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 is Golliwogg’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’s 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.
From her wooden sleep ... is at the ICA, London, until 17 May.
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