Melissa Gould
MELISSA GOULD (born in New York City; lives and works in New York City)
Souvenir Wien 1938 Scrub Brush (from the installation Schadenfreude)
1993
Photocopy on paper
36 x 63"
Courtesy of the artist
Sara/Israel Toothbrushes (from the installation Schadenfreude)
1993
Photocopy on paper
36 x 54"
Courtesy of the artist.
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Statement
A large installation project, Schadenfreude (1993), explored anti-Semitisim by way of a "Nazi wallpaper showroom." ("Schadenfreude" is a German word meaning the delight one gets from someone else's misfortune.) Using illustrations taken from one 1935 German Brockhaus dictionary, I created six wallpaper patterns which were installed as a three-room (1600-square-foot) exhibition at London's Imperial War Museum in 1995. I used wallpaper in a metaphoric gesture to suggest the presence of anti-Semitism in pre-war Europe–so ingrained in daily life that it was paid little attention–it hung in the background and set the environment, likeJune 14, 2007se two "impossible images," Souvenir Wien 1938 Scrub Brush and Sara/Israel Toothbrushes. These photographs, made to appear as if they were enlarged from an old tabloid newspaper, document invented artifacts–ersatz souvenirs in the guise of historical relics–which I fabricated to memorialize an incident in Vienna, 1938, where the S. S. compelled Jews to scrub the streets with brushes. Under the Third Reich, "Sara" and "Israel" were the obligatory names Jews added to their own on official documents.