FROM DARKNESS INTO LIGHT

Four Nazi men and women smile complacently and sip at their coffee in a small European cafe. In the background, Jewish men and women, their mouths open eternally in silent screams, are shoved and herded into a huge gas chamber that had once been a bathhouse. This is "Banality of Evil/Struthof," one of the first works in Judy Chicago's latest exhibit, "The Holocaust Project," currently on display at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum.

After observing only a few of the works in the exhibit, one is left appalled, shaken and distressed. But it is because of the great horror of the subject matter, not the quality of Chicago's work, that one encounters such feelings. True, many of the exhibit's works are graphic and almost cartoon-like. True, she compares the Holocaust to other issues such as racism, sexism and nuclear waste disposal. Yet she handles all of the issues so deftly and with such balance that, despite the darkness and horror that fill the journey, one continues to follow Chicago's voice on the tiny headset through it, from the despair-filled beginning to the beautiful and hopeful ending.

"We chose to make this journey," Chicago told an audience at Brandeis on October 15 (she also spoke at Harvard on October 18), "and that's what's going to have to happen when the survivor generation dies off." Leaning on the podium, she stares thoughtfully through her purple-tinted glasses and recollects a conversation with her publisher. "I asked her if she'd seen 'The Holocaust Project' and she said 'No... "The Dinner Party" [an earlier work of Chicago's] was an event you couldn't miss. "The Holocaust Project" is something that I'd rather not have to choose to see."

For the last 30 years, Chicago has been creating artwork that some people and art critics would rather not see, but that many more shower praise upon. She remains best known for such controversial multimedia exhibits as "The Dinner Party," dedicated to history's semisung women; "The Birth Project," focusing on mothers and their emotional processes; and "Powerplay," a chronicle of male domination and manipulation. But despite all her previous work, nothing prepared her for what she and her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, encountered on their jouney preparing for "The Holocaust Project."

"Certainly, there is no guarantee that one will ever come out to the light of hope, and there was certainly a long period where I myself felt that I would never see the light again," Chicago comments, her bright auburn hair and colorful outfit contrasting the darkness the project shadowed upon her. "In every country we went to, it was as if there had been a different Holocaust... the scale, the scope, the complexity, the impact of the Holocaust was so beyond anything we had any idea of when we left American soil, it was mindboggling. I think it was at that point that I began to question the notion of the Holocaust as entirely of interest to Jews, [and] only about Jews. The deeper in we got, the murkier it got."

"'The Holocaust Project,' for us, was a voyage of discovery... questioning many of the things that all of us grew up with: assumptions about human life being inherently more important than other species, about human beings' place, about progress, about modernism, about technology... many, many questions.

"For me, what is the function of art? It's not to get a good review," Chicago notes mockingly, in reference to the Boston Globe's recent harsh criticism of her work. "That was not my goal in life. I have this vision of art playing a different role in the world, and speaking to more people...if ever there was a time to challenge what art is, what it can be, what it should be, what it might be; those are the issues that are of interest to me... I like work that remembers that art is about communicating.

"I think what shocked me was that I thought--dreamed, I suppose, is a better word--that between the '70s, the '80s, and the mid-'90s," Chicago continues. "... that some of this would have changed by now, and to be greeted by the same level of viciousness... that was sort of discouraging. I don't know what to make of it. Maybe the fact that now there's actually beginning to be some counter-dialogue, that people are actually starting to discuss my work in other terms--maybe that will begin to have an effect."