To the Editors:
Jed Perl’s criticism always fails to be convincing, but the reason why has never been more apparent than in a noxious comment found in his “A Dissent on Kiefer” (December 1988).
Perl, who believes the Holocaust is being trivialized in both German and American art today, assails the use of photographs of concentration camp victims in the recent mixed-media reliefs of Robert Morris. In a footnote, he discusses Morris’s earlier use of a specific World War II reference: the notorious 1974 poster in which the artist showed himself naked to the waist and wearing dark glasses, a spiked steel collar, manacles, and what appears to be a Nazi helmet.
From s-and-m imagery [Perl writes] to Holocaust imagery is quite a leap—a recapitulation of Nazi history that may also, consciously or unconsciously, mirror one trajectory of contemporary sexual experimentation, whereby some who back then took up s-and-m are now losing their lives to AIDS.
Perl’s inference of an equation between the history of the AIDS epidemic and the history of Nazism is certainly repugnant and offensive. More important, however, his supposition of a cause-and-effect relationship between the loosening of sexual repression in the United States and the appearance of the disease is simply false.
Like many bigots who come to the subject of AIDS, Perl is operating under the easy assumption that it constitutes a sexual malady. He expects mere mention of “sexual experimentation” in the vicinity of the disease
