Ydessa Hendeles’s “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project)” dominates one floor of “Keeper” exhibit at New Museum (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Wednesday through Sunday through September 25, $10-$16
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
Just about everyone collects something. From baseball cards to Wedgwood, coins to stamps, rocks to dolls, and so much else, most people have something they like to stockpile, many to the point of hoarding. The New Museum explores that natural instinct in “The Keeper,” a four-floor extravaganza of unique items that continues through September 25. “‘The Keeper’ is an unusual exhibition in that it multiplies the function of the museum by presenting, within one show, an array of imaginary museums and personal collections — what one might consider to be museums of the individual. Organized as a series of case studies or portraits, ‘The Keeper’ tells the stories of various figures through the objects they chose to protect and preserve — some extraordinarily precious and others apparently trivial or valueless,” museum director Lisa Phillips writes in the catalog foreword. “‘The Keeper,’ of course, is not simply a treatise on collections or on objects and their relative value. Rather, it points beyond these objects to the acts of those who have given themselves the task of safeguarding them, tracing the passions and impulses that inspire their intrepid undertakings, subjective quests, and chronicles of experience.” Spread across three floors plus the glassed-in lobby gallery, “The Keeper” is often reminiscent of the kind of exhibits the old American Folk Art Museum used to mount, particularly Arthur Bispo do Rosário’s tapestries and constructions using cans, dolls, beaded necklaces, bicycle wheels, clothing, and other odd items, created during fifty years in a Rio psychiatric hospital, and Hilma af Klint’s occult paintings, which she did not allow to be seen in public until twenty years after her death in 1944.
![Vanda Vieira-Schmidt Weltrettungsprojekt [World Rescue Project] consists of more than thirty thousand drawings (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)](https://twi-ny.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/the-keeper-2-e1474394670620.jpg)
Vanda Vieira-Schmidt’s “Weltrettungsprojekt (World Rescue Project)” consists of more than thirty thousand drawings (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)
Perhaps the most obsessive collection is Ydessa Hendeles’s “Partners (The Teddy Bear Project),” an enormous two-story installation of three thousand vintage family-album photographs in which children pose with a teddy bear, along with related ephemera, spiral staircases, and classic teddy bears in vitrines, a kind of museum exhibition unto itself. Tony Bingxue has preserved sixty-two photographic studio portraits of Ye Jinglu taken in 1901 and then from 1907 to 1968, which reveal a changing culture while calling into questions of authorship. After her family escaped Germany following Kristallnacht, Hannelore Baron started making assemblages using found objects and personal mementos. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov collected butterflies, discovering nearly twenty species and naming them after family members. Yuji Agematsu picks up detritus from New York City streets and displays them in clear plastic wrappers. One of the most fascinating works is Ed Atkins’s The Trick Brain, a sixteen-minute video of found footage that scans André Breton’s personal collection of rare books and tribal artifacts, made after the poet’s death. For The Last Silent Movie, former anthropologist Susan Hiller recorded dozens of endangered or extinct languages, played over a black screen that identifies in white text what language it is and translates what is being said into English. “Today you will get to know me through my tongue,” the last known speaker of K’ora says. It’s a haunting film in an exhibition that ranges from the ridiculous to the sublime while exploring the basic human need to collect, revealing that what we are collecting and preserving is, of course, ourselves, our irreproducible minds with their endless capacity for order and choice. (On Friday, September 23, at 12:30, there will be a New Perspectives tour of the exhibit, “Keeping to Change,” led by New Museum Teaching Fellow Maggie Mustard.)
Sandrine Bonnaire won the César for Most Promising Actress in her film debut, Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours, and she has more than fulfilled that promise in her still-vibrant thirty-plus-year career. Bonnaire stars as fifteen-year-old Suzanne, who suddenly becomes sexually promiscuous one summer. “‘Don’t you think one can die of love?’” she asks, rehearsing for a camp play. “‘You told me you loved me. What kind of a world is this?’” As Suzanne flits about from lover to lover, her family begins to notice a change in her and is not very happy about it. Her mother (Evelyne Ker) and father (Pialat) are on the verge of a breakup, and her creepy brother, Robert (Dominique Besnehard), doesn’t really get any of it; all three seem emotionally stunted, able only to express their feelings about Suzanne’s behavior by striking her physically. Suzanne is a decidedly contemporary Western European ingénue; the film casts no aspersions on her and does not judge her actions, even if her mother and Robert do. Bonnaire was around the same age as her character when she made the film, which contains significant nudity and bed scenes if not graphic depictions of sex; the film would likely have been wildly controversial if made in Hollywood with a fifteen-year-old American actress. Suzanne’s father, a furrier who has left his wife for another woman, is sad that she has lost one of her dimples, a sign of her maturing; when she was a baby, he wanted to protect her from kidnapping, but now he knows and accepts that he no longer has control over her life. Suzanne enjoys the sex she is having but is obviously seeking something more; but Pialat, the director of the film and who also plays the fictional father, never delves too deeply into her psyche, refusing to provide any easy answers or simplistic resolutions for this complex coming-of-age story. 
Nominated for the Palme d’Or and a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, My Night at Maud’s, Éric Rohmer’s fourth entry in his Six Moral Tales series (falling between La Collectionneuse and Claire’s Knee) continues the French director’s fascinating exploration of love, marriage, and tangled relationships. Three years removed from playing the romantic racecar driver Jean-Louis in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman, Jean-Louis Trintignant again stars as a man named Jean-Louis, this time a single thirty-four-year-old Michelin engineer living a relatively solitary life in the French suburb of Clermont. A devout Catholic, he is developing an obsession with a fellow churchgoer, the blonde, beautiful Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault), about whom he knows practically nothing. After bumping into an old school friend, Vidal (Antoine Vitez), the two men delve into deep discussions of religion, Marxism, Pascal, mathematics, Jansenism, and women. Vidal then invites Jean-Louis to the home of his girlfriend, Maud (Françoise Fabian), a divorced single mother with open thoughts about sexuality, responsibility, and morality that intrigue Jean-Louis, for whom respectability and appearance are so important. The conversation turns to such topics as hypocrisy, grace, infidelity, and principles, but Maud eventually tires of such talk. “Dialectic does nothing for me,” she says shortly after explaining that she always sleeps in the nude. Later, when Jean-Louis and Maud are alone, she tells him, “You’re both a shamefaced Christian and a shamefaced Don Juan.” Soon a clearly conflicted Jean-Louis is involved in several love triangles that are far beyond his understanding, so he again seeks solace in church. My Night at Maud’s is a classic French tale, with characters spouting off philosophically while smoking cigarettes, drinking wine and other cocktails, and getting naked. Shot in black-and-white by Néstor Almendros, the film roams from midnight mass to a single woman’s bed and back to church, as Jean-Louis, played with expert concern by Trintignant, is forced to examine his own deep desires and how they relate to his spirituality. Fabian (Belle de Jour, The Letter) is outstanding as Maud, whose freedom titillates and confuses Jean-Louis. My Night at Maud’s, which is being shown September 17-18 and 24-25 as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Six Moral Tales series, is one of Rohmer’s best, most accomplished works despite its haughty intellectualism.