Kennedy, Car, Crush: 
THEATER for Therapy

At Fluentum, a private collection of video art in Berlin-Dahlem, the moving image installation THEATER (2024) by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff narrates the story of Kennedy (Leilah Weinraub), who hopes to find a way out of her weary solitude by seeking members to build a theater ensemble. In an abandoned parking lot, Kennedy rests in the shade of trees in the city of Los Angeles, described as her “bright space of unpromised future.” Leaning on the bonnet of her silver Kia, she contemplatively smokes one cigarette after another, then takes white plastic chairs out of her car to assemble them in a circle on the asphalt. In this DIY assembly, Kennedy sits alone, changes seats, and contemplates how to find a variety of perspectives for her collective project.  

THEATER, episode 1, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, film still, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

After more than a decade of artistic creation, Henkel’s and Pitegoff‘s artistic strategies of documentation have quadrupled: what started out with the mere documentation of their collaborators through post-conceptual photography soon developed towards documenting their social sculptures through semi-fictional narratives which are in the following staged as theater plays and screened as films as well as published in two novels titled Other People's Clothes (2021) and Scrap (2024), authored by Calla Henkel. THEATER is a continuation of the duo‘s investigation of performative practices and their quest to find answers to the questions that have long been at the heart of their endeavors: How to run a theater? How does collectivity work?

The two-person collective met as undergraduate students at New York’s Cooper Union. As David Bussel notes, their shared practice is fairly simple: “organize a structure or provide an infrastructure—a bar, a theater, a space—and it will issue forth relations, situations, and things.”¹ This is exactly what they did after graduating from art school in New York City. Henkel and Pitegoff moved to Berlin, where they founded four spaces between 2011 and 2022: the first was a bar called Times Bar in Berlin's Neukölln neighborhood, which became a hotspot for the art world for a year. When running the bar began to drain the owners' energy they closed their first space and opened a new one, called New Theater. There, the many evenings and conversations experienced through the lens of performance Henkel and Pitegoff had documented at Times Bar were further developed and, from their fragments, turned into plays. Their work at New Theater then led to holding curatorial responsibility at Volksbühne's Grüner Salon under Chris Dercon's directorship, before finally opening TV Bar on Berlin's Potsdamer Straße in 2019, just a few months before Covid hit.

The artists’ practice stands in the lineage of institutional critique, relational aesthetics, and social practice art, but radicalizes their meaning by realizing long-term projects that fully partake in a city’s cultural infrastructure, including business tax woes and other logistical complications. The various kinds of performances experienced in their curated spaces create an infinite, self-feeding source that Henkel and Pitegoff constantly replenish through their collective artmaking and in turn can richly draw from for every new project.

Conveyed through subtitles, Kennedy‘s storyline employs third person narration rendering homage to Hollywood‘s origins in silent film as well as comic culture, both of which emerged as mass media at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States. Accompanied by music composed by MK Velsdorf and driven by a disruptive and ghostly pathos as well as intense background sound effects such as the twittering of birds and the noise of the streets, the voiceless series is, however, anything but static or silent.

Drawing on 16mm film as nostalgic medium and situating the work within Hollywood’s contemporary streaming boom through releasing the work in the format of a contemporary Netflix-like series at the same time, Henkel and Pitegoff toggle between nostalgic and contemporary stylistic articulations of narration. Throughout the series the text possesses a crucial function that goes beyond the spoken word, which becomes part of an overall dramaturgy. Henkel‘s poignant, humorous, absurd, and almost surrealist Dada-like style of writing creates many novel connections between word and image that keep the viewer surprised by the innovative way of storytelling which does not follow a linear storyline. Have you ever seen a theater described as a “black box like mouth without teeth” and its visitors characterized as its “cultural dentists?”²  

In her car, Kennedy travels through the sprawling cityscape of Los Angeles, with the Hollywood hills looming on the horizon. Driving on surface streets, she encounters a diverse range of people in front of Hollywood‘s eminent movie studios, including a teenager who wants to be a famous actor, an influencer training to become a therapist, and a Belgian documentary filmmaker. Kennedy invites her new acquaintances into her car, transforming the silver Kia into a “theater on wheels” that invites dialogue, direction, and truth. The silver Kia appears to be an incredibly modest car in which her guests take a seat in the back while she navigates the city. A stylish influencer and wannabe therapist asks Kennedy, while his clothes flutter in the Hollywood breeze: “How can we make content in a moment like this?”

THEATER, episode 1, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, film still, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

In-between the conversations held in the car, Kennedy observes the SAG-AFTRA strikers march the streets of Los Angeles. The protests and labor actions organized by the Screen Actors Guild in 2023 were among the largest protest actions in Hollywood’s history and paralyzed the American film industry. Still, the political clamor remains background noise: Kennedy’s circle of chairs never becomes a forum for the strikers to discuss strategies of resistance against the curtailment of film workers’ rights. Instead, the assembly in THEATER exists solely in its aesthetic form, devoid of its political function.

The encounters made en route are driven by Kennedy‘s desire for connection and empathy with others. Her guests are, however, hesitant to join her in the exploration of collective truth, consequently, she remains by herself in the circle of chairs. Throughout her journey she passionately foams and rinses her silver Kia highly focused – her personal vehicle for desire – which in the first episode appears as the protagonist‘s only real partner in crime. 

Contemporary art‘s humanization of the relationship to cars has been described in Art's Love for Cars by Andreas Shenthal as a broader phenomenon in recent art and popular culture. Coining the term "mechanophilic impulse" Shenthal observes the omnipresent fetishization of cars in negligence of the machine‘s toxicity for the planet. From Lana del Rey to Florentina Holzinger through the acts of "caressing, copulating, and destroying," he argues, the mechanophilic impulse highlights the paradoxical attachment to cars as both objects of desire and agents of destruction.³ Kennedy‘s will to embrace her own destruction for the sake of the glow is not at least underlined by her understanding of creative success that reflects the toxicity of L.A.‘s entertainment industry: “You have to be willing to burn to transform.”

In THEATER we experience the mechanophilic impulse‘s paradoxical attachment when Kennedy‘s car collides with a bus and she is injured. The settlement she receives from the city is described as “the American dream, a payout for all that pain” and she uses the money to buy an abandoned theater, still hoping to remedy her physical and mental hardship by assembling a creative community. With the purchase, Kennedy’s salvation seems within reach.

Pitegoff and Henkel rely here on a well-known and heavily referenced formula of the American post-war period: car + Kennedy = American Dream. This iconography invokes broader cultural references, drawing on the visual language of Pop Art icons such as Roy Lichtenstein's “In the Car” (1963) and James Rosenquist's “President Elect” (1960-61). In the early 1960s both the car and President John F. Kennedy became the commodified emblems of freedom, status, and community. By reproducing these images and narratives, THEATER recalls the era when American commodities—including the automobile and Hollywood media—symbolized the triumph of capitalism in the Western world. It cannot be overlooked that, with these tropes Henkel and Pitegoff return to the hotbed from which the so-called New Hollywood Era of non-conformist filmmaking emerged in the 1960s, a tradition within which Henkel and Pitegoff position their own work.

Seeing Kennedy behind the wheel of her car crash Henkel and Pitegoff inevitably draw a connection to Andy Warhol‘s Death and Disaster series (1962-1964). In The Return of the Real, Hal Foster argues that by taking up and reproducing trauma, Warhol features the breakdown of commodity exchange and formulates a critique of American consumerism. The car crash, Kennedy’s mourning as well as the abandoned chairs are truly Warholian subjects that have been repeatedly woven into the series. By acknowledging Warhol‘s criticality sixty years later, Henkel and Pitegoff continue the “tradition of truth-telling” on American consumerism which Thomas Crow has identified in Warhol’s work.⁴ Yet,THEATER takes Warhol further, as Kennedy‘s crash is not the end of the story. On the contrary, the disaster itself being commodified through the settlement Kennedy receives.

THEATER, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, installation view, 2024. Photo: Stefan Korte.

Following the traumatic experience, the financial transaction taking place through the settlement check functions at the same time as therapy and door opener that allows Kennedy to step into a new role of the theater owner in her project. Given that Henkel and Pitegoff tend to document their own artistic journey through their work, the viewer is compelled to ask which stroke of fate has befallen the artist duo that is being worked through in THEATER. Is the car crash just the make-up for a good American story or are Henkel and Pitegoff processing the Covid 19 – pandemic in their oeuvre that abruptly paralyzed Berlin‘s social life and forced the artists to close their bar before moving to Los Angeles and acquiring a theater  in Hollywood?

Through the sudden change of roles, THEATER moves into a mise-en-abyme wherein a drama within a drama begins to unfold. As the owner of a theater, Kennedy is soon caught in the dull reality of everyday life: living, sleeping, eating, drinking, and working in what was initially believed to be a haunted space. As Kennedy oversees the theater’s maintenance, financing its running costs, and looking for subtenants for the theater to pay the bills. Through the performances of her tenants, Kennedy herself becomes a guest in the productions that take place at the theater, while at night she moves her red wooden bed to sleep on stage, taking the place of a performer. The plays continue to evolve in Kennedy‘s body – for her, the boundaries between reality, performance, and staged fiction become blurred. Nonetheless, the group of invited people is repulsed by Kennedy‘s honesty in her search for collaboration and her own complicity in the nakedness of the new theater owner’s life. Through transforming her bedroom into a public stage switching between the roles of guest and host, performer and spectator in her theater the dichotomies of inside and outside, private and public, as well as the said absence and presence of performance is meticulously examined.

Photo: Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff.

Clearly, THEATER‘s site specific installation is an extension of artists‘ previous work, interrogating the socio-historic performance of the “American state theater”⁵ on stage as well as backstage. For example, the photo series “Interior” (2016), which was commissioned by the 9th Berlin Biennale, addressed the tension between private and public sphere within the realm of statehood. In “Interior” Henkel and Pitegoff took a performative photo series under theater light at the American ambassador's residence in Berlin to artistically capture the ambiguity of the space with its inherent dual function simultaneously serving as temporary home for the ambassador as well as a private stage serving the public, therefore also shedding light on the dichotomy of absence and presence of the performativity of American state presence on foreign territory.

Fluentum‘s building, too, both externally and internally through its architecture and historic political function, used to serve state representation. Bought by collector Markus Hannebauer in 2019, the site was initially constructed as representative part of a military complex constructed by the National Socialists before WII and afterwards served as military infrastructure orchestrating American state hegemony in contrast to its counterpart on the other side of the wall during the Cold War in West-Berlin.⁶ Therefore, the edifice not at least marks the starting point for the transatlantic relationship between Germany and the United States embodying freedom, democracy, and capitalism.

THEATER, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, installation view, 2024. Photo: Stefan Korte.

In this space that echoes the historic transition of fascism towards democracy in the 20th century the exhibition functions as artistic intervention which takes the form of an artistic counter monument to its official narrative. On three movie screens the episodes are presented across the building, while the series is accompanied by photography exposing THEATER‘s cast. The portraits, which alternate between black and white and color in their hanging arrangement, are reminiscent of classic Hollywood star portraits with clear artistic presence making a mesmerizing statement in the exhibition‘s entry.

The audience navigates through the building on a curved staircase that radiates the fascist history and representative character of the building until today. Giving their protagonist the name Kennedy not only evokes familiar associations of the statesman through the mentioned iconography of Pop Art in the series. Its installation at Fluentum also merges the fictional narrative of the theater director Kennedy with the homo politicus. In the former military complex, JFK has been immortalized through historic large scale golden letters on the walls of the building, exposing the extract of one of the President‘s key speeches: “The world must know that we will fight for Berlin.”

What‘s more, the commission of the work for Fluentum pursues a contextualization of the artists' own biography, which, like the series itself, culminates in a mixture of fiction and reality and, above all, is delivered as a kind of postcard from L.A. presenting their latest work to Berlin‘s art world Henkel and Pitegoff recently have left behind. President Kennedy‘s speech speaks to Calla Henkel’s and Max Pitegoff’s practice as the two artists have been part of a late generation of creatives, who came to Berlin as American expats in the early 2010s succeeding in surfing on the tailend of the city’s “poor but sexy” wave. Not surprisingly, as young Americans, they have frequently been associated with JFK‘s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” – speech he addressed to the citizens of West-Berlin in 1963.⁷ Having worked in Berlin for a decade, the two artists born in Buffalo and Minneapolis must have been familiar with the building before it was turned into an exhibition site because – as a remnant of the JFK era – the U.S. Citizen Services is still housed right next to Fluentum.

THEATER, episode 3, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, film still, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

Being the owner and the audience at the same time thus switching between on-stage and off-stage mode while running the theater Kennedy acts both as guest and host. However, she is joined by an unpleasant third figure: the ghosts. At the theater, Kennedy seems haunted by the many whispers visiting her. The penetrating voices she cannot pinpoint are always the same. She becomes entrapped in a cyclical, almost psychotic repetition of the same dialogues from Tennessee Williams’ 1951 play A Streetcar Named Desire. This auditory loop is punctuated by extended, collective outbursts of HA-HA-HA-HA-HA, interwoven with guttural, animalistic sounds reminiscent of the dynamic group meditation practices of the Osho sect. At this point, THEATER insinuates that Kennedy is haunted by the traumatic experiences of the past through the dialogues of William's Streetcar and caught in an intense ritual in the present. Again, in Wahrhol's Death and Disaster series Hal Foster proposes a surrealist reading of the work in which he recognizes in reference to Freud a contradictory “traumatic realism:”

“Repetition serves to screen the real understood as traumatic. But this very need also points to the real, and at this point the real ruptures the screen of repetition.”⁸

Henkel and Pitegoff build on the Warholian interconnection of trauma, machine, and repetition that Foster has described in Warhol‘s iconic screenprint series of Jackie Kennedy. Kennedy, leaning on her theater‘s black wall, is caught in the repetition of alien voices that screen the traumatic events of her past – the car crash – as well as the traumatic presence that is determined by her strong desire for collectivity in her theater ensemble and the actual absence of it in reality. The theater walls, in this context, emerge as the locus of projection and concealment, performing a dual function: they host Kennedy’s internalized “melancholic wish psychosis,” while materializing her ruptured self.

THEATER, episode 3, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, film still, 2024. Courtesy the artists.

In the third episode, a new window opens when Kennedy finds out that she bought a Theater cut in half and that the haunting voices she hears are not her psychotic illusions, however, an acting class on the other side of THEATER rehearsing A Streetcar Named Desire. This narrative twist creates another moving image within the moving image, when Kennedy binge-watches the work of the neighboring company documented on 24/7 big brother format in her bed on the main stage of her own theater. The appearance of the ghosts is dissolved by her developing a crush on one of the actors in the series, thus finding focus in a new obsession.

As viewers of the series, we experience Kennedy in an interplay of identification and disidentification that allows her to analyze the power dynamics within a theater ensemble in a voyeuristic manner. The series next-door runs as Kennedy‘s observes a group of young actors in training as part of her personal field study of collectivity. The tyrannical acting teacher is ensconced in front of a paravent illustrated with a baroque painting on an antique chair next to a side table holding a cocktail, a book, a candle, and two framed pictures of Marilyn Monroe. Wearing full ginger hair, a pearl necklace, leopard-print top, dog-paw tattooed décolleté, black straps, and red heels, she interrupts, insults, humiliates, and intimidates the participants – using trauma to create emotional bonds – to hold her theater group together: „Think about how your parents were treating you. That is the grit I am talking about, not this fugacy voice you are turning on.”

Throughout the series, Henkel and Pitegoff employ mise en abyme as a narrative technique to intensify the effect of alienation throughout their series. While the first episode of Kennedy's itinerary is conceived as moving image on film, the second episode is primarily narrated through documentation of multiple staged plays, which makes the episode a collaged play within the series to allow the work in the third episode to become a digital series staged in the collaged play of the series on film. Unlike the recordings of Kennedy in the first and second episode, entirely shot on 16mm without direct speech, the neighboring series that Kennedy consumes on stage is shot in digital and transmitted through spoken dialogue. It gives the impression that Kennedy‘s fixation on the live documentation is where she finds the stability and presence she seeks in her own project.

THEATER, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, installation view, 2024. Photo: Stefan Korte.