No longer behind the curtain, a puppet master drops the strings
In 2006, residents in the Trinity Bellwoods district were struck by the wee, unremarkable bungalow suddenly festooned with an officiallooking sign: “Municipal Archives.” Inside, a lab-coated archivist offered tours of a tangle of horrors: Masses of wax roughly the size of a side of beef dangling from the ceiling, crude sculptures of rabbits throughout, all of it the obsessive work of the elderly, now-hospitalized loner Joseph Wagenbach. The house, you were told, was being assessed for “cultural significance.
Then in 2008, the Art Gallery of Ontario opened the sub-basement of its old Grange mansion to reveal an archeological dig, where, you were told, construction crews had uncovered multiple objects hidden in the walls. Archaeologists, they said, believed they had been stashed there a century before by an Irish house maid, Mary O’Shea, and were trying to unravel the mystery of her time there.
Then at Nuit Blanche last year, almost the near-giveaway: A small room-sized storage locker in City Hall’s underground parkade jammed with preserved food in jars wrapped in tin foil — the fevered efforts, you were told, of a survivalist haunted, as a child, by images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Being part of the all-night art circus, compelling as it was, it could only be fully concocted — the product not of a man’s obsession, but, like the others, the imagination of one very remarkable artist: Iris Haussler.
For years, she’s been inching closer to the big reveal. Now it’s finally here: Until May 11 at the Daniel Faria Gallery, Haussler pulls back the curtain on a practice that has kept her deliberately hidden in the shadows. Schematics, floor plans and concept diagrams lay out in detail the remarkable precision with which her grand deceptions were plied. Called, simply, Also Known As
... , the show is a warm-hearted unveiling of a practice steeped in the richness of narrative and unique in its root material: genuine emotional reaction.
Haussler, who is German and came to Toronto about a decade ago, has hinted at her deceptions in the past: Joseph’s house, while teeming with art brut jumbles, included a clear reference to Brancusi’s iconic Endless Column, not to mention the dozens of Giacomettilike bunnies.
For her AGO project, Haussler’s “archaeology team” offered an informational handout complete with her logo for her fictional “Anthropological Services Ontario,” where, in her own voice and under her own name, explained not only that this was a secret fiction, but why: “The difference between thinking about emotions, and actually feeling them,” Haussler wrote, “is huge.”
To come pre-loaded for an art experience, not an experience, period, denies its emotional core. To borrow another phrase of Haussler’s, we cannot un-know what we know.
Central to Haussler’s projects actually functioning as she intended was that they be convincing. To do that, Haussler needed more than ideas: She needed craft. This show proves beyond reasonable argument that Haussler’s hand is as deft and as gifted as her mind.
Two vitrines’ full of sketch books show her talents for line drawing, water colours, charcoal sketches and many other media. And over there on the wall, what do we see? Thick wax slabs, coalesced around women’s garments — forever preserving them, and making them useless at the same time. Lovely, yes, but check the byline: Iris Haussler, alone herself. Imagine that.