Name: Jack Rasmussen (click to download headshot)
Occupation: Director and Curator, American University Museum
Residence: Bethesda
“On Normality: Art in Serbia”
Where: The American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, 4400 Massachusetts Ave.
When: Through June 7
Info: Free; 202-885-1300; american.edu/cas/katzen/museum
What I want to tell you about this piece: It stops viewers in their tracks. It’s on a 30-by-30 foot wall. It’s grand and oppressive. It’s not surprising, but it certainly is interesting how anything close to a swastika, even an inverted and slightly askew swastika, still has so much power after 60 years. Obviously, the artist is taking advantage of the power of that symbol to get your attention. I think, in his case, the swastika is kind of a stand-in for totalitarian thought. The Serbs didn’t side with the Nazis in World War II, but the government under [former Serbian dictator] Slobodan Milosevic was consummately totalitarian. All the work in this show was done under the reign of Milosevic, between 1989 and 2001. None of it was shown in Serbia. There was simply no venue for contemporary artists to show anything [critical of the government].
I remember showing this image to [American] University administrators about a year and a half ago, and the first response was, “You can’t show this.” It’s only after some reflection that viewers can appreciate this is by an artist responding to a time and a situation and pushing back. We need to understand what the dynamics are here; how this is being used as a critique of a regime of terror.
Typically in this artist’s work, the chairs mounted on the wall refer to the marginalized in the society. It’s not left or right — there’s just this totalitarian mindset that takes up all the air, and everybody else is left to the fringes. That seems to be what he’s saying with the chairs and the empty buckets.
