Partners

The response of an object to contact sufficient to lead to a change in inherent quality (vis inertiae).
La réaction d’un objet au contact suffisant à entrainer un changement de qualité inhérente (vis inertiae).1

What do international contemporary art, popular and historical icons, press photographs, family snapshots, teddy bears and other antique toys have in common? They are collected and presented in continually new configurations in exhibitions by Ydessa Hendeles. Last November the exhibition ‘Partners’2 ­opened with a selection from the collection at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, which has recently come under Chris Dercon’s ­directorship.

Hendeles, an internationally renowned Canadian collector and curator, was born in 1948 in Marburg, the only child of two Jewish concentration-camp survivors. In 1950 the family moved to Toronto, where Hendeles ran a gallery from 1980 to 1989 and ­introduced artists like Jeff Wall, Jana Sterbak and Ken Lum. In 1988 she opened her Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation with the installation Canada by Christian Boltanski: 6000 second-hand pieces of clothing, covering the walls of the room in the former ­uniform factory.

Amid the modest hype in war exhibitions in the last two years, ‘Partners’ is a breath of fresh air. In contrast to, for instance, ‘No one ever dies there, no one has a head’ in Dortmund in 2002 and ‘Mars. Kunst und Krieg’ in Graz in 2003, ‘Partners’ is not literally about war or its representation in the media and the arts, but rather alludes to it in an indirect and subtle way. Hendeles violates the moral laws that have applied since Auschwitz on the representation of the Holocaust: she does not limit herself to collecting, organizing and testifying; she presents all the parts within a narrative structure, with its own, namely Hendeles’s own, logic.3

The location itself has a startling his­tory, when you realize that the name Haus der Kunst (‘House of Art’) included the adjective ‘Deutschen’ (‘German’) until 1949. The museum, built at Hitler’s orders, opened on 18 July 1937 with the Nazi-sanctioned ‘Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung’ (‘Great German Art Exhibition’), one day before the opening of the ‘Entartete Kunst’ (‘Degenerate Art’) exhibition elsewhere in the city. An ideal location for Hendeles, who had a number of later additions to the architecture ­removed for the exhibition, so that the building was once more visible in its laden but ­original form.

The exhibition is divided into three passages, which compel the visitor to walk past the works in a specific order and sometimes to turn back. A small self-portrait of the Jewish-American photographer Diane Arbus from February 1945 opens the show, flanked by a unique studio portrait of the famous Wild Bunch gang, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The third opening object is an antique toy, Minnie Mouse Carrying Felix in Cages, circa 1926–1936. From there Hendeles leads the visitor to her own project, Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), a collection of 3,000 photographs of all imaginable and unimaginable scenes of people with teddy bears: pin-ups, soldiers, children in sailor suits, sports figures, film stars, families.4 All sorted according to the classical art-history method of teddy-bear iconography. Absurd and hilarious, were it not for two dissonant notes: a cuddly sleeping dog by Maurizio Cattelan, which turns out to be stuffed, and several stories of Jewish children whose teddy bears were taken away when they were deported. After the suddenly oppressive quantity of cheerful pictures of teddy bears, the visitor enters an empty room, in which a little boy, seen from behind, kneels in front of a bare wall, also a work by Maurizio Cattelan. It’s a great shock to find that the little boy’s face is that of Hitler. The first passage ends here; the visitor must turn back and look at all he has just seen with new eyes.

Typical of Hendeles’s way of collecting and thinking is the inclusion in ‘Partners’ of the world-famous photograph by Eddy Adams of the execution of a Viet Cong suspect. The impact of this one photo on public opinion was enormous: for the first time the American people saw on every newspaper’s front page the cold-blooded murder of an apparently innocent victim by the South Vietnamese general Loan, a great friend of the Americans. The public was shocked; until that moment people had steadfastly believed that only the enemy committed atrocities. The fact that afterwards the suspect did turn out to be guilty of murdering a family, that the ‘spontaneous’ execution was a staged event for a group of photographers and journalists, that Adams himself later regretted having ever taken the photograph, because he had not foreseen its effect and had not wanted it,6 no longer mattered. The photograph ultimately turned the tide of the war and this gave it mythical ­proportions.

What makes ‘Partners’ so special is that Hendeles does not simply show this icon, but, quite essentially, the photos that came before and after it as well. They restore a context to the photo, allow the viewer to ‘fill in’ the now empty icon with a new meaning and to re-experience the horror of the execution as the series unfolds. And however shocking this may be, Hendeles places the responsibility for interpreting, for being able to interpret pictures once more on the viewer. No ready-made bite-size pieces, no short-lived spectacle, Think, make connections, strip icons bare, think, assign new content, experience and think again.

And along with Bruce Nauman you shout furiously at Hendeles: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!7