The two different behaviors have something significant: The independent pediatrician was only bound to the language but not tied to the state. Der Laupheimer design artist Adler was especially professor, who had to loose a modest pension and in the United States despite the New Deals local government under Roosevelt looked forward to an extremely uncertain future.
In Germany, he could, although only very limited, continue his activity at the Jewish Kulturbund in Hamburg until its resolution in 1941. Nevertheless, Adler also planned to emigrate from 1938 on, but he did not succeed in it.
In the installations of Itty Neuhaus, Friedrich Adler is present with memory objects he designed: his desk, his table lamps and even the gravestones become a kind of symbol of transience, shared loss and conflict.
One of the installations for the emigration history combines a replica of the impressive furniture wrapped in black piece of black cloth and surrounded with a filmed interview with Neuhaus's father, which arrived in the United States at the age of ten. In the film, he speaks about his own death, his estate dispositions, and other aspects of preparedness, but also reads the playful self-descriptions of the artist Friedrich Adler. In this way Neuhaus illustrates, how the desire to transience and getting death to be forgotten is caught by cultural artifacts and cultural traditions. Another video installation deals again with these critical principles themselves: a cloudy sky painted on a house's ceiling, with videostills of the real sky as contrasts, capturing the look, Neuhaus's father had from the floor of a bombed out house on the open sky above, when he came back to Germany as an american soldier.
Both the sedate, black desk in his representation of design and in comparison to the serious topic of death and the ickyly darked clouds in the sky compared with the sparse nature sick at the aesthetic discrepancy between the effort of presevering their own cultural tradition even in the difficult day-to-day needs and their own approach to be able to cope with history, - all this against the apparent ease of natural, seemingly unsymbolic aesthetics of nature. The filmed natural sky above the window view of the town house, the fleeting shadow of the design objects in the film and the black light around the desk are far more convincing than the documentary artifacts, which are more-than-exemplary of the burden of proving for the aesthetics of the installation.
Itty Neuhaus, who herself lives in the United States and demonstrates with this exhibition the ability to focus on other new environments, developed a perhaps for her generation (as no longer directly affected) a typical „Besides“ text on the status and value of art. The artist attests herself "feelings of guilt" towards the assassinated artist Adler. But this is perhaps more a lack of ability to understand the generation of her father and grandfather, who were not capable to accelerate Adler's trust in his own creative potential and such to strengthen his decision for an emigration.
Even in the very first installation "sub human," that amazed thematically in the show, the visitor finds a reflection on the reputation of representation and forms of representation itself. A Medical Women's figure in the Brockhaus-Issue of 1933 distorts the female womb into a kind of cabinet, and serves together with another interview-film materials as a reference to the occupation of Neuhaus's father and grandfather who practiced as pediastricians. The prudish pseudo-enlightenment of the grandfather generation is one of the anecdotal treasury of the father, especially his memories of his own father, as they are delivered by Itty Neuhaus.
In the interview and commentary text of the artist this gender component remains unspoken, the reduction of women to machines of reproduction - cynically for warfare - and the projections of weakness and dependence based on sex. Likewise unsaid, as in this work itself, it resonates as a personal conflict with the family when the artist Neuhaus compares the two doctors with the two independent artists - Adler and herself - who is in the "sub-human" video shown as a married woman. The artists are both, due to their specific activities, attacks and personality changes, more exposed than the father and grandfather as independent doctors. At the same time, Neuhaus shows with her exhibition, that she as an artist is better placed than her father to preserve their own identity and traditions as cultural heritage, and thereby indirectly proves Adler also a reference.
The documentary and personal content of these installations ties not only to historical events but also to the innerfamiliar, more anecdotal texts of tradition. This shapes the Barbara Fountain installation, which combines natural elements such as light and water with the reproduction of a more aesthetically insignificant figure and with anecdotes from the family. The anecdotes of a thwarted love of an aunt and an adventurous flight across the Danube just fulfill the request to be representative for countless other family stories from the time of the Second World War to the same extent.
They are also coins on the debt account of the german facism. But actually they raise the question of why these anecdotes, especially because they are in no way depthly analysed, deserve such a lot of space. Well, the answer is included precisely by reference to Adler and the unspoken conflict between the occupation of the father and the daughter's other selfunderstanding: the whole fabric of installations illustrates just by the almost unbroken, respectful inclusion of non artistic, individual memories, how capable art functions to generate cultural and critical awareness of morality.
Report and Photos: Dr. Ulrike Ritter
Exhibition "Itty Neuhaus. Home for Haus“
09th September 2007 to 27th January 2008
Stadthaus
Ulm
Münsterplatz
50
D-89073
Ulm
Opening Hours: 09.00 to 18.00 pm
Thursdays until 20.00 pm
On Sundays and public holidays, 11 to 18.00 pm (except 24th and 25th dec.)
Every first Friday of the month free entrance
Tours on request: stadthaus@ulm.de
stadthaus@ulm.de
Tel.
0731 161 77 00
Lightly and easyly are the white Pappmaché-Reliefs hanging in the bright and enlightened Ulmer floor of the Stadthaus, an important place in the city's center for exhibitions and musical events. Only on closer examination can be recognized that the white shapes are imprints of tombstones. In the background a video has been installed by the artist Itty Neuhaus, that shows her laying stones on the graves at a Jewish cemetery. With the pebbles on the gravestones the members of the Jewish Tadition signal that the deceased have not been forgotten.