The audience is already seated. There are rows and rows
of them, entire families and groups all staring to the front. Others have taken
up position around the walls, on tables and in several vitrines. They all look
absorbed, or rigid with shock after some devastating announcement. Perhaps the
end of the world has been declared.
Except they’re manikins, not people.
There are over 150 of these articulated wooden figures – from little peg dolls
to life-sized men and women – filling the theatre of London’s ICA, like a
bizarre meeting of some arcane society. Lifelike but not alive, the earliest manikins
date from about 1520, and there are examples from every century since. Some are
toys, most are figures used by artists as stand-ins for live models. The effect
is uncanny. There’s detail after detail in this tableau vivant, too much to
fully grasp.
More bodies are arranged under a long
refectory table, and smaller figures are lined up on a flat-topped railway
cart, as if they’re about to be dispatched somewhere. Others are stuffed into
vitrines whose rear walls are mirrored, their bodies all tangled up with their
own reflections. I catch my own reflection in the distorting fairground mirrors
on the walls, my body extruded and compressed, a yawing malleable me.
Meanwhile, the bulbous phallic nose of the commedia dell’arte character
Pulcinella sits under a glass dome, sniffing the air. Close to it, a little
Aryan-looking girl sits on the naughty chair.
This is From
her wooden sleep ..., by Ydessa
Hendeles. Everything has a history and a reason to be here, though
the story is complicated. You’ll never get to the bottom of it because history
is bottomless, though it is filled with echoes. I don’t feel quite myself among
these wooden people with their complications and their implacable wooden
expressions. Am I meant to perform? Apologise?
I was getting progressively more
disturbed by all the carved blank eyes on me when Hendeles walked in. If Little
Bo Peep ditched her crook and became a goth, she might look like Hendeles. At
66, she is a striking figure dressed in black, her black hair falling from
under her natty brimmed hat and terminating in a pigtail. She has the
deportment of a dressage equestrian. For some years, she wore only white. Her
look is all her own.
Like her manikins, Hendeles has had
multiple lives. Born in Germany to Jewish parents of Polish origin, who had
been living in a displaced persons camp after surviving Auschwitz, Hendeles and
her family moved to Canada when she was two. She was their only child. “My
worry,” she says, “is that a disproportionate focus on my backstory leads to an
‘Ah-ha’ moment that short-circuits the work. After all, the work is not about
me, it is about everyone. We are wired both to generalise and discriminate.
Human beings need to relate. No one can be isolated from the crowd.” That, in
part, is what From her wooden sleep ... is about.
Hendeles has been an art therapist and an art historian, as well
as a successful gallery owner in Canada. In 1993, ArtNews magazine called her
one of the 50 most powerful people in the art world. Between 1988 and 2012, she
mounted strange, compelling exhibitions at her private
foundation in Toronto,
drawn from her expanding collection of artworks, artefacts and objects. One
2009 show I saw pitched a video installation by Pipilotti Rist and a sculpture by Thomas
Schütte against a
large collection of antique police truncheons and a 19th-century Punch and Judy
tent from an English seaside resort. It was one of the most intriguing
exhibitions I’d seen in a long time.
Most famously, Hendeles devised an
exhibition called Partners
(The Teddy Bear Project), for Munich’s Haus der Kunst in 2003.
Hendeles filled the Nazi-built museum, situated on the edge of the city’s
English Garden, with artworks by the likes of Bruce
Nauman and Diane Arbus. The show – which also featured Maurizio
Cattelan’s Him, a sculpture of a diminutive Adolf Hitler praying on
his knees – had as its centrepiece a collection of 3,000 framed photographs
from family albums. Taken between 1900 and 1940, each had a teddy bear
somewhere in the picture. It was an exhibition about loss, memory and the
Holocaust, culminating with a madcap, macho installation of a wild-west saloon
by American artist Paul
McCarthy. From her wooden sleep ... takes similarly unexpected
turns.
As we talk, a 1912 piano-roll recording of Claude Debussy
playing the same little piano piece over and over animates the stilled wooden
figures. It is more than soundtrack or atmosphere, though, and leads us to the
heart of From her wooden sleep .... The music isGolliwogg’s Cakewalk, from the composer’s 1908
Children’s Corner suite. Nearby, in a vitrine, sit opened first editions of
Florence K Upton’s The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg, which
influenced the composer. A line from this 1895 children’s book provides the
title of the exhibition.
I can barely bring myself to write the
word “golliwogg”, so racist has the term become, not least because of the
inherent racism of Enid Blyton’s golliwog stories of the 1940s and 50s, and the
persistence, certainly up to the 1980s, of the derogatory term wog. “It was
Blyton who turned this lovely, gracious fellow into a racist scoundrel,”
Hendeles tells me. She goes into this in depth in the notes accompanying the
exhibition. Upton’s character, based on a rag doll owned by her children, was
an entirely benign, chivalrous hero of an immensely popular series of books
that went on to be banned in Nazi Germany (the golliwog image, wearing a Star
of David, was used as an icon in the Nazi’s “degenerate music” campaign).
This element of the show troubled the ICA. “It isn’t my
intention to hurt anybody,” Hendeles says. “Sometimes, you have to go to
difficult places. It wouldn’t be contemporary art otherwise. Only in a context
like this can I talk about difference. Only in a context like this can I talk
about difference.” Hendeles wants us to know where the “golliwogg” came from.
“It is revisionist history to deny it. You can’t ignore the Holocaust, either.
I’m trying to take it back to its benign beginning, even though it came out of
slave culture. How does a good thing go bad?”
She cites William Morris’s arts and
crafts movement, too, and his utopian socialism, which were also taken up and
debased in Nazi Germany. Some of the figures here sit on arts and crafts
furniture. Even the display of old banjos references how an African instrument,
imported during slavery, was deliberately appropriated by white culture in the
American south.
Hendeles regards herself as a
storyteller. She has also been described as a kind of magic realist, but she is
more artist than novelist. Collector, curator, artist? To those who worry about
such things, I say get over it. “Much of my work,” she says, “is a
post-Holocaust document. I was born from the Holocaust, but I don’t want to
play the victim card. I try to look at my life and what it means to me.”
This exhibition, she insists, is not a
cabinet of curiosities. “I think through objects,” she says. “It is not about,
‘Look what I have.’ Nor is it an antiquarian show about a bunch of manikins.’
How strange, how disquieting it all is.
• This article was amended on 30 March
2015. An earlier version mentioned video installations by Susan Hiller and
Pipilotti Rist, rather than Rist’s alone paired with a sculpture by Thomas
Schütte. Bertha Upton was also mentioned, rather than her daughter Florence K
Upton.
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