That Century: Notes on Partners
Of all the characters in "Partners," the exhibition organized last winter by Ydessa Hendeles for Munich's Haus der Kunst, Minnie Mouse was the brightest star.
Portrayed in the show by a tin toy from early in the 20th century, Walt Disney's fabulously popular rodent stands tall in her pretty dress, clutching suitcases emblazoned with images of Felix the Cat, caged and frantic. It's a wonderful picture of anyone confidently on the move—an immigrant, a refugee headed for a better place—and especially an ambitious collector and curator, trucking her stuff around. It's also an apt, and subtly complex, portrait of Hendeles at her current moment of worldly success and critical acclaim.
The mouse has caught the cat, won the day. Capturing the enemy, the powerful Other, the rival star, gives Minnie power, independence, stature. Through collecting well, and curating brilliantly, Minnie-Ydessa has turned herself from a fugitive creature scampering around outside the circles of art-world power into a self-possessed player in the male-dominated world of collectors, curators and museum executives. With Felix in the bag—with a widely coveted collection of contemporary art and photography under her control—Minnie-Ydessa at last has the power traditionally denied to mice (and female curators).
Or does she? Viewed from a certain angle, Hendeles' catalogue notes point out, the tiny tin suitcases turn out to be empty. Hendeles' guess is that Felix has escaped. But another theory seems just as plausible: that Minnie never had Felix in the first place—that the lithographed image of Felix on Minnie's suitcases is only a trace of wishful thinking, the kind of mirror-play of reputation and prestige insistently (and perhaps tragically) encouraged by the art world. In the real world, after all, mice never capture cats; girl-mice are never really independent of boy-mice, except in their dreams.
Not to get too far ahead of the story, we should remember that the Minnie toy is, of course, just a toy, representing popular icons in 20th-century film culture. That it can be much more than a toy is a central proposition in Ydessa Hendeles' theory of curating.
A toy or artwork—any cultural artifact—according to this notion can become an object with explanatory, divinatory powers, when set to work by a viewer equipped with a prepared and eager mind, open to intellectual complexity. For such a viewer, the object will recall old, old stories about mice and cats. If the story about mice and cats is recalled in a dense cultural context like "Partners," then numerous pairings and groupings come to mind, each partner bundled by history and biology with the others in infinite variations of desire and repulsion, identity and distance. Among the possibilities evoked by the cats and mice in this exhibition: Germans and Jews since early modern times; the Nazi tyrants and their German subjects; the bombers and the bombed; the powerful and the powerless; even men and women. This game of expanding fields of meaning can be played, then, not only by scholars, but by anyone who has lived through the 20th century, or thought mindfully about its disasters.
The structure of the show: three passages through the dark and violent 20th century, three itineraries past stations, each station on this via crucis marked by something Ydessa Hendeles has collected along the way. A unique work by an artist, or a throwaway she has redeemed from oblivion—the teddy bear snapshots, for example—or an image made famous by mass circulation and here given a new life in a newly orchestrated composition of images and meanings.
It seemed, at the outset, that "Partners" was to be an American affair, spun from the amazing stuff of Hollywood Westerns and cartoons, of Hollywood dreams of violence and romance—myths produced by the world that photography and photojournalism invented, and made possible. Minnie Mouse, silver-screen diva, met us in the spare first room of the exhibition. The frontier gang known as The Wild Bunch, made famous by movies and popular mythology, was also there, derby-hatted in a studio photograph. And, also, a tiny self-portrait photo of Diane Arbus, snapped in 1945 when the obsessive future camera chronicler of the oddities in America's mid-century utopia turned 22.
Past the first room, however, the partnerings began to multiply and proliferate beyond America and the strictly political. They run down a vast, complex declension of psychological and cultural relationships: narcissistic, in the pair of self-beholding plaster Venuses by Giulio Paolini; surreptitious and alienated, in Walker Evans's spy-camera shots of people on New York subways; combative, in James Coleman's film about boxers; abusive, in Bruce Nauman's extraordinary videotape, featuring a figure who aggressively shouts "Thank you!" again and again.
But ordinary politics, inevitably, come into the show. Hitler, the most famous politician of his century, turns up at the heart of the exhibition, in Maurizio Cattelan's statue Him. Not in its geographical heart, but at its psychological centre of gravity, Hendeles' own "Teddy Bear Project." This archival work of imagination and obsession marshals thousands of pictures of teddies (a typical and pervasive 20th-century toy) to pinpoint the yearnings of millions in the last century for security, comfort, familiarity—and to remind us of the doom that befell them, when one or another of the competing totalitarianisms of the epoch obliged their desire. A teddy, however dearly loved, cannot give the comfort we long for; nor can political leaders, ideologies, theories. But at least a teddy cannot betray confidence or trust. Only people can do so. Hitler, who was dearly loved, led his lovers to destruction. In Him, we were reminded of the betrayed promises and false hopes that littered the 20th century, and that constituted powerful thematic currents in this exhibition.
Everyone reading these words has survived the 20th century—escaped its genocides, benefited from the defeat of its dictators, outlived its industrial toxins, been spared (by virtue of nothing any of us did, or could have done) the horror of nuclear annihilation. Yet all those things could overtake the world in the 21st century. The evils have not gone away. They wait to re-emerge, or are already coming out of their holes and crannies. Our partnership with the century of "Partners" continues.
To return to a key place Ydessa Hendeles wants to take us: the toy opens up an interesting question about the linkage between the collector and the collected. After some 20 years of buying contemporary art and photography, after spending a fortune to create a museum of philosophical objects that delight her with their suggestive correspondences, she finds the meaning of what she has done escaping her grasp, like Felix. She wonders, in the catalogue note accompanying Minnie, "what one really has when one captures something. What is at the heart of collecting? What is it that makes someone desire something and acquire it?"
There are no ready answers for these questions, even after a century of Freudian, Marxist and other theories of behaviour. But the activity of collecting itself, and its disappointments, produce certain conclusions. "A collection of anything, and particularly of art, has a place in our culture that is both enabling and baggage....A collection is both a physical burden and a precious reservoir of information, providing a resource for scholarship. A coherently curated collection suggests the universe has an inherent order that can be discovered, based on a belief that order can be made out of chaos. However, a collection can also be baggage, insofar as a system can distort reality."
Or, as we find in the art featured in "Partners," a collection of art and artifacts can accurately reflect a distorted time.
The era during which the work in this show was largely conceived, made and collected—the last quarter of the 20th century—witnessed the rise to great popularity among curators and collectors of an art of gadgetry and mechanical technique, with a philosophical vocabulary (borrowed from the social sciences) to complement it. The issues raised by this art of camera, videocam, computerized printing, digital image manipulation and so on were peculiar to a culture of machines: reproducibility, copy and copyright, authenticity, originality, the ontological status of the ready-made, or this or that mechanical replica. Moral questions, the discussion of ethical imperatives, were as deeply unfashionable among opinion-makers in the art world as in the world at large, where relativism and skepticism, the values of the social sciences, prevailed. (The last notable, credible moral art-world thunderings were pronounced some 20 years ago, by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, when he laid a curse on the new European painting for its presumed crypto-fascism.)
I am not suggesting things in the period 1975-1999 could have been otherwise. Many in the generation that came of age in the 1960s, my generation, were left exhausted, by the mid-1970s, by the excess, hedonism and shallow idealism of the counterculture—by its extravagant proposals for liberation.
But without the connection to the world provided by moral discourse, the inner world of the 1970s became purely psychological, imaginary, obsessed by the fluid dynamics of sex and power. Ideas—real ideas, I mean, carrying moral conviction and leading to principled courses of action—carried less and less weight. The mental landscape of "Partners" inevitably reflects this desolate world of the late 20th century, its psychic homeland—the era's narrowed vision and emotional range, its diminished ambitions and withdrawn hopes.
Given any occasion to do so, Ydessa Hendeles has insisted in public and private that "Partners" was not a political show. Contrary to her intention, this protest had the effect of turning our attention sharply toward the highly political aspects of this complex exhibition.
Not that these aspects were exactly hidden.
The architecture of the Haus der Kunst, a monumental work produced during the Nazi period, looms meaningfully over everything and everyone that comes within it. The enemy of the Jews, the enemy of German high culture, the political enemy of the world, is instantly recalled in every legend, architectural trace and popular memory of the cultural centre. It was a building built by Hitler, for Hitler, to Hitler's specifications, to showcase the objects of Hitler's taste for the sentimental and bombastic, and to provide a grandiose architectural frame for celebrity appearances by the führer and other bosses of the regime. (As if there were any danger that we might forget, executives of the Haus der Kunst like to point out to visitors the office used by Adolf Hitler—something that happened to me in 1988, and is apparently still a tradition.)
National Socialism's attempted transformation of its image, after 1937, from bullyboy populist movement to defender of classical virtue and value finds expression in the vacant, vastly over-scaled interiors of this exhibition palace, and in the piss-elegance of its detailing. Anything shown within such a total, unignorable environment will necessarily find itself in either a position of contest or one of complicity. In "Partners," the contest ranged from pugnacious to subtle, but never ceased to work to the embarrassment of Nazi architecture and arrogance—whether in the suggestive contrasts between intense little photographs and the bogus grandeur of the building, or between Paul McCarthy's raunchy, very American Saloon and recollections of the slick, militaristic, hyper-masculinist sculpture favoured by Hitler and the Nazi culture commissars. The best and most brilliant insult to Hitler's building and cultural program came during the opening ceremonies, when Elvis impersonator Wolfram Harmuth, alias Chris Jones, sang the King's "(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear." Take that: slicked-back black hair, Graceland kitsch, American showbiz, Las Vegas trashiness, pop sexiness, the power of image—the works.
Spring 2004
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