ART-PRESENTATION: The Keeper
The New Museum hosts an exhibition dedicated to the passion of collecting objects from the most precious artworks to the apparently worthless. Collecting is fundamental to the whole enterprise of Museums, Galleries and Private Collections, it reflects on the passions which inspire the undertaking of collecting and curating, and the multiple desires which underlie it, as well as the whole idea of assigning value to a particular object.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: New Museum Archive
The exhibition “The Keeper” brings together a variety of imaginary Museums, Personal Collections, and unusual assemblages, revealing the devotion with which artists, collectors, scholars, and hoarders have created sanctuaries for endangered images and artifacts. The exhibition includes projects by 28 artists. The centerpiece of this exhibition is “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project)” (2002), a vast display conceived by Ydessa Hendeles. Composed of over 3,000 family-album photographs of people posing with teddy bears, and vitrines containing antique teddy bears, Hendeles’s project establishes the teddy bear as a metaphor for the consolatory power of artworks and images, and underscores the symbiotic relationship that ties people to their objects of affection. Through a series of studies and portraits that spans the 20th Century, the exhibition tells the stories of various individuals through the objects they chose to collect, exposing the diverse motivations that inspired them to endow both great and mundane things with exceptional significance. Other collections were not so much kept but hidden, such as Hilma af Klint’s suite of abstract paintings. Hilma af Klint was a pioneer of Abstract Paintng that turned away from visible reality. By 1906, she had developed an abstract imagery. This was several years before Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, who are still regarded as the pioneers of Abstract 20th Century Art. Upon her death in 1944, she left her estate, comprising of over 1,000 works and 125 notebooks to her nephew, Erik af Klint, stipulating that the works could not be seen for at least 20 years. The first public exhibition of af Klint’s abstract works was in 1986 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which not only placed her within a Modernist tradition, but revealed her to be one of the first Abstract painters. Susan Hiller’s video “The Last Silent Movie” (2007–08) looks at sound, gathering the voices of speakers of 25 dying or lost languages to offer a meditation on the conditions that have led to their extinction. The exhibition presents the complex lives of images and objects that have escaped a tragic end alongside the existential adventures of individuals driven by unreasonable acts of iconophilia.
Info: Curators: Massimiliano Gioni, Natalie Bell, Helga Christoffersen and Margot Norton, New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, Duration: 20/7-16/9/16, Days & Hours: Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.newmuseum.org
