Visiting “The Keeper,” New Museum’s fascinating look at art created through a process of accumulating objects, images or other materials, I couldn’t help but recall a New York legend that isn’t recounted much anymore: The tale of Homer and Langley Collyer, two wealthy, eccentric and reclusive brothers who, in 1947, were found dead in their Harlem mansion amid 140 tons of stuff gathered over several decades. The resulting towers of trash restricted movement through their house to narrow corridors intentionally set with booby-traps—one of which claimed Langley.
None of the artists in “The Keeper” (a roster of outsiders, insiders and people in between) rise to the lethal level of the Collyers’ compulsiveness. But it’s worth mentioning that while the brothers represent an extreme antipode to institutional holdings like the Met’s, they shared the same impulse to collect, an idea which runs through this show focusing on “museums of the individual,” as the organizers put it.
Most of the offerings have colorful backstories relayed through labels that are must-reads (much as I dislike shows that lean heavily on wall texts). And while their motivations and methodologies vary, the works rely on a multiplicity of form for their impact, a surfeit that could have easily turned the New Museum itself into the Collyer mansion but doesn’t, thanks to generous allotments of space for each artist.
Just what collecting entails is given a wide berth, expressed more often than not as a way of indulging curiosity or ordering reality, either through observation or something else entirely. In the case of Hilma af Klint’s paintings, that something else is an interest in occult symbology driven by a turn to spiritualism after her sister’s death in 1880. The works themselves, more than a century old, are amazing, resembling geometric abstractions that are decades ahead of their time. More prosaic, though no less obsessive, are empirical studies of different varieties of apples by German Catholic priest and pomologist Korbinian Aigner, plus Wilson Bentley’s photos of snowflakes taken through a microscope. Elsewhere, the prospect of doomsday, real and imagined, impel eyewitness sketches of Auschwitz’s horrors by an anonymous inmate known simply as MM, as well as Arthur Bispo do Rosário’s assemblages and tapestries made in anticipation of Judgment Day.
The show’s pièce de résistance, however, is undoubtedly Ydessa Hendeles’s museumlike installation of 19th- and 20th-century photographs of people posing with teddy bears. Actual examples of the stuffed toy are sprinkled among wall-to-ceiling hangings and display cases amassing some 3,000 images grouped according to similar themes (children or adults with teddy bears; teddy bears at parties, hospitals, etc.).
Hendeles brings a formally trained sensibility to the work, though she’s a curator, not an artist. The Teddy Bear Project, as it’s called, almost resembles a parody of institutional critique, but in fact, it is a repository of memory and feeling—of loss, pain and sorrow. It is, like the show as a whole, a reminder that each of us is a museum of the individual built out of collected experiences.