Ydessa Hendeles

The drive for violence and power—of a sort transcending food chain necessity—seems unique to the human species. Since the development of mass media and now with Internet efficiency, we know the effects; too many of us experience them directly. Traumatized by grand genocides and intimate cruelties, how do we bear up? Living below the skin, but drained of its immediate terror, we channel the otherwise crippling pain through rituals, systems, art and at the end, dinner. In her recent exhibition, “Death to Pigs,” Ydessa Hendeles has laid open the skin’s surface to explore our deep relations to that violence.

The exhibition’s modest breadth and mostly humble content belie its allusive and layered depth. A single narrative with chapers (all dated 2015)—a naïve painting, an anatomical model, a piece of children’s furniture, photographs, a novel, fairy tale illustrations, toys, sculpture and a video installation— comfortably inhabited the intimate space of Barbara Edwards Contemporary.

The exhibition returns Hendeles to Toronto after significant international engagements—at the Venice Biennale (2013), the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, England (2015), and most recently, the New Museum, New York (2016), where her Partners (A Teddy Bear Project), 2002, which included her collection of over three thousand photographs of teddy bears, was centrally featured and acclaimed. Her collecting and curatorial practice, developed within the Ydessa Gallery (1980– 1988), evolved into her current status as artist at her later Ydessa Hendeles Foundation (1988– 2012). Within that elegantly cavernous space, Hendeles carefully combined elements from her expanding collection— artworks, found, historical and archival objects and images, and newly commissioned pieces— into whispered conversations concerning the darker undertones of human relations.

Hendeles, as see-er, recognizes the totemic and talismanic potency in innocuous objects circulating through culture, and particularly within modern society with its totalitarian tendencies and bourgeois consumption. Through careful arrangement, her focused gatherings of, for example, police truncheons, photographs of Zeppelins and mannequins become vessels loaded with the weight of our wrongs.

That troubled tone survived in this project, but its fresh dialogue revolved around a new figure: here, the pink skin of the pig was flayed to survey the darker pulses in humanity. As if the poor, lowly pig, banned from diets and epithetic for all things low—police, sexual predators and the unkempt— hasn’t served us enough. Now, we ask it to tell us about ourselves.

Just inside the gallery door, a small, framed photograph of three pink-skinned, porcelain, vintage dolls introduced the exhibition’s theme (Family). A human baby, slightly scuffed, sitting beside two pristine pigs, appeared as a small deviant family. Dolls have often been used in art as doppelgangers and repressed evil doubles. The uncanny eyes and sly lipstick mouths of these smooth-skinned bearers of human scorn reveal a dark secret unknown to their human sibling.

Despite this first encounter and according to the catalogue Notes, the exhibition began at the back of the gallery, where an altar-like installation was set just inside a small space framed by partially opened doors (Prize). Enshrined beneath Bernini-like light, two 19th-century representations of pigs noted their value as food: a painting of a gentleman farmer standing beside his enormous prize pig was suspended by chains over an almost life-size anatomical model of a pig. Veterinary medicine, with its invasive analysis of animal bodies, developed to improve animal husbandry and pork industry profits. The other side of this perfect, pastel pig revealed its abstract mutilation: marked for dissection, its organs readily removed for inspection and education. The pig as property, status, food and the subject of art. We’re invited to dig in.

Princess (1964), 2015, introduced more families who have gone off the rails. In a black and white high school yearbook photo, the teenaged Leslie Van Houten beams from under her princess crown. Alluding to Van Houten’s dark double, the exhibition title—Death to Pigs—reiterates the blood scrawl signature made after a 1969 Charles Manson murder. Houten traded her crown for prison bars in that family fun. Paired beside this framed photograph, another dysfunctional family is introduced through an original copy of George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (1945). In Orwell’s story—a response to socialist Russia’s totalitarian turn—his piggy characters violently upturn utopian social organization. Princess probes Hendeles’s question: “How does a good thing go bad?”

In Sow (1904), 2015, two of three illustrations from the fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs” suggest the easy interchangeability of victim and victor; eaten and eater. In one pastel page, the wolf closes in on the frantic pig hiding in a haystack; in another his sibling, protected inside brick architecture, prepares the boiling pot for the wolf’s chimney entrance.

Three sets of photographs of small vintage pig windup toys and sculptures invited consideration about the relative ontologies of media forms. Hendeles often exploits material objects for their auras and talismanic potency. Though these sculptures are also representations of pigs, their extended photographic mediation reduced their totemic value.

If viewers’ hearts, charmed by the pretty pink and the children’s toys, missed the shadowed strains here, they couldn’t after experiencing The Three Little Pigs. Ominously austere, a slate-grey metal box appeared as a small square coffin on the wall. Opening its door with a key on a chain and pressing the knob inside activated a video that took viewers directly on an excruciating trip to hell. On the small monitor, footage from a slaughterhouse, sourced by Hendeles from an animal rights group’s website, showed three pigs scrambling desperately for air inside their metal cage during their ‘humane’ asphyxiation and poisoning with carbon dioxide gas. The manipulation and overlay of imagery with solemn Judaic liturgical song and the concentrated cries of pigs propelled the experience into one of universal horror. Below the box on a tiny metal shelf a bronze pig lay spent on its side. Even without knowing that Hendeles’s parents were Auschwitz survivors, an association with the gassing of Jews was clear, a correspondence similarly suggested by journalist Chris Hedges in his condemnation of industrial meat production. Hendeles, though surely influenced by her particular history, is not bound exclusively to it, but alert to universal human violences.

An odd but endearing feature of this gallery is its functioning kitchen. This is where viewers arrive directly after The Three Little Pigs. Clever in a clever resolution of our relation to the violence permeating the exhibition. As active participants, we turn door keys, wind up toy pigs, open doors, pull out pig organs, turn pages, look, see and finally, come home for dinner. ❚

“Death to Pigs” was exhibited at Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto, from October 7 to December 10, 2016.

Jill Glessing writes on art and culture, makes photographic art, teaches at Ryerson University and lives in Toronto.