Exhibition Walkthrough: Laura Hoptman and Daniel Terna on Stéphane Mandelbaum

Curatorial walkthrough of Stéphane Mandelbaum with The Drawing Center's Executive Director, Laura Hoptman and artist Daniel Terna.

Laura Hoptman:
Good evening everybody. Thank you for coming. My name is Laura Hoptman. I'm the Executive Director of the Drawing Center. Welcome to our exhibition of the work of Stéphane Mandelbaum. For those of you who haven't been to the Drawing Center before, but I bet most of you have, we're an almost 50-year-old organization that's been in the SoHo neighborhood for as long as we've been the Drawing Center, and we're dedicated to the exhibition and scholarships surrounding works on paper, specifically drawings. But we're also dedicated to the notion of contemporaneity, and that means that part of our brief is to exhibit contemporary art, but also art that has contemporary significance that is somehow, at least to our minds, contributing to the contemporary conversation. And while we're walking around this exhibition, it would be interesting for me to hear from you about that question, the question of contemporaneity, and how you feel about this show vis-a-vis that question.

Stéphane Mandelbaum is not a household name. He's not a household name anywhere, by the way. He was born in Belgium in 1961, so if he were alive today, he would be 62 years old, almost 63 years old, so not a baby, but not an extremely elderly person. Unfortunately, he had a very short career and a very short life. He started drawing when he was around seven years old because both his parents are artists. His mother, Pili, who's still alive, is a Belgian Armenian person who is an illustrator; and his father, Arié, who's also still alive, is a fine artist and was from Stéphane's birth, so he grew up in a very artistic household where his talent for drawing was immediately recognized. The work that you see surrounding you is just a small fraction of a pretty substantial oeuvre for a guy who only was working for about 10 years, but it represents artwork that Mandelbaum made from the age of 17 until his death at the age of 25.

I'm going to talk about the death first, because if Mandelbaum has any name recognition in francophone Europe, that is, say, Belgium and France, it's because of the kind of spectacular way that he lost his life. He was murdered as a result of a theft gone awry, and nobody was trying to steal from him. Actually, he stole something from someone. And why he decided to turn to burglary at this moment in his life is an open question. For me, as an art historian, the first thing I thought of was venerable history of the avant-garde artists either stealing things or faking stealing things, and you can think of Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso as two artists, both of whom were, at one point or another in their careers, accused of stealing the Mona Lisa. I think it was the Mona Lisa in both cases.

I thought that maybe for Mandelbaum, since one of the things that becomes apparent from the work that you see around you is that his very deep interest in the underworld and the parts of society that are impolite society, the opposite of polite society. Like a lot of young people, he was interested in clubs and drugs and pornography and thought that kind of fun, so in a way, it fits the fascination that he had with that underworld stuff. But in speaking to some of his Belgian contemporaries, it seems that he might've also had an economic reason, which is a much more obvious, normal reason to turn to thievery, if you will, than to do it because you're an artist. To do it because you need the dough that makes more sense in a way. Anyway, just to finish the story, he and a friend stole a painting that they thought was a Modigliani, and it turned out not to be a Modigliani. And that would be funny if it wasn't tragic. He stole this object at the behest of a group of people, not good people, bad people, and when the bad people found out that it was a fake, they refused to pay him, and he insisted on being paid, and they shot him. That's how he died. He had disappeared in December of 1986, and his body was found at the beginning of January of 1987, and it caused, as these sensational murders do, a little bit of a stir in the press. There are plenty of press clippings from Brussels, where he was born, and also Paris, because the French papers took it up.

Over the years, Mandelbaum's friends and his family gathered his work together in the hope of keeping his memory alive, and, in fact, they have. I began talking about him by saying he's not a well-known artist at all, except in a very small cohort. And that small cohort, most of the people who lent to this exhibition, friends and family have produced, not one, not two, but three catalog, one of them being a catalogue raisonne of this artist's work, a novel based on his life, and two films. Very few artists, even the best known ones have that. But this romance that surrounded Mandelbaum's life, his short life, his incredible talent, and his kind of spectacular death created this, and I'm saying this with love, a kind of cult of personality around the artist. So what do you do with an artist who only had a 10-year career starting at age, what, 17 or 16? What do you do? In art historical terms, what we're looking at is juvenilia. This is not an example of who the artist is, necessarily, but maybe what he would become, and we'll never know.

But even in this very short period of time, this very, very young artist with very little experience, the level of talent that he displayed is extraordinary, but even more extraordinary than that was the level of ambition. I'm standing in front of a wall that features two of his large drawings. Mandelbaum made about 45 of these very big drawings over his career, and for those of you who think about drawing, one of the things we think about when we think about drawing is how intimate it is, how personal it is. I'm saying this very quickly because they're almost cliches of drawing, and if you're working in a world of drawing like we are here, we hear this all the time. It is the direct connection between the artist's brain and the artist's hand, etcetera, and this is all true. But what do you make of a five-foot tall drawing? This is an artist who's using this medium as a language, and a public language.

That's a very, very brief overview, but before I go any further, I want to thank those far-sighted people who helped us put this show together, because it wasn't easy. And I thank my colleagues, and I also thank the people who have funded the show. But I also want to thank the special guests that I have, because it's not just me lecturing to you today. We are super lucky to have with us a wonderful artist. His name is Daniel Terna, he's right here. He's the fellow at the mic.

Daniel Terna:
Hello.

Laura Hoptman:
Daniel was born in Brooklyn in 1987, so a year after Stéphane Mandelbaum's death. He is an artist who works in photography and video, but I like to think of you as having a particular love for drawing, because Daniel also photographs our exhibitions for us, so we know him in another guise as well. He's seen a lot of our exhibitions.

From the biography: Daniel's work has based on family and inherited trauma. He blends autobiography with a "tourist's approach," that's your words, to exploring sites, be they memorials, cities, personal archives or the body itself. He has had shows all over the world, most recently in Germany, and at the Jewish Museum of Maryland in Baltimore, among many, many others, so he has a long resume for such a young artist. And the reason why we are brought together today is an interesting one, and it is this: I began this introduction by telling you Stéphane Mandelbaum's biography; not about his work at all, but rather who he was and how he died, his parents, etcetera, because biography plays a very large role, not just in the remembrance of Mandelbaum. As I said, there's a cohort of people who remember him largely because of his biography, but because of the subject matter that he chose.

There are several subjects that he dilated on, and we're going to talk about them in more detail because they surround us. One are his demons, and that would be these portraits, and they're portraits of Nazis. This is Ernst Röhm, a Nazi figure who lost his life. He was murdered by Hitler's henchman in 1933 for many different reasons, among which one of the things is that he was openly gay. In the middle here is, for those who don't know, and I'm sorry, I think many of us do know exactly who this is, and they even know the photographs this is taken from. This is Joseph Goebbels in mid-rant, who was the Minister of Propaganda during the whole Third Reich. And then on the right here is another Ernst Röhm. That's these sort of devils, if you will.

But he also made portraits of those people that he admired deeply and greatly, some of whom he was related to; his father and his grandfather, for example, which we'll see on the other side of this wall, both of whom are the Jewish part of his family. His mother is from Armenian extraction. His father and his grandfather, Szulim, was an immigrant from Poland and a survivor from the Holocaust. Szulim, the grandfather, did not experience the concentration camps because he and his family spent time in hiding, which was very lucky. But still, the trauma of the Holocaust was very much a part of the family. And along with this veneration of his father and his grandfather, Mandelbaum decided early on in his adolescence that he was very interested in that part of his life, that half of his life, which is the Jewish part of his life.

He did not grow up in a religious household at all, but rather, found out about the Mandelbaum Jewish history from the grandfather who was living proximate to the family. And notably, and you can see that here in many cases, but we'll talk about it a little bit more, Mandelbaum started to teach himself Yiddish. And this is an amazing thing because the artist was severely dyslexic, so it was not easy to teach himself anything, but he managed to teach himself some Yiddish. Are there any Yiddish speakers or readers here, hand raised? Nobody, so we can't check him. I know one word, this one [Pointing at a word scribbled in one of Mandelbaum's paintings]: kosher. Right? I know that from where you see it all over. And just to say, this says "Pas Kosher," so that means Ernst Röhm is "not kosher."

Anyway, the reason why I'm saying this is because the reason why Daniel and I are here to talk to you about this exhibition is that Daniel has a couple of things in common with Stéphane Mandelbaum. One of them is, of course, both of them are artists. But the other thing is that Daniel's father was the survivor of the Holocaust. And this was something that you've thought about a lot, have talked about a lot, and that it has an impact on the kind of art. Is that correct?

Daniel Terna:
Yes.

Laura Hoptman:
And we are very much different generations. I'm the same generation as Stéphane Mandelbaum, I'm a year younger than he is, and I am also the child of a Holocaust survivor. My mother was from Poland and was in the concentration camps, but I grew up in the United States. So with this peculiar lens, I guess I would say, we thought that we could talk about the exhibition, not talk about being children of Holocaust survivors as such, but rather how artists deal with, are motivated by, sometimes, trauma and also inherited trauma.

And in the case of Mandelbaum, it's a very specific kind, because as I said earlier, he was born in Brussels, he grew up in Belgium, and being a child or a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor in Europe, in my small opinion, is a big difference between being the children of a survivor, say, if you grew up in Israel amidst a whole bunch of people, this is a very common background in that country, or in the United States, where in some places it is also a commonality. You were born in Brooklyn, for example. Before I ask you anything more, can I just ask in the audience, does anybody here have a similar background to us? Family who have been impacted by the Holocaust over the past two generations? Okay. Yeah. New York, I would think, would be one of the places where we'd be able to find people with similar points of view.

But Daniel, before we do launch into the Mandelbaum-ness of our discussion, can you tell us a little bit about how you've been able to process or use your family history, perhaps, in your work, or as a motivator? Don't let me put words in your mouth, but how is it integrated or not into your art practice? And again, we only have him. We don't have his photographs.

Daniel Terna:
It is very integrated, and I don't know how I can avoid not talking about being the child of a survivor, but I will try. It will come up and I will try not to put so much attention on it. But it just was ever present in my life growing up, being an audience member, listening to oral testimonies. And it was there and it was planted in my mind from a very early age. And when you read the essay in this catalog that talks about even Mandelbaum's, earliest drawings at the age of seven and nine, it makes me feel like I am a little less alone in a way, because I, too, was drawing weird, fucked up drawings because of what I was listening to.

Laura Hoptman:
That's so interesting. This seems so obvious, but do you think that the work is only a function of his history? Because for me, when I see this, I see this as a function of somebody who's not just grappling with this information that he has had from his dear family and the trauma that he has inherited from that family's experience, but also as a chosen sacred subject.

Because this is an artist who didn't have to go this route, but he deliberately chose to do it, which also makes me think that he was using it, and I'm saying this not with any judgment, but as something that would motivate him artistically, as much as, perhaps, his interest in some of the... It's boys, so I can say this: the bad boys of post-war, European contemporary culture, and I'll just point out a few: Francis Bacon here with his boyfriend, George Dyer, who famously and horribly decided to do away with himself the night before the opening of his lover's retrospective at Tate. He did it in a hotel room, killed himself in a hotel room the night before Francis Bacon's first retrospective. Pier Paolo Pasolini, dead at early middle age on a beach in Austria, Antica, at the hands of a male prostitute. Rainer Werner Fassbinder, there. Arthur Rimbaud here. Who am I missing? Buñuel. I don't have anything bad to say about Buñuel. He was a surrealist. Luckily he didn't come to the kind of violent ends we're talking about.

But this is a kind of pantheon that Mandelbaum assembled as a young artist. In juxtaposition with this anti pantheon, would you say, anti-heroes of the Nazis that he was...

Daniel Terna:
I can very much identify with the violence and the anger that he was feeling in a lot of these works. When you talk about juvenilia, what struck me was thinking about the context in the mid-80s, thinking about Claude Lanzmann's Shoah...

Laura Hoptman:
1985.

Daniel Terna:
And even Spiegelman's Maus.

Laura Hoptman:
Right, does anybody remember the year of Maus?

Daniel Terna:
Later.

Laura Hoptman:
It's after he died, I think.

Daniel Terna:
I think '88, '89. I don't know. But surely someone here knows.

Laura Hoptman:
The book is in there [at the Drawing Center's Bookstore]. We can look.

Daniel Terna:
But the point being that there was imagery going around the Shoah that was being circulated in the media, works of art, things like that, and those were landing, and those were present in my household, and those were making an impression, the visualization of the Shoah, and that was landing.

Laura Hoptman:
So when you think of the 1980s, recent times, and the way that some artists have processed the Second World War, the names you come up with Claude Lanzmann and thinking about the Shoah, and also Art Spiegelman, who is our neighbor, by the way, lives on Green Street, and Maus I and Maus II, two of the greatest graphic novels ever drawn. On his deathbed, Art Spiegelman's father was recalling to his son his experiences in Auschwitz, and Spiegelman made a graphic novel, a series of comic strips, about it. Jews were mice. Am I going to get this right? Nazis were...

Daniel Terna:
Cats.

Laura Hoptman:
Cats. Oh, right. And Poles were pigs, because that's why the Poles were very angry at...

Daniel Terna:
And Americans were dogs. And the French were frogs.

Laura Hoptman: And if you're going to Tennessee, bring your Spiegelman with you, because it's on a list of band books, which is interesting in and of itself. As an artist, as a young male artist, can I ask you a direct question about something that I've been interested in?

Daniel Terna:
Yeah, let's get into it.

Laura Hoptman:
Yes, good. So since we're standing in front of this wall, and I did this on purpose, because this is, for me some of the hardest material that we're going to be talking about. But the question that I have might have more to do with something on the other side of the wall, so can we just migrate to the other side of the wall?

Daniel Terna:
Yeah.

Laura Hoptman:
And Yes, this is a curatorial conceit. You see the Nazis here, you're going to see the Jews on the other side. Sorry, that's me.

Daniel Terna:
Keep them separated.

Laura Hoptman:
I did that on purpose. But what I wanted to ask you, Daniel, was to speculate, because we're not only seeing heroes and demons, lovers and friends, on this back wall here are some of his friends that he met at a club that he used to hang out in called the Club Mambo, where he met a group of people who were immigrants from Zaire, which is now Democratic Republic of Congo. He met his wife, a person from Zaire, and married her a year before he died. But the question I wanted to ask you, Daniel, this is Arié Mandelbaum. I'm sorry you guys don't speak Yiddish. This is "Kiss My Tuchus" which means kiss my ass, for non-New Yorkers, because I think that that's already in the New York lexicon.

My question is, why do you think he's incorporating pornography along with Nazis? And is it just the regular, dull answer would be, because he's a young guy, and they like Nazis and pornography. What?