Heide Hatry
Hatry prevailed upon nine art historians, critics, curators and thinkers (Susanna Partsch, Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Renée Vara, Michaël Amy, Elsbeth Sachs, Cornelia Koch, Christoph Zuschlag, Veronica Mundi and Hans Gercke) to participate in the project, maintaining the conceit and treating each of their subjects as unique, living, artists.
Hatry's collaborators in the project included Jennifer Belle, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Svetlana Boym, Rebecca Brown, Mary Caponegro, Thalia Field, Diana George, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Jessica Hagedorn, Elizabeth Hand, Katia Kapovich, Lydia Millet, Micaela Morrissette, Selah Saterstrom, Iris Smyles, Luisa Valenzuela, and Can Xue.
100 prominent intellectuals, writers, and artists (such as Jonathan Ames, Stephen T. Asma, Bazon Brock, Steven Connor, Karen Duve, Jonathan Safran Foer, Anthony Haden-Guest, Donna Haraway, Siri Hustvedt, Thyrza Goodeve, Lucy Lippard, Richard Macksey, Kate Millett, Richard Milner, Hannah Monyer, Rick Moody, Avital Ronell, Stanley Rosen, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, Justin E. H. Smith, Klaus Theweleit, Luisa Valenzuela, and Franz Wright...) address “the question of the flower” from a multiplicity of perspectives, including anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, philology, botany, neuroscience, art history, gender studies, physics, and chemistry.
The project is accompanied by the book publication, Heide Hatry: Icons in Ash, published by Station Hill Press in 2017[17] in which twenty-seven contributing authors have offered a multiplicity of perspectives on the human relationship to death.
The contributors include Michaël Amy, Hans Belting, Mark Dery, Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, Anthony Haden-Guest, Eleanor Heartney, Phoebe Hoban, Siri Hustvedt, Claudia Steinberg, Thomas W. Laqueur, Jonas Mekas, Lydia Millet, Rick Moody, Marc Pachter, Steven Pinker, George Quasha, Wolf Singer, Luisa Valenzuela, Adele Tutter, Peter Weibel, Linda Weintraub, and Naief Yehya.
[29] Accompanied by “explanatory” signs, such as: Let us chill, or, Mommy, what is a carbon footprint?, the light-hearted public project became a locus for family discussion of Climate Crisis as well as a spontaneous outdoor art tutorial for kids that attracted daily crowds and significant notice in the press.
[31] Hatry created 200 tiny rusty “balloon dogs”[32] for use in Situationist-style performances, some of them “guerilla” stagings, that she enacted at several locations, including the Frieze Art Fair, NY and at public events during the Jeff Koons Retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 2014.
She also mounted her meditation on time and ephemerality entitled Rust Room,[33] an installation that was constructed at Undercurrent Projects, NY, and consisted of an entire room in which everything, from floor to ceiling, was rusted, including table, chairs, shelves, books, bric-a-brac, and even the CD-player on which the Verdi Requiem was playing during the exhibition.Since 2004, Hatry also created a significant body of performance works, many documented in videos, including "Skin Room",[34][35] which was performed in the Heidelberger Kunstverein, Germany; "Politics",[36] which was performed on 9/11, 2007 in Central Park, New York, with a huge American flag made out of pigskin and spattered with blood; and her best-known performance-work, "Expectations", which has been presented at several venues including the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY; Brown University, Providence, RI; Studio Soto, Boston, MA; Kunstverein Nord, Berlin, Germany; and the 10th Barcelona Art Contemporari Festival, Barcelona, and at Catinca Tabacura Gallery in NY in 2017.
Her numerous solo and group exhibitions have included work by Carolee Schneemann,[37] Tania Bruguera, Jana Sterbak, Zhang Huan,[38] Kate Millett, Theresa Byrnes,[39] Regina Jose Galindo, Minnette Vári,[40] Larry Miller, Pat Steir, Richard Humann, Dove Bradshaw, Chrissy Conant, Peter Downsbrough, Max Gimblett, Chie Hasegawa,[41] Kahn & Selesnick, Annette Lemieux, Aldo Tambellini,[42] and many others... She has also edited many books and catalogues, and her own unique artist's books[43] "treating texts by Paul Celan, Frederic Tuten, Friedrich Hölderlin, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, John Keats, Samuel Beckett, Walter Abish, Jorge Luis Borges",[44] Franz Wright, Robert Kelly,[45] and David Sedaris among others, are held in many private and public collections.
