Isa Genzken: Art on a Common Level
It
was only made public very recently: Isa Genzken will be representing
Germany at the 52nd Venice Biennale of 2007, in the Deutsche
Bank-sponsored German Pavilion. Over the past thirty years, the artist,
who lives in Berlin, has produced a highly versatile body of work. Yet
Genzken is entirely situated in the Modernist tradition. Brigitte
Werneburg on one of today’s most important German artists.
Fuck
the Bauhaus, No.4, 2000
Courtesy
Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln
Humor,
seduction, love, and surprise: in a conversation with Diedrich
Diederichsen in a monograph recently published by Phaidon
Press, this is where Isa
Genzken envisions the future of modern art. Why is it so conspicuous
that she isn’t talking about contemporary art? In using the adjective
"modern," she removes art somewhat from the constraints of the here and
now, from the exhibition and auction establishment, and locates it in the
context of the incomplete Modernist project.
New
Building for Berlin, 2004
Courtesy
Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln
At the
same time, in introducing notions of humor, seduction, love, and surprise,
she is propagating ideas that seem inconsistent with Modernism’s aims.
According to a Post-modern sensibility, the history of modern art belongs
in the context of the larger narratives – hence it’s all about the whole,
about art’s social responsibilities and about aesthetic action as a weapon
in the fight for a better future; about the innovations both in production
technology and artistic form, which aim for the renewal and change of
society itself – an aim that from today’s perspective possesses an
old-fashioned charm and is little suited to the demands of the future.
New
Building for Berlin, 2004
Courtesy
Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln
If they
should be made fertile again for the future, then the fields of Modernism
have to be plowed once more. Indeed, Isa Genzken locates herself in the
Modernist tradition when she expresses a criticism of ideologies, when she
uses the concepts humor, seduction, love, and surprise like plows to break
open the ground that has been trampled down all too compactly by masculine
energy and masculine severity.
This is an
approach that differs radically from that of Hans
Haacke, who is but one of her precedents in the German
Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.
In 1993, Hans Haacke destroyed the floor of the German Pavilion in a
highly symbolic
way in order to expose Modernism’s darker depths regarding the
compromises it made with fascism – even though this abyss didn’t turn out
to be very deep, framed as it was by the Hitler portrait and the German
mark emblem. Modern art can only have a future when it files away its
boastful gestures and all the easy recipes for art and society’s
liberation; when it departs from the esotericism of purity. In her db
artmag interview with Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, Isa Genzken quite
rightly criticizes Hans Haacke. And it’s also entirely correct that she
defends herself against the expectation that she is supposed to deliver
some huge sensation with her work for the German Pavilion. Because the
previous game with Post-modern distance was a disappointment.
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Empire / Vampire, Who Kills Death, 22-part
series, 2003
Courtesy Galerie
Daniel Buchholz, Köln
For Isa
Genzken, what characterizes the Biennale work she most admires is that
it’s profound instead of loud: Joseph
Beuys’ Strassenbahnhaltestelle
from 1976. She wants to approach the Pavilion from the outside:
circumspect, distanced, without conquering the interior right away. When
you consider Isa Genzken’s work to gain an idea of her approach, a
consistent and reliable motif emerges, the fact that her work always
occurs on the same level as the viewer. Nowhere in her art can a gesture
of overwhelming the viewer be found, as little as an overhasty
accommodation. Isa Genzken’s wish to encounter a public interested in art
on a common level carries like an Ariadne thread through an oeuvre rich in
both scope and surprise that encompasses sculpture, photography, film,
video, works on paper and canvas, collages, and books.
Empire
/ Vampire, Who Kills Death, 22-part series, 2003
Courtesy
Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Köln
Her wish
is not a matter of metaphors. Whether you consider her plaster works of
1984, the red cement architectures she began making in 1986, or the series
she started in 2003 titled Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death: Isa
Genzken always places her sculptures on pedestals, which she elevates to
the viewer’s height. Even her Window works, her column
sculptures, her photographic works – for instance of the stereo systems
(1979), which she augmented with her World Receiver of cement
(1987-92) – but above all her works with mirrors and reflective surfaces:
all of them depend on the viewer’s upright posture when he or she
establishes contact with the work.
Weltempfänger,
1992
Courtesy Galerie Daniel
Buchholz, Köln
Hence, Isa Genzken’s
invitation to become involved with her works and their complex forms does
not shy away from addressing the viewer in a gesture of communicative,
artistic reason. It is an entirely surprising gesture; a seductive,
loving, and above all sustainable gesture, because it is in no way
extrinsic to the work.
Deutsche
Bank Proposal, 2000
Installation
view: AC Project Room, New York 2000
Courtesy
Neugerriemschneider, Berlin
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