EVERYDAY ETHICS EXAMINED: AMELIA HELDT’S EXHIBIT A

August 2015, The New York Times

It’s not unprecedented that an artist requires his or her viewer to possess approximately $1,000, a passport and 48 hours of traveling time to fully appreciate a piece of work, but Amelia Heldt’s Exhibit A does tick a number of other art-world firsts, not all of them comfortable. The line between art and life has been debated for centuries and many artists have deliberately crossed it, hoping to provoke a reaction. Consider Sophie Calle’s stalking of an unknown stranger in Address Book, Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s trick on the American public in Couple in the Cage and Andy Warhol’s living-art Factory. But in an act that has sent moralists, critics, lawyers and artists around the globe into a frenzy, Heldt has blown the above out of the water.

Readers in the UK will know Heldt better as Alexandra Southwood, the wife, mother and University of York lecturer who went missing in February 2013. Her face was splashed across newspapers, on the sides of buses and in train stations up and down the UK. Her husband made regular appeals for people to come forward with information and the media had a field day with rumors about her murder, abduction and more.

In contrast, those au fait with the American performance and installation art scenes will be aware of Heldt as a rising star since 2004. A series of glowing reviews, grants and invitations from large galleries secured the name, if not the face, in the art-world psyche. Famously reclusive and thought by some to be the alter ego of another well-known artist (rumors ranged from Miranda July to the resurrected Andy Kaufman), she’s racked up awards and acclaim with unprecedented success.

Only a few months behind the authorities, it seems, we discover the two are one and the same. Southwood constructed Heldt’s identity while studying as an international student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon returning to England, she continued to secure legal documents for her imagined companion. While Southwood dropped out of her MFA course with one semester left to complete, she managed to make Heldt graduate even though she herself was in England for the final showcase and not a single professor could attest to having met the star student. In recent years, other SAIC alumni have spoken publicly of their close friendship with Heldt, creating buzz for a group labeled the Chicago Set. We now know, however, the leading figure and entire backbone of this set never actually existed.

The initial part of Southwood and Heldt’s combined story might make amusing reading, but it is the events from February 2013 onward that leave a sourer taste in one’s mouth. Southwood disappeared from York, England, on Thursday, February 21, 2013, after leaving work. Her belongings and her blood were found next to the River Ouse, but no body was ever discovered. The police unearthed few leads and Southwood’s husband and two daughters were left to accept she had joined the ranks of the some 250,000 people who go missing every year in the UK. The truth, we now learn, is that Southwood left the country using a passport in Heldt’s name and arrived in New York intending to adopt her fabricated identity full-time.

Heldt’s latest installation offers the contents of her missing person inquiry as art. She’s collected newspaper clippings, video footage, police reports and even recordings of her husband’s tearful pleas and signed her name to them as original pieces of creativity. Held simultaneously in York and New York, Exhibit A comprises two gallery spaces stuffed with the detritus of both Heldt’s lives. In the New York space, we find the remnants of her life in York: minutes from PTA meetings, shopping lists, family snapshots, practical shoes with worn-down soles, TV box sets, academic planners, art history tomes, and other pieces of evidence of a perfectly functioning, middle-class existence. Meanwhile, the gallery in York offers a completely different view of the same woman. The left side of the room is given to documenting Heldt’s artwork, dating back to 2002 and including her work with advertising agencies and such celebrated events as My Terms of Endearment, Be My Friend and Shot at Love. Meanwhile, the right side of the gallery is devoted to an explanation of her transition from Southwood to Heldt. With documents beginning in 1999, we learn that Heldt came into existence as a piece of coursework about immigration. As an international student curious about the treatment of “alien” citizens in the USA, Southwood researched methods of obtaining a Social Security number, applying through the correct, legal methods as well as purchasing fake documentation on street corners and applying the “infant death” technique. It was in this way that Southwood created a fictitious roommate with a Social Security number and State of Illinois driver’s license. The exhibition claims her original plan was to present Heldt along with tax records for illegal immigrants in a piece about the corruption behind the IRS and the Social Security Service.

However, in the winter holidays before her graduation, she dropped out of her program to be with her future husband. Upon returning to England, she began to lead the life we see documented in the New York gallery, but in York we find traces of her gradual deception. Notes to her husband about visiting her elderly mother coincide with airline boarding passes and programs for gallery openings in Manhattan. Displayed in a glass case are copies of letters from Heldt to Southwood, seemingly the correspondence of old roommates about their divergent lives, but in fact one woman’s jottings about her schizophrenic existence.

The corner of the York gallery where viewers seem most drawn contains Heldt’s explanation of the past two years, detailing how she vanished from York and made her way to the US, abandoning her husband and two young daughters. As astonishing as this act is, it is perhaps more astonishing still that throughout the process, with no knowledge of how it would conclude, she had the foresight to imagine this piece and collect the documentation along the way. The brief artist’s statement says Exhibit A was intended to open in February 2023, a decade after her disappearance, but has been brought forward due to “unforeseen legal matters.”

The largest unforeseen matter, we learn, is that she was found. Marcus Southwood tracked his wife down in Greenwich Village and turned her in to the immigration authorities. The installation, however, had already been meticulously prepared on both sides of the pond. York gallery owner Don McGee explained that he received a phone call from the institution where Southwood was being held, telling him to access a locked storage facility on the edge of town where he would find all the materials and detailed written instructions to set up the installation.

“I realized right away how controversial this piece would be, and I immediately phoned the New York gallery to see what they were thinking, but we decided together that we should go ahead with it,” said McGee.

Southwood’s pleas for extradition were denied and, following a hunger strike and a suicide attempt, she was held in a high security psychiatric facility in upstate New York. Heldt’s charges included using false documents to be employed, misusing a Social Security number and using false documents with intent to defraud the US. Her plea for diminished responsibility due to mental incapacity was denied, and she was found competent to stand trial. She was found guilty on all counts and sentenced to the maximum available penalty of 15 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. Her appeal date is yet to be set.

Exhibit A gives a gory tabloid account of a seemingly impossible stunt, but what neither of the exhibition spaces offers is any sense of why. For this, if there is an answer, we must turn to the novel-length document Southwood has produced from incarceration. Displayed in the original in the New York gallery, it has also received a limited print run. Available at both sites, it’s an audaciously fictional account of her family’s experiences from the day of her disappearance to the moment her husband found her in New York. Though in many ways it is yet another form in which Southwood has managed to deny her family their own voice, their own autonomy, even from the depths of incarceration, the document does add a heavy weight to the question: what is art worth? Attempts have been made to reach out to Marcus Southwood to tell his side of the story, but as of yet he has declined to make a statement to this or any other journalist. Left only with Amelia Heldt’s version of events, the viewer at either of the installations is forced to contemplate whether what they are devouring as art is a fair exchange for someone’s suffering.

Periodically, across the arts, a story surfaces that sends us into a frenzied discussion of right and wrong. In literature, we’ve seen Michel Houellebecq and Karl Ove Knausgård justify robbing their families of their privacy; in film, we’ve had reports of Alfred Hitchcock abusing Tippi Hedren and Bernardo Bertolucci confessing to camera about the lengths he was willing to go to produce a “real” reaction from Maria Schneider. Some will argue art needs to be controversial to make its point, that exploitation can itself be an aesthetic, or that the end justifies the means. But can art ever be worth inflicting pain? Is it an acceptable reason to break someone’s heart, abandon one’s children?

I ask these questions without the glib critic’s rhetoric readers are used to encountering, but with a truly uneasy feeling in my gut. For it is articles like this and all the individuals who queue to enter Exhibit A that will ensure Heldt’s place in the art books, thus effectively answering a resounding “yes” to all of the above.

Reinhardt Lang

Art Features Editor