Iris Häussler: Honest Threads
Exhibition Essay by Mona Filip
Iris Häussler: Honest Threads
Koffler Gallery, 2009
In my late teens I had a recurring dream of myself older, somewhere in my thirties, with the long hair that I later did have, wearing her coat... the coat you see here. In the dream it is night and raining. From a distance I see myself begin to cross a wide city street. The sheen of the wet night on the streetcar tracks leads the light from the street lamps toward me. Looking out from within this older self, I scan the street for cars, notice the light on the tracks and begin to run across the slick pavement. Then there is a blinding flash of light, a crash, and the dream ends. My mother died when I was in my early thirties. After a time, I took all her beautiful clothes to an upscale vintage clothier. All except this coat. – Stephanie Rayner
We arrived in Toronto, at Union Station, on Caribana Weekend 1985. A friend came to pick us up and took us to his condo on Lakeshore at Long Branch, where he set up a bed for us in his dining room. It took me three weeks to find a job writing computer programs for a large downtown company. We moved into our own place in a drab, ugly high-rise at Bathurst and Steeles. A couple of weeks later, somebody at work told me about the CNE and said we must go ... my wife and daughter went on the rides but I just stood and stared at this green rugby shirt at the booth of the “All Things Irish” stand. As a lifelong rugby fan and a major admirer of the Irish National team, I was fascinated and I massively wanted that shirt. The jersey was forty dollars ... groceries for a week.—Many years later, for my fiftieth birthday, my family gave me that same jersey... I now wear it once a year on March 17th. – Miki Uhlyarik
The civil war started in Rwanda on October 1st, 1990. When it happened we didn't know it was going to become a genocide. Tutsis started being taken to jail or killed, and every day you were wondering if you were the next target. Within one week from October 4th, many Tutsis, close to 10,000, were jailed without any explanation, just based on assumptions and made-up stories that they were helping the Tutsi rebels. During this period of time, some of my friends, neighbours and co-workers were taken to prison. It was just a question of time until I would be taken also, and I knew that life in prison without money would be terrible. I got the idea to hide money in my pants so that if I was taken I could use the money to bribe people to get what I needed. I made a hole in the lining of the waistband and put in 25,000 francs (about $40 now, $250 in 1999) inside. I wore only those pants and one other pair I altered the same way, and never used the money for anything, saving it for the time I would end up in prison.– Leo Kabalisa
After the war my mother and my father awaited transport to Canada in Berlin’s American Zone. My Uncle Moishe was in the Russian army in the Russian Zone and my mother decided she was going to smuggle him out with the help of the Red Cross... She trekked for miles to find the barracks, managed to pass inspection carrying an American passport into the Russian Zone!!!... all while pregnant with her first baby... My mother left behind her beloved sister Isa in Riga... She always worried whether Isa would be endangered by my mother's illegal adven- ture... In 1977, Isa's daughter was getting married... My mother was so sad that she could not go... she was sure there were WANTED posters of her at every police station... After months of coaxing, I convinced her that after all this time there could not possibly be any risk... At Russian customs... we were thoroughly interrogated... We stayed in a hotel room, as we were not allowed to stay with my aunt... and we were followed... I started to understand a little bit about the paranoia that had occupied my mother's psyche for so many years. This is a photograph of my mother and her sister Isa at the wedding, with their hairdos and party dresses on... reunited... in a kiss... – Soozi Schlanger
Famous for constructing immersive environments that reveal personal histories, real or fictional, Iris Häussler counts on the complicity of the public as active contributor to her work. Viewers are compelled to relinquish the passive role of spectators, to participate in con- structing the reality drafted by the artist. Häusslerʼs complex installations integrating found or fabricated archives and artifacts rely on the audienceʼs suspension of disbelief, on the indi- vidual capacity of each viewer to fill in blanks and evolve their own narrative. Often relying on concealment to delay our perception of them as artistic productions, her relational1 projects raise questions about the demarcation between art and everyday life. Pushing the line even further, Honest Threads overtly involves the public in the actual content production from the beginning. Responding to the Koffler Galleryʼs invitation to develop the first project in a new off-site program, Häussler engaged Torontonians in sharing their real life stories, staging an installation where they, not the artist, occupy the limelight.
An unexpected spot of intense, silky red draws the eye across the piles of inexpen- sive jeans, packaged shirt-and-tie combos and other shmatas in the menʼs department at Honest Edʼs, Torontoʼs landmark discount store. A little boutique is nestled between the hair salon and the antiques collection. Imitating the storeʼs famous marquee, a large hand-painted sign announces: Honest Threads. Inside, a few metal racks display unique garments—a strange mix of attractive vintage pieces and everyday clothes showing no distinctive quali- ties. The walls are covered with rows of small frames encasing photographs and texts. The connective thread is soon apparent: the photographs introduce the owners of the clothes, while the texts tell their stories.
Blending visual art, literature and theatre, Honest Threads is an interactive project that both imitates and challenges museum practices. The role of the artist as creator is de-central- ized and reclaimed by multiple authors. The setting—Honest Edʼs—subverts expectations regarding the place of art and the ritual of our engagement with it. With its overload of celebrity portraits and eccentric sales items, Honest Edʼs is no ordinary store but a museum in itself, blurring the boundaries between commercial, public and exhibition spaces. Finally, the actual installation emulates a mercantile enterprise while at the same time assuming museological methodologies. Although set-up as an old-fashioned upscale boutique, Honest Threads presents an unusual display: garments that are not intended for commerce, along with the memories they carry. Lent by ordinary Torontonians as well as local celebrities, each item holds a personal story revealing a glimpse of the many threads that weave oneʼs iden- tity over time. The history they tell is fragmentary and private. The objects are not preserved with anthropological care, but meant to be handled and borrowed. The interaction between the audience and the work of art is unmediated. In fact, this relationship becomes an integral part of the art work, which is not limited here to the material content of the exhibition space, but truly takes shape in the experience of the viewersʼ encounter with the objects. And the connective reverberations reach even further.
As pieces of a vast puzzle, the individual stories at the core of Honest Threads render a partial portrait of the city while weaving a web of connections between participants on both sides of the storytelling. Able to borrow the garments for a few days and to wear them, viewers experience both literally and psychologically what it is like to “walk in someone elseʼs shoes.” Any explorer of the narrative labyrinth has to proceed with caution. A festive wedding gown can hide heartbreak, an elegant Chanel imitation suit speaks of overcoming poverty and abuse, and an unassuming pair of black pants bares a deep scar in the fold of their waist- band. Poignant, stirring, or sometimes humorous, the personal accounts span the whole reg- ister of human emotion, relating the individuals who have lived or recalled them to those who make their way through the exhibition, reading, touching, wearing and feeling. Through the process of sharing the memory-laden clothes, participants add new layers to the garments’ histories, all the while expanding the work of art beyond the three dimensions of the exhibition space, encompassing the network of relationships thus generated.
With show-bill aplomb, Honest Edʼs illuminates the heart of downtown Toronto at the intersection of Bathurst and Bloor Streets. Capturing the imagination of passers-by with its quirky aesthetics and self-deprecating advertisements, the store represents a piece of the cityʼs history, attesting to the story of its founder, Ed Mirvish. The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria, his philanthropic generosity and his contributions to Torontoʼs cultural scene had an invaluable impact on the city. At the same time, Honest Edʼs is the ultimate bargain destination and a safe haven for newcomers to Canada. Spotlighting the storeʼs significance, Honest Threads positions it as the meeting point of individual Toronto narratives of immigration, survival and childhood dreams, entwined with the cityʼs cultural history. The experiences traded by storytellers and “storywearers” deepen the collective perception of the place we call—sometimes emphatically, sometimes doubtfully—home.
1 French curator and critic Nicholas Bourriaud defined relational aesthetics in his 1998 book of the same title and described relational art as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context." Relational practices are engaged widely by contemporary artists including Torontonians Anne Fauteux and Ilona Staples who participated as lenders in Honest Threads.