From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
A Fuzzy View of Terror
Remember the Baader-Meinhof gang? A major museum does, badly.
Sometimes art and life intersect in inconvenient ways, never more so than when the subject is terrorism.
New York's Museum of Modern Art has just opened "Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting," a retrospective of a notable German contemporary artist. The show was organized by Robert Storr, the museum's senior curator of painting and sculpture. It includes nearly 200 works, but one is of special interest just now.
"October 18, 1977," painted in 1988, is a suite of 15 pictures whose subject is the Baader-Meinhof Gang, the 1960s radicals who constituted what was a German version of the Weather Underground, only worse. Between 1968 and the arrest and imprisonment of its five core members in 1972, the gang sought the violent overthrow of German democracy through a campaign of terror against innocent civilians. All five killed themselves in prison, the last three on the date in 1977 that is memorialized in the painting's title.
For his work, Mr. Richter drew on black-and-white news photos of the terrorists' capture, their prison cells, their dead bodies and their funeral. For the purposes of art, Mr. Richter greatly enlarged the images and rendered them in an out-of-focus grisaille. Though he himself has been careful in his public statements not to endorse the Baader-Meinhof Gang--or condemn it--it is almost impossible to see "October 18, 1977" as anything but a series of martyr paintings, particularly given the claims circulating at the time that the three terrorists were not suicides but the victims of murderous authorities.
And yet . . . At the press conference for the current show, a questioner asked how Sept. 11 had changed the meaning of "October 18, 1977." Here is Mr. Storr's reply:
"If you consider how the people involved in the attack on the World Trade Center were characterized when it first happened, as if they were unknowably strange--fanatics that we could somehow not fathom their thinking--and then you realize, in fact, that some of the people involved were middle-class, relatively speaking, educated people who, out of desperation, out of anger, did horrific things . . . then one of the things that the [Baader-Meinhof] paintings represent [that] should be present in our thinking about current events . . . is that we are not dealing with monsters, we are not dealing with people we do not know; we are dealing with people very much like ourselves."
Talk about moral equivalence! What kind of mind is it that, at this stage of the game, refuses to distinguish between good and evil, between civilization and barbarism, and falls back on a parody of inclusiveness--"people like us," driven by "desperation" and "anger"--to explain an atrocity like Sept. 11? Perhaps it takes a mind that is still in thrall to the revolutionary ethos of the 1960s counterculture.
And in fact Mr. Storr's original 2000 catalog, "Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977," is a valentine to the student protests of the 1960s. A typical passage reads: "In 1968, a generation erupted. Before that there had been restlessness and angry optimism. Afterward there was retrenchment and stifled rage."
For Mr. Storr, the members of the Baader-Meinhof Gang weren't terrorists but "idealists" who merely felt "alienated." Theirs wasn't a terror campaign but a "crusade." The "most wrenching phase" of their war on German society, he declares, "began with the detention of those who had triggered \[it\]." Most people would argue that the truly wrenching phase had come earlier, with the terror itself.
Though Mr. Storr pays lip service in the catalog to the prisoners' suicides, acknowledging that all the evidence points that way, it is an article of faith with him that the circumstances of their deaths remain "mysterious." On those rare occasions when he does own up to the truth about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, he is careful to neutralize their culpability by pairing it with an accusation of police excess. Thus West Germany during the late 1960s and early 1970s is described as a country "under siege--and counter-siege."
Granted, all this was written before Sept. 11. But since then Mr. Storr has had ample opportunity--in the catalog to his current exhibition, in its wall texts, in his public statements--to repudiate his previous position, to tell us that the calamity forced him to rethink his earlier views. Yet he hasn't done so.
Because he cannot. To grasp the import of Mr. Storr's press-conference comments about Sept. 11, you have to turn to page 77 of his previous catalog on Mr. Richter, where he writes of young radicals "guided by the notion that the prologue of peaceful protest necessarily led to the main event of actual violent revolution."
In other words, in his view of history, the counterculture terrorism of the 1960s was not an excess perpetrated by the fringe to the dismay of the mainstream. It was a more advanced stage of protest that grew out of the marches and sit-ins.
This means that Mr. Storr's "people like us" rationalization is not, after all, anything as respectable as moral equivalence. It's a dodge. He can't categorically condemn the Sept. 11 terrorists because that would be a judgment on the Baader-Meinhof Gang too, terror being indivisible. He can't condemn them because doing so would amount to an indictment of the 1960s student movement as a whole. And that would be an act of apostasy too awful for Mr. Storr even to contemplate.
In 2001, terrorists murder 3,000 of his fellow citizens in his own backyard. But all that really counts for Mr. Storr is keeping alive the delusions of 1968.
Mr. Gibson is deputy editor of the Journal's Leisure & Arts page.
