it, including the mother, but it turned out to be a doll.

[Pawn Power]

Seems pretty insignificant really.

[Stranger Than Paradise]

I think it is actually quite disturbing and enforces the message of the brutality and evil of the Holocaust.

[NecroCommie]

It's a bunch of plastic dudes... Whether it trivializes atrocities or not is in the eye of the beholder. I see it as art allright, not just very good art. And I don't find it trivializing, it is a good thing someone still points these things out.

[Durruti's Ghost]

Whether or not this is good art, bad art, or not art at all is not something that can be determined objectively. The artistic merit of a piece relies entirely on the subjective experience it produces in the viewer/listener/reader/whatever-er. To me, it might be worthless trash; to someone else, it might be the greatest piece of art ever conceived. If large number of people view a piece as good, society will consider it good; if the opposite, society will consider it bad. An individual need not conform to society's evaluation of said piece, though.

[Das war einmal]

LEGO did of course sue the artist

I think thats more because Lego wants to show their disgust, but they actually don't make a chance in the court.

[Orange Juche]

I find it rather eerie.

Though, from an artistic perspective, I love the contrast between the innocence of a toy and the atrocious and horrifying nature of the holocaust.