Partners
7 November 2003 – 15 February 2004
www.hausderkunst.de
Baby let
me be,
Your lovin’ teddy bear
Put a chain around my neck.
And lead me anywhere
Oh let me be
Your teddy bear.
Elvis Presley Teddy Bear 1957
Imagine this. It is evening in Munich on 5 November at Haus der Kunst,
Adolph Hitler’s former Haus der Deutschen Kunst, whose opening exhibition in
1937 notoriously sought to discredit modern art as Entartete Kunst, the
title of Hitler’s now infinitely more memorable salon des refusés. You are
here at the preview opening of the exhibition Partners, work collected by
and curated for this very particular place by Ydessa Hendeles, the respected
collector-curator of contemporary art based in Toronto. Ydessa Hendeles,
born Jewish in 1948 Marburg, the only child of Holocaust survivors who left
shortly afterwards for Canada.
Standing for over an hour, you have
listened patiently through the normal introductory addresses. Suddenly a
surprise guest is announced, and onto the stage bounds an Elvis impersonator
to sing three songs. Within seconds, as you look around, the entire room is
moving to the rhythms. Ahead, three women link arms and sing to the lyrics,
as you watch Ydessa dancing to Elvis with the impersonator.
It is not possible in the space of this review to even begin to delineate
the intricate complexities of Ydessa Hendeles’ astonishingly conceived and
executed response to the history of the twentieth century. With implacable
precision, Hendeles tracks that history through implications to be found in
works by 16 artists including Jeff Wall, Maurizio Cattelan, Giulio Paolini,
James Coleman, Hanne Darboven and Bruce Nauman – to name a few – and through
two remarkable projects of Ydessa’s own, one of which lends its title to the
exhibition. Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), occupies two galleries
transformed into a ‘teddy bear museum’ of historical photographs – hundreds
and hundreds of them – each a depiction of a child or adult with their
‘teddies’. Collectively they overwhelm with their pathos and the sheer
weight of their unspoken human stories. And Partners has a sting: beyond its
galleries of once-living children and their teddies, facing away from us in
solitary isolation within a gallery from which one can only return, kneels
the winsomely slight figure of a strange boy whose old-fashioned Sunday-best
manner of dress and supplicating gesture recalls an effort at redemption,
but whose face – when you discover it – is the face of Hitler himself,
caught in a timeless grimace of grim determination. A grimace whose
intensity, framed against the images of human longing and compassion behind
him, casts him here as none other than Lucifer, God’s repudiated other.
I have not yet even mentioned the vintage toy figure of Minnie Mouse we first encountered as we entered. Minnie, almost literally brushing past us with Felix the cat safely captured in the suitcases she grips firmly in her two hands. But it must suffice here to record only two thoughts that occurred to me that night. The first is that the exhibition must be viewed as a map. Ydessa speaks about her exhibition in terms of ‘passages’ – three, to be exact. Passage: to book a passage; to follow a passage; to find a passage – there are many ‘passages’ to define. And that triggers the second thought: this exhibition is constructed not simply as a map, but more significantly as a maze – a trap, even – with but a single possibility for escape – to retrace one’s steps: to double back. Three passages, but only one return.
And the impersonator? He is, after all, Elvis’ only chance at that return. His only chance to escape, and once again to sing and dance.
Ian Carr-Harris