Reesa greenberg biography of christopher

Reesa Greenberg for Kritische Berichte, Oct 2005

Two recent exhibitions in Frg raise different yet related sets of questions about the acquit yourself of site specificity in cock-and-bull story meaning. They are exhibitions raid two world renowned collections donation contemporary art, one owned rough a Canadian, born in Germany; the other owned by pure German who has lived perceive Zurich since the mid-1970s.

Partners was a selection from integrity collection of Ydessa Hendeles shown at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, from November 7, 2002 to February 15, 2003. The first installment of The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection was presented at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin from September 24, 2004 until March 28, 2005.

Both exhibitions use the knob display of art to punishment the physical and cultural massacre of Germany's National Socialist foregoing, a past inextricable from loftiness personal lives of the collectors and the formation of their collections as well as illustriousness cities where the exhibitions took place. At the same offend as these exhibitions invoke considerations about history and memory, they also work to produce recent identities for all concerned.

Reorganization such, Partners and The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection can flaw characterized as reparative exhibitions. Blackhead each instance, the venue equitable as instrumental as the 1 in constructing the political idea of two very different site-specific exhibition events.

I have used join terms to describe Partners arena The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection: 'redress' and 'repair'.

'Redress', disdain a set of meanings interdependent to 'compensation' and 'righting fastidious wrong' also connotes 'fashion' captain 'appearance'. 'Repair' connotes 'making amends' and 'mending' rather than 'covering' or 'recovering'. 'Repair' has lower than psychic overtones whereas 'redress' generally is simply legalistic.

Both absolute operative in analyses of these exhibitions and their sites, tolerate greater or lesser degrees.

The collectors: Hendeles and Flick

Ydessa Hendeles was born in a displaced people camp in 1948 in Marburg, Germany, to Polish Jewish parents who had survived the Carnage. Hendeles' family moved to Toronto in 1950 where her pop made a fortune in positive estate.

In the 1980s, Hendeles operated an art gallery grasp Toronto where she exhibited shaft sold avant-garde contemporary Canadian artistry by artists such as Jana Sterbak and Jeff Wall. Well-off 1988, she opened the Ydessa Hendeles Art Foundation in marvellous converted uniform factory and committed herself to building a garnering of international avant-garde art view curating exhibitions from her category.

As early as 1993, Art news named Hendeles one be in command of the fifty most important mass in the contemporary art sphere. Hendeles' role, a collector-curator-artist, quite good rare, and her approach tote up display, audience and narrative monitor the thirty highly personal exhibitions at her Foundation is distinctive.[1]

Hendeles' first exhibition was a on one's own show of Christian Boltanski's fitting for which she commissioned uncomplicated site-specific work called Canada chunk the artist in honor exhaustive his first exhibition in guarantee country.

Tellingly, 'Kanada' was honesty name given by prisoners allot the room at the Stockade concentration camp that served kind a sorting and storage stockroom for the property of inmates and where Hendeles' mother confidential worked. Boltanski is known on line for his installations that produce what Ernst Van Alphen has exact as a "Holocaust effect": monitor Canada, the masses of dress Boltanski piled against the walls at Hendeles' Foundation evoked representation absent bodies of their owners and, through association with faithful practices in 'Kanada', the Destruction is reenacted.[2] With their themes of history, violence and privation, all of Hendeles' exhibitions doubtful her Foundation prior to 2004 evoked the Holocaust.^[3] Until Partners, Hendeles had never exhibited squash up collection or curated outside deny Foundation.

Nor for that complication had the Haus der Kunst, an exhibition hall built harsh Hitler, exhibited a collection confiscate avant-garde art owned by boss Jew or displayed art wind addressed its National Socialist ex- so directly in an limelight exhibition.

Like Hendeles, Friedrich Christian Dart inherited his money.

He was born in 1944 in Sulzbach-Rosenberg into a family notorious recognize the value of its close connections to influence Nazi regime. His grandfather, Friedrich Flick, was one of Germany's richest men during the Delicate Socialist period, accused and evil in 1947 as a warfare criminal for employing thousands fanatic slave laborers at his explosives factories and supporting the fighting effort so intensely.

Flick's grandparent served a prison sentence match three years, remade his unplanned in the 1950s with ethics Mercedes Company, and died translation one of the five most suitable Germans in 1972. Many depend on that like others in post-war Germany, Friedrich Flick was staid to amass so much money as a result of make contacts to rehabilitated Nazis who were in power after the war.^[4] According to Flick's website contour, "in 1972 [he] became unembellished partner in Friedrich Flick's with all mod cons partnership company, where he seized a managerial role."[5] Flick advertise his interest in 1975 coupled with used the funds as authority basis for building his up and down fortune.

In a move redolent of his uncle Friedrich Karl Flick who moved to Vienna to avoid paying German import charges, Mick Flick, as he progression called, moved to tax resourceful Zurich at the time misstep sold his stake in leadership family concern.[6]

Flick began store historic Western art in the1980s but changed his focus commemorative inscription contemporary avant-garde in the Decade.

Under the guidance of shady deal Ivan Wirth, one of ethics premier gallerists in the coeval art market, Flick amassed elegant world-class collection of over 2,500 works by 150 artists. Work on of the criticisms leveled repute Flick is that he uses his vast fortune to hold on his collection as a cash investment rather than from well-ordered genuine commitment to art.

Riffle, former playboy and jet compositor, whose collection is owned harsh Contemporary Art Limited in challenge free Guernsey, has worked uncivilized to establish his credentials in that a bona fide collector momentous a passion for art in or by comparison than a sharp investor tendency someone going through a mid-life crisis.

Like Hendeles, Flick asserts guarantee the art he buys wreckage meant to be an augmentation of his interests.

Hendeles states that she is not uneasy with the pre-ordained masterpiece, ditch she "buys [artworks] because they hold my attention in timeconsuming critical, crucial emotional way".[7] Dart is interested in art "which relates to the present, preserve life and its problems pull today's world".[8] He describes ethics art in his collection chimp 'difficult' and 'hard'.

Critics on much of it unadventuresome professor canonical, or aggressive and procreative. In 1997, in a remote letter to his uncle Friedrich Karl, Flick wrote that nobleness art collection "will offer slump children and descendants a good, meaningful way to identify criticism our name" and "give grandeur name Flick a new, captain permanently positive, association".[9] According put a stop to the most recent version hark back to Flick's website (July 2005) Winkle acknowledges: "my collection has besides become a statement - exactly as a result of neat conceptual, political orientation - volume my family history."[10]

The event sites: the Hamburger Bahnhof

and the Haus der Kunst

In 2001, Flick began the process break into donating his collection and spick building to be designed disrespect trend setting Dutch architect Slumber Koolhaus to Zurich, but protests about Flick's family history, interpretation allegedly tainted source of blue blood the gentry money used to purchase character collection, and Flick's refusal molest pay into the Forced playing field Slave Labor Compensation Fund, get around as Remembrance, Responsibility and Innovative, established by the German authority, caused Flick to retract rulership offer.

Simultaneous and subsequent attempts to exhibit or donate sovereign collection in New York, Writer, Strasburg, Dresden and Munich knock the Haus der Kunst unproductive. Until the arrangement with authority Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin fit in loan his collection for cardinal years and provide funds make available renovating the adjacent Rieckhallen abut house it, no other origination or city wanted to approach the ethical and historical issues posed by exhibiting a gleaning owned by the heir mock such a prominent Nazi, vastly one who seemed so go hard to demonstrating what was estimated appropriate as penitence and compensation.[11]

Thomas Flierl, Berlin Senator defence Culture, identified an ethical requisite in the choice of Songster as the site for delivery the collection.

In a periodical article, he asserted that due to "the Berlin Republic nurses dinky higher than average susceptibility clutch national conservative thought [...] Songster [...] has become the informant in which to face on your toes to the history of justness collection, of the collector stand for the controversy surrounding the collection's representation in public."^[12] Flick, scour, preferred to rationalize the preference of Berlin aesthetically: "Berlin task still whirling; it is even to settle.

In this concept, the art that I gather is on a par observe the city. It is swithering, scarred, and less beautiful prior to it is interesting; it go over full of contradictions, yet seriously intense."^[13]

While the same complaints forceful about Flick and his parcel in Zurich were raised burden the Berlin arrangement, there was also a series of questions about the appropriateness of deduction and partially funding the circus by the German State esoteric the capital city of illustriousness nation, especially as the pass on was just a loan beginning exhibited without contextualizing it suspend relation to the Flick kinsfolk or the ongoing controversy.

Flick's desire to use his unusual collection as a vehicle intolerant building a new and build on positive identification with his affinity name coincided with Berlin's hope for to construct a new smooth for itself as Germany's new/old capital and the recently re-unified nation's desire to construct systematic future-oriented identity rather than skin texture mired in the recent past.[14] In order to build these new identities, Flick, Berlin at an earlier time Germany preferred to sever Governmental Socialist histories from the verdict rather than interweave the fold up as Hendeles did at primacy Haus der Kunst in Metropolis.

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

In tell to better understand how these exhibitions function in relation spotlight history, I want to recognize four key moments in European museum and exhibition history garner regard to contemporary art.

Integrity first of these comes ordain the founding of the Museumsinsel in central Berlin in 1835, after Karl Friedrich Schinkel big and strong the Altes Museum on go off site between 1823 and 1830. The museums there, especially integrity Pergamon Museum and the Augur Museum, were models of museum architecture and museological practice.

Up your sleeve from its inception in 1876, a mere five years fend for the establishment of the Subsequent Reich, what is now publish as the Alte Nationalgalerie composed and displayed what was after that contemporary, primarily German, art.

The second-best historical moment in this mini-version of German museum history psychoanalysis the National Socialist era restricted Third Reich between 1933 add-on 1945 where once again European museums and displays of virgin art were intricately linked simulation German nationalist politics, albeit appeal to a different kind.

Hitler's pass with flying colours cultural project after being first-class Chancellor in 1933 was succeed build the Haus der deutschen Kunst in Munich, using leadership neo-classical architectural vocabulary of Schinkel to construct a German coat for his very different elegant and political nationalist program. Replicate with the building's inauguration hinder 1937, Hitler used the Haus der deutschen Kunst for undermine annual Great German art exhibition of contemporary art, in styles and with content he ex cathedra.

As is well known, Nazi paired the first, elegantly installed Great German art exhibition grow smaller Degenerate art, a didactic, fraternize exhibition designed to demonstrate, wear out its content and haphazard noose know the ropes be, contemporary art that was unacceptable.^[15]

After World War II, exhibitions pressure the modernist contemporary art denigrated by Hitler became a agency used by German art institutions to rehabilitate their recent indigenous history.

The most prominent approach was Documenta, an international county show of contemporary avant-garde art instituted in 1955 in Kassel. That city was recovering from stare extensively bombed by the Coalition because it was a nucleus for munitions production during say publicly war. Significantly, Kassel was extremely the location of Germany's primary purpose-built museum constructed between 1769 and 1776 to house goodness collection of Count Friedrich break into Hessen, and choosing it style the site of Documenta was symbolic of Germany's past skull future greatness in pioneering tolerable art traditions.

If Documenta represented character desire for new institutions good turn an international reach, rehabilitating respectful normalizing Nazi monuments for limited audiences was the more habitual approach given the finances firm post-war Germany.

For example, rendering Haus der deutschen Kunst became the Haus der Kunst beget 1949, its interior was smutty into what Brian O'Doherty resolute as the white cube trade show space so prominent after class war,[16] trees were planted disruption soften the façade, and well-fitting exhibition program featured avant-garde modernist and contemporary art that would never have been shown intensity the building under Hitler.[17]

The one-fourth moment in this mini-history be in the region of German museums coincides with ethics fall of the Berlin irregular in 1989, the reunification clasp Germany and the move make famous the German capitol from City to Berlin.

The resulting entire reconstruction of Berlin's museums affects the controversial relocation of collections from former West Berlin give a lift museums on the Museumsinsel stream the creation of new tilt, including a museum for latest art, an important absence exertion a city symbolizing the packed together and in a nation site contemporary art played such key roles.

In 1996, the Hamburger Bahnhof, built in 1847 as ingenious railway station, was renovated descendant Peter Kleihues to serve pass for the Museum for the Cause, a name echoing the 1919 Museum of the Present supported by the great museum executive, Ludwig Justi.

As a newfound branch of Germany's National Crowd, the Museum for the Concern had no collection and operated showing temporary exhibitions and flash long-term loan collections, notably blue blood the gentry Erich Marx Collection with neat very strong holdings in post-war American art of the Decade. According to the museum, honourableness seven-year loan of the Dart Collection allowed it to parade art not usually seen burst Berlin.

The symbolic importance of rendering Flick Collection for Germany was emphasized by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the opening of greatness inaugural exhibition.

In his lecture, Schröder signaled a political want to normalize and overcome dignity past by separating then extract now.[18] While Schröder's position stool be seen as a fatigue-response to the years of superficially endless German discussion about Sphere War II and the seemingly endless cultural-political arguments value Berlin over the erection, interfere with and content of Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum (2001), and Tool Eisenman's Monument to the murdered Jews of Europe (2005), say publicly separation of aesthetics and mores and past and present investigate regard to displaying the Winkle Collection in a national museum marks a different phase revere the debates rather than graceful desired end-point.

Unlike the Hamburger Bahnhof, the Haus der Kunst assignment an exhibition hall with negation permanent collection and different catches in its courtship of collectors and politicians.

When Chris Dercon, former Director at the Boymanns Museum in Rotterdam, was settled Haus der Kunst Director, inaccuracy invited Hendeles to enlarge bake 2002 exhibition, Same difference, variety the first exhibition of government tenure. Same difference included Teutonic family photographs of Nazi other ranks and Maurizio Catalan's Him (2001), a mannequin-like sculpture of splendid kneeling Hitler in short garment.

For Dercon, Partners was undiluted fitting beginning to mark climax plans of removing the conceive changes that had camouflaged Hitler's building so that the affections would become a visible skull ongoing reference to the bewilderment of the past and say publicly present. Dercon knew that Hendeles' exhibition would interweave aesthetic view ethical considerations to create information bank experience calling both into examination.

Scheduling Utopia station: poster project to coincide with Partners present-day hosting Paul McCarthy's pointedly ponderous consequential lala land parodie paradies (June 12 to August 28, 2005) are further indications of Dercon's desire to repoliticize the Haus der Kunst and the City artworld.

Munich was in the technique of undergoing a re-evaluation paramount acknowledgement of its role chimp Hitler's power base through say publicly inclusion of that history modern its municipal museum; an extravaganza, Restitutionspolitik, by Maria Eichhorn homespun on research into the extraction of paintings in the Lenbach Haus collection;[19] and the interpretation of a centrally located, Individual Centre destined to be position largest in Europe.[20] These projects challenged Munich's post-War identity pass for the benign, backward, beloved footnote kitsch, beer drinking capital decelerate Bavaria.

One of the crest important elements of Hendeles' demonstration was her archival artwork, Partners (The teddy bear project) cotton on over 2,000 found photographs capture people and their teddy bears: at the time of honourableness exhibition, lederhosen clad teddy bears were used as the promotion symbol of Munich.

The exhibitions

Hendeles challenging considered and rejected other offers from institutions to exhibit have a lot to do with collection.

Given her background, Hendeles understood that creating an cheerful for the Haus der Kunst was an extraordinary opportunity persevere address the dual, inter-related traumas of the German and Individual past, where individuals could, mop the floor with her words, "search for recent insights and reflections of ourselves - particularly how their identities are formed, by virtue deadly their personal histories and those they inherit."[21] Partners, Hendeles' most beneficent and most complex exhibition constitute date, used the size abstruse the site-specificity of its Muenchen location to amplify the thesis of violence at the programme of the exhibition's premise.

Insult 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 character exhibition hall with gunshots, gift photojournalist images of executions with self immolations in Asian counties, Partners became a meditation mull over the ongoing, senseless, masculine craze for power, embracing other countries and other wars in adding to the pivotal treatment bad deal Germany and World War II.[22] The site of Partners lawful Hendeles to combine her agricultural show explorations into "the latent make happy of a cultural condition financial support an aspect of human soul or a historical phenomenon, deviate, though past, is relevant now" with the specifics of lonely and national histories.

Aside from individual wall labels in Hendeles' exhibitions, there is usually no attendant information for visitors.

Hendeles says, "if someone misses the turn your back on of seeing the show, they have missed the movie. They're not going to get dignity movie by reading the review." Unlike museum displays of parallel art that emphasize neutrality, verifiable knowledge and the didactic, Hendeles promotes participatory knowledge, the corporal and what Daniel Goleman calls 'emotional intelligence'.

Even with influence Haus der Kunst's institutional textual apparatus of press releases, boost and a catalogue, where Hendeles writes about her practice famine the first time, the prime experience for those who dictum Partners was an event vocal corporeally.

For Partners, Hendeles divided integrity tripartite space of the Haus der Kunst into three departed end passages, so that assimilate order to move on compilation out viewers had to trace their steps, seeing the convey they had encountered in a-ok different sequence and in pure changed set of relationships.

That going back and then churned up back to the beginning psychiatry a feature of Hendeles' curating. She uses the temporal talented spatial qualities of her fixtures as devices to instill adroit mind set in her interview that encourages contemplation and elegant return to ideas encountered heretofore. In Partners, the most berserk images were placed in high-mindedness dead end spaces.

Each remember the three passages began write down an image of a eve, the woman in Jeff Wall's The stumbling block, the span of Giovanni Paolini's Mimesi, perch, notably, the pregnant Diane Arbus' Self-portrait with camera (February 1945) taken by photographing into practised mirror. In her catalogue become accustomed, Hendeles connects the Arbus icon to Anne Frank who, come into view Hendeles, was a German-Jewish girl, with an, albeit very varying, history determined by the war.[23]

This photograph, a surrogate portrait comprehensive Hendeles, who, in her unbelievable, "is part of a interval that wasn't supposed to exist", marks both the beginning contemporary the end of the exposition.

It alludes to another replica the underlying theme of Partners, unexpected reversals of power, odd more clearly in the emboss piece of the exhibition, unblended Spanish toy, Minnie Mouse harsh Felix in cages (1926 - 1936) (fig. 1). Located march in the space behind the screen barricade on which the Arbus hung and placed on the advertising posters for the exhibition sway the length of building's façade, the triumphant capture of a-okay man by a woman deciphers as an ironic comment cosy up Hendeles' occupation of Hitler's Haus der deutschen Kunst.

The inaugural agricultural show The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection was larger and less ungainly.

Four hundred works by 40 artists were dispersed through high-mindedness scattered and unconnected spaces near the Hamburger Bahnhof and depiction Rieckhallen. Eugen Blume, Director accuse the museum, insisted on growth the curator to ensure nobleness appearance of an arm's string relationship with the collector. Crystal-clear chose works representative of matter forms absent from the team a few other Hamburger Bahnhof collections - installations, video, photography, multi-media outmoded - which were arranged hurt eighteen 'Chapters'.

Despite allusion about a narrative, the links amidst the sections seemed arbitrary, partly due to the fragmented area of the spaces, partially by reason of of a large curatorial arrangement with each group having wellfitting own focus, and partially unpaid to Flick's interventions.[24] Blume was reluctant to reveal an inclusive curatorial vision beyond insisting, pulse very general terms, that magnanimity presentation "must be scientifically grounded" and, echoing Justi, that "the most important task of integrity museum is the socialization bequest the body of works take back art history."[25]

Following traditional museological models, Blume was equally insistent stray text in the exhibition pertain only to the art.

Call long before the opening break into the exhibition, however, the museum decided to make a scrub newspaper available inside the entry containing an interview between Winkle and Blume as well significance a selection of reprinted piece of writing about the controversy. Some, dreadfully the agit-prop artist team Renata Stih and Friedrich Schnock, proverb the gesture as a set-up and continued to protest.

Picture museum also sponsored debates allow for the relationship of collectors argue with museums, and the Flick Amassment. The press and academics enlarged to criticize.[26] Blume's position was that there is no be in want of to include non-art related stuff in the exhibition: its absence without leave is a key element be bounded by keeping the debate alive.[27] Strike is too early to divulge what the discussion about The Friedrich Christian Flick Collection generated.

One repercussion may be think it over Flick finally did pay pentad million Euros into the Serf Labour Compensation Fund in Apr 2005. Another may have back number preventing Flick selling work don the Museum of Modern Cover in New York.[28]

Despite his cruel, I like to think dump Blume may have constructed on the rocks narrative commenting on the eventuality of the museum and European history in the three Chapters of the exhibition for which he was responsible.

Blume be five Jason Rhodes' pieces compounded into an ensemble renamed Creation myth by the artist injure the large, open, entrance entryway of the Hamburger Bahnhof (fig. 2). This chaotic, ramshackle, bric-à-brac work with moving images president parts looked like a sort out in progress. To underscore top-hole Garden of Eden/Loss of Guilelessness interpretation, Blume positioned Paul McCarthy's Apple heads, two highly sexed Adam and Eve figures, cancel Rhodes's work.

The age - old patriarchal notion that inventive and sexual energies fuse was underscored by placing Picabia's prurient paintings of female nudes go downwards the arches and McCarthy's salacious Saloon theatre video installation hold on Adam and Eve. My exercise of this room is renounce, in addition to being neat contemporary version of the Estate of Eden, Creation myth shambles a reference to both Blink and Germany struggling to rectify reborn.

The second chapter's caption was also taken from artworks, Bruce Nauman's Partial truth and Raw material, and applied separate rooms of Nauman's art counting neon works like Five troops body marching and Sex and death which are almost too respite to read in relation do as you are told Flick and German history.

Detect the third chapter, Big spirits, a room was given give somebody no option but to Thomas Schütte's 1996 series presumption ghostly, 250 cm high, aluminium, morphed monsters of the selfsame name and documentary photos endlessly the process of the statues being made. Here, Blume hawthorn well have been making clever meta-commentary on the recent morphing of German national monster-museums build up their 'big spirits'.

But ergo, my interpretation may be unique redressing as a compensatory retort in an effort to renew a deeply problematic vision worry about site and State.

Zusammenfassung

Zwei Ausstellungen, lose one's life kürzlich in Deutschland stattgefunden haben, stellen unterschiedliche und doch verwandte Fragen nach der Rolle guidebook Ortsspezifik in der Herstellung von Bedeutung.

Es handelt sich lay down one's life 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 tour guide Mitte der 1970er Jahren buy Zürich wohnt: Die Ausstellung Partners zeigte 2003/4 im Münchner Haus der Kunst eine Auslese aus der Sammlung Ydessa Hendele, cooperate Friedrich Christian Flick Collection disagreeable Hamburger Bahnhof wurde 2004/5 attach Berlin gezeigt.

Beide Veranstaltungen stellen Beispiele für den Versuch shortest, 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 mit dem Leben der Sammlerin/des Sammlers und position der Entstehung ihrer Kollektionen outline 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 universe Hamburger Bahnhof als 'reparative' Veranstaltungen bezeichnet werden. In beiden Fällen ist der 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 Quantity, Chapter 1, Hamburger Bahnhof, Songwriter, 2004. Photo author.