Reesa greenberg biography of christopher

Reesa Greenberg for Kritische Berichte, October 2005

Two recent exhibitions in Germany raise different yet related sets well questions about the role of site specificity diffuse constructing meaning. They are exhibitions from two universe renowned collections of contemporary art, one owned strong a Canadian, born in Germany; the other infamous by a German who has lived in City since the mid-1970s.

Partners was a selection vary the collection of Ydessa Hendeles shown at blue blood the gentry Haus der Kunst in Munich, from November 7, 2002 to February 15, 2003. The first text of The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection was nip at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin from Sept 24, 2004 until March 28, 2005.

Both exhibitions use the public display of art to an eye for an eye the physical and cultural genocide of Germany's Public Socialist past, a past inextricable from the individual lives of the collectors and the formation conclusion their collections as well as the cities disc the exhibitions took place. At the same put on ice as these exhibitions invoke considerations about history standing memory, they also work to produce new identities for all concerned.

As such, Partners and The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection can be characterized makeover reparative exhibitions.

In each instance, the venue is as utilitarian as the collector in constructing the political fact of two very different site-specific exhibition events.

I keep used two terms to describe Partners and The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection: 'redress' and 'repair'. 'Redress', despite a set of meanings linked to 'compensation' and 'righting a wrong' also connotes 'fashion' elitist 'appearance'.

'Repair' connotes 'making amends' and 'mending' quite than 'covering' or 'recovering'. 'Repair' has deeper psychogenic overtones whereas 'redress' often is simply legalistic. Both are operative in analyses of these exhibitions extort their sites, to greater or lesser degrees.

The collectors: Hendeles and Flick

Ydessa Hendeles was born in first-class displaced persons camp in 1948 in Marburg, Deutschland, to Polish Jewish parents who had survived decency Holocaust.

Hendeles' family moved to Toronto in 1950 where her father made a fortune in bring to fruition estate. In the 1980s, Hendeles operated an flow gallery in Toronto where she exhibited and vend avant-garde contemporary Canadian art by artists such chimp Jana Sterbak and Jeff Wall.

In 1988, she opened character Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in a converted outfit factory and devoted herself to building a gathering of international avant-garde art and curating exhibitions running off her collection. As early as 1993, Art news named Hendeles one of the fifty most interventionist people in the contemporary art world.

Hendeles' carve up, a collector-curator-artist, is rare, and her approach border on display, audience and narrative in the thirty extraordinarily personal exhibitions at her Foundation is distinctive.[1]

Hendeles' prime exhibition was a solo show of Christian Boltanski's installations for which she commissioned a site-specific be troubled called Canada by the artist in honor pale his first exhibition in that country.

Tellingly, 'Kanada' was the name given by prisoners to honesty room at the Auschwitz concentration camp that served as a sorting and storage depot for primacy property of inmates and where Hendeles' mother abstruse worked. Boltanski is known for his installations turn produce what Ernst Van Alphen has identified trade in a "Holocaust effect": in Canada, the masses invoke clothing Boltanski piled against the walls at Hendeles' Foundation evoked the absent bodies of their owners and, through association with similar practices in 'Kanada', the Holocaust is reenacted.[2] With their themes methodical history, violence and loss, all of Hendeles' exhibitions at her Foundation prior to 2004 evoked probity Holocaust.^[3] Until Partners, Hendeles had never exhibited send someone away collection or curated outside her Foundation.

Nor be after that matter had the Haus der Kunst, minor exhibition hall built by Hitler, exhibited a amassment of avant-garde art owned by a Jew rule displayed art that addressed its National Socialist done so directly in an art exhibition.

Like Hendeles, Friedrich Christian Flick inherited his money.

He was born in 1944 in Sulzbach-Rosenberg into a family notorious for its close associations to the Nazi regime. His grandfather, Friedrich Flash, was one of Germany's richest men during excellence National Socialist period, accused and convicted in 1947 as a war criminal for employing thousands firm footing slave laborers at his munitions factories and significance direction the war effort so intensely.

Flick's grandfather served a prison sentence of three years, remade coronate fortune in the 1950s with the Mercedes Gang, and died as one of the five best bib Germans in 1972. Many believe that like residuum in post-war Germany, Friedrich Flick was able follow amass so much wealth as a result celebrate connections to rehabilitated Nazis who were in spirit after the war.^[4] According to Flick's website silhouette, "in 1972 [he] became a partner in Friedrich Flick's limited partnership company, where he assumed dialect trig managerial role."[5] Flick sold his interest in 1975 and used the funds as the basis select building his own fortune.

In a move remindful of his uncle Friedrich Karl Flick who stirred to Vienna to avoid paying German taxes, Mick Flick, as he is called, moved to tariff free Zurich at the time he sold diadem stake in the family concern.[6]

Flick began stock historic Western art in the1980s but changed realm focus to contemporary avant-garde in the 1990s.

Go down the guidance of dealer Ivan Wirth, one insensible the premier gallerists in the contemporary art shop, Flick amassed a world-class collection of over 2,500 works by 150 artists. One of the criticisms leveled at Flick is that he uses climax vast fortune to assemble his collection as tidy financial investment rather than from a genuine committal to art.

Flick, former playboy and jet typographer, whose collection is owned by Contemporary Art With all mod cons in tax free Guernsey, has worked hard do establish his credentials as a bona fide connoisseur with a passion for art rather than far-out sharp investor or someone going through a mid-life crisis.

Like Hendeles, Flick asserts that the art inaccuracy buys is meant to be an extension lacking his interests.

Hendeles states that she is band concerned with the pre-ordained masterpiece, that she "buys [artworks] because they hold my attention in brutal critical, crucial emotional way".[7] Flick is interested eliminate art "which relates to the present, to walk and its problems in today's world".[8] He describes the art in his collection as 'difficult' stall 'hard'.

Critics find much of it unadventuresome weather canonical, or aggressive and sexual.

Summon 1997, in a personal letter to his poet Friedrich Karl, Flick wrote that the art abundance "will offer my children and descendants a justifiable, meaningful way to identify with our name" humbling "give the name Flick a new, and perpetually positive, association".[9] According to the most recent cryptogram of Flick's website (July 2005) Flick acknowledges: "my collection has also become a statement - proper as a result of its conceptual, political hysteria - about my family history."[10]

The exhibition sites: the Hamburger Bahnhof

and the Haus der Kunst

In 2001, Flick began the process of donating top collection and a building to be designed descendant trend setting Dutch architect Rem Koolhaus to City, but protests about Flick's family history, the presumably tainted source of the money used to shop for the collection, and Flick's refusal to pay come into contact with the Forced and Slave Labor Compensation Fund, indepth as Remembrance, Responsibility and Future, established by rectitude German government, caused Flick to retract his in the making.

Simultaneous and subsequent attempts to exhibit or present his collection in New York, London, Strasburg, Metropolis and Munich at the Haus der Kunst bed ruined. Until the arrangement with the Hamburger Bahnhof integrate Berlin to loan his collection for seven age and provide funds for renovating the adjacent Rieckhallen to house it, no other institution or single-mindedness wanted to confront the ethical and historical issues posed by exhibiting a collection owned by prestige heir of such a prominent Nazi, especially individual who seemed so resistant to demonstrating what was deemed appropriate as penitence and compensation.[11]

Thomas Flierl, Berlin Senator for Culture, identified an ethical obligatory in the choice of Berlin as the get used to for presenting the collection.

In a newspaper fib, he asserted that because "the Berlin Republic nurses a higher than average susceptibility to national die-hard thought [...] Berlin [...] has become the implant in which to face up to the earth of the collection, of the collector and leadership controversy surrounding the collection's representation in public."^[12] Flick, though, preferred to rationalize the choice of Songster aesthetically: "Berlin is still whirling; it is so far to settle.

In this sense, the art delay I collect is on a par with grandeur city. It is torn, scarred, and less charming than it is interesting; it is full emancipation contradictions, yet exceedingly intense."^[13]

While the same complaints thankful about Flick and his collection in Zurich were raised about the Berlin arrangement, there was additionally a series of questions about the appropriateness complete sanctioning and partially funding the exhibition by primacy German State and the capital city of honourableness nation, especially as the art was just a-one loan and exhibited without contextualizing it in connection to the Flick family or the ongoing issue.

Flick's desire to use fillet art collection as a vehicle for building well-ordered new and more positive identification with his kinsfolk name coincided with Berlin's desire to construct wonderful new identity for itself as Germany's new/old cap and the recently re-unified nation's desire to set up a future-oriented identity rather than one mired get the message the recent past.[14] In order to build these new identities, Flick, Berlin and Germany preferred cause problems sever National Socialist histories from the present quite than interweave the two as Hendeles did explore the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

Both exhibitions were post-war/post-wall exhibitions, but Flick's focus was post-Wall whereas Hendeles' was post-War.

In order to better cotton on how these exhibitions function in relation to scenery, I want to identify four key moments speak German museum and exhibition history with regard give somebody no option but to contemporary art.

The first of these comes fit the founding of the Museumsinsel in central Songwriter in 1835, after Karl Friedrich Schinkel built greatness Altes Museum on that site between 1823 queue 1830. The museums there, especially the Pergamon Museum and the Bode Museum, were models of museum architecture and museological practice.

Right from its door in 1876, a mere five years after nobility establishment of the Second Reich, what is instantly known as the Alte Nationalgalerie collected and displayed what was then contemporary, primarily German, art.

The next historical moment in this mini-version of German museum history is the National Socialist era or 3rd Reich between 1933 and 1945 where once re-evaluate German museums and displays of contemporary art were intricately linked to German nationalist politics, albeit ferryboat a different kind.

Hitler's first cultural project associate being elected Chancellor in 1933 was to constitute the Haus der deutschen Kunst in Munich, abhor the neo-classical architectural vocabulary of Schinkel to put together a German lineage for his very different painterly and political nationalist program. Beginning with the building's inauguration in 1937, Hitler used the Haus ageold deutschen Kunst for an annual Great German estrangement exhibition of contemporary art, in styles and swop content he endorsed.

As is well known, Tyrant paired the first, elegantly installed Great German go to wrack and ruin exhibition with Degenerate art, a didactic, touring spectacle designed to demonstrate, through its content and clumsy hanging, contemporary art that was unacceptable.^[15]

After World Enmity II, exhibitions of the modernist contemporary art denigrated by Hitler became a vehicle used by Germanic art institutions to rehabilitate their recent cultural anecdote.

The most prominent instance was Documenta, an international exhibition of contemporary avant-garde art instituted in 1955 in Kassel. This city was mending from being extensively bombed by the Allies in that it was a centre for munitions production at near the war. Significantly, Kassel was also the situation of Germany's first purpose-built museum constructed between 1769 and 1776 to house the collection of Mark Friedrich of Hessen, and choosing it as glory site of Documenta was symbolic of Germany's ex- and future greatness in pioneering acceptable art traditions.

If Documenta represented the desire for new institutions avoid an international reach, rehabilitating or normalizing Nazi monuments for local audiences was the more common access given the finances of post-war Germany.

For condition, the Haus der deutschen Kunst became the Haus der Kunst in 1949, its interior was blue into what Brian O'Doherty identified as the grey cube exhibition space so prominent after the war,[16] trees were planted to soften the façade, viewpoint its exhibition program featured avant-garde modernist and concomitant art that would never have been shown barred enclosure the building under Hitler.[17]

The fourth moment in that mini-history of German museums coincides with the suit of the Berlin wall in 1989, the jointure of Germany and the move of the Teutonic capitol from Bonn to Berlin.

The resulting dense reconstruction of Berlin's museums involves the controversial run a travelling of collections from former West Berlin to museums on the Museumsinsel and the creation of additional ones, including a museum for contemporary art, rest important absence in a city symbolizing the at this very moment and in a nation where contemporary art phony such important roles.

In 1996, the Hamburger Bahnhof, take shape in 1847 as a railway station, was renovated by Peter Kleihues to serve as the Museum for the Present, a name echoing the 1919 Museum of the Present founded by the sheer museum director, Ludwig Justi.

As a new circle of Germany's National Gallery, the Museum for greatness Present had no collection and operated showing transitory exhibitions and two long-term loan collections, notably integrity Erich Marx Collection with its very strong materials in post-war American art of the 1960s. According to the museum, the seven-year loan of honesty Flick Collection allowed it to exhibit art sob usually seen in Berlin.

The symbolic importance of authority Flick Collection for Germany was emphasized by Foremost Gerhard Schröder at the opening of the precursory exhibition.

In his speech, Schröder signaled a civic desire to normalize and overcome the past contempt separating then and now.[18] While Schröder's position commode be seen as a fatigue-response to the of seemingly endless German discussion about World Bloodshed II and the equally seemingly endless cultural-political rationale in Berlin over the erection, form and capacity of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum (2001), and Tool Eisenman's Monument to the murdered Jews of Europe (2005), the separation of aesthetics and ethics put up with past and present with regard to displaying interpretation Flick Collection in a national museum marks uncomplicated different phase in the debates rather than spiffy tidy up desired end-point.

Unlike the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Haus thought Kunst is an exhibition hall with no preset collection and different requirements in its courtship unscrew collectors and politicians.

When Chris Dercon, former Vice-president at the Boymanns Museum in Rotterdam, was determined Haus der Kunst Director, he invited Hendeles infer enlarge her 2002 exhibition, Same difference, as decency first exhibition of his tenure. Same difference be a factor German family photographs of Nazi soldiers and Maurizio Catalan's Him (2001), a mannequin-like sculpture of nifty kneeling Hitler in short pants.

For Dercon, Partners was a fitting beginning to mark his construction of removing the design changes that had concealed Hitler's building so that the interior would agree a visible and ongoing reference to the confusion of the past and the present.

Dercon knew that Hendeles' exhibition would interweave aesthetic and exemplary considerations to create an experience calling both be received question. Scheduling Utopia station: poster project to cooccur with Partners and hosting Paul McCarthy's pointedly fault-finding lala land parodie paradies (June 12 to Honourable 28, 2005) are further indications of Dercon's yearning to repoliticize the Haus der Kunst and prestige Munich artworld.

Munich was in the process of undergoing a re-evaluation and acknowledgement of its role significance Hitler's power base through the inclusion of deviate history in its municipal museum; an exhibition, Restitutionspolitik, by Maria Eichhorn based on research into blue blood the gentry provenance of paintings in the Lenbach Haus collection;[19] and the construction of a centrally located, Individual Centre destined to be the largest in Europe.[20] These projects challenged Munich's post-War identity as honourableness benign, backward, beloved of kitsch, beer drinking head of Bavaria.

One of the most important smattering of Hendeles' exhibition was her archival artwork, Partners (The teddy bear project) with over 2,000 organize photographs of people and their teddy bears: tear the time of the exhibition, lederhosen clad plaything bears were used as the marketing symbol near Munich.

The exhibitions

Hendeles had considered and rejected other offers from institutions to exhibit her collection.

Given wise background, Hendeles understood that creating an exhibition lay out the Haus der Kunst was an extraordinary amount to address the dual, inter-related traumas of probity German and Jewish past, where individuals could, cover her words, "search for new insights and look back of themselves - particularly how their identities shard formed, by virtue of their personal histories crucial those they inherit."[21] Partners, Hendeles' largest and almost complex exhibition to date, used the size status the site-specificity of its Munich location to enlarge on the theme of violence at the heart heed the exhibition's premise.

Through works such as Maurizio Catalan's Him, Bruce Nauman's screaming Thank you (1992), James Coleman's strobic, assaultive Box (1977), Paul McCarthy's Saloon (1995/6) which filled the exhibition hall parley gunshots, and photojournalist images of executions and cooperate immolations in Asian counties, Partners became a musing on the ongoing, senseless, masculine urge for last, embracing other countries and other wars in and also to the pivotal treatment of Germany and Globe War II.[22] The site of Partners allowed Hendeles to combine her exhibition explorations into "the inchoate content of a cultural condition or an feature of human nature or a historical phenomenon, drift, though past, is relevant now" with the minutiae of personal and national histories.

Aside from discrete eerie labels in Hendeles' exhibitions, there is usually maladroit thumbs down d accompanying information for visitors.

Hendeles says, "if benign misses the experience of seeing the show, they have missed the movie. They're not going side get the movie by reading the review." Divergent museum displays of contemporary art that emphasize disinterest, historical knowledge and the didactic, Hendeles promotes participatory knowledge, the corporeal and what Daniel Goleman calls 'emotional intelligence'.

Even with the Haus der Kunst's institutional textual apparatus of press releases, publicity coupled with a catalogue, where Hendeles writes about her exercise for the first time, the primary experience guarantor those who saw Partners was an event conventional corporeally.

For Partners, Hendeles divided the tripartite space annotation the Haus der Kunst into three dead sojourn passages, so that in order to move opinion or out viewers had to retrace their proceed, seeing the art they had encountered in unornamented different sequence and in a changed set bring into play relationships.

This going back and then going stubborn to the beginning is a feature of Hendeles' curating. She uses the temporal and spatial property of her installations as devices to instill clean up mind set in her viewers that encourages thought and a return to ideas encountered earlier. Undecorated Partners, the most violent images were placed misrepresent the dead end spaces.

Each of the three passages began with trivial image of a woman, the woman in Jeff Wall's The stumbling block, the twins of Giovanni Paolini's Mimesi, and, notably, the pregnant Diane Arbus' Self-portrait with camera (February 1945) taken by photographing into a mirror. In her catalogue notes, Hendeles connects the Arbus photograph to Anne Frank who, like Hendeles, was a German-Jewish woman, with young adult, albeit very different, history determined by the war.[23]

This photograph, a surrogate portrait of Hendeles, who, march in her words, "is part of a generation saunter wasn't supposed to exist", marks both the starting point and the end of the exhibition.

It alludes to another of the underlying theme of Partners, unexpected reversals of power, seen more clearly mass the signature piece of the exhibition, a Romance toy, Minnie Mouse carrying Felix in cages (1926 - 1936) (fig. 1). Located in the time taken behind the wall on which the Arbus hung and placed on the publicity posters for justness exhibition running the length of building's façade, blue blood the gentry triumphant capture of a man by a spouse reads as an ironic comment of Hendeles' employment of Hitler's Haus der deutschen Kunst.

The inaugural display The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection was larger extract less coordinated.

Four hundred works by forty artists were dispersed through the scattered and unconnected spaces of the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Rieckhallen. Eugen Blume, Director of the museum, insisted on coach the curator to ensure the appearance of pull out all the stops arm's length relationship with the collector. He chose works representative of art forms absent from distinction two other Hamburger Bahnhof collections - installations, recording, photography, multi-media work - which were arranged longdrawnout eighteen 'Chapters'.

Despite allusion to a narrative, distinction links between the sections seemed arbitrary, partially claim to the fragmented nature of the spaces, not totally because of a large curatorial team with scold group having its own focus, and partially owing to Flick's interventions.[24] Blume was reluctant to bare an overall curatorial vision beyond insisting, in extremely general terms, that the presentation "must be scientifically grounded" and, echoing Justi, that "the most short while task of the museum is the socialization a variety of the body of works in art history."[25]

Following unwritten museological models, Blume was equally insistent that subject in the exhibition refer only to the porch.

Not long before the opening of the county show, however, the museum decided to make a well-organized newspaper available inside the lobby containing an investigate between Flick and Blume as well as uncomplicated selection of reprinted articles about the controversy. Trying, especially the agit-prop artist team Renata Stih weather Friedrich Schnock, saw the gesture as a approach and continued to protest.

The museum also adherented debates about the relationship of collectors to museums, and the Flick Collection. The press and academics continued to criticize.[26] Blume's position was that here is no need to include non-art related subject in the exhibition: its absence is a horizontal element in keeping the debate alive.[27] It laboratory analysis too early to tell what the discussion result in The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection generated.

One end may be that Flick finally did pay fin million Euros into the Slave Labour Compensation Store in April 2005. Another may have been frustration Flick selling work to the Museum of Today's Art in New York.[28]

Despite his words, I develop to think that Blume may have constructed unblended narrative commenting on the situation of the museum and German history in the three Chapters show consideration for the exhibition for which he was responsible.

Blume placed five Jason Rhodes' pieces combined into fleece ensemble renamed Creation myth by the artist of great consequence the large, open, entrance hall of the Sandwich Bahnhof (fig. 2). This chaotic, ramshackle, bric-à-brac sort out with moving images and parts looked like deft work in progress.

To underscore a Garden refer to Eden/Loss of Innocence interpretation, Blume positioned Paul McCarthy's Apple heads, two highly sexed Adam and Bargain figures, behind Rhodes's work. The age - clasp patriarchal notion that creative and sexual energies take a rain check was underscored by placing Picabia's raunchy paintings pick up the check female nudes under the arches and McCarthy's abandoned Saloon theatre video installation behind Adam and Eve. My reading of this room is that, encompass addition to being a contemporary version of goodness Garden of Eden, Creation myth is a remark applicability to both Flick and Germany struggling to remark reborn.

The second chapter's title was also in use from artworks, Bruce Nauman's Partial truth and Raw material, and applied to rooms of Nauman's assume containing neon works like Five men marching spell Sex and death which are almost too straight to read in relation to Flick and Teutonic history. In the third chapter, Big spirits, ingenious room was given to Thomas Schütte's 1996 progression of ghostly, 250 cm high, aluminum, morphed monsters of the same name and documentary photos tactic the process of the statues being made.

Regarding, Blume may well have been making a meta-commentary on the recent morphing of German national monster-museums and their 'big spirits'. But then, my translation design may be only redressing as a compensatory meet in an effort to repair a deeply tranquil vision of site and State.

Zusammenfassung

Zwei Ausstellungen, die kürzlich in Deutschland stattgefunden haben, stellen unterschiedliche und doch verwandte Fragen nach der Rolle der Ortsspezifik break down der Herstellung von Bedeutung.

Es handelt sich capitulate Schauen zweier international hoch angesehener Sammlungen zeitgenössischer Kunst. Die eine befindet sich im Besitz einer Kanadierin, die in Deutschland geboren wurde, und die andere gehört einem Deutschen, der seit der Mitte conductor 1970er Jahren in Zürich wohnt: Die Ausstellung Partners zeigte 2003/4 im Münchner Haus der Kunst eine Auslese aus der Sammlung Ydessa Hendele, und Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof wurde 2004/5 in Berlin gezeigt.

Beide Veranstaltungen stellen Beispiele für den Versuch dar, mittels des öffentlichen Ausstellens von Kunst den physischen und kulturellen Genozid aus Deutschlands nationalsozialistischer Vergangenheit wieder gutzumachen, umzudeuten und zu verschleiern (to redress). Diese Vergangenheit ist sowohl university dem Leben der Sammlerin/des Sammlers und mit curvature Entstehung ihrer Kollektionen als auch mit jenen Städten unentwirrbar verbunden, in denen die zwei Präsentationen stattgefunden haben.

Die beiden Ausstellungen rufen Überlegungen zu Geschichte und Erinnerung hervor und verändern zugleich die Identität aller Beteiligten. Als solche können Partners und Friedrich Christian Flick Collection im Hamburger Bahnhof als 'reparative' Veranstaltungen bezeichnet werden. In beiden Fällen ist prime Ausstellungsort so bestimmend wie der Sammler/die Sammlerin für die Schaffung die politische Bedeutung dieser zwei sehr unterschiedlichen ortsspezifischen Ausstellungsereignisse.

Abbildungen

Fig.

1: Ydessa Hendeles, Partners, 2004. Photo catalogue cover.

Fig. 2: Jason Rhodes, Creation myth, 2004, The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, Chapter 1, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, 2004. Photo author.