Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver

By Lisa Lee

The work of German sculptor Isa Genzken is brilliantly receptive to the ever-shifting conditions of modern life. In this first book devoted to the artist, Lisa Lee reflects on Genzken’s tendency to think across media, attending to sculptures, photographs, drawings, and films from the entire span of her four-decade career, from student projects in the mid-1970s to recent works seen in Genzken’s studio.
           
Through penetrating analyses of individual works as well as archival and interview material from the artist herself, Lee establishes four major themes in Genzken’s oeuvre: embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. Contextualizing the sculptor’s engagement with fellow artists, such as Joseph Beuys and Bruce Nauman, Lee situates Genzken within a critical and historical framework that begins in politically fraught 1960s West Germany and extends to the globalized present. Here we see how Genzken tests the relevance of the utopian aspirations and formal innovations of the early twentieth century by submitting them to homage and travesty. Sure to set the standard for future studies of Genzken’s work, Isa Genzken is essential for anyone interested in contemporary art.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226410036

Lisa Lee

Lisa Lee is a 35-year veteran educator with the honors of being named "Teacher of the Year" in DeKalb County, Georgia (2007) and Runner-Up "Teacher of the Year" for Colorado (2017). Over the years, Lisa Lee has taught in Georgia and Colorado elementary, middle, and high school classrooms, with a specialization in Gifted and Talented and a focus on the students who don't always fit in a box. An experienced TEDx speaker, Lisa embraces the TEDx platform as a gateway to deliver her messages of connection and relationship building that she so strongly believes in.Her personal life philosophy is that "We're put here on the planet to make life better for others. Period." This belief is the foundation ofher messaging in that making connections with others and building community can change lives. Lisa lives in the Denver, CO areawith her wife, 2 grandtwins, and her dog Rosa Barks.

Book preview

Isa Genzken

Isa Genzken

Sculpture as World Receiver

Lisa Lee

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in China

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40997-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-41003-6 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226410036.001.0001

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Princeton University

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lee, Lisa, 1978– author.

Title: Isa Genzken : sculpture as world receiver / Lisa Lee.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016054302 | ISBN 9780226409979 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226410036 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Genzken, Isa, 1948– —Criticism and interpretation. | Sculpture—Germany—20th century. | Sculpture—Germany—21st century.

Classification: LCC NB588.G454 L44 2017 | DDC 730.943/0904—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Daniel

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1  Geometries of Lived Perspective

2  Make Life Beautiful!

3  Plastic Allegories

4  Radical Exposure

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver is in the world thanks to many who have informed it intellectually and supported it pragmatically. Brigid Doherty has remained my most rigorous reader and committed advocate. This book bears the marks of her mentorship throughout, whether as a result of her incisive interventions or—less directly perhaps but no less powerfully—of the values she instilled in me during my years at Princeton University. There, too, I had the great fortune of studying with Hal Foster, who opened doors and then conveyed his absolute certainty that I could meet whatever intellectual and professional challenges awaited me on the other side. His confidence bolstered mine. Brigid and Hal, along with Yve-Alain Bois and Spyros Papapetros, read portions of this material in nascent form. Collectively, these mentors encouraged me to locate and to embrace my strengths as a writer and thinker. Where this book conveys a distinct voice and perspective, I have them to thank.

I must, of course, acknowledge Isa Genzken, whose inventive, intelligent, and demanding oeuvre inspired the thoughts that populate the many pages to follow. I have benefited greatly from the support of Daniel Buchholz, Christopher Müller, and the rest of the team at Galerie Buchholz. Katharina Forero de Mund, in particular, has provided logistical support with efficiency and patience. I owe special thanks to Ekkehard Kneer, Genzken’s longtime conservator, who patiently answered my many detailed questions about how the sculptures are put together. Stephanie Weber, formerly of the Museum of Modern Art and now of the Lenbachhaus, provided encouragement and practical support at a crucial juncture in the development of this project.

I have been fortunate to test out and refine portions of this book in print and for responsive audiences. To the editors of October I express my heartfelt gratitude. Their early and continued investment in my scholarship on Genzken has been galvanizing. I am obliged to Sabine Breitwieser and Laura Hoptman for the invitation to contribute to the official conversation surrounding Genzken’s first retrospective in the United States, which originated at MoMA in 2013–2014. Portions of this book also appeared in different form in the journals Pidgen and Garage. I am grateful for the speaking opportunities afforded me by Daniel Adler, Jeannette Redensek, Isabelle Wallace, and the Association of Graduate Art Students at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia.

The research and writing of this book were made possible by the financial generosity of many institutions. The Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) was a remarkably rich and rigorous context in which to write and conduct research as a predoctoral fellow. Additional funding in those early stages was provided by the Donald and Mary Hyde Academic Year Fellowship, awarded by the Graduate School at Princeton University, and by the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. At the postdoctoral stage, my research was supported by the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago. The color reproductions in this book were obtained through the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Princeton University. A subvention from Emory College and the Laney Graduate School funded preparation of the index.

I have been privileged to work among supportive and inspiring colleagues. I had the good fortune to spend two years as a Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. I must give special thanks to Christine Mehring, who offered guidance, comments, and encouragement during the formulation of this book project. My first years on faculty at Emory University have afforded me precious time and mental clarity to lay down new prose and rework existing chapters. The Art History Department’s congenial atmosphere has been invaluable for scholarly production. In particular, I thank Walter Melion, who, in his capacity as department chair, made certain that I would have some uninterrupted time to write during my first semester here.

I am glad for this opportunity to recognize Susan Bielstein, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, for her initial openness to this project and for her sure and sympathetic guidance in all subsequent stages of manuscript development. James Toftness has provided invaluable logistical support. Joel Score’s judicious edits have improved the manuscript markedly. I must acknowledge the book’s two anonymous reviewers, who so generously offered their insights and comments.

I first encountered the work of Isa Genzken while observing the installation of a concrete sculpture at the Busch-Reisinger Museum, where I spent formative years as a curatorial assistant. The constructive principles governing the work impressed me deeply. I wish to thank Peter Nisbet, Laura Muir, Joachim Homann, Adrian Sudhalter, Celka Straughn, and Kirsten Weiss for their friendship and for the example each has set for me. I must also acknowledge Lisa Saltzman, who kindled my interest in postwar and contemporary German art when I was yet an undergraduate.

For her friendship, forged in the crucible of graduate study but fortified in the years since, I thank Kate Nesin. To her and to Annie Bourneuf, Benjamin Lytal, Susanna Caviglia-Brunel, Dipti Khera, Abra Levenson, Natasha Goldman, and Susan Gagliardi I am indebted for abiding support and intellectual stimulation. I am a better human and a better scholar for these interlocutors. Yuhka Miura and Amy King knew me and cared for me well before I entered academia, and they continue to anchor me to the real world. The love of language, learning, and making was a constant in my upbringing. I am grateful to my mother, Lin Chien-Ling, for instilling such values in me, and for the example of her tireless pursuit of knowledge and joy. To Daniel Bosch, my first reader and greatest champion, this book is dedicated. To live in a world of words and images in his company is to live well indeed.

Introduction

In November 1986, pedestrians passing MUSIX, a music and electronics store in Cologne, may have observed some unusual wares on display in the window: small, cast-concrete blocks of varying dimensions tightly arranged on a steel pedestal (fig. 1). From each stony mass emerged a radio antenna. With a simple gesture, inserting a telescoping rod into concrete, Isa Genzken transformed brute matter into signifiers of receptivity. Fittingly, Genzken dubbed the series of sculptures Weltempfänger (World Receivers)—a title that at once denotes shortwave radios and connotes an attunement to wide-ranging inputs. My antennas were also meant to be ‘feelers,’ Genzken asserts, things you stretch out in order to feel something, like the sound of the world and its many tones.¹ The series shares its name with the one and only unassisted readymade in Genzken’s body of work, a National Panasonic–brand multiband radio (1982; fig. 33). In short, the term world receiver is meant to identify Genzken’s receptivity—to art history, to social, political, and economic currents—as a defining characteristic of her oeuvre. Intractable substance, the stuff of sculpture, reverberates with and is made responsive to life itself.

Fig. 1 Isa Genzken, installation view of Weltempfänger (World Receiver), 1987. Galerie Buchholz at MUSIX, GmbH, November 12–18, 1987. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

An explicit theme of receptivity runs through Genzken’s work. Mein Gehirn (My Brain, 1984; fig. 2) serves as a biological analog to the Weltempfänger. A thin metal wire emerges from a lumpy, paint-daubed plaster brain—Genzken’s own, the title tells us. Tremulous and curved, the wire has a slightly comical, inquisitive quality. Sending out its sensitive antenna, Mein Gehirn inclines toward the world, figuring what consciousness of and in the world entails: vulnerability and a readiness to be impressed. This cerebrum suggests a double receptivity: to sonic waves, yes, but also to traces of the artist’s hands imprinted in the top of the oblong, domed form. The whorls of Genzken’s fingerprints and the lines scoring her palms are minutely preserved in plaster. Indexes of a different sort, Genzken’s Ohren (Ears, 1980; fig. 3) are large-format portraits of women’s ears—mostly those of strangers she approached on the streets of New York. Despite any forensic associations conjured by the photographic isolation of this organ, there is something intimate rather than objectifying about the images. In 2002 Genzken further enlarged a single image from the Ohr series, which she plastered to a side of the city hall in Innsbruck. Thus supplemented, the building suggests a listening architecture.² Here again, we are presented with an image of aural receptivity.

Fig. 2 Isa Genzken, Mein Gehirn (My Brain), 1984. Plaster, metal, paint. 24 × 20 × 18 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

Fig. 3 Isa Genzken, Ohr (Ear), 1980. Color photograph. 175 × 118 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

In the architecture of a mammal’s ear, the openings in the walls that divide the middle ear from the inner ear are called fenestra ovalis and fenestra rotunda. The window-ear analogy helps us see that Genzken’s series of Fenster (Windows; fig. 4), begun in 1990, extends the thematics of reception even further, this time in relation to architectural form. Rectangular apertures delimited by cast concrete, with edges more or less finished, and often with wide embrasures or a fragment of a jamb that juts perpendicular to the plane of the window, the Fenster are lifted to eye-level by elegant steel pedestals that are integral to the works’ overall effects. Some of the Fenster feature fluted surfaces; others have slightly bowed lintels. All are unshuttered, unglazed, and free of obscuring curtains. Genzken’s windows cannot be closed. Recalling Georg Simmel’s observation that the ear cannot turn away or close itself, one might associate Genzken’s Fenster with the radical openness of ears rather than with the exclusionary capacity of eyes.³ The eye looks out, holds at a distance; the ear takes into itself.

Fig. 4 Isa Genzken with two Fenster (Windows), 1990, at Galerie Ryszard Varisella, Frankfurt/Main, 1990. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

To suggest that Genzken’s works adopt a mode of alertness and openness toward the world is not to imply that they passively reflect their times. Her artworks are receivers, yes, but they are also transmitters of a distinct perspective that is always personal, always incisive. Genzken’s mode of receptivity detects currents, works through them, and, finally, translates her critical position on these currents into the stuff of sculpture. Tectonic or atectonic, frankly material or spectacularly prismatic, floor skimming or sky reaching, monumental or scaled to the hand, bought or made: each set of decisions ramifies.

This introduction weaves together two moments in Genzken’s career—her emergence as an artist in 1970s Düsseldorf and the belated international recognition bestowed upon her at midcareer—in order to clarify and to contextualize Genzken’s receptivity, which is manifest not only in her motifs but in her practices. My goal is not to present a full biographical account, but rather to characterize Genzken’s sensibility regarding art historical and sociohistorical currents in particular. As to the former, I trace Genzken’s decisive engagement with the work of Joseph Beuys, as well as with developments in American minimalism and postminimalism. As to the latter, I explore her confrontation with Germany’s troubled past (not to mention her ambivalence toward her Germanness) and the conditions of multinational capitalism. The contemporaneity of Genzken’s oeuvre, regenerated at every turn, is inseparable from these dual sensibilities.

—

One could start with Genzken’s installation at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Upon entering the atrium of the German Pavilion, the viewer was greeted by a phalanx of briefcases, backpacks, duffels, and suitcases (fig. 5). Stacked, open, partially unzipped, draped with coats, hung with garment bags, and watched over by eerie-eyed taxidermic mascots, the belongings of absent travelers become their proxies. (Anyone tracking Genzken’s developing lexicon of rolling pedestals—wheelchairs, walkers, shopping carts, dollies—must now add wheeled luggage to the list.) A basset hound gazes sweetly from a framed poster propped against a suitcase, just as Rembrandt’s visage looks out from an exhibition poster. Draped over another piece of luggage is a reproduction of an eighteenth-century veduta by Canaletto, a wink to the picturesque setting of the Biennale. Above this nylon, polycarbonate, and feathered retinue hover three dummies in NASA space suits. Nearby, plush monkeys cling to nooses above skulls dissembling behind carnival masks.

Fig. 5 Isa Genzken, installation view of Oil, German Pavilion, 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York. Photo: Jan Bitter.

When commissioned to conceive a project for the German Pavilion, Genzken was faced with more than the question of how to fill its spaces. The pressures attending the prestigious commission—not to mention the idea of representing Germany—were exacerbated by the challenges presented by the architectural container. No mere white cube, the German Pavilion is freighted with a National Socialist history.⁴ In 1938, the Nazi architect Ernst Haiger was charged with altering the original neo-Renaissance pavilion, erected in 1909. Haiger rendered the building more massive by expanding its footprint and raising the ceiling. A new, more imposing portico was installed, featuring square columns instead of the original Ionic ones. The only modification made to the exterior of the building immediately after the war was to remove the Nazi emblems (eagle and swastika) hanging above the main entry. The ideological message of the structure remains so inescapable, however, that in 2010 Arno Sighart Schmid, the president of the Bundesarchitektenkammer (Federal Chamber of German Architects), advocated that it be demolished and replaced with a design that speaks to democratic principles.⁵ Others responded that to do so would be tantamount to a denial of history and a reinscription of the tactics of totalitarian regimes, which always have to annihilate something to make room for themselves, in the words of Christoph Schlingensief, the German film and theater director whose 2011 installation for the German Pavilion garnered him, posthumously, the Golden Lion.⁶

Genzken’s installation began with the pavilion’s exterior.⁷ Her solution to the overbearing rhetoric of the building was simple and ingenious. Realizing that she had to work from the outside in, she built scaffolding around the façade, which she then enveloped in the orange plastic netting commonly used at construction sites (fig. 6). This economical gesture not only obscured the offending architecture but constituted a critique of it. Genzken’s treatment of the exterior invited viewers to conjure myriad redesigns for the pavilion, thereby circumventing the limitations of imposing a single vision. At the same time, she avoided the theatricality of destruction.

Fig. 6 View of the German Pavilion, with façade installation by Genzken, 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. Photo © janbitter.de.

With regard to the