Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver 9780226410036

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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/2016054302

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

For Daniel

Contents

Acknowledgments ix



Introduction 1

1

Geometries of Lived Perspective  21

2

Make Life Beautiful!  53

3

Plastic Allegories  85

4

Radical Exposure  109



Notes 139 Index 157

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 Prince­ ton 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

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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 C ­ hien-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.

Acknowledgments

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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. 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

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.

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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.

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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. 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’

Introduction

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

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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. 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 sculp­ ture. 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 inter­ national 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.

Introduction

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.

— 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.

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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.

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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. 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

Introduction

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

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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. With regard to the installation’s title, Oil, Genzken explains, “That is what the whole world is about. Whether there’s war or not, that’s what it’s all about. Energy and oil.”8 She conceived the work in the lead-­up to the oil shock of 2007–­2008 and three years into the US-­led ­invasion of Iraq, which many still believe to have been largely motivated by American interest in the Persian Gulf’s natural resources. If Genzken’s treatment of the pavilion’s exterior addresses Germany’s national history, her installation inside attends to political and economic forces that reverberate globally. Genzken dismisses most of the previous installations for the German Pavilion: There’s only one exhibition that comes to mind that I really liked: the one by Joseph Beuys. I liked his Straßenbahnhaltestelle [Tram Stop] from 1976 very much. It wasn’t loud, but it was very powerful. Neither [Ulrich] Rückriem nor anyone else impressed me all that much. And I’ve seen a lot of works in the German Pavilion. I didn’t find Hans Haacke very good at all. I just don’t understand why everyone always says afterwards: yes, but that was really very good. I found it so forced, and then the Nazi flag outside, and the German flag—­I just don’t like it.9

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Subtitled Ein Monument für die Zukunft (Monument to the Future), Beuys’s installation (fig. 7) achieved its affective power through a combination of figuration and abstraction, an exploration of the personal and the historical, and an engagement with sculptural material and spatial context. Set deep in the building’s foundations, the barrel of a field cannon reached vertically into the pavilion’s cavernous space. From the cannon’s mouth emerged an iron sculpture of a man’s head, its features fixed in an expression of profound anguish. The combined elements of the column stood nearly seven meters tall. Beuys cast the cannon, and the four mortars surrounding it, from a seventeenth-­century monument in his hometown of Cleves.10 The earth displaced by Beuys’s column lay in a mound next to it. A stretch of rail ran alongside, a reference to the tram stop near the Cleves monument, where the young Beuys frequently changed trains. The final component of the installation was an iron rod, bent into thirds. One end reached down through a bored hole into the Venice lagoon, the middle third skimmed the floor of the pavilion, and

Introduction

Fig. 7 Joseph Beuys, Straßenbahnhaltestelle (Tram Stop), installation in the German Pavilion, 37th Venice Biennale, 1976. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn. Image courtesy Foundation Museum Schloss Moyland, Collection van der Grinten. Photo © ­Manfred Tischer.

the final third extended upward. Beuys’s Monument für die Zukunft was a countermonument vis-­à-­vis the architectural container, the peeling walls of which the artist elected not to have refinished. In contrast with Beuys’s lyricism, the foregrounding of Germany’s fascist past in Haacke’s 1993 installation, Germania, seemed overtly didactic. Above the pavilion’s main entrance, where the eagle and swastika hung during the Nazi era, Haacke placed an enlarged replica of a one–­deutsche mark coin (fig. 8)—­the mark had been the West German currency and continued as the official currency after reunification until the euro was adopted in 2002. A red-­painted temporary wall facing the entry bore a photograph of Adolf Hitler’s visit to the 1934 Biennale. Once

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Fig. 8 Hans Haacke, Germania. Portico, German Pavilion, 45th Venice Biennale, 1993. © Hans Haacke/ Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy the artist and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo: ­Roman Mensing.

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inside, the viewer was confronted with treacherous terrain: the pavilion’s marble flooring, installed during Haiger’s 1938 redesign, had been dislodged and shattered. For many, Germania was particularly potent given the questions of national identity raised by the still-­recent reunification of Germany. The curator Okwui Enwezor deems it the first project “[to take] the national pavilion as a subject of inquiry.”11 In Genzken’s assessment, however, Germania was too sensational, too contrived. One might fault Genzken’s Oil for going too far in the opposite direction. Some have found its flashy tableaux of found-­object assemblages overly elliptical in their narratives, too much governed by caprice. Yet, however heterogeneous, the elements coalesce around a discernible set of socioeconomic and political themes. The various surrogates for ­human presence—­mangled dolls and mutilated mannequins—­suggest the loss of innocence and the reification of the subject. Explicit references to tourism and space exploration signal spatial incursion and, by implication, cultural, economic, and political imperialism. Genzken’s

responsiveness to such issues is coupled with a receptivity to art historical precedents. She has volunteered that her installation was inspired by Beuys’s Schmerzraum (Pain Room, 1983–­1984), first exhibited in Konrad Fischer’s Düsseldorf gallery.12 A small space clad in lead sheets and illuminated by a single dim bulb, Schmerzraum was a claustrophobic, bunker­like container that spatialized suffering. Oil bears little formal resemblance to Schmerzraum, apart from having one of its rooms lined with mirrors and a few matte metal panels. Genzken transfigures Beuys’s imagery of the cold-­war bomb shelter into a kind of spacecraft-­ cum-­tomb for recumbent astronaut figures—­though something about the metal panels also suggests the fashion for stainless steel surfaces in the contemporary kitchen. (With Genzken, a critique of contemporary ­industrial design is never far from mind.) Yet something of Schmerz­ raum’s pain inhabits Oil: its motley cast of stuffed animals, sightless manne­quins in spacesuits, skulls, and Venetian carnival masks register as fabrications of a feverish nightmare. To spatialize pain, Beuys drew upon an architectural imaginary; Genzken drew upon the world of things rendered threateningly animate.

Introduction

— Genzken recounts a conversation with Beuys, who loomed large as a cultural figure in postwar West Germany: I once called him and said, “I must talk to you.” And he said, “Just come over.” . . . We sat under the cherry tree in his wonderful little garden and he asked, “Well, what do you want from me?” I said, ­“Architecture is a catastrophe in Germany; we’ve got to change that.” Then he said, “Go ahead, you can always sign for me.” [Laughs.]13 Here Genzken implicitly claims the responsibilities and capacities traditionally associated with architects, developers, urban planners, and politicians. Beuys would be the logical interlocutor for such an expanded concept of art and the artist’s purview. It was, after all, Beuys who proposed in his 1964 Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Life Course/Work Course) to raise the Berlin Wall by five centimeters—­for “better proportions!” he claimed. The ironic proposition treats the Wall in sculptural terms as a means to dematerialize it, to render it conceptual rather than merely physical. “Disarm the Wall immediately,” he offered by way of explanation. “Through inner laughter. Annihilate the Wall.” Obtuse and astute in equal measure, Beuys went on to declare, “The Wall as such is totally unimportant. Don’t talk so much about the Wall! Establish through self-­education a better morale in mankind and all walls will disappear.

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There are so many walls between you and me.”14 On the one hand, he ignored the very real spatial and social ramifications of the concrete slabs dividing Berlin, as well as their political specificity. On the other hand, he recognized the mental construction of division—­the enduring Mauer im Kopf (“wall in the mind”) that has been said to haunt Germany after re­ unification.15 It is impossible to interpret Genzken’s laughter at Beuys’s offer to lend his name to her project. She has acknowledged a degree of satisfaction at having garnered his stamp of approval: “You can sign for me, he said. He didn’t just say that to anyone. And so yes, I was proud of that.”16 But it could as well be a lighthearted response to his presumptuousness in volunteering it. Either way, one must attend to Genzken’s desire to approach Beuys with a serious concern—­the state of architecture in Germany. If her sustained engagement with architectural motifs is in good part formal—­ offering a way to explore scale, volume, space, materials, and tectonics—­ it is also, crucially, a means by which to reflect upon extra-­aesthetic ­questions of sociality, desire, power, and memory. Beginning in the 1960s, Beuys’s deployment of fat, honey, felt, and chocolate returned materiality to sculptural practice in force.17 Beuys cast his quotidian materials in a pseudo-­Christian symbolic system in which healing and social transformation were metaphorized (indeed, made manifest) in ephemeral or debased materials and processes. More controversially, he enacted the artist as shaman who performs an aesthetic-­ cum-­ritualistic act that claims to effect that healing. If Genzken has little patience with Beuys’s mysticism or symbolism, she holds other aspects of his work in high regard. One might say that Genzken, more than any other artist or art historian, understands and draws out (by drawing upon) Beuys’s sculptural intelligence and its capacity to engage affect, conjure psychological states, and articulate human needs. This is in marked distinction to his performative tendencies and rhetorical strategies, which tend to dominate the critical discourse surrounding him. Genzken’s take on Beuys highlights a shared sensitivity to the connotative plenitude of objects and materials and to the psychological resonance of sculptural environments. She also values the older artist’s success in situating his oeuvre and his artistic persona in the public sphere.18 In Beuys’s concept of Soziale Plastik (Social Sculpture), the boundaries of the medium are both profoundly enlarged and utterly dissolved (or dissolved precisely because so enlarged): “This most modern art discipline—­ Social Sculpture/Social Architecture—­will only reach fruition when every living person becomes a creator, a sculptor or architect of the social organism.”19 He thus granted unprecedented scope to art in general and to sculpture in particular. His claim for the latter was sweeping: “Sculpture is simply the law governing the world.”20 Here, at the far reaches of Beuys’s

expanded concept of art, we locate a fundamental and crucial variance in the two artists’ thinking. Genzken’s observation, quoted earlier, that “[Oil] is what the whole world is about” signals her refusal to sublimate geopolitical and economic realities through art or to subordinate them to it. For her, oil is not merely a substance to manipulate or a material metaphor to be deployed, as fat was in Beuys’s oeuvre, but a commodity the pursuit of which continues to shape global politics in the twenty-­first century. Genzken does not obfuscate the economic and political forces that condition art and life. Rather, she struggles in her art against those very conditions.

Introduction

— In a 2007 interview with Genzken, the curator for her German Pavilion installation, Nicolaus Schafhausen, asked, “Do you see yourself as a German artist, or what is German about your work?” Her retort: “This question is impertinent. You’re not serious, are you? I studied in America for a long time. I’m really much too pro-­American. But German . . . now what is that? No, really.”21 Genzken’s irritation is palpable, but her refusal to engage makes her response somewhat equivocal. Is the question impertinent because she takes the answer to be self-­evident, because she feels any inquiry into identity to be unproductive, because she deems the suggestion of “Germanness” as a quality of art to be nonsensical, because she finds the specific connotations of “German art” distasteful, or some combination of these? And how does her response to Schafhausen jibe with her readiness in a contemporaneous interview to reflect upon Beuys as a “specifically German” artist—­and to add, unprompted, “So am I, for that matter”?22 Genzken has always maintained a pointedly cosmopolitan view toward advanced art, aligning herself with modern and avant-­garde figures and modes that were often explicitly positioned against nationalist sentiment. (This is not to say, however, that she believes in the untroubled continuity of a universalist model of abstraction or of the avant-­garde ambition to transform life through art.) At the same time, she has repeatedly taken up issues germane to the German postwar and post-­Wall contexts—­as her appeal to Beuys attests. Genzken’s series New Build­ ings for Berlin (2001 and 2004; fig. 43) bears out this complex dynamic especially clearly. Even as it responds to the problem she broached with Beuys more than a decade earlier, the state of architecture in Germany, its artistic “lineage” is mixed. The serial columns of polychromatic glass panes derive as much from the Glasarchitektur of Paul Scheerbart and Mies van der Rohe as from the forms and strategies of American minimalism and postminimalism.

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Given the explicitly critical tone of works like Empire/Vampire (2003–­ 2004) and The American Room (2004), discussed in chapter 3, it is safe to assume that Genzken’s “pro-­American” stance does not extend to US political and economic policy. But other works, from her early photographs of punk rock shows in gritty New York City bars to her filmic appreciation of the Chicago skyline, attest Genzken’s long-­standing romance with aspects of American culture and its iconic cities. In declaring herself to be pro-­American, she affirms, above all, a formative and sustained engagement with particular developments in art: abstract expressionism (specifically Barnett Newman), minimalism, pop (chiefly Andy Warhol), and conceptual practices of various stripes (especially Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, and Lawrence Weiner). A photo album from 1977 offers insight into the seriousness with which Genzken approached her unofficial studies in the United States.23 Funded by a travel grant from the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she had been enrolled since 1972, Genzken undertook a cross-­country trip that included stops in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Houston, and New York.24 In Los Angeles, Genzken viewed landmarks of modernist architecture with Michael Asher, focusing on the buildings’ formal and constructive principles—­principles that would feature prominently in her sculptural works in the decades following (fig. 9). One could hardly find a companion more suitable for such a venture. Since 1968, Asher’s “situational aesthetics” had manifested his extreme sensitivity to built space (though he intervened in institutions rather than domiciles). Genzken’s camera captures the distinctive trellis that spans R. M. Schindler’s Elliot House (1930); the thrusting, prowlike structure of Schindler’s Tischler House (1949), exemplary of the architect’s late style; the expressive angularity of John Lautner’s Wolff Residence (1961); the ornamental cast-­concrete blocks on the façade of the Lloyd Wright House (1927); and the dramatic cantilever of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sturges House (1939). It’s significant that a number of these architects wedded principles of the International Style with distinctive features of the vernacular architecture of the American southwest. On the other coast, Genzken was preoccupied with architecture in a decidedly different register. Roughly a decade after the initial publication of Dan Graham’s signal pop-­conceptual project Homes for America, Genzken accompanied the artist on a tour of its sites (fig. 10).25 Genzken’s snapshots of New Jersey tract housing recall Graham’s iconic images of the mid-­to late 1960s. But where the most indelible of Graham’s photos evoke an otherworldly blankness—­the frames unpeopled, the homes ­under construction or newly finished, the air heavy with haze—­Genzken’s snapshots include cars, pedestrians, and bristling utility poles and television antennas. The inclusion of such visual noise

can be ­ascribed to changes to the neighborhoods wrought by time, but equally to Genzken’s interest in the reciprocal shaping of inhabitants and built space. As is often remarked, Homes for America identifies in the readymade environment of tract housing the same logics that governed minimalism: seriality, geometry, permutation, and production using industrial means and materials. Put more forcefully, Homes for America reveals a latent cultural content that minimalism’s rhetoric of non­referentiality emphatically denied. Genzken’s now decades-­long friendship with ­Graham is based in part on a shared impulse to inflect purely formal tropes with precisely this sort of social and cultural specificity. In her sculptural output, Genzken expressly seeks the opposite of “modernistic, flung-­down objects that strive to avoid all content.”26 Genzken’s receptivity to developments in American art was shared by many in her Düsseldorf milieu. As Thomas Ruff, her classmate at the academy, recalls, “The people we looked up to were the American minimalists, not European bohemian types.”27 This inclination was informed by the pedagogy and studio practices of certain prominent teachers at the academy. Gerhard Richter, in whose painting class Genzken enrolled, was heavily influenced in his early career in West Germany by American pop. Benjamin Buchloh, whom Genzken had met years earlier, joined

Fig. 9 Isa Genzken, views of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Sturges House (1939), in photo album, trip to the United States, 1977. Ring binder with 113 color photographs, 60 pages. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/ New York. Fig. 10 Isa Genzken, photo album, trip to the United States, 1977. Ring binder with 113 color photographs, 60 pages. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

Fig. 11 Isa Genzken, Parallelogramme (Parallelograms), 1975. Gouache on paper. 112 parts, each 29.7 × 21 cm; framed each 33 × 24 × 3 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

16

the faculty the year she matriculated to teach courses on the historical avant-­garde and on minimalism and conceptual art. Another key figure was Konrad Fischer, who opened his Düsseldorf gallery on 21 October 1967 with an exhibition of Carl Andre’s 5 × 20 Altstadt Rectangle. Fischer quickly established himself as a primary advocate of American minimalism, process-­based art, earth art, and conceptual art in Germany and in Europe more broadly. Andre, Richard Artschwager, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Fred Sandback, Robert Smithson, Lawrence Weiner, Douglas Huebler, On Kawara, and Hanne Darboven all had their European premiers with Fischer.28 Fischer mounted a solo show of Genzken’s work in 1976—­her first, while she was still a student at the academy—­and then twice more, in 1981 and 1986. By exhibiting with Galerie Konrad Fischer, Genzken became affiliated with artists on the leading edge of minimalist and postminimalist practice on both sides of the Atlantic. In that first exhibition, Genzken showed Parallelogramme (Parallelograms, 1975; fig. 11), which comprises four rows of twenty-­eight individually framed sheets.29 On each sheet (save the first and last in each row), Genzken filled four squares with distinct geometric or linear compositions in yellow, gray, and black. An elongated, yellow parallelogram can be seen in the top row. In the row below, the shape is rendered in yellow outline rather than as a solid form. Rows three and four repeat rows one and two but with the upper and lower registers of each sheet transposed: the parallelograms are thus bisected into scalene triangles—­solid in row three, outlined in row four. Yet recognition of the repeating geometric form is made difficult by its purposeful segmentation—­first by the isolation of one sheet from the next, and second by the white crossbars

Introduction

Fig. 12 Isa Genzken, Parallelogramme (Parallelograms), 1975 (detail: third row, sixth from the left). Gouache on paper. One of 112 parts, 29.7 × 21 cm; framed 33 × 24 × 3 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

separating the colored squares, much as muntins separate the panes of a window. The schematic, mathematical, and permutational qualities of this work partake of the conceptual impulse. But if Sol LeWitt once cautioned that color, surface, and texture distract from the idea, the subtle painterliness of Genzken’s work refuses such abstemiousness.30 The yellows and grays in particular display minute tonal variations related to the movements of the brush (fig. 12). In quality and visual interest, the sheets stand singly as geometric abstractions. In other words, Genzken manages to produce a work that is simultaneously autonomous and contingent, hard-­edged and gestural, conceptual and perceptual.

17

Alongside Parallelogramme, Genzken displayed a computer-­ generated rendering of an ellipsoid. In the next decade, she produced twenty-­odd three-­dimensional Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, of increasing complexity (e.g., figs. 20–­25). The aerodynamic look of these minimal surfaces belies the fact that Genzken made each by hand based upon dimensions calculated with the aid of a computer. In creating the conditions for rich and complex phenomenal experience, these wood floor sculptures continue in the vein of minimalism. And yet, in their morphological likeness to ordinary objects (canoes, toothpicks, cigars) and in their palettes (tangerine, sea foam, cadet blue) they bear a pop aspect. For her second exhibition with Fischer, Genzken showed four of the floor sculptures and works from two photographic series, Hi-­Fi (1979) and Ohren (Ears, 1980). The Hi-­Fi series (figs. 31 and 32) involved rephotographing advertisements for upscale stereo equipment. Genzken found in the appropriated advertisements a spur for her sculptural production: “Then I hung the pictures on the wall and put an Ellipsoid on the floor and thought, the Ellipsoid must be at least as good as this advert. At least as good. That’s how good a modern sculpture has to be.”31 This insight cuts to the heart of the matter. Genzken acknowledges the considerable pull of the non-­art object world and obliges her works to lay claim to relevance in relation to it.

—

18

In Isa Genzken: Sculpture as World Receiver, I have set aside comprehensiveness in favor of two other priorities: the focused analysis and thick description of individual works and, through them, the development of four themes—­embodied perception, architecture and built space, the commodity, and the body. This book considers the material, structural, and formal choices in Genzken’s works as the terms and substance of a commentary on the issues she deems most pressing: from the implications of built space for the contemporary subject to the reign of the commodity, from the possibility of intimacy to art’s engagement with reality. Throughout, I explore Genzken’s receptiveness to sociopolitical and art historical inputs and her ability to inflect sculptural form with such wide-­ ranging content. In chapter 1, I examine Genzken’s works of the 1970s and early 1980s in relation to debates set off by minimalism, conceptual art, and process art, on the one hand, and to a legacy of constructivist sculpture, on the other. Attending in analytical detail to the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, I elaborate the complexities of phenomenal experience they open up. Yet far from asserting the “purity” of such experiences, I argue that Genzken

was already investing them with real-­world referents. Her nascent interest in mass-­produced objects and images can be seen in the contemporaneous series of appropriated advertisements. Proceeding roughly chronologically, chapter 2 traces Genzken’s preoccupation with architecture and built space: from her early photobook Berlin, 1973 through her architectonic work in plaster, concrete, and glass, to her recent proposal for the World Trade Center site in New York. I situate the photobook and the architectonic sculptures in relation to spatial politics of reconstruction in the FRG—­West Germany—­and in post-­Wall Germany, even as I elaborate Genzken’s travesties of the legacy of modernist and avant-­garde architecture. I pay particular attention to unpacking Genzken’s choice of material and structural principles. Over the decades, Genzken’s concerns have become increasingly broad, incorporating globalization, imperialism, the false separation of private and public spheres, and the view that consumption is an act of subject-­formation and citizenship. The complexities of contemporary subject-­object and subject-­subject relations are critically enacted in Genzken’s works in the form of subject-­sculpture relations. Chapter 3 addresses Genzken’s assemblage practice under conditions of multi­ national capitalism, which are tied, for her, to forms of imperialism. In her hands, the aggressive combination of mass-­produced things confronts questions of labor, production, and value, as well as the artistic means adequate to them. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s writings, I argue that Genzken’s assemblage process is an allegorical one that attempts to combat the conditions of reification. Finally, chapter 4 explores the thematics of the body and the models of subjectivity in Genzken’s oeuvre. Here, art historical debates about figuration and anthropomorphism are at issue. I establish the centrality, for Genzken, of the analogy between bodily, architectural, and sculptural skins. I argue that Genzken’s model of subjectivity is predicated on the collapse of inside and outside, the breach of the skin or surface, and the erosion between public and private spheres; the threat of violence seems the precondition for meaningful contact. Genzken’s performance of her own subjectivity is taken up in this chapter, especially as it is figured in quasi-­diaristic projects like I Love New York, Crazy City. Throughout, I have adopted Genzken’s model of critical receptivity. I take to heart the license the work grants and the modes of attention it demands.

Introduction

19

1 Geometries of Lived Perspective For seven days in the summer of 1973, Isa Genzken, then a student of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and of art history and philosophy at the University of Cologne, carried out Bruce Nauman’s Instructions for a Mental Exercise at Konrad Fischer’s Düsseldorf gallery. A ­ ccording to Nauman’s rubric, two exercises were each to be performed for a half an hour daily: A: Lie down on the floor near the center of the space, face down, and slowly allow yourself to sink down into the floor. Eyes open. B: Lie on your back on the floor near the center of the space and slowly allow the floor to rise up around you. Eyes open. Nauman offers some pointers to the would-­be performer: “In exercise A it helps to become aware of the peripheral vision—­use it to emphasize the space at the edges of the room.”1 Genzken kept a daily log, sub­sequently published in the 1974 issue of the avant-­garde journal Interfunktionen, through which we gain insight into her psycho-­physiological responses to the exercises. “The first impression was that the perspective of the room was getting lost; the line of the floor along the two side walls became a single horizontal with the end wall.”2 Genzken’s concentration on the architectural seams warps space, such that the planes of the room—­walls set at right angles—­fuse along a single, continuous line. Genzken goes on to describe the optical blurring of floor and wall, which heightens her ­ lthough exercise sense of the “bright, glowing strip” of the horizontal. A B entailed a corresponding deemphasis of peripheral vision, the initial sensation Genzken records seems to have been the same: the melding of floor and wall. Her concentration is uneven during the seven days’ performances, but she makes progress. During exercise B on day four

21

she reports, “I felt very strongly that the floor was concentrating itself in my body along the line of my spine from both sides at the same time, and was rising with me.” She claims to have attained the goals of sinking into the floor and allowing the floor to rise on days five and seven. Similar instructions served as the basis for two videos Nauman produced in a New York studio that same year: Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down (fig. 13) and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up over Her, Face Up. The motivation for making the videos, according to Nauman, was to create “a record, to see if you could see what was happening.”3 This strikes one as quite perverse, for unlike any number of videos by Nauman from the late 1960s that train the lens on overt manipulations of the body (pinching, stamping, stretching, bouncing), the phenomena to be “seen” in Tony Sinking into the Floor and Elke Allow­ ing the Floor to Rise Up involve “a purely mental activity as opposed to a purely physical situation which might incur some mental activity.”4 Nor are the performances structured by built space (as with the corridors, corners, and walls Nauman constructed in those years) so much as means of structuring space, again in the perceptual experiences of the performers. Across fade-­ins and shifts in camera angle, what one “sees” in Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down is the performer’s “purely physical situation,” as it were: twitches, coughs, and measured or labored breath. Thus an interviewer voices reasonable skepticism when he admits, “I’m not sure it is possible to really understand what is happening in [Tony Sinking into the Floor].”5 Without a doubt, it is precisely this impossibility that Nauman is keen to investigate. Fig. 13 Bruce Nauman, Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down, 1973. Still from videotape, 60 minutes, color, sound. © 2015 Bruce Nauman/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

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Genzken, too, takes up the questions of whether it is possible to make visible perceptual experiences like those induced by Instructions for a Mental Exercise and, crucially, of how one might do so. In contrast to Nauman’s use of the time-­based medium of video, Genzken confronts the concrete terms of an art object. This choice is no less perverse, given the intractable materiality so long perceived to be sculpture’s liability. I don’t mean to suggest that Genzken explicitly set out to find a corollary to Nauman’s exercises or to address the limitations of Tony Sinking into the Floor and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up. But by Genzken’s own account, the Ellipsoids that launched her career in the late 1970s were influenced by Nauman. The precise nature of this influence, and how Genzken plumbed her experience to generate new terms for sculpture, has yet to be adequately understood in the critical and scholarly reception of the works. Genzken’s Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos are highly attenuated wood sculptures, ranging from 400 to 1180 centimeters in length, whose forms are defined geometrically: an ellipsoid is “a solid of which all the plane sections through one of the axes are ellipses, and all the other sections

Fig. 14 Isa Genzken, Gelbes Ellipsoid (Yellow Ellipsoid), 1976. Lacquer on wood. 9 × 9 × 486 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

23

Fig. 15 Isa Genzken, Untitled, 1974. Oil on wood. Two parts, 250.5 × 1 × 4 cm and 206 × 2 × 2 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

24

ellipses or circles,” while the hyperboloid is “a solid or surface . . . some of whose plane sections are hyperbolas, the others being ellipses or circles.”6 Genzken’s iterations of these forms are particularly striking because the lengths of their longitudinal axes far exceed those of their lateral and vertical axes—­62:2:1, the approximate ratio of longitudinal to lateral to vertical axis of Blau-­grün-­gelbes Ellipsoid “Joma” (Blue-­Green-­Yellow ­Ellipsoid “Joma,” 1981), is typical. In sculptural terms, the works activate maximum space while occupying minimal volume and having little mass. Or rather, in these works volume and mass are distributed in such a way as to lessen their magnitude in the perception of the viewer. This is especially the case when they are exhibited directly on the ground, as was the original intent.7 Inhabiting the periphery of the viewer’s field of vision, the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos animate space without obstructing it. The first three Ellipsoids are unitary, closed forms. Notably, given Genzken’s now career-­long engagement with the legacy of modernist abstraction, each gestures toward a primary color.8 In form and hue, then, Gelbes Ellipsoid (Yellow Ellipsoid, 1976; fig. 14), Rotes Ellipsoid (Red Ellip­soid, 1977), and Blaues Ellipsoid (Blue Ellipsoid, 1977) constitute the point of departure for subsequent works in the series. From the outset, Genzken plays with different profiles and proportions (circular or elliptical cross sections, narrowness or breadth vis-­à-­vis total length), such that the individuality of each Ellipsoid or Hyperbolo eclipses any sense of seriality or of a single mathematical ideal. Genzken states in an interview that she sought to capture in her floor sculptures a “horizon-­like quality,” and follows the remark by citing Nauman’s influence.9 Thus a curator has been prompted to write, “As Genzken explains it, the phenomenological experience of the Nauman exercises inspired her to conceive of her sculptures lying horizontally on the floor.”10 While this is a sensible conclusion, it is not entirely satisfying. After all, horizontality was not in itself new to sculptural production. The most immediate referent for radical horizontality would be Carl ­Andre’s metal “rugs,” which had a profound impact on Genzken during her student years. (As I noted in the introduction, Andre’s Altstadt Rectangle, with which Konrad Fischer inaugurated his Düsseldorf gallery in 1967, was a signal moment in the reception of American minimalism in Germany.) Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly, Genzken made two vertical wood sculptures in the mid-­1970s (after her performance of the Nauman exercises and before the first Ellipsoid) that articulate concerns elaborated in the floor works. A consideration of these precursors to the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos reveals that orientation to the ground plane was hardly of the essence. Untitled of 1974 (fig. 15) comprises two tapering, spearlike wooden elements of unequal height that lean against the wall. Each is painted

26

partially gray and partially black on the front—­a pattern repeated, though inverted, on the back. Yellow paint, applied with an emphasis on facture, covers the sides. Approached head-­on, the forms register as lines—­one long and thin, the other shorter and thicker. Deviate from the frontal view, and one sees that each is a volume, however slight, composed of four planes. Or is it six? The black and gray segments of a given surface begin to distinguish themselves optically, with the gray “plane” canting ever so slightly—­an effect deriving from our familiarity with conventions of rendering geometric volumes through shading. The viewer wavers between a sense that the colored planes reinforce physical characteristics and a suspicion that they produce optical illusions. The shorter of the two elements was shown in 1981 at the Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt as a stand-­alone sculpture under the title Parallelogramm Nr. 2 (Parallelo­gram No. 2).11 This title, subsequently abandoned, offers a clue to the logic of the form: the object and its taller partner can be imagined as parallelepipeds so stretched that their obtuse angles approach 180 degrees. “Untitled” gives less away, leaving intact the perceptual ambiguity that is crucial to its workings. The viewer is left to negotiate perceptual slippages between line, plane, and volume; between optical illusion and geometric actuality; between sculpture and painting. Genzken’s admiration for the work of Barnett Newman comes into focus, for the abstract expressionist’s canvases of saturated color and dynamic “zips” rendered moot the distinctions between line and plane, figure and ground, and (especially in the case of the skinny paintings of 1950, like The Wild) painting and object.12 In 1976 Genzken made another vertical work, Ellipse Nr. 1 (fig. 16). Here, a strip of wood, one centimeter thick and 1.8 meters tall, takes the shape indicated in the title. Front and back are painted black and the edge limned with yellow. Leaning against the wall, Ellipse Nr. 1 is evidently an object projecting into real space and dependent upon the architecture. Yet, seen head-­on, its matte black face reads as a fissure in the expanse of the wall. The literal object gives way to an illusion of indefinite recession, infinite space. Untitled and Ellipse Nr. 1 may seem modest when one considers the technical sophistication and exponentially greater perceptual complexities explored in the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, initiated later in 1976. But they offer insight into Genzken’s preoccupations during these years, and they help us to think more subtly about what she might have meant, beyond matters of orientation and placement, by a “horizon-­like quality.” We might begin to unpack this phrase by revisiting the notes Genzken wrote during her seven-­day performance of the Mental Ex­ ercise: “The first impression was that the perspective of the room was

Chapter 1 Geometries of Lived Perspective

Fig. 16 Isa Genzken, Ellipse Nr. 1 (Ellipse No. 1), 1976. Oil on wood. 180 × 7 × 1 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

getting lost; the line of the floor along the two side walls became a single horizontal with the end wall. The colors of the floor and walls got mixed up; the black of the floor became a transparent gray and the horizontal seemed like a bright, glowing strip.”13 That “bright, glowing strip,” ­observed time and again, was the initial stage, one might even say the requisite stage, in the space-­and mind-­bending acts Nauman outlined. With the Ellipsoids, as in the vertical works preceding them, Genzken transfers such embodied perceptual experience to the viewer. The horizon is, after all, a perceptual phenomenon—­the apparent meeting point of sky and earth, contingent on the observer’s ever-­shifting point

27

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of view. From an oblique angle, one follows an Ellipsoid’s attenuated course: its contours seem parallel in the midsection but veer toward convergence at either end. This deviation from the straight line, I wish to argue, corresponds to the warped space Genzken perceived during her execution of the Nauman exercise. Concomitantly, the curved surface of the Ellipsoid renders as continuous discontinuities involved in the intersection of flat planes, which is a basic principle of architecture as well as of linear perspective. The undoing of cubic space, and of the modes of vision it structures, is enacted via the surfaces of differential geometry. In this way, the Ellipsoid encompasses and supersedes the ambiguities put into play by the minutely canted planes of Untitled. A more compelling assessment of the horizontal comes into view, one with epistemological implications. If perspectival space, associated with rationality and idealism, is predicated upon the erect and static figure, then a contingent experience of space is associated with the axis to which it is opposed. From the “radical reversibility” of El Lissitzky’s Prouns, analyzed by Yve-­Alain Bois, to the operations suggested by the “flatbed picture plane,” elaborated by Leo Steinberg, the orientation to the horizontal corresponds to shifts in the political, social, and cultural realms, or at least to the ambition to effect those shifts in and through art.14 The development in the 1950s of a picture surface as receptacle of heterogeneous material and inputs partakes “of a shakeup which contaminates all purified qualities,” Steinberg tells us.15 In this phrasing one might detect a resonance with Georges Bataille’s notion of the Informe, the operation that serves “to bring things down in the world.”16 However differently inflected, these artistic and theoretical models of horizontality signal an altered address to the world—­an ­address that is nonhierarchical, antirational, and anti-­ideal. Crucially, their animosity toward the “dictatorial perpendicular,” to use Walter Benjamin’s indelible characterization, was not necessarily expressed in physical placement or orientation, but was enacted via the inbuilt logic of the work and its mode of confronting the viewer. The skeptic might ask whether Genzken exchanges the reductive organizational principles of single-­point perspective, and all that they suggest, for more complex systems of spatial understanding. In which case, she could be seen to upgrade rather than eschew idealisms. Sophisticated mathematical calculations were in fact integral to the realization of the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, to such a degree that Genzken enlisted the help of Ralph Krotz, a PhD candidate in physics at the University of Cologne. Genzken provided Krotz with the length of prospective works, the shapes and dimensions of crucial cross sections (often at the midpoint and, in the case of the Hyperbolos, at each end), and, as the iterations grew increasingly complex, additional information about

deformations, excisions, and so on.17 Using these specifications, Krotz calculated exact vertical and lateral measurements at ten-­centimeter longitudinal intervals, on the basis of which Genzken produced the final forms (fig. 17). For the catalog of Documenta 7, where four Ellipsoids were shown, Genzken invited Krotz to pen a text that stood in place of a traditional artist’s statement. In contrast to “linear approaches, which allow only rough, simplified approximations,” Krotz explains,

Fig. 17 Isa Genzken, computer printout on continuous paper, n.d. Each 28 × 25 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

These fundamental forms [the ellipsoid and the hyperboloid] find their equivalents in the idealized physical space where, from the macro domain—­galaxies, planetary systems—­down to the micro domain—­ atoms, elementary particles—­trajectories and structures can be described by quadratic functions (ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas).18 Krotz proffers quadratic functions as universal principles for mapping macro and micro phenomena. Seen thus to be instantiations of “fundamental forms,” Genzken’s Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos could be set within a tradition of sculptural visualizations of mathematics. Their basis in geometric minimal structures would signal their affinity with Naum Gabo’s evocations of ruled surfaces and Max Bill’s sensuous elaborations of the Möbius band. One might even consider the various excisions from

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Fig. 18 Three-­axial ellipsoid. Collection of models, Department of Mathematics (Mathematisches ­Institut), Ruprecht-­Karls-­ Universität Heidelberg. Photo: R. Diesel, Munich.

Genzken’s wooden forms to perform something akin to the revelation of structure offered by Gabo’s stereometric method. Yet Genzken professes her interest in, but ultimate remoteness from, Krotz’s perspective in her brief statement following his text: “Out of our collaboration emerges this attempt to consider my work not from an aesthetic point of view but from a mathematical-­scientific one—­a point of view that strikes me as of vital importance, although foreign to me, and although articulated in technical terms.” The stakes for insisting upon the technoscientific aspects of the floor sculptures are multiple and real, including the need to distinguish herself from contemporaneous German artists like Georg Baselitz, who carved wood to figurative and monumental ends. Yet an examination of the sculptures reveals an interest not in universals but specifics, not in certainties but ambiguities. The Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos defy a scientific attitude “whose fundamental bias,” Maurice Merleau-­Ponty maintains, “is to treat everything as though it were an object-­in-­general.”19 Indeed, they but poorly encapsulate or model any geometric idea or ideal. By virtue of their extreme elongation and floor-­bound state, the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos deny any single, instantaneous, and encompassing view—­a view, in other words, that would be transparent to an idea. Elongation and curvature also produce disorienting effects of foreshortening that cannot be “read” according to conventions of perspective. To compare the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos with plaster mathematical models of the same quadratics (figs. 18 and 19) reveals the extent to which Genzken has attenuated the forms, almost to the point of un­ recognizability. (In this she takes to an extreme the perturbation of geometric volumes begun by Constantin Brancusi in works like Beginning of the World and Bird in Space.) In the emphasis they lay upon the imminence of experience, Genzken’s floor sculptures answer Merleau-­Ponty’s call to return scientific thinking to the “there is”: “to the site, the soil of the sensible and humanly modified world such as it is in our lives and for our bodies.”20 To associate Genzken’s cuts with Gabo’s stereometric method is thus to fall prey to pseudomorphism. Whereas stereometry, which Gabo demonstrated in Two Cubes,

reveals “the constructive principle of a sculptural space expression”21 by opening the cube to the penetrating and analytical gaze of the viewer, the cuts, compounds, and channels in Genzken’s Ellipsoids and Hyper­ bolos do not facilitate an immediate conceptual apprehension of their geometry. Consider, for instance, Grün-­graues offenes Ellipsoid (Green-­Gray Open Ellipsoid, 1977) and Rot-­graues offenes ­Ellipsoid (Red-­Gray Open Ellipsoid, 1978). Analogous to pea pods emptied of their contents, these Ellipsoids disclose their interiors through longitudinal slits. Yet, the medium-­gray interiors, partially in shadow, offer a sense of indeterminate, sometimes infinite depth. Even at ground level and from less than a foot away, one is tempted to confirm with the hand what the eye cannot verify. Genzken’s precise use of color and finishes renders ambiguous curved surface and flat surface, interior and exterior, line and plane, edge and face, vertical and horizontal—­which is to say, it gives rise to a host of illusionistic effects that undo rather than clarify structure. One might surmise that Gabo’s preference for monochrome or untreated wood, steel, cardboard, and plastic was due to a wariness of the optical effects of color as much as to a materialist sensibility. Color is not the only means by which Genzken suspends geometric clarity. While some of her cuts do inscribe the forms’ longitudinal, lateral, or vertical axes, geometric perspicuity is often confounded by other formal features. Blau-­grün-­gelbes Ellipsoid “Joma” (Blue-­Green-­Yellow Ellipsoid “Joma,” 1981; fig. 20) is partially split along its horizontal mid­ line, ostensibly resulting in a top (painted parakeet green) and a bottom (lacquered azure). The green element is set back (or in) by a few millimeters, as if constituting a portion of a concentric, inner ellipsoid. The margin between “inner” and “outer” is tipped yellow. The distinction between top and bottom is complicated. Along part of the form’s length, the azure surface continues onto the upper half of the form; the dimensions of this segment are not perspicuous because it features an oblique cut. From one side, Joma appears to be cleanly bisected, a reading that is contradicted from other angles. Or consider the strategy employed in Violett-­graues Ellipsoid (Violet-­Gray Ellipsoid, 1978; figs. 21

Fig. 19 One-­sheeted hyperboloid. Collection of models, Department of Mathematics (Mathematisches Institut), Ruprecht-­ Karls-­Universität Heidelberg. Photographer: R. Diesel, Munich.

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Fig. 20 Isa Genzken, Blau-­grün-­gelbes Ellipsoid “Joma” (Blue-­ Green-­Yellow Ellipsoid “Joma”), 1981. Lacquer on wood. 10 × 15 × 620 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

and 22). An upper quadrant of the elliptical ellipsoid has been removed. In its place rests a quarter of a circular ellipsoid of differing dimensions. Because the diameter of the circular fragment is equal to the major axis and greater than the minor axis of the ellipse it abuts, a semilunar ridge results along the vertical cut. This ridge violates the contours (and logic) of the elliptical ellipsoid, producing a visual and cognitive irritation as subtle as it is palpable. Thus it is not the rationalism of Gabo but the antirationalism of ­Lissitzky with which Genzken is aligned. Benjamin Buchloh, Genzken’s intimate during these years, describes the way in which her thinking about the transitions from painting to sculpture to architecture galvanized around Lissitzky’s Prounenraum (Proun Room).22 Conceived for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1923, the Prounenraum was Lissitzky’s attempt to extend his Proun drawings—­which he famously called way stations between art and architecture—­into real space. Compositions of flat, painted forms and bas-­relief elements adorned the walls. The ­ceiling

Chapter 1 Geometries of Lived Perspective

Fig. 21 Isa Genzken, Violett-­graues Ellipsoid (Violet-­Gray Ellipsoid), 1978. Ink on paper. 70 × 100 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York. Fig. 22 Isa Genzken, Violett-­graues Ellipsoid (Violet-­Gray Ellipsoid), 1978. Lacquer on wood. 12 × 9 × 620 cm. Installation view, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, 1979. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York. Photo: Sigwart Korn.

bore a relief design as well, though the black square he envisioned for the floor could not be realized. Directed by the careful s ­ equencing of diagonal, horizontal, and vertical compositions on the main walls—­ negotiated with the help of corner-­spanning relief elements—­the viewer was led on a predetermined itinerary.23 However visually dynamic Lissitzky’s deployment of geometric forms, however energetic his attempt to defeat the corners and dissolve the support surface, the architectonic facts of the room enforced a static orientation vis-­à-­vis top and bottom,

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figure and ground. Although it induced the circulation of the viewer within the room, the Prounenraum was ultimately more pictorial (or even decorative) than spatial or volumetric. Lost were the perceptual ambiguities Lissitzky had put into play in his two-­dimensional Proun drawings and paintings through virtuoso combinations of planes, lines, textured collage elements, and forms rendered in axonometric projection. In contrast to single-­point perspective, which organizes the visual field in relation to a vanishing point at which the lines of recession intersect, axonometric projection is a type of parallel projection. Lissitzky exploited the resulting oscillation between the illusion of extension in front of and behind the pictorial plane as a means to wrench the viewer from a position of certainty before the work of art.24 It was precisely this certainty that was reinforced in his project for the Great Berlin Art Exhibition. One might say that Genzken embraced the unfulfilled ambition of the Prounenraum, to engender an experience of space in which the logics of verticality, gravity, and fixity are defeated. Genzken does not merely illustrate perceptual phenomena, reifying the temporal and elusive into something fixed. Rather her Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos engage the viewer in the unstable apprehension of the works’ shapes, colors, and forms, which unfolds in time and in relation to the viewer’s position in space. The undersides of the sculptures can seem distinct in value and saturation from the lit surfaces with which they are continuous; the extreme elongation of the forms exaggerates the effects of foreshortening; the evidently stereometric may optically flatten into two dimensions; the plane begins to read as line; and alternate views of the work can induce a sense of radical disjunction. Whatever influences Genzken assimilates—­Nauman’s phenomenology, Andre’s sculpture as place, Lissitzky’s radical reversibility, among others—­she also transcends, developing entirely original forms whose means and effects must be taken on their own terms. Scrupulous description of these works and their effects—­very much my ambition here—­reveals the unwieldiness of language relative to form and color. Smooth contour, definite hue, and seamless itinerary quickly become labored when parsed. Even the most compelling and rigorous of discussions by art historians like Buchloh and Birgit Pelzer have tended to speak of the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos as series rather than individual works.25 If none of the floor works has been analyzed in detail and in its specificity, this lacuna can be ascribed to a problem of writing as much as to the inherent difficulty of these works. In the coming pages, I shall at times sacrifice eloquence in favor of explicitness.

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After elaborating the Ellipsoid, Genzken produced the first Hyperbolo in 1979. As commenters have noted, the new series reverses aspects of its predecessor. Whereas the ellipsoid is a finite, closed shape, the hyperbolic form suggests extension into space. Whereas the Ellipsoid balances at one central point, with all other points seeming to hover, the Hyperbolo rests on two extreme points and arches in between. Genzken dismantled the Hyperbolos more aggressively than she had the Ellipsoids, experimenting with cantilevers, with voids, and with more visually distinct “parts,” seemingly keen to test the legibility of shape, the elasticity of the formal envelope. Put differently, she attempted to maximize internal differentiation without sacrificing wholeness. Schwarzes Hyper­ bolo “Nüsschen” (Black Hyperbolo “Little Nuts,” 1980; figs. 23 and 24), for instance, can be described as a whole consisting of portions of two distinct hyperboloids, one atop the other.26 They are unified in hue and saturation but differentiated in surface quality (glossy with visible grain versus matte and smooth). The upper element features an elliptical cross section, the lower element a circular one. Seen from one end of Nüss­ chen, the upper half of the elliptical hyperboloid rests flush against the lower half of its circular partner (fig. 23). Walk the length of the sculpture, however, and one finds that the relation of adjacency between two flat surfaces (that is, two longitudinal sections) has become a nesting or spooning of two curved forms (fig. 24). At this other end of Nüsschen, the lower element seems to cradle the upper, which is now not halved but whole. Genzken’s treatment of the termini accentuates this difference: the undisguised blonde wood of the upper element contrasts with the bottom’s light-­absorbing matte brown. The two terminal views of Nüsschen provoke distinct, one might even say conflicting, proprioceptive sensations with regard to the relation of its parts. Returning to the first vantage, one senses that the bisected elliptical hyperboloid rests gingerly, if stably, upon the circular hyperboloid. The diameter of the circle exceeds the major axis of the ellipse, and the longitudinal section is taken, not at the circle’s center, but above it, further emphasizing the greater surface area and, implicitly, mass of the lower element. The resulting impression is of a purely ornamental, rather than tectonic, relation between top and bottom. The view from the other end, by contrast, with its dramatic cantilever—­the upper element pro­ jects approximately two feet beyond the lower—­expresses a ­dynamics of load and stress. The solid girth of the elliptical hyperboloid now dominates and seems to bear down upon its partner. The antithetical nature of these extremities induces in the viewer renewed interest in the midsection that bridges them. Precisely where Schwarzes Hyperbolo “Nüsschen” becomes most attenuated, the viewer’s attention becomes most concentrated. The viewer scans the

Chapter 1 Geometries of Lived Perspective

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Fig. 23 Isa Genzken, Schwarzes Hyperbolo “Nüsschen” (Black Hyperbolo “Little Nuts”), 1980. Lacquer on wood. 14.5 × 25 × 558.5 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

length of the form seeking visual verification and elucidation of the “logic” of transformation that she “knows” to be in play. But satisfaction remains elusive, for the transformation is too subtle and incremental to be mapped by sight. Furthermore, the longer and closer one looks, the less conviction one can feel about what one knows. The relation, in Nüsschen, of two nesting curved surfaces, one convex and the other concave, is actually an illusion conjured by a right-­angle notch cut into the upper element, which simply abuts the lower element. Throughout the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, powerful effects of interpenetration (e.g., Grün-­orange-­graues Hyperbolo “El Salvador,” discussed below), nesting (e.g., Nüsschen), or sheathing of forms (e.g., Joma) are induced by unexpected means. Recognition of the logistics of fit (ingenious, if also terribly pragmatic) contradicts but never undoes the illusions. Thus a space is opened up between conception and perception, inference and evidence, knowledge and experience. The viewer’s frustrated pursuit of

Chapter 1 Geometries of Lived Perspective

Fig. 24 Isa Genzken, Schwarzes Hyperbolo “Nüsschen” (Black Hyperbolo “Little Nuts”), 1980. Lacquer on wood. 14.5 × 25 × 558.5 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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clarification, insofar as it produces a state of heightened perceptual and cognitive alertness, is also the substance of aesthetic pleasure. One might think of the length of Nüsschen in terms of a trajectory or transit, thereby deemphasizing the measureable, finite, and static in favor of the durational and dynamic. The transits embodied in this work are between the nontectonic and the tectonic, flat planes and curved ones, parts and wholes. Equally seamless is the transit of Grau-­grünes Hyperbolo “Jülich” (Gray-­Green Hyperbolo “Jülich,” 1979), a hollow form that terminates in a circle at one end and in an ellipse at the other (fig. 25). Seeking Krotz’s assistance in calculations, Genzken writes in a postcard from 1978 (fig. 26), “Here, once again, are the precise measurements: The circle has a diameter of 20 cm, the ellipse in the middle is 3:4 cm, the ellipse at the end is 25 cm:15 cm.”27 Genzken’s hand-­drawn diagram further indicates that two-­thirds of the form (320 cm of the ­total length of 480 cm) will feature a quarter cut, opening up the light-­ gray exterior to reveal the sea-­foam green of the inner surface. Letters in Krotz’s archive show that Genzken sent specifications in 1979 and 1980 for three additional Hyperbolos exploring this same conceit. Jülich seems to have been the only one realized, as none of the other parameters can be matched to sculptures in the catalogue raisonné. The Hyperbolos in this vein, whether realized or not, feature, at one end, two equal axes and, at the other end, distinct major and minor axes. Apprehension of the forms, however, does not depend upon a grasp of such technicalities. Above all, it is kinesthetic sensation Genzken calls forth. The movement from circle to ellipse finds one analogy in a chest alternately filling with air and expelling it. Crucially, the pneumatic is conjured through decidedly nonliteral means—­by geometry rather than organic form, by unyielding shell rather than elastic membrane.28 Grün-­orange-­graues Hyperbolo “El Salvador” (Green-­Orange-­Gray Hyperbolo “El Salvador,” 1980; fig. 27) elaborates upon this transformation from elliptical to circular hyperboloid by doubling it. A mint green hyperboloid interlocks with its orange partner. Chiastic, the direction of transformation in one element reverses that in the other. The orange element is embedded in the green element and projects beyond it in the form of a cantilever. The metaphors conjured include the technological (the dismantling of machine parts) and the organic (cell division). But here again a corporeal (even erotic or autoerotic) image seems most resonant: that of sexual intercourse or that of one person’s clasped forearms. Visually separable into parts of differing color and “itineraries,” El Salvador simultaneously conjures wholeness or oneness—­not so much the uninterrupted contours of a body but the psychophysiological and proprioceptive conditions of being.

Chapter 1 Geometries of Lived Perspective

Fig. 25 Isa Genzken, Grau-­grünes Hyperbolo “Jülich” (Gray-­Green Hyperbolo “Jülich”), 1979 (floor). Lacquer on wood. 20 × 25 × 480 cm. Akai, Front Operation, Technical Research, and Hitachi, 1979 (wall, from left to right). Installation view, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, 1979. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York. Photo: Sigwart Korn. Fig. 26 Isa Genzken, postcard sent to Ralph Krotz, 1978. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York. Fig. 27 Isa Genzken, Grün-­orange-­graues Hyperbolo “El Salvador” (Green-­Orange-­Gray Hyperbolo “El Salvador”), 1980. Lacquer on wood. 15 × 19 × 600 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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A slightly later work, Grau-­schwarzes Hyperbolo “MBB” (Gray-­Black Hyperbolo “MBB,” 1981; fig. 28) is particularly vivid in this respect. At ten meters, MBB is among the longest of Genzken’s floor works, and it is the only one to be produced in a material other than wood—­namely, fiberglass and epoxy resin. With a single slit gently torquing along its length, MBB reads as both plane and volume—­or rather as a plane demarcating a volume. Its slit suggests a spine, and the whole recalls, in an entirely abstract way, a recumbent body in the process of turning over. The corporeal dimension observed in the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos is entirely congruent with Robert Morris’s assertion regarding curved forms: “Surfaces under tension are anthropomorphic: they are under the stresses of work much as the body is in standing.”29 Standing—­or flipping over, or breathing, or stretching. It is worth mentioning in this context that the expression of intense corporeality attained in the best of the floor works is largely absent in the four upright Hyperbolos that Genzken produced between 1982 and 1985. Standing firmly on broad bases, narrowing in the midsection, and widening again near the top, the vertical Hyperbolos are palpably anthropomorphic—­an impression sustained by their titles, which, unlike the plainly descriptive or allusive titles of the horizontals, bear the names of individuals.30 Yet, the degree to which the vertical Hyperbolos approximate the human form seems inversely proportional to their capacity to conjure the body as inhabited. This isn’t to say that the vertical Hyperbolos lack complexity, only that the formal questions they engage are perhaps more conventional vis-­à-­vis the sculptural tradition. The three components of Meister Gerhard (Master Gerhard, 1983), for instance, fit together like the most refined puzzle. Genzken simultaneously references and defies bilateral symmetry by joining longitudinal sections of a circular and an elliptical hyperboloid. The resulting “pose,” while not quite contrapposto, conveys elegant asymmetry, with the circular hyperboloid functioning analogously to the engaged leg and the elliptical hyperboloid to the free leg. The Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos propel the literal (some might say literalist) movement around the work, setting off a phenomenology of viewing in which the kinesthetic and the optical are wedded. The viewer registers, and struggles to map, the disjunctive relations of load and stress, the oscillation between perception of parts and of wholes, the contradiction between stasis and motion, the precise yet elusive deformations of geometry. She registers these dynamics by analogy to her own body—­ its struggle against gravity, its integral nature and many-­partedness, its surfacing into the world as a thing seen, its animation as sensed from within—­so that seeing is inseparable from feeling and cognition. Another

way of framing this is to say that Genzken’s Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos lay stress on “lived perspective,” the contingent experience of the world that cannot be ordered by conventions of picturing.31 Winkingly and ever so incisively, Genzken takes up this distinction ­between “lived perspective” and perspectival rendering in Blau-­grau-­ gelbes Hyperbolo “Elbe” (Blue-­Gray-­Yellow Hyperbolo “Elbe,” 1981; fig. 29). As a solid, circular hyperboloid, Elbe seems structurally simple in relation to other Hyperbolos. One longitudinal quadrant of the blue-­ lacquered hyperboloid is occupied by a yellow slice that is both slightly smaller in radius and slightly longer than its host. The diameters of the termini are unequal. In other words, Elbe is not symmetrical along its lateral axis. The relatively simple structure, however, highlights other subtleties: the yellow quadrant is not uniform in color but grades from a saturated canary yellow at the broad end to a yellow-­tinged light gray at the other. Encouraged by the work’s title, which conjures the landscape tradition of German Romanticism, we might understand Elbe as a sophisticated pun on the conventions of aerial perspective, in which

Fig. 28 Isa Genzken, Grau-­schwarzes Hyper­ bolo “MBB” (Gray-­Black Hyperbolo “MBB”), 1981 (on ground). Lacquer on epoxy resin and fiberglass. 1000 cm long. Installation view, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, 1989. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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distance is conveyed through decreased saturation of color. (Not coincidentally, the luminous sky in Caspar David Friedrich’s Fog in the Elbe Valley [1821] features a palette of blues and grays shot through with yellow.) Elbe’s length and asymmetry redouble the effects of spatial recession: when one stands at its broad end, Elbe seems nearly elastic in its reach as it diminishes and fades in the distance. Yet the illusion is not untroubled. Single-­point perspective is also invoked—­only to be contravened, for the contours of Elbe, which, seen from this angle, seem to shoot forward like lines of recession, ultimately diverge rather than meet. One might continue to push this reading: a further disturbance is introduced by the longitudinal juxtaposition of blue and yellow, for the seam between them operates as a sign for the horizon line between sea and sky. (The pairing of horizontal, monochrome expanses to evoke the feel of landscape has been exploited by painters from Mark Rothko to Blinky Palermo to Brice Marden.) This “horizon” works at cross-­purposes (quite literally) with the one conjured, however partially, from the aforementioned vantage. It is also self-­contradicting: blue sky and yellow shore readily invert, becoming sunlit atmosphere and ultramarine waters. The inversion bears implications for how the viewer understands her body to relate to the work. Continue to circle the work and one arrives at the other terminal view, where the suggestion of aerial perspective is contradicted by the increasing saturation of more distant color. Finally, all of these allusions and illusions are constantly read against the material presence of the object. With the words allusion and illusion I recall Rosalind Krauss’s exploration of the sensuous presence of Donald Judd’s sculptures and the ways in which the work “exploits and at the same time confounds previous knowledge [e.g., perspective] to project its own meaning.”32 Krauss observed “the inadequacy of the theoretical line” regarding object-­art, which asserted the specific and definite qualities of the whole with zero remainder. Operating in an artistic rather than a discursive mode, Genzken offers a critique of and an alternative to these proscriptions. The Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos are aligned with minimalism, especially in its emphasis on phenomenological vision, yet they flout its hermeticism. Identifying a career-­long preoccupation, Genzken reflects: I was trying to get this balance between minimalism and something else beyond that—­in dialogue with minimalism, but with content. That was always the thing with minimalism, there was no content allowed of course, but only the thing in the space, that was what Sol LeWitt was always about, and Carl Andre—­it was all about avoiding content. I was always very interested in this, right from the beginning, especially with my “Ellipsoids.”33

Chapter 1 Geometries of Lived Perspective

Fig. 29 Isa Genzken, Blau-­grau-­gelbes Hyperbolo “Elbe” (Blue-­ Gray-­Yellow Hyperbolo “Elbe”), 1981. Lacquer on wood. 20 × 20 × 544 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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If content is typically associated with literal or metaphorical depths, the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos bear cultural content on their very surfaces. Their hues skew toward the commercial and conjure product finishes more than sculptural patinas.34 Genzken reflects upon the illegibility of her aims at the moment of their making: Benjamin Buchloh criticized my Ellipsoids for having too much content. He said to me, “You haven’t even understood Carl Andre yet.” I said, “Of course I understand him. But I can hardly try to outdo Carl Andre.” Of course, it was exactly this “content” that I wanted to bring back into the Ellipsoids so that people would say, “It looks like a spear,” or a toothpick, or a boat. This associative aspect was there from the very beginning and was also intentional, but from the viewpoint of minimal art it was absolutely out of the question and simply not modern.35 In this context, we might also understand better Genzken’s affinity with the paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, whose hard-­edged abstraction often derived from “readymade” motifs located in the world.36 It was on the grounds of his works’ referentiality that Kelly hoped to disassociate them from the minimalist works to which they were sometimes compared. ­Illusion, allusion, content, association, referent: distinct as they are in emphasis and in relation to discursive contexts, all of these terms suggest Genzken’s desire to open her work to the world, which includes the body and prior experiences of the viewer, the things that populate everyday life, the history of art and its conventions.

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In a photograph of the artist in her studio in 1982 (fig. 30), we see a band saw to the left and a woodworking bench to the right. On the latter lie assorted instruments and remnants of the working process. Like recumbent bodies in bunks or sculls in a boathouse, an Ellipsoid and three Hyperbolos lie snug in shallow shelves against the right wall. Wood dust and shavings coat the floor. In the center of the room, the top and bottom halves of the more slender member of Rot-­gelb-­schwarzes Doppelellip­ soid “Zwilling” (Red-­Yellow-­Black Double Ellipsoid “Twins,” 1982) balance upon two sawhorses. Genzken, with a look of concentration, grips the upper element with both hands. The tools of woodworking evidence the skills the artist acquired and labor she expended in producing the floor sculptures. “I was also very proud of them because they helped me achieve a level of craftsmanship that many of my American colleagues no longer have,” Genzken says. “With the exception of my outdoor

sculptures I’ve always done everything by hand anyway. I don’t mean to insist that you have to do it that way, but it can’t hurt.” Genzken goes on to cite Construction in Enamel 1, 2, and 3 (1923), abstract paintings that László Moholy-­Nagy claimed to have produced by communicating instructions to an enamel factory via telephone. “That was seen as especially advanced,” she explains. “And it was. But times change, and today everything is outsourced. And it’s also more interesting to develop things yourself.”37 These statements exemplify Genzken’s characteristic lucidity with regard to the historical specificity and economic implications of any particular set of artistic acts. Fundamental to her interest in certain materials, this pursuit of relevance—­an acknowledgement within the structure of making that “times change”—­is the catalyst for the restless transformation of her modes and means over the past four decades.

Fig. 30 Isa Genzken in her studio, Düsseldorf, 1982. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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In the context of 1970s artistic practices, Genzken’s Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos were advanced in two seemingly incompatible ways. Her collaboration with Krotz was a relatively early instance of an artist making recourse to computer technology.38 Genzken has long foregrounded the technical aspects of the floor sculptures, often obtaining from Krotz computer-­generated drawings to exhibit alongside the sculptures they describe.39 These artifacts reinforce the sense of mechanical production induced by the sculptures’ precise curves and immaculate surfaces. In actuality, the making of the sculptures involved a process both highly mediated and unusually direct for advanced art of the period. Genzken produced, by hand, wooden molds corresponding to the dimensions Krotz computed for each ten-­centimeter interval. Pieced together, the segments described the Ellipsoid or Hyperbolo in negative. A wooden form exceeding the overall dimensions was assembled and then pared down to accord with the molds. In this last stage Genzken benefited from the aid of Hermann Hertel, cabinetmaker at the Düsseldorf Academy.40 On the one hand, this reliance upon the artist’s skilled labor stands in contrast to the by-­then commonplace tendency among artists to have components or entire works manufactured—­a tendency pushed to the extreme in conceptual art’s radical deemphasis of the finished object. On the other hand, this time-­consuming, form-­based procedure is remote from the immediacy of certain process-­based postminimalist practices. One might say that Genzken weds traditional craftsmanship with a technophilic position, skirting thereby the pitfalls both of nostalgia and of undue belief in progress. But her embrace of craft and its conventional materials has been ambivalent. In a letter to Krotz dated 27 January 1980, Genzken enthuses about the prospect of using fiberglass to produce the next generation of Hyperbolos. This new material would be sturdier, lighter. The walls of the sculptures could be thinner—­five millimeters for fiberglass, as opposed to ten for wood—­which would render the forms even “faster,” more weightless, and less separable from color. The potential for speedier execution must also have been great. The painstaking, multistep process of producing the wood floor works limited output to two or three per year. But finally, Genzken writes, “As a material, wood has something old-­fashioned about it and it’s possible that the sculptures will now have a technical appearance.”41 The only work to embody this dreamed-­of union of “technical appearance” and technological substance was the aforementioned Grau-­schwarzes ­Hyperbolo “MBB” (1981), made of epoxy resin and fiberglass, and produced in collaboration with the German aerospace company Messerschmitt-­Bölkow-­Blohm.42 Genzken’s tendency to exploit the connotations borne by materials will be explored in subsequent chapters, but here, wood’s character as a “familiar and poetic substance” that speaks to “the humanity of touch,”

in Roland Barthes’s words, needed to be deemphasized.43 “I did it all by hand,” declares Genzken, referring to the work of making the wood Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, “but I wanted them to look—­plop!—­right out of the machine.”44 The desired effect was certainly achieved. But to what end? As early as 1979, Genzken exhibited her floor sculptures in proximity to her Hi-­Fi series (an arrangement often reprised in retrospective groupings of her work; see fig. 25). The series involved rephotographing and enlarging magazine advertisements for high-­end audio equipment, including turntables, cassette decks, and amplifiers. Genzken acknowledges the original context by separating the images of left-­and right-­hand pages with a small gap. The advertisements, predominantly for products by Japanese manufacturers, are polyglot. As Buchloh notes, the pointed selection of international campaigns (in English, German, French, and Japanese) signals the global reach of corporate culture.45 As always, Genzken has one eye on the socioeconomic and political contexts in which her art operates. Indeed, it must do more than operate in these contexts; it must vie for validity within them:

Chapter 1 Geometries of Lived Perspective

When I was photographing the hi-­fi adverts I thought to myself, everyone has one of these towers at home. It’s the latest thing, the most modern equipment available. So a sculpture must be at least as modern and must stand up to it. Then I hung the pictures on the wall and put an Ellipsoid on the floor and thought, the Ellipsoid must be at least as good as this advert. At least as good. That’s how good a modern sculpture has to be. . . . I have always said that with any sculpture you have to be able to say, although this is not a readymade, it could be one. That’s what a sculpture has to look like. It must have a certain relation to reality.46 Positioned in front of the Hi-­Fi series, the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos are expected to stand up both to the graphic power of the advertisement and to the design qualities and technological sophistication of the products pictured.47 The Hi-­Fi series has of late received deserved appreciation as an early instance of appropriation art. What hasn’t been sufficiently examined is the humor and critical edge that Genzken wields with surgical precision against advanced art practices, even those (precisely those) with which she is sympathetic. The surgical procedure is diagnostic, if nothing else. From the red-­and white-­striped background of Technical Research, which recalls Daniel Buren’s signature, to the four consoles lined up at the bottom of Akai (fig. 31), to the bull’s-­eye at the center of the platter in Hitachi, the Hi-­Fi series punningly addresses conceptual art, minimalism, and hard-­edged abstraction. The claims put forth in the Hitachi advert, to present “the clean and simple truth” and to “eliminate all of the

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Fig. 31 Isa Genzken, Akai, 1979. Two black-­ and-­white photographs. 49.5 × 76.9 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York. Fig. 32 Isa Genzken, Pioneer, 1979. Two color photographs in wooden frame. 59 × 92.5 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/ New York.

audio hassle,” find their analogue in formalisms of various kinds (whether Greenbergian or Juddian). Genzken’s demand that “sculpture must be at least as modern and must stand up to” the commodity bears repeating—­ she calls attention to the proximity between good art and good design but does not necessarily decry it. Genzken must have taken particular pleasure in finding Pioneer’s advertisement for its “Magni-­Wide” amplifier. Pioneer (1979; fig. 32) is less visually concise than the others in the series, and I suspect Genzken chose it for its rhetorical strategy rather than its graphic impact. The bold, sans-­serif headline translates to “Discover true three-­dimensional sound with ‘Magni-­Wide’ amplifiers from Pioneer.” The three dimensions of intensity, duration, and frequency are illustrated with a diagram of a mountain range set into a cube. (The mountain range is the ad’s operative metaphor for the experience of sound.) Perhaps it’s too neat to say that this mountain-­in-­cube represents the sculptural traditions, representational and abstract, that Genzken exceeds with her Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos. With characteristic bravado, she seems to say, “Discover true three-­dimensional form with the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos of this artistic pioneer.” In 1982 Genzken produced her first and only unassisted readymade, Weltempfänger (World Receiver; fig. 33), a National Panasonic multiband radio receiver. Not surprisingly, perhaps, it marked a pivot, if not an about-­face, between the supremely elegant floor sculptures and the crude and crusty plasters she began the next year. This shift is typically narrated as a turn toward the spontaneous and formless after the mediation and exactitude required by the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos. That’s undeniable. But perhaps the confrontation with the readymade in its pure form revealed the absurdity, richly productive though it was, of planing wood to resemble objects extruded—­“plop!”—­from a machine.

Fig. 33 Isa Genzken, Weltempfänger (World Receiver), 1982. Multiband radio receiver. 37 × 51 × 20 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

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2 Make Life Beautiful! In 1985 Isa Genzken produced a sculpture entitled Neubau, which literally translates to “new building” or “new construction.” It came toward the end of a series of plaster works she initiated as a sort of antidote to the floor sculptures: releasing herself from the laborious and protracted process of making the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, Genzken exploited the quick-­drying medium and its capacity to be carved, cast, and aggregated. She had begun her exploration of this new immediacy the year before with organic, grottolike accretions such as Müllberg (Pile of Rubbish; fig. 34). As its title suggests, Müllberg is aggressively disparate in its makeup: embedded in the plaster matrix are bits of yellowed paper, angular shards of metal, fraying burlap, and salvaged chunks of hardened plaster. Yet the title belies a perceptible structure, for this “pile” ­describes an interior space left by the objects around which Genzken built up the plaster mound. Fissures and an explicitly tunnel-­like opening offer a glimpse inside. By the next year Genzken had streamlined her plaster forms and transitioned to vertical, planar structures that emphasize the right angle. In their contours and proportions, and in their titles, they reference modernist skyscrapers. Ming Pei (1985; fig. 35), named after the Chinese-­born American architect I. M. Pei, for instance, features two vertical corner pieces, one nested in the other. Such partial delineation is sufficient to suggest architecture—­ slight overhangs conjure horizontal planes (roofs or ceilings)—­and even to evoke specific design conventions like setbacks. The works in this vein may be seen to recall Kazimir Malevich’s fantastical Architektons, also made of plaster beginning in the early 1920s, though next to Genzken’s deliberately rough and ruinous constructions his suprematist sculptures-­cum-­models seem nearly ornate in their configurations of small cubic volumes.

Fig. 34 Isa Genzken, Müllberg (Pile of Rubbish), 1984. Plaster, metal, paper, cloth. 42 × 42 × 47 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

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At 67 centimeters high, 34 wide, and 17 deep, Neubau (fig. 36) can be described as a shaft, closed at one end. One of the long walls is ­substantial, smooth, and cleanly finished, with squared edges and corners. Its facing wall, by contrast, is thinner and marked with uneven depressions, indices of the mold. Projecting further out, the ragged margin of this facing wall is emphasized. In the context of architecture and urban planning in Germany in the postwar and reconstruction contexts, “Neubau” was not a neutral descriptor. Neubauten took the form of large-­scale, high-­rise housing developments, often made from prefabricated elements, and stood in contrast to Altbauten, prewar dwellings, as exemplified by Berlin’s notorious Mietskaserne (rental barracks). Neubauten adhered to a narrow understanding of the legacy of Neues Bauen, utopian modernist architecture of the prewar and interwar periods that ranged in style from the expressionism of Bruno Taut to the rigorous geometries of Mies van der Rohe. Despite the diversity of aesthetics articulated by Neues Bauen, the style and practices propagated by the Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) became the default mode for Neubauten: unornamented façades; strict cubic volumes; functionalist separation between work, living, and recreational areas; nondifferentiation between buildings and the units within them.1 In both East and West Germany of the 1960s, massive “satellite cities” of Neubauten rose up in an attempt to address housing shortages.2 The efficacy of the Neubauten was already a topic of intense argument by the late 1960s, and it continued to be a flashpoint in the debates around the construction of public space for decades following. Genzken’s photobook Berlin, 1973 attests her attentiveness to these issues from the very beginning of her career. In seventy-­eight black-­and-­ white, high-­contrast photographs mounted to cardboard, Genzken takes a pedestrian’s view of West Berlin of the late 1960s and early 1970s, documenting the contradictions, transitions, and banalities written on its surfaces. The impassive façades of Neubauten and the ornamented mullions, lintels, and pediments of Altbauten repeatedly confront one another on facing pages (fig. 37). The Märkisches Viertel, a satellite city begun in 1963 on the outskirts of West Berlin, features prominently; its exteriors are perused, its massive blocks surveyed from the wastelands surrounding it, its vacant playgrounds noted (fig. 38). Benjamin ­Buchloh’s assessment of the contents of Berlin, 1973 hits the mark: “Shown are the shards and derelict remnants of Berlin’s self-­destruction as well as the city’s brutalist and hastily inflicted attempts to present itself as a new concrete metropolis distanced from the horrors of the recent past.”3 Indeed, the old and the new seem strangely of a piece in Genzken’s stark, monochromatic vision.

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Fig. 35 Isa Genzken, Ming Pei, 1985. Painted plaster. 63 × 31 × 16 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/ New York. Fig. 36 Isa Genzken, Neubau (New Construction), 1985. Painted plaster. 67 × 34 × 17 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken.

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Fig. 37 Isa Genzken, Berlin, 1973, 1973 (detail). Artist’s book prototype: 78 black-­ and-­white photographs mounted on cardboard, adhesive tape. 19.5 × 31 × 8.5 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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Returning to Genzken’s Neubau, one might ask: Does its juxtaposition of a thick, rectilinear slab and a differentiated surface in a state of deterioration amount to a contrast between new and old construction? Does it suggest the fate of Neubauten, the decay of which began almost immediately? Can we detect in it Genzken’s position vis-­à-­vis urban planning and building policies of West Germany in the 1960s and 70s? Can we read the work as a rumination upon the utopianism of Neues Bauen, a legacy carried forth by architects like Minoru Yamasaki (architect of the former World Trade Center) and Pei, both cited in this sculptural series? As a work of art, and not a work of exposition, Neubau remains richly ambiguous. What cannot be doubted, however, is that with the Plasters Genzken takes up, in the medium of sculpture, the ramifications of built space and of the legacies of modernist, utopian architecture—­themes she has plumbed time and again in the three decades since. This chapter traces the development of this thematic, which, in Genzken’s work of the 1980s and early 1990s, finds its context in the ongoing architectural and economic reconstruction of West Germany, and West Berlin in particular. By the turn of the millennium, Genzken’s scope broadens to include the unstoppable force of global capitalism and the specter of terrorism. The onus of this chapter is to elucidate how these urgent historical realities are reworked and worked through in Genzken’s sculptural motifs, means, and materials. Sometime in 1985, Genzken must have realized that to confront these issues thoroughly and structurally, a change of materials and processes would be necessary. Plaster has long played a role in art-­making practices: as substrate for fresco painting, as material for modeling, as

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an intermediary in the casting process, and as a medium of sculptural reproduction. Genzken abandoned these fine art associations when she turned to concrete, entirely associated with the business of building. This shift in material was concomitant with a crucial shift in sculptural conception, if not sculptural integrity. For, though the Plasters allude to architecture, they do so morphologically—­which is to say, by creating the overall impression of architectural form. One might argue that the Plasters, compelling as they are, remain pictorial. Genzken’s attention to their surfaces confirms this: the Plasters are scored with marks derived from the lexicon of drawing—­hatching and cross-­hatching, scumbling, and scribbles—­as are the variegated washes of gray pigment that give them their evocative tone. A comparison with the remarkably beautiful series of ink and pencil drawings Genzken made in 1987 (fig. 39), rarely reproduced or exhibited, reveals this same lexicon deployed in its native medium—­to greater effect, I would argue. Out of pools of velvety black, sweeps of gray, and muscular strokes of graphite, vertiginous views down alleys, corridors, and urban canyons come into being. As with the Plasters, the titles of the Concretes (1986–­1990) indicate architectural reference points—­Zimmer (Room), Halle (Hall), Kirche (Church), Hochhaus (High-­rise), Durchgang (Passageway), Bühne (Stage), Tür (Door)—­though the works seldom mimic the morphology of the designated architectural type. And like the Plasters, the Concretes feature on their surfaces subtle gray gradations, tinged with brown or blue: dove, ash, lead, silver, pewter. But here the similarities end. The differentiations in the Concretes’ surfaces are not, for the most part, applied, whether as drawn incisions or as washes of color, but result from the chemical

Fig. 38 Isa Genzken, Berlin, 1973, 1973 (detail). Artist’s book prototype: 78 black-­and-­white photographs mounted on cardboard, adhesive tape. 19.5 × 31 × 8.5 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/ New York.

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Fig. 39 Isa Genzken, 1987, Dez. (1987, Dec.), 1987. Graphite and ink. 41.6 × 29.5 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Fig. 40 Benjamin Katz, Isa Genzken, Atelier, Cologne, 1987. © Benjamin Katz. Digital image courtesy Benjamin Katz.

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and physical processes of mixing, curing, and casting the material. The Concretes are impressed by wood and sometimes Styrofoam molds, speckled and streaked with uneven sediment, tinged with residues from releasing agents, and pockmarked with air pockets. The casting process is traditionally associated with the production of multiples, but Genzken built unique molds from fragments of wood and construction materials salvaged from the street (fig. 40).4 Into these molds she poured concrete in uneven strata, giving rise to the horizontal breaks that mitigate, to an

extent, the intimidating effect of overall mass. Indeed, Genzken’s artful modification of the number and thickness of strata, varying across the planes or sections of a single work, animates the whole with rhythmic energy (fig. 41). The relation of these strata, which, in most of the finished works, rest one upon the next without mortar or connective armature, expresses a fundamental, one might say primordial, architectural procedure in which “mass and volume are conjointly formed through the repetitious piling up of heavyweight elements.”5 Herein lies the leap Genzken makes between the Plasters and the Concretes: whereas the former remain essentially pictorial, the latter are emphatically architectonic, embodying the logic of load, compression, and equilibrium fundamental to building. They do not describe architecture so much as share its structural logic, what Genzken has called “the rational thinking of the engineers.”6 The greater structural integrity allows Genzken to explore the spatial logic that architecture shares with sculpture. With the exception of a few early examples, the rectilinear Concretes are never sealed or solid but instead roofless partitions that delineate space. (The multiple views in Berlin, 1973 of the sky framed and “carved out” by edifices, which rise up on all sides, suggest a preoccupation with openings rather than enclosures.) Breaks in the outer walls reveal dark corridors and niches partially lit by slanting rays that snag on concrete ridges. The pleasures of parallax are economically produced, as a walk around the sculpture opens up new, previously unmappable lines of sight. The formal aspects of Genzken’s works often prompt the viewer to read them as models—­this would be palpable even without titles designating them as building types or elements. But Genzken is not invested in rendering architectural detail in miniature; instead, with her characteristic sculptural acuity, she evokes architectural form without actually reproducing it: the contours, proportions, massing, surface ­effects, and tectonics of a given sculpture induce the viewer to recognize the architectural. (In this, Genzken is aided by modernism’s tendency to favor structural and tectonic organization of basic geometries over the merely ornamental.) This perception is additionally encouraged by the sculptures’ placement at eye level, which the artist orchestrates by designing her own pedestals. The Concretes are lifted into the line of sight, with the effect that the viewer’s body is implicated in the gaze as it navigates interstices and occasionally encounters corners that cannot be turned. Photographs of architectural models have long capitalized on the monumentalizing effect of this point of view in order to render convincing images of unbuilt, or unbuildable, structures.7 An iconic example would be the image of the model of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s second Glass

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Fig. 41 Isa Genzken, Tür (Door), 1988. Concrete, steel. 235 × 120 × 75 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

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Fig. 42 Mies van der Rohe, Glass Skyscraper Project, view of the model, 1921. Gelatin silver print. 11.7 × 8.9 cm. Mies van der Rohe Archive, gift of the architect. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­ Kunst, Bonn. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/­ Licensed by SCALA/ Art ­Resource, NY.

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Skyscraper of 1922, published in Bruno Taut’s journal Frühlicht. Taken from a low perspective, looking up, the photograph grants Mies’s visionary, unrealizable building a material and monumental presence in space (fig. 42).8 If Genzken’s sculptures can be said to be models, they come closest to the category of “conceptual model,” to which the Mies glass model belongs.9 They are neither studies nor promotional aids toward the realization of a built edifice but serve to realize ideas. They differ from Mies’s model in that the latter was primarily conceived to be mediated through photography; Genzken’s “models” are resolutely meant to be experienced in the round. Arthur Drexler, curator and director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art from 1951 to 1987, once warned of the seductive power of the model: “But when the primary object of the architect’s deliberations is the model itself, the ‘real’ building stands to it in the interesting but superfluous relationship of a giant copy of an egg to its miniature original.”10 Drexler calls for architects to reorient themselves to the task of building and away from the fetishization of the “miniature original”—­or, put another way, to stop treating the model as a sculpture.11 For the sculptor, however, the autonomous model presents the possibility of achieving the effects of architectural scale without the sometimes oppressive impact of architectural size. Regarding the concrete works, Genzken avers with no small amount of pride, “I can make relatively small sculptures that go on to attain a large, relative monumentality. That’s a rare attribute. It never has a 1:1 ­effect, but the quality of a model. The true size is only realized in the viewer’s imagination.”12 Indeed, perceived monumentality, engendered by the artist’s careful calibrations with regard to sculptural form and viewer address, is one of the startling achievements of Genzken’s oeuvre. But Genzken sells herself short with this claim. In declaring that the sculptures never read as 1:1, she fails to account for the full complexity of scale in her works. On the one hand, they may be seen to conjure ruins, gaping structures that speak of monuments succumbed to the ravages of nature and time—­though, ultimately, it may be more historically apt to think of the Concretes in terms of Robert Smithson’s antiromantic “ruins in reverse,” which “don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather

rise into ruin before they are built.”13 On the other hand, as concrete clasts they are life-­size. Thus, our understanding of them shifts from part to whole (albeit a whole on the path to parts), and back again.14 For Robert Morris, the ruin straddled the sculptural and the architectural, a condition of liminality that aptly describes Genzken’s works. Morris writes, “But whether the gigantic voids of the Baths of Caracalla or the tight chambers and varying levels of Mesa Verde, such places occupy a zone that is neither strictly a collection of objects nor an architectural space.”15 Additional conflicting meanings inhere in the sculptures’ material. Sigfried Giedion wrote in 1928 of concrete’s nearly alchemical promise:

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From slender iron rods, cement, sand, and gravel, from an “aggregate body,” vast building complexes can suddenly crystallize into a single stone monolith that like no previously known natural material is able to resist fire and a maximum load. This is accomplished because the laboratory intelligently exploits the properties of these almost worthless materials and through their combination increases their separate capacities many times over.16 But even as concrete evokes early and mid-­twentieth-­century utopian aspirations for air-­and light-­filled spaces, and even as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles compellingly reimagined flexible mass housing in undisguised concrete, we have now come to know it better for its degraded manifestation in postwar low-­income housing the world over. The immediate referent in Germany would be the ubiquitous prefabricated concrete-­slab structures (Plattenbauten) built beginning in the 1960s throughout the Federal Republic of Germany and, in even greater numbers, the German Democratic Republic. Construed in conflicting ideological terms, and responding to the distinct economic and political realities of the two countries, the prefabricated, high-­rise complexes nevertheless gave rise to similar problems.17 Detractors decried the monotony of the resulting landscapes, the developments’ lack of infrastructure, and the privileging of economic factors above actual living conditions.18 If Genzken’s sculptures cite concrete’s utopian promise, their bulky masses aspiring to lightness on thin legs, they simultaneously bring home the failure of architects and urban planners to make good on that promise. As we shall see, utopianism in Genzken’s work cannot be pried apart from its perversion.19 But if cynicism is one possible and common response to utopianism’s corruption, Genzken seems unwilling to abandon its original optimism entirely. Indeed, a dialectical awareness (often expressed in her sculptures as friction, oscillation, or instability) can be seen as her project’s activating energy. Buchloh writes that Genzken’s sculptural work in concrete “insists

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conspicuously and consistently on addressing the collective conditions of existing in architecture.”20 One might add that she shows those collective conditions to be deeply conflicted. In Genzken’s works the same stony face of concrete reads variously as Smithsonian ruins in reverse, Brutalist Je-­m’en-­foutisme, Corbusian harmony and airiness, Neubau drab, and Giedionesque technological optimism. The suggestive power of her sculptural practice lies precisely in its richness of reference ­irreducible to a single position. Hers is an exploration of those positions and possibilities as they are active in the present—­as legacies to be reckoned with, tested against one another, deployed, or transformed. More specifically, in the case of the concrete series and the New Buildings for Berlin, begun in 2001 and revisited in 2002, 2004, and 2014, the present to be explored was Germany’s in the decades leading up to and after reunification. Like the Plattenbauten, die Berliner Mauer (the Berlin Wall)—­first a literal barrier and then, post-­1989, a differently insurmountable “wall in the mind”—­can be seen as an unavoidable referent for Genzken’s concrete works, executed between 1986 and 1990.21 Here again the structural logic of the Concretes signifies, for compressive blocks constitute Mauern rather than Wände.22 The barrier erected in August 1961 was a drastic solution (a manifestly and violently physical one) to heightened political conflict between the Western allies and the Soviets over the status of Berlin. It was also a measure to halt the tide of East German emigration to the West, for which Berlin served as gateway. But for architect Rem Koolhaas, to encounter the Berlin Wall was to be confronted not by a political situation but by “architecture’s true nature”: Were not division, enclosure (i.e., imprisonment), and exclusion—­ which defined the wall’s performance and explained its efficiency—­ the essential stratagems of any architecture? In comparison, the sixties dream of architecture’s liberating potential—­in which I had been marinating for years as a student—­seemed feeble rhetorical play. It evaporated on the spot.23

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Koolhaas’s account is yet another narrative of the potential dissolution of a utopian outlook in the face of reality. Wolf Vostell, décollagist and Fluxus artist, deployed concrete in his works precisely as a “visual principle” of psychological and sociopolitical hardening: In our reality concrete is no longer a value-­free material. Concrete isolates and divides people. Concrete hides and conceals, and in the end it will become the symbol of the petrification of a hopeless situation. The concrete of the Wall weighs invisibly, but all the heavier,

on all the people who deal with this phenomenon or who are affected by disaster.24

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Vostell’s acts of Betonierung (“concreting”) render invisible burdens ­visible and emphatically physical, whether by embedding automobiles in concrete, thereby permanently halting them, or by augmenting photo­ graphs of cityscapes to include monumental obstructions. Genzken is keenly aware of dystopian realities, but her deployment of concrete is not fatalistic in tone. In their fissured and ruined states, Genzken’s sculptures suggest a rupture of circumscribed space and a breakdown of ­inside and outside. Rather than instantiate division, enclosure, or concealment, her Mauern yield to the gaze. The distinctly Styrofoam-­ textured interior of Rosa Zimmer (Pink Room, 1987), for instance, blushes with a light coat of pink spray paint. Variously tinted, textured, and embellished with colored-­tile inclusions, many of the Concretes announce their interiority—­sculptural, architectural, and, by implication, psychological—­and share it with the viewer.

— Rapidly removed, auctioned, or chipped into memento-­ready chunks, little was left of the Berlin Wall by 1991. In its absence a large swath of no-­man’s-­land cut through the center of the city, from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz, Leipziger Platz, and beyond.25 The voids were destined to be patched in a rushed and uncoordinated manner, with corporate entities and private developers vying for spots in the new Weltstadt (world city or cosmopolis). Potsdamer Platz, a thriving center until it was devastated in World War II, had been reduced to a barren periphery by the erection of the Wall.26 The fall of the Wall prompted frantic efforts to reinstate it as the symbolic center of Berlin. Already in the months before the fall of the Wall, Berlin’s city government negotiated the sale of fifteen acres of Potsdamer Platz to Daimler-­Benz at a fraction of market value. The controversial sale was finalized in 1990, and site work began in 1992 in accordance with architect Renzo Piano’s prizewinning scheme. Only around 1995 were structures seen above­ ground.27 The Daimler-­Benz building was finished in 1998 and the Sony headquarters in 2000, with other buildings in progress over the next few years. Friedrichstadt Passagen, Checkpoint Charlie, and Alexanderplatz were also reenvisioned as commercial and corporate centers in these years. The first of these, Friedrichstadt Passagen, was built with considerable leeway in regards to design and materials, following the dictates of Berlinische Architektur, a policy of conservative and illusory historicism upheld by the Senate Building director, Hans Stimmann. Architectural historian Francesca Rogier summarizes the policy thus:

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Berlinische Architektur, an allusion to classical convention, is a homogenization of Prussian tradition blended with the severe architecture of the Third Reich. . . . Berlinische Architektur is, in practice, a rudimentary formula of closed, squat volumes with cornice lines at twenty-­two meters and roofs no higher than thirty meters; sober punched-­window façades, restrained ornament if any, and preferably drab materials such as stucco or stone.28 Alexanderplatz, with little surviving “historic fabric,” was exempted from these regulations. (Its more recent history as the rebuilt center of East Berlin was all too readily dismissed.) Against the bitter protest of community groups, big business representatives dominating the Alexanderplatz jury rallied behind Hans Kollhoff and Helga Timmerman’s winning scheme, which proposed the construction of thirteen high-­rises and garnered the nickname “Little Manhattan.”29 Critics have described the post-­Wall refashioning of Berlin, with faux historicism on the one hand and anonymous corporate architecture on the other, as the making of a theme park, media city, and Schaustelle (site of viewing and spectacle); as a sign of willed ignorance of ­Germany’s Weimar-­era legacy of advanced architecture by figures like Mies, Taut, and Walter Gropius; as a troubled reckoning with the Nazi past; and as a promulgation of fictionalized notions of a European city of uniform building structures.30 It is against this backdrop of architecture as image and reconstruction as spectacle, in the Debordian sense of a pseudo-­reality of signs, that we must see Genzken’s series New Buildings for Berlin (fig. 43). Rectangular strips of jewel-­toned, clear, and textured glass, eighty centimeters high, lean one against another like streamlined descendants of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919), or Richard Serra prop pieces made luminous (if precarious) skyscrapers. But are these Serras made luminous or Serra “lite”? Serra’s meticulous architectonics of gravity and weight hold hefty slabs and plates in perfect suspension—­and we feel this tension. Genzken’s New Buildings, by contrast, are held together with silicone adhesive. The atectonic nature of these “props” is pointed, given her fluency, evident in the Concretes, with the logic of compressive mass; here she pays homage even as she travesties Serra’s work, taking to task the hyper­masculine tendencies and blue-­collar pretensions of some of the rhetoric surrounding it.31 Parsing the historical forms of parody, French literary theorist Gérard Genette defines travesty as the stylistic translation of a heroic idiom into a base, more familiar one, while the content remains ostensibly the same. “Travesty,” he observes, “may be turned, depending on context and tone, into either a derisive buffoonery or a subtly ambiguous

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Fig. 43 Isa Genzken, New Buildings for Berlin, 2004. Glass, silicone, wooden pedestals. One of five parts, each 220 × 60 × 45 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/ New York.

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Fig. 44 Isa Genzken, Soziale Fassade (Social Façade), 2002. Metal, plastic, metal foil. 70 × 100 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York. Fig. 45 Joseph Beuys, We Won’t Do It without the Rose, 1972. Offset print. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-­ Reisinger Museum, Willy and Charlotte Reber Collection, Gift of Charlotte Reber, 1996.155. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn. Imaging Department, © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

glorification. Parodic incongruity is a bifid weapon, a form in search of a function.”32 For Genzken, the function of travesty resides in its capacity to generate evaluative distance from the oeuvres, aesthetic principles, and utopian motivations of her avant-­garde predecessors (as well as more recent ones), even as it draws them nearer to the present.33 Take for instance Tatlin’s Corner Reliefs (1915) reimagined as Schwule Babys (Gay Babies, 1997), flaccid, jangling mobiles of mangled cake pans, rakes, and other housewares. Or the floor-­bound contortions of one of Genzken’s Schauspieler (Actors, 2013), which makes grotesque comedy out of the pathos of Aristide Maillol’s The River (begun 1938).34 Another example: observe Genzken’s Soziale Fassaden (Social ­Façades, begun 2002; fig. 44), panels of mirror foil in saturated color and disco-­ready finishes, which suggest gleeful perversions and amped-­up iterations of abstraction’s opticality. Gridded foil taunts the stoic modernist grid; the purported nonreferentiality of geometric ­abstraction gives way to glittering façades; and sublime uplift is trumped by the specular ecstasy of the dance hall and club culture.35 Moreover, imperfect application of the foil creates visual hiccups and distortions in the flow of reflections—­ literal cracks in the image surface. Or consider her public sculpture Rose, an eight-­meter-­t all stainless steel, aluminum, and lacquer rose, which could be read as a kitschy, banal, and ludicrous literalization of Beuysian utopianism, à la Rose for Direct Democracy, in which a fresh bloom in a graduated cylinder enlivened each of the hundred days of Documenta 5 in 1972 (figs. 45 and 46). Beuys writes, “Bud and bloom are in fact green leaves transformed. So in relation to the leaves and the stem the bloom is a revolution, although it grows through organic transformation and evolution.”36 The revolution is ­arrested in Genzken’s Rose (1993), a steely column memorializing the loss of transformative potential, a public punch line to Beuys’s outsized romanticism. And yet it remains generous somehow. With sculptural i­ntelligence and finely honed wit, Genzken balances her objects on the line between homage and ridicule—­a line she shows to be remarkably fine.

Fig. 46 Isa Genzken, Rose, 1993/1997. Stainless steel, aluminum, lacquer. Height 800 cm. Outdoor project for Leipzig Fair on the occasion of Re­ alisation. Kunst in der Leipziger Messe, 1997. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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In Genzken’s mode of strategic irreverence—­“downgrading” is ­ enette’s word—­historical paragons are brought down to size, which G is to say, made manageable, made productive rather than inhibitive for creating work in the present and of the present. One might frame this reduction as a matter of scale. Revolutionary aspirations; expansive rhetoric; faith in the supposedly pure, self-­referential, or rational forms of geometry; optimism with regard to art’s relationship with politics: all are diminished to reflect the situation of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries, in which modernist utopianism is untenable because decidedly ahistorical. Reduced in scale, the heroic is open to scrutiny, its shortcomings more readily grasped.

—

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In a 2006 monograph on Genzken, the artist chose to publish Charles Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Bad Glazier,” from his collection Petits poèmes en prose, alongside reproductions of 2004 versions of New Buildings for Berlin. The poem begins, “There exist characters, purely contemplative and completely unsuited for action, who, however, influenced by a mysterious and unknown impulse, sometimes act with a speed of which they would not have believed themselves capable.”37 The poem’s speaker proceeds to relate instances of “harmless dreamers” “abruptly hurled into action by an irresistible force,” finding an “excess of courage for executing the most absurd and often even the most dangerous acts.” He ends by recounting his own brush with demonic inspiration. Flinging open his window to the grimy Parisian air, he hears the discordant cry of a glazier hawking his wares. “Seized by a hatred for this pitiful man as sudden as it was despotic,” the narrator calls the glazier up to his room, up seven flights of narrow stairs. Examining the fragile wares, the speaker cries in disbelief, “What? You have no colored panes? No pink panes, no red, no blue, no magic panes, no panes of paradise? You are shameless! You dare walk through poor neighborhoods, and you don’t even have panes which make life beautiful!” Having wrestled his wares back down to the street, the disgruntled glazier is knocked on his back by a falling flowerpot, his precious cargo crushed. The narrator, perpetrator of this senseless violence, recalls, “drunk with my madness, I shouted at him furiously, ‘Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!’” Whether or not Baudelaire’s poem directly proposed the terms for New Buildings for Berlin, it describes an aesthetic attitude critical for understanding Genzken’s work, and particularly its development into the twenty-­first century. Baudelaire deftly illustrates that the call for beauty and for life’s betterment is interwoven with violence, irrationality,

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Fig. 47 Mies van der Rohe, Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project, Berlin-­Mitte, Germany, perspective of northeast corner, 1921. Charcoal and graphite on brown paper, mounted on board. 173 × 122 cm. Mies van der Rohe Archive, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the architect. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­ Kunst, Bonn. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

and intoxication (ivresse); that the dystopian inheres in its more idealistic opposite; and that advocacy may erupt in antagonism. Baudelaire describes the clamor of the glazier’s shattered glass as “the brilliant sound of a crystal palace smashed by lightning,” a likely reference to the Crystal Palace built for the 1851 London exhibition. Scholars have extended the link to the rapid changes to the Parisian u ­ rban fabric brought about by Baron Haussmann’s impetus to modernize, sanitize, and make rational the medieval city.38 Genzken’s affinity with “The

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Bad Glazier” allows us further to relate the wholesale reconfiguration of Baudelaire’s Paris to the reenvisioned Stadtbild (cityscape) of reconstruction and post-­Wall Berlin. In the context of the Friedrichstadt Passagen development, with its strictures of false historicism, Genzken’s glass sculptures also raise the specter of Mies’s 1921 competition entry for Berlin’s first skyscraper, designed to be built on Friedrichstrasse (fig. 47). Mies’s crystalline structure, with its expressionist, skyward thrust, ­bespoke a utopian belief in transparency brought about by technology: steel construction would free the glass walls from their load-­bearing function. Mies’s fascination with “the rich interplay of light reflections” is mirrored in the shifting perspectives offered to the ambulatory viewer of Genzken’s New Buildings, which additionally offer the delights of layered colors and texture’s subtle distortions. Genzken could be said to give us a ­ ision taste of glass architecture as figured in Paul Scheerbart’s ecstatic v of “the earth . . . adorned with sparkling jewels and enamels.”39 Writing in the 1910s, Scheerbart imagined the opening out of living spaces by introducing glass architecture, which lets in the light of the sun, the moon, and the stars . . . through every possible wall, which will be made entirely of glass—­of coloured glass. The new environment, which we thus create, must bring us a new culture. . . . We should then have paradise on earth, and not need to watch in longing expectation for the paradise in heaven.40

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Does this call for cultural change through the liberating effects of colored glass remind us of Baudelaire’s narrator, who demands that the glazier remake the world with rose-­tinted lenses? (“No colored panes . . . no magic panes, no panes of paradise?” he cries.) In Baudelaire’s poem, deliberate irrationality and perversion quickly become nastiness; soon prismatic hopes shatter into shards. In Genzken’s New Buildings for Berlin, too, we begin to wonder if the glittering facets of color circumscribe emptiness. Whereas elevation views of the sculptures can give the overall impression of ethereal wholes, their floor plans (really “pedestal plans”) suggest staccato configurations driven by centrifugal force. Thus, even as Genzken’s kaleidoscopic towers evoke glass architecture’s utopian promises, they reflect the evacuation of Miesian optimism and rigor from the ubiquitous curtain walls of anonymous corporate structures such as those rising rapidly at Alexanderplatz and elsewhere in the city. Dan Graham, an artist Genzken admires and whom she befriended, has described the literal transparency of glass as a “paradoxical camouflage” for corporate interests: “for while the actual function of a corporation may be to concentrate its self-­contained power and control by secreting information, its architectural façade gives the illusion of absolute open-

ness.”41 Taking Genzken’s title literally, for a moment, might we suspect that her “buildings” offer us pure veneer, devoid of function or program? If, as architect Dagmar Richter perceives, Berlin will become the first state-­organized media city of surface,” surpassing even “our expectations of Las Vegas, Disney, and City Walk,” do Genzken’s glass façades reflect the apotheosis of image culture, of surface pure and simple?42 Does Scheerbart’s vision of culture reconfigured by glass architecture metamorphose into the nightmare of a thoroughly mediated culture, in which light-­filtering glass darkens and becomes the ubiquitous, image-­ dispersing LCD screen? Does Genzken show glass to be a cut-­rate substitute for genuine “sparkling jewels”? Consider her condemnation of the flimsiness of post-­Wall architecture in Berlin:

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The awful thing about architecture here is that everything, almost everything, is done in the cheapest construction style, the cheapest. They don’t make sure people use the best materials, they just use what’s cheapest. Just look at Potsdamer Platz, it’s like a piece of scenery!43 The demonstrably atectonic nature of the New Buildings for Berlin renders them no more substantial than stage flats.

— Hal Foster has diagnosed the recent trend among star architects to wed literal and phenomenological transparency into sculptural preciousness: Sometimes . . . skins and scrims only dazzle or confuse, and the architecture becomes an illuminated sculpture, a radiant jewel. It can be beautiful, but it can also be spectacular in the negative sense used by Guy Debord—­a kind of commodity fetish on a grand scale, a mysterious object whose production is mystified.44 This potential (and for Foster, problematic) conflation of architecture, sculpture, and commodity seems crucial for mapping the turn that Genzken’s architectonic work takes at the beginning of the millennium. One should note, however, that already in Berlin, 1973 she had implicitly posited an inextricable relation between architecture (reconstruction, urban planning, urban renewal), the commodity, and the ways each promoted an illusory sense of progress. Not quite halfway through the photo­book, Genzken turns her attention from the façades of edifices to their storefronts, homing in on signage, advertising, and window displays. From television sets to liquor, housewares to baked goods,

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Fig. 48 Isa Genzken, Berlin, 1973, 1973 (detail). Artist’s book prototype: 78 black-­and-­white photographs mounted on cardboard, adhesive tape. 19.5 × 31 × 8.5 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York. Fig. 49 Isa Genzken, Fuck the Bauhaus #2, 2000. Plywood, plastic, paper, cardboard, plastic flowers, stones, tape, model trees, toy car. 210 × 70 × 51 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

the bounty of the West German boom years is on exhibit. (All is not untroubled, of course, for inflation rates were high in the early 1970s, and the oil crisis was on the horizon.) The sequence of images progresses from tableaux of women’s shoes and men’s outerwear to arrays of identical units of laundry detergent and fabric softener. While the former may yet seem quaintly reminiscent of Atget’s documents of a fading fin-desiècle Paris, the latter bespeak pop art’s assimilation of the logic of consumer capitalism. Emblazoned with hexafoil logos and tightly stacked in grid formation, boxes of Ariel detergent promise convenience, cleanliness, and abundance even as they betray overwhelming monotony (fig. 48). At roughly the same moment Genzken created the prismatic New Buildings for Berlin, she was increasingly turning toward mass-­produced objects as the building blocks for a distinct assemblage aesthetic. Just a year prior, in 2000, she had strapped together a pizza box and the remnants of a shopping bag, topping off the structure with a Gehry-­esque flourish of construction site netting (fig. 49); arrayed plastic containers, clipboards, and a Slinky to resemble a madcap high-­rise, set beside the dome of an overturned light fixture (fig. 50); stacked metal discs and a propeller into an ensemble that seems as ready to topple as to take flight; and named the series to which these works belong Fuck the Bau­ haus (New Buildings for New York) (2000). The title’s irreverence is more than earned in sculptural terms. Seeming to stem from impulse rather than analysis of form or material, governed neither by the craft emphasis

of the early years of the Bauhaus nor by the technological optimism of its later years, the flamboyant polychromy, cheap materials, gratuitous ornamentation, and slapdash construction of Genzken’s sculptures flout the considerations of good design that have come to be synonymous with the Bauhaus aesthetic. Indeed, a work like Fuck the Bauhaus #3 wears its bad design like a badge of honor. Its component panes of green and blue glass and sheets of board—­the latter encrusted with oyster shells—­are hinged to one another with colored tape messily applied. The same adhesive seems to be the only means by which the vertical components are anchored to the pane of glass that serves as their support. It is a wonder that the structure stands erect at all. Its unruly combination of elements, so tenuously constructed and blatantly anti-­ aesthetic, can barely be grasped in the mind as a coherent composition. As models for “new buildings,” the six works in the Fuck the Bau­ haus series defy the conventions that have come to be understood—­or misunderstood—­as a coherent “Bauhaus style” of architecture, which already in 1930 one commentator had reduced to “houses with lots of glass and shining metal” featuring “smooth white walls, horizontal walls of windows, spacious terraces and flat roofs.”45 If Genzken’s sculptural series were merely a flippant dismissal based upon some version of this ossified reception, Fuck the Bauhaus would be amusing but forgettable. To the contrary, I would argue that Genzken’s nuanced assessment of a range of sculptural and architectural experiments conducted at the Bauhaus belies the series’ brash title. Here again, I invoke Genette’s characterization of travesty as a “bifid weapon,” involving both ridicule and homage. Take, for instance, Fuck the Bauhaus #4, in which the exploration of transparent volumes—­literally transparent in the case of the red plastic column, and as circumscribed by the Slinky—­can be traced to László Moholy-­Nagy’s sustained interest in the spatial-­compositional possibilities and visual effects of glass and plastic. Scholars have noted a formal resemblance and posited a specific reference to Moholy’s Nickel Sculpture of 1921: both works feature helices projecting from atop prominent vertical elements. But where Moholy’s polished nickel spiral suggests a propulsive movement upward in the contraction of its rings, Genzken’s sad Slinky only droops. The dynamic motion suggested by the spiral form—­exploited not only in Moholy’s work but emblematically in Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International—­is here diminished, made banal in a child’s plaything, and a frustrated one, at that. As specimens of fantastic or “visionary” architecture (though the connotations of the latter may ultimately be too grand), Genzken’s New Buildings for New York also bear relation to Herbert Bayer’s striking schemes from 1923–­1924 for multimedia kiosks and display structures. Neither Bayer’s designs nor Genzken’s models were meant to be built.

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Fig. 50 Isa Genzken, Fuck the Bauhaus #4, 2000. Plywood, Plexiglas, plastic, clipboards, aluminum light shade, flower petals, tape, printed paper, shells, model tree. 224 × 77 × 61 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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Fig. 51 Herbert Bayer, Design for a News­paper Kiosk, 1924. Tempera and collage on paper. 64.5 × 34.5 cm. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn. Digital image courtesy Bauhaus-­ Archiv Berlin. Photo: Hermann Kiessling.

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In Bayer’s de Stijl–­influenced designs, intersecting planes and geometric volumes, painted in bold, primary hues, exert graphic power enhanced by the addition of collage elements (fig. 51). In Design for a Newspaper ­Kiosk, the structure’s function is synecdochically rendered with clippings of headlines and adverts disjunctively arrayed. With a smokestack doubling as an outsize cigarette, Design for a Cigarette Pavilion employs both graphic and linguistic sign systems to draw our attention to the proffered goods (a monumental, illuminated “P” indicates the brand name). In these designs, Bayer conjures an integration of color, light, text, smoke, image, sound, and kinetic movement, all directed at the viewer’s (that is, the buyer’s) sensorium. With two yellow, rectangular “screens” running alongside and projecting from a vibrant red tower, square at its base, Fuck the Bauhaus #4 evokes in succinct and decidedly rudimentary fashion the architecture of geometric abstraction and colored planes that Bayer’s schemes exemplify. Genzken’s screens, of course, are no more than ordinary office clipboards, souped-­up in material and hue. Clipboards become billboards, as a black-­and-­ white photograph of an elaborately curtained stage is affixed to one side and the Playbill logo to the other. (Ever the colorist, Genzken must have taken delight in the yellow background of the latter, which coordinates so neatly with her palette of primaries.) Just as Bayer’s structures are generic volumes, squares and rectangles, whose functions are designated by textual and visual markers, so too does this New Building advertise itself as performance space. Similarly, the pizza box and shopping bag that constitute the main volumes of Fuck the Bauhaus #2, double as murals advertising the myriad diversions available within what one imagines to be a shopping mall. But more than formal punning is at work here. For one can understand the Fuck the Bauhaus series to debate the conjunction of advanced aesthetic means and capitalist aims that is at the heart of Bayer’s experiments. The confrontation is enacted by adopting the smokestack-­cum-­cigarette strategy—­an instance of “structure . . . refashioned as sign,” in Foster’s words46—­in which commodity (and its paraphernalia), sign, and structure are collapsed.

Finally, in Fuck the Bauhaus #4, Genzken takes seriously as a way of making, even as she travesties, the prefabricated, modular architecture Walter Gropius pursued throughout his career. Her ruby-­red high-­rise is, after all, constructed of four stacked Baukasten, of a sort. In the early 1920s, Gropius developed Baukasten im Grossen (full-­scale construction kit or building blocks), a system of standardized, factory-­produced elements that could be assembled on site to make single-­family dwellings. The cubic volumes of the “kit”—­made from prefabricated concrete panels—­lent themselves to various nestings, stackings, and juxtapositions. In Bauhausbücher no. 1, devoted to international architecture, Gropius summarizes the concept: “Models of Mass-­Produced Houses. Variability of the same plan-­type through the addition of repetitive spatial units in different ways. Basic principles: integration of the greatest degree of repetition with the greatest possible variability.”47 In theory, Gropius’s system exploited mass production as a means to build affordable housing with some degree of flexibility. With Fuck the Bauhaus, Genzken simultaneously pays tribute to and takes the air out of whatever was utopian in the concept of prefabricated housing for the masses, and whatever it figured as the architect’s capacity to improve the lives of individuals through a “unity of art and technology.” The impoverishment of means and materials is significant in this respect. Genzken’s Baukasten in Fuck the Bauhaus #4 are cheap plastic containers, not spaces of cast concrete. The idea of construction/composition through recombination of mass-­produced elements governs all of the works in the series, including the teetering piles of impellers and fan clutches that constitute Fuck the Bauhaus #5 and #6. In this reduction of scale from the architectural to that of things, and in the historical and geographical transposition from the housing shortage in early-­1920s Germany to the economic boom of the late-­1990s United States, Genzken makes the dream of mass production—­as a force of rationalization, as a means of improving the quality of life—­a joke, if not quite a nightmare. Thus, despite the pronounced dissimilarities between Fuck the Bauhaus and the Plasters and Concretes that precede them by more than a decade, they worry the same set of questions regarding built space, even if they arrive at different conclusions. So too, they proceed from the same impulse to explore the materials and means that seem most relevant at the moment. For if the tectonic nature of cast concrete addressed the conditions of ongoing reconstruction in Berlin, the precarious accumulation of heterogeneous stuff befits our moment of globalized capitalism. Perhaps it seems a stretch to claim, as I do, that Genzken’s series—­or a single work from that series, even one so spirited as Fuck the Bauhaus #4—­can exhibit such a thorough processing of historical precedent.

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Yet Genzken is an artist whose art historical consciousness and formal acuity are developed to just such a degree. Her alertness to art history is matched, and thus often upstaged, by her facility with and sympathy for utterly contemporary materials—­both the stuff of the late twentieth-­ and early twenty-­first-­century object world and its pop cultural imagery. (She is equally likely to make reference in her art to Leonardo da Vinci or to Leonardo DiCaprio, to Donald Judd or to Donald Duck.) So too can the breezy insouciance and humor of her assemblages, in particular, obscure perception of the serious analytical, critical work that they do. To appreciate the latter is to acknowledge the full implications and accomplishment of the ludic aspect of her practice.

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It is precisely this difficult balance of analytical precision and humor that characterizes Genzken’s Ground Zero suite of 2008. Genzken presented her idiosyncratic vision for the fraught site of the September 11 attacks even while the actual process of rebuilding was mired in logistical, financial, and political trouble. Where solemnity is called for, Genzken’s garish constructions are deliberately and provocatively in poor taste. With her sculptures’ exuberant polychromy, Genzken thumbs her nose at the vast majority of contemporary memorial building, characterized by monumental abstraction or figuration aided by the age-­old material rhetoric of marble and granite. All of the Ground Zero works incorporate fiberboard plinths outfitted with casters (sometimes doubled by wheeled structures like trolleys and carts), a presentation that refuses monumental permanence in favor of mobility. For the exhibition’s catalog, Genzken mimics the visual tropes of design competition submissions and architecture glossies, creating photomontages in which the colorful artworks are set against black-and-white images of the site (fig. 52). There can be no mistaking at whom and at which professions she takes aim. In parody­ing the conventions of the architecture establishment, and in flouting the formulaic ways of dealing with wounds in the urban fabric and in the collective memory, she shows the codified language of memorials to be unimaginative, gutless, and cynical. Instead of the “Freedom Tower,” memorial, and transportation hub that Daniel Libeskind’s master plan maps out for the site, Genzken offers seven structures. It is worth noting that she does fulfill to a degree the brief for the redesign of the site: the memorial function is served by Light and ­Memorial Tower, the commercial interests represented by a retail space (perversely titled Osama Fashion Store), and its status as traffic hub addressed by Car Park. Surprisingly beautiful is Memorial Tower, composed of rippled and transparent plastic cubes. Lengths of

undeveloped film dangle from the exterior and images of the site immediately after the attacks line several of the cubes. The textured but transparent walls both facilitate and distort our view of the contents. The tangled curtain rods, coat racks, wire trivets, and fruit bowls of Light call to mind the gnarled metal remnants left in the wake of the September 11 attacks without actually being macabre. There is a lightness of touch (if you will forgive the pun) in both of these works that stands in contrast to the physical heaviness and rhetorical heavy-­handedness of much memorial design. Both Car Park and Osama Fashion Store are composed of stacked, modular, polycarbonate baskets. The garage is surrounded at the base by three circular mirrors or platters traversed by tiny figurines. Toy cars line its radiating, prismatic ribs.48 Osama Fashion Store, with its uppermost layer set askew and filled with a kitschy pillow, a crumpled plastic sheet, a length of coiled rope, and a shopping bag emblazoned with the store’s name, combines department store and trash bin. In a gesture of provocation, it collapses the counterposed ideologies of jihadism and capitalism, precisely where these two forces came into spectacular and violent contact. But if Genzken offers her versions of the commercial, transportation, and memorial structures planned for the site, her addition of a menacing

Fig. 52 Isa Genzken, Ground Zero, 2008. Digital photo montage. © Isa Genzken, Stefan Zappe, Zappe Architekten, Berlin, with photographs reproduced from Joel Meyerowitz, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive (Phaidon, 2006). Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York and Hauser & Wirth.

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church and hospital makes visible the disciplinary functions that govern Western society.49 In Church (fig. 53), gridded industrial carts overlaid with sheets of transparent plastic travesty the intricacies of stained glass windows while a makeshift cross, topped with a toy skull, turns piety into grotesque comedy. Hospital—­evoking ill-­fitting hospital gowns or straitjackets with draped green, silver, and brocade fabrics secured with colored ties; gurneys with a drink trolley; and get-­well bouquets with a vase of synthetic blooms—­is constituted metonymically from elements that are ubiquitous in patients’ rooms. Its nine shot glasses can measure out perfect doses—­ ideal for medication or self-­medication. As if offering us an antidote to these oppressive powers, the seventh element in Genzken’s proposal for Ground Zero is Disco Soon. A shipping crate, raised on bricks, topped with red plastic, and partially covered with mirrored foil, serves as the disco’s main volume. Against the front of the structure leans a mirror bearing the name of the establishment. A flashy marquee hovers over the frames of a folding screen. With drooping lengths of light ropes and spools upon spools of colored ribbons heaped in a tangled mass, Disco Soon offers the visual pleasure of spectacle come undone, unwound. A grown-­up club kid, Genzken makes this offering to a city she loves. Writing powerfully about the political stakes of the redesign of the World Trade Center site, Reinhold Martin calls architects and critics to task for failing to address the historical conditions that gave rise to the events of September 11. In his view, supposedly “progressive” and “­ visionary” architecture (as vigorously promoted by the late New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp, who bears the brunt of Martin’s critique) has been too ready to give visual and spatial expression to a rhetoric of enlightened rationalism, which operates “in the service of an emboldened sense of empire and war on all fronts, and not against it.”50 For Martin, the visual and verbal rhetoric by which “progressive architecture” was linked to nationalism and to de­historicization made it the testing ground for the official and media rhetoric that would justify the military actions after (and in the name of) September 11.51 Genzken’s Ground Zero is a serious attempt, however partial, to address the historical dimensions and cultural contexts of the events of September 11 and their aftermath. Jihadism, free-­market capitalism, and Christianity are brought to bear in the forms of Osama Fashion Store and Church. The wheeled plinths might be understood in this context to suggest the instability of these institutions. With one wheeled industrial cart turned on its side and inserted into another cart, Church thematizes redundancy and impotence. The structural fragility of the stacked constructions, conveyed by the tilted upper layer of Osama Fashion Store, can likewise be mined for subtext. Finally, in the very makeup of the Ground Zero works—­in the commodities of which they are composed—­the issue of economic interests is acknowledged to be central.

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Fig. 53 Isa Genzken, Church (Ground Zero), 2008. Metal, plastic, tape, wood, acrylic, spray paint, mirror, MDF, casters. 172 × 97 × 170 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

At their most powerful, Genzken’s works are borne of the urge to respond adequately to current social, political, and economic conditions and to dispel the myths surrounding them—­from the narrative of progress told by the Neubauten of 1960s and 1970s West Germany, to the image of unity hastily fashioned for post-­Wall Berlin, to the reassertion of American might after the attack on the World Trade Center. These myths of national identity and ideological certitude are writ on the urban fabric. Neither an architect nor a policy maker, Genzken tackles these issues with the tools of her métier. In so doing, she newly invests sculpture’s materials, forms, and constructive principles with the capacity to mean.

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3 Plastic Allegories Divorced from their use-­value, objects are repurposed and depurposed in Isa Genzken’s assemblages. She aggravates the lack of “natural mediation” between parts, playing up disparate scales and drawing from unrelated object categories. Individual elements are hardly subsumed into a coherent whole but remain agonistically and tenuously combined. (Her drips of paint, for example, never amount to a unifying coat.) Like ensemble casts in which every B-­list player thinks himself the star, objects in Genzken’s works jostle for the spotlight. Indeed, her tableaux can be seen to literalize a situation described by Guy Debord in which “each individual commodity fights for itself, cannot acknowledge the others and aspires to impose its presence everywhere as though it were alone. The spectacle is the epic poem of this strife.”1 Genzken turns epic poem into mock-­epic sculpture marked by manic energy and residing at the brink of collapse. She does not merely juxtapose but grafts, binds, smashes, and pits objects against one another. For viewers most familiar with Genzken’s early series in wood, plaster, and concrete (or her other series with overt architectural morphologies, such as the windows and paravents of the early to mid-­1990s or the slender, clad columns that succeeded them), the radical breakdown of sculptural restraint, if not sculptural control, embodied by the suite of assemblages collectively titled Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, begun in 2003, came as something of a shock. The antinomies economically alluded to and evoked in the earlier structures—­construction and deconstruction, utopian and dystopian impulses—­now rupture the surface and wage full-­blown war on the combat zone of the pedestal. Rather than distinct substances worked into forms derived from a postminimalist vocabulary, Empire/Vampire explodes into the myriad surfaces and shapes offered by consumer culture: toys, tchotchkes, articles of clothing, domestic wares, and, occasionally, organic substances like bread and

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sunflower seeds. Exuberantly spattered with glossy paint (in blinding white or Day-­Glo colors) and topped or wrapped in sheets of mirror foil, these mad constructions seem to flout compositional harmony, visual cohesion, and skill. The architectural is hardly absent, but it has suffered grotesque and hilarious disfigurement. Glasarchitektur is literalized (and lampooned) in these works in the form of decorative snifters, goblets, tumblers, and vases. Two wine glasses, one atop the other, morph into a turret or a TV tower (a reference to Berlin’s Fernsehturm, perhaps?). A rubber tube, spray-­painted mottled silver, approximates the soaring form of Eero ­Saarinen’s Gateway Arch, though set comically askew (fig. 54). Architecture is suggested not only by formal resemblance but also through relative scale. In a composition peopled with action figures, a vase becomes an edifice, a rumpled brown garment metamorphoses into Fig. 54 Isa Genzken, Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, 2002/2003 (detail). Installation, mixed media. One of twenty-­ two parts, 220 × 70 × 45 cm. Installation dimensions variable. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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a muddy knoll. A new scenographic and narrative impulse—­specifically dystopian in tone—­is in evidence. Here, two pairs of child-­size boots serve as the contested terrain on which toy soldiers prepare for further confrontation; pools of slick red paint indicate that the battle so far has been a bloody one (fig. 55). There, a space-­age drama plays out: miniscule humans patrol a liquor bottle-­turned-­rocket ship while colossal aliens and superheroes wrestle on a dungaree landscape. Cyborgs, army men, musketeers, Buddhas, superheroes, aliens, civilians, cowboys, and Indians: the protagonists of Empire/Vampire are disjunctive, hailing from different genres, embodying various degrees of formal articulation, and inconsistent vis-­à-­vis scale. Broadly speaking, Empire/Vampire draws from two object categories: the household item and the toy. We have an intimate sense of how these objects relate to touch. We understand how the bulbous form of a snifter can be cradled in the palm, how the stem of the wine glass is pinched between the fingers, how one tumbler can be nested into another like it. Toys, of course, are the world remade to fit a child’s small hands. In orchestrating the events that transpire in the life of his or her playthings, the child exercises some measure of mastery. However distant in memory, the manipulation of a toy, figurine, or doll is shared by most. Not only developmental psychologists, but thinkers from Walter B ­ enjamin

Fig. 55 Isa Genzken, Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, 2002/2003 (detail). Installation, mixed media. One of twenty-­ two parts, 158 × 60 × 48 cm. Installation dimensions variable. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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Fig. 56 Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2006. Wheelchair, mirror foil, fabric, ribbons, felt, lacquer. Approx. 90 × 100 × 125 cm. Installation view, Secession, Vienna, 2006. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York. Fig. 57 Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2006. Two plastic animals (goats), two dolls, one pair of shoes, one cap, plastic, foam, felt, fabric, metallic paper, adhesive tape, lacquer, spray paint. Approx. 48 × 110 × 62 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/ New York.

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to Claude Lévi-­Strauss to Roland Barthes, have commented upon the formative role of toys with regard to our subsequent relation to the world. “In it and through it a person is made into a subject,” Lévi-­Strauss writes of the child’s engagement with a doll.2 The imagination’s projection of sculptural object into monumental scale, discussed in chapter 2 in relation to Genzken’s concrete works, is now set in productive tension with another perceptual event: the haptic experience of objects scaled to the hand. The body’s apprehension of the sculpture-­pedestal unit as an anthropomorphic entity is yet a third perceptual possibility. Each series of works in Genzken’s oeuvre plays upon these perceptual registers differently—­in shifting combinations and degrees of emphasis. This oscillation between scales is a primary means by which the works attain their perceptual complexity, aesthetic power, and conceptual reach. In her exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2006, Genzken expanded on the sculptural idiom initiated in Empire/Vampire. The untitled works, installed as a motley group, amount to a no-­holds-­barred, head-­on strike against the sculptural form. For here—­even more than in Empire/ Vampire, where the pedestal remained intact and the scenic aspect palpable—­Genzken sabotages sculptural integrity, pushing it to its very limits. If the earlier series addressed the catastrophes of architecture become theater, war turned deadly play, and world morphed into an aggregate of interchangeable commodities, the 2006 works turn up the decibel level of her commentary with strident effectiveness. Wheelchairs and walkers take the place of bases (fig. 56)—­how more succinctly and literally could Genzken convey the crippled state of sculptural practice? Sculpture’s “body” collapses into the wheelchairs as so many lengths of ribbon, unbuckled belts, and crumpled sheets of fabric and plastic sheeting—­sculptural form is deflated, flaccid and formless.3 Long a means of implying an underlying form through the transmutation of matter—­marble into silk, wood into brocade—­the illusion of drapery is made literal in heaps of coarse ticking and polyester net. For all the seeming lack of restraint, however, these untitled works are remarkably economical sculptural puns: the walkers are armored vehicles that double as complex torture devices as well as rehabilitation aids for the war-­ wounded. High-­tech crutches lean against the wall like rail-­thin automatons or sci-­fi firearms. The “enlightened human” comes in the form of a some-­assembly-­required torchiere lamp outfitted with stick-­figure arms, legs, and head. Infant dolls are shaded by slashed beach u ­ mbrellas—­like pint-­size Buddhas, wise before their time. Two more dolls slouch over plastic goats, travesties of the heroic genre of equestrian statues that are acute enough to elicit laughter (fig. 57). One of the figures sports something on its head that looks like Napoleon’s bicorn. They will never make it across the St. Bernard Pass.

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Genzken has significant predecessors in the use of mass-­produced materials in assemblage, from Kurt Schwitters’s Merz constructions of the 1920s and 1930s to Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and Arman’s Accumulations, Trashcans, and Robot Portraits in the postwar period. Out of the remains of a culture shattered by World War I, Schwitters developed an aesthetics of detritus. Obsolescence and waste generated his raw materials, which he mined for their melancholic, poetic, and formal values. As Leah Dickerman has detailed, Schwitters’s particular interest in objects intimately associated with individuals singularized the commodity and invested it with a mnemonic function.4 Roughly three decades later, Arman visualized mass production through accumulations of objects ranging from doll parts and clock faces—­replete with poignant metaphor—­to new electric razors with their looping and tangled cords. Displayed in gridlike patterns in glass or Plexiglas vitrines, the heaps of nearly identical objects embody at once all stages of the production-­ consumption cycle, from the repetitive action of manufacture, to the promise of abundance, to the scrap heap of obsolescence.5 Arman’s vitrines are the boxes in which goods are delivered but also some future archaeologist’s drawers of sorted artifacts. In Rauschenberg’s combines, found objects and images settle in painterly fields that conjure a mental space of memory, association, and metaphor.6 For all Genzken might owe to these predecessors, her works remain unattached to any overall pictorial structure like the grid or sculptural envelope like the cube.7 The more crucial distinction between Genzken’s use of found materials and those of Schwitters, Arman, or Rauschenberg, however, resides in the relent­less newness of the majority of her chosen objects. Unmarked by use, without the patina that time imparts, still bearing the sheen of manufacture, they derive less from flea market stalls than from the newly stocked shelves of the 99¢ store or designer boutique. If the former was the privileged site of Surrealism’s “objective chance,” where the subject found his or her desires anticipated, manifested, and fulfilled by the found object, it is from the latter that the commodity fetish leers back at the consumer. With their lurid colors and designer curves, Genzken’s works might be said to embody what Walter Benjamin so memorably called “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”8 Further historical distinctions must be made, as a number of artists in the 1980s claimed the allure of the pristine commodity as the substance and the content of their works. Jeff Koons declared The New to be his purview when he encased the latest vacuum cleaners in acrylic boxes and lit them with fluorescent lights whose effulgence makes literal the contents’ auratic presence. Similarly deliberate are Haim Steinbach’s rhythmic arrangements of objects, which equalize everything, from coveted status symbols to mass-­produced utilitarian items to kitschy

regional artifacts, under the rubric of merchandise. Steinbach’s Formica-­ clad, triangular shelves and Koons’s vitrines mimic commercial displays at the same time as they cite minimalist geometries. Nearly unattainable in their perfection and remove, the commodities in these works are regarded in the light of fetishistic fervor. “The sex appeal of the inorganic” is very differently treated in Genzken’s assemblages. More often than not, it is laced with, if not overtaken by, perversion and a whiff of deathliness. Case in point: Eros, the luminous Philippe Starck–­designed swivel chair, is turned on its side and propped up on the struts of an upturned folding chair in Genzken’s ­Geschwister (Siblings, 2004; fig. 58). Blank-­eyed and smeared with paint, a mangled doll is entangled in this rack-­cum-­scaffold. Possessed of a dark humor, Genzken conjures a scene of torture and neglect through a discordant visual idiom of bright colors and high industrial design. Yet she is also ever the formalist, rhyming the swivel chair’s circular base with polished metal platters and balancing its strong color with the diagonal and downward extension of the doll. A second folding chair—­collapsed, seatless, and backless—­leans against the column. The two folding chairs, one open and one collapsed, articulate concisely a sculptor’s fascination with the spatial extension of two-­dimensional form into three dimensions. (Think of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Hang­ ing Spatial Constructions, Karl Ioganson’s tensile structures, or Gustav Klutsis’s designs for radio-­announcers sapped of their utopianism, dynamism, and rigor.9) In addition to the shift in tone—­from reverence to irreverence, from preservation of the inviolable to its violation—­Genzken can be distinguished from “neo-­pop” artists because she engages processes of sculptural composition, however deskilled, rather than those of commercial display. Thus Genzken is more sympathetic with Andy Warhol than with her nearer contemporaries. Warhol subjected the seamless images of mass culture to rupture, first, by amplifying the accidents of the reproduction process and, second, by surfacing traumatic events in political and cultural history, such as the brutal police response to civil-­rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Like Warhol, Genzken attempts to expose the barbarity inherent in commodified culture. In so doing, she might be seen to adopt a strategy of mimetic exacerbation that Hal Foster has traced from Dada to Warhol, in which hyperbolic identification with the conditions of alienation can be defensive when successful and complicit when failed.10 Unable and unwilling to presume a cynical distance or moralizing superiority, Genzken produces artwork through an exaggerated performance of consumerism, at once joyful and self-­loathing, gratuitous and compulsive. Genzken’s object world is composed of contemporary, manufactured things—­a world that ­precludes

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nostalgia for the precapitalist object or the pre­consumerist subject. Indeed, neither is even entertained as a possibility. Yet Genzken’s relationship to the object world is a complicated one. What Yve-­Alain Bois says is true: “[Genzken] is a voracious consumer, but one who is at war with the merchandise: all she buys—­even the most expensive design objects—­she immediately declares as trash.”11 Indeed, as exemplified by ­Geschwister, the use of contemporary luxury furniture in her assemblages has the effect of downgrading the design object rather than elevating the gimcrack with which it keeps company. But Genzken’s antinomy is thus: even in her destructive idiom her sensitivity to (and obvious pleasure in) the material and visual properties of her materials suggests something akin to sympathy. This is in great part a formal affinity—­she does not struggle against or cancel the properties of the ­objects, but harnesses the forms and colors particular to the twenty-­first-­ century commodity. Genzken possesses a keen eye for the palette of the contemporary object world, just as she taps the humor and p ­ athos in the subjection of objects to human whim.

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Fig. 58 Isa Genzken, Geschwister (Siblings), 2004. Plastics, lacquer, mirror foil, glass, metal, wood, fabric. Approx. 220 × 60 × 100 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/ New York.

— Given the contemporaneity of Genzken’s object sensibility, it is fitting that the predominant material featured in her hellish tableaux is plastic, a material whose ongoing takeover of every visible surface and interior mechanism began to gain ground in the postwar period. In Genzken’s Elefant (Elephant, 2006; fig. 59), hulking mass is made light in vertical blinds, plastic toys, artificial flowers, bubble wrap, and plastic tubes—­the last of these the “trunk” that functions synecdochically for the animal. These are the wonders of polymers with multisyllabic names and plosive abbreviations: PP, PC, PVC, PS, PETE, ABS, etcetera. Genzken not only works in Plastik, the art of three-­dimensional sculpture, but renders such sculptures in Plastik—­that ubiquitous material that can be variously treated (stamped, extruded, vacuum-­formed, compression-­or injection-­ molded) and that can withstand high degrees of deformation while maintaining its molecular structure.12 Both forms of the word derive from the Greek plastikos, meaning moldable. Traditionally understood as the molding and modeling of three-­ dimensional forms, sculptural plasticity is, in Genzken’s assemblages, under duress. The bundling and piling of disparate materials, secured by weight, tension, or rudimentary systems of fastening, seem worlds apart from the skilled manipulation of surfaces and volumes to animate mere matter with expressive life. If the sculptural idiom of modeling has been in decline since Rodin, reaching extreme attenuation in the work of A ­ lberto Giacometti, Genzken has had to redefine and re­imagine sculptural plasticity in different terms. Her gambit in the

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­assemblages has been to substitute sculptural plasticity with literal plastics. Her turn to mass-­produced objects in Empire/Vampire was initially prompted by a concern with post-­9/11 themes, but, as she explains, she became increasingly attuned to a formal language of cheap materials and cheap production. I’m not talking about cheap, hand-­made objects, like the self-­modeled stuff that’s so amateurish you can see it a mile off. When I say “cheap materials” I mean industrially fabricated sculptures that are very interesting as sculptures in their own right. . . . For example, the hippo­potamus figure you see over there and the small iron next to it: I ­specifically bought things that were cheap, both in terms of how they were manufactured and their retail price. They were things I’d never be able to create with my own hands. If I were to model a hippo­potamus it would never look like that—­and I wouldn’t be capable of doing it anyway. It looks so good, not even Stephan Balkenhol could achieve it.13 Genzken cites her countryman Balkenhol, who has developed since the 1980s a mode of antiheroic statuary in chiseled wood, implying that his technique of direct carving simply cannot compete in the face of mass production. Genzken frames the question of materials and techniques as one of political and aesthetic relevance, “In a time such as the present one, a time when things go to seed, it is important to use cheap materials.”14 On the one hand, Genzken’s use of plastic commodities (quintessential “cheap materials”) offers an implicit account of the loss of relevance of craft-­based modeling practices after industrial manufacture.15 On the other hand, she can be seen to appropriate and exploit the plastic properties of her chosen materials as a means to redefine sculptural plasticity. From the jointed carapace of a toy grasshopper to the curved petals of metallic blooms, from ridged tubes to sheets of dazzling optical foil, molecular plasticity in its infinite variety might be seen to trump sculptural plasticity. But herein lies a source of drama in Genzken’s work, for at times the sculptures’ plastic expression is limited by their vocabulary of mass-­produced forms or eclipsed by the perversity of the scenarios she dreams up. Yet at their most visually compelling, Genzken’s works shape space in quite unexpected ways, as when circumambulation of Elefant shows that what droops and sags on one side arches with jaunty energy on the other. The first semisynthetic plastics were developed in the mid-­nineteenth century and the first fully synthetic resins in the first decade of the twentieth century. Celluloid, the first mass-­produced semisynthetic plastic, was patented in the United States in 1869. Bakelite, made of fully synthetic polymers, was invented in 1907. Further developments followed

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Fig. 59 Isa Genzken, Elefant (Elephant), 2006. Wood, plastic tubes, plastic foils, vertical blinds, plastic toys, artificial flowers, fabric, bubble wrap, lacquer, spray paint. 200 × 220 × 100 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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quickly, and continue still. In their earliest history, plastics were intended as mass-­producible substitutes for expensive and increasingly rare materials such as ivory, tortoiseshell, and amber. In this capacity for cost-­effective simulation reside both plastics’ utopian potential (for the distribution of inexpensive, quality wares to a wide sector of the population) and the grounds for their dismissal as the material of dystopian simulacra.16 These polarized connotations were exemplified, in the post–­ World War II period, in the German Democratic Republic, where plastics were touted as the material means of achieving socialist utopia, even as, in American capitalism, they facilitated the transition to a culture of planned obsolescence.17 Further complicating plastic’s cultural meaning is the connection of its many forms with the most advanced technological developments, not least the chemical wizardry required in its making. Today’s plastics are found in toy soldiers as well as real weapons of mass destruction. The connection between the two is not negligible, for the greatest advances in plastic were spurred by armed conflict. Bake­ lite, for instance, was employed in military production during World War I and became available for product design only in the 1920s. And as America and Germany battled on the world stage a second time, Du Pont (USA) and I. G. Farben/Bayer (Germany) engaged in a parallel struggle for dominance in their laboratories, developing new synthetic fibers for the manufacture of parachutes, tires, windshields, and much more.18 More directly implicated in the violence of warfare, napalm contains as its principal ingredient polystyrene.19 One need only follow this line of thinking to its extreme to arrive at Norman Mailer’s attempt to link the threat of nuclear apocalypse to the loss of humanity to synthetic polymers.20 In our day, the ecological threats of nonbiodegradable trash are as real as the specter of biochemical warfare. Derived from fossil fuel, plastic remakes the remains of millennia in its image, one that asserts its own monstrous longevity in our landfills. The confluence of plastic and plastic art—­or the exploration of a “plastic Plastik,” one might say—­was already initiated in the 1920s by Naum Gabo and László Moholy-­Nagy, at a moment when the material yet embodied utopian potential (figs. 60 and 61). Gabo’s call to “transfer the constructive thinking of the engineer into art” and Moholy’s to promote a “new unity between art and technology” suggested, among other things, the embrace of new industrial-­scientific materials such as celluloid and Plexiglas. Each experimented with the pliability and transparency of plastic sheets in three-­dimensional works to effect something approaching a dematerialization of sculpture—­its liberation from mass and its play in light and space. Genzken’s Untitled of 2006 (fig. 62) can best be understood as a succinct postscript to the mixture of technological optimism and formalism that governed these early experiments.

Fig. 60 Naum Gabo, Column, ca. 1923 (reconstructed 1937). Perspex, wood, metal, glass. 104.5 × 75 cm. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Work of Naum Gabo © Nina & Graham Williams. Image courtesy of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation/ Art Resource, NY. Fig. 61 László Moholy-­ Nagy, Plexiglas Sculp­ ture, 1940. Gelatin silver print. 23.0 × 30.7 cm. Purchased from Mrs. Sibyl Moholy-­Nagy with funds provided by Eastman Kodak Company, 1981.2163.0066. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn. Image courtesy of George Eastman Museum. Fig. 62 Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2006. Plastic foil, wooden pedestal. Approx. 140 × 100 × 45 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

Fig. 63 Isa Genzken, Hallelujah (Yellow), 2012. MDF, metal, plastic, glass, mirror foil, Perspex, globe, plastic figure, casters. 256 × 101 × 55 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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Forgoing the modulation of light produced by Moholy’s experiments in undulating Plexiglas and the precise rationalist-­formalist intersecting planes of Gabo’s constructions, here a single, brightly hued plastic sheet is “draped” over a pedestal. On one level, Untitled suggests that the seductive qualities of plastic’s high-­gloss, high-­tech sheen render artistic enhancements superfluous. On another, Untitled can be seen to render flaccid the once lofty promises of plastic. If plastic once lent itself to “space modulators,” it was soon to be, if not already, the stuff of imitation-­bone letter openers, novelty ashtrays, disposable dinnerware, and the like. Even Moholy-­Nagy, recounting in 1944 his experimental sculptural work, recognized the ambivalences inherent in the tantalizing material (though he warns less of kitsch than of decorativeness): “The results [of using plastic], although very pleasing, bring some danger with them. The smooth perfection of the plastics, their light-­flooded, sparkling planes, could easily lure one into an effective but decorative performance.”21 A recognition of the positive potential of polymers and the dangers accompanying them registered two decades later in the alternate names “Light and Space” and “Finish Fetish,” applied to certain instances of minimalism in the 1960s that exploited materials such as acrylic and polyester resin in the pursuance of optical effects.22 In her series of assemblages prominently featuring luxury plastic furnishings, Genzken confronts and exploits “decorative performance.”23 Such items appear in Genzken’s works as early as 2004—­for example, Geschwister, discussed earlier—­but the motif is most consistently developed in a series of untitled works begun in 2010. (The turn to high-­end plastics after having explored “cheap materials and cheap production” is characteristic of Genzken’s tendency to invert the terms of her own production: vertical/horizontal, opaque/transparent, atectonic/tectonic, and other such binaries are prevalent in her oeuvre.) Perched on flashy columns, stacked and upturned designer chairs seem nearly weightless, as if engaged in suspended acrobatics. Clad with colored Perspex, mirrors, and mirrored foils, the square columns are not neutral bases, those made-­to-­be-­invisible museum apparatuses. Rather, they are integral parts of the coloristic and formal composition. They establish the spatial envelope, the column of air, if you will, that the plastic chair legs and backs puncture with such dramatic flair. The columns are usually open on one side, divulging trinkets stowed in their interiors. In a particularly striking, stripped-­down example, Hallelujah (Yellow) (2012; fig. 63), an ­orange Frilly chair balances inverted against a fuchsia LCP chaise longue, the latter composed of a single sinuous piece of bent metha­crylate. The ensemble rests on a column finished with yellow Perspex and metallic foils. An inexpensive figurine adorns the chaise; a cheap globe is stashed within the base. Crude in produc-

tion value and aesthetic idiom, the tchotchkes provide necessary friction against the “smooth perfection of the plastics, their light-­flooded, sparkling planes.” One senses that both the figurative and certain abstract traditions of sculpture are being unseated in these works: the former insofar as the vacant furnishings inevitably evoke the absented human bodies that they are intended to support, the latter because the chairs’ formal features are motivated by functional and commercial considerations (and are therefore “impure”). It is hard to say, however, whether art or commercial design wins out in these assemblages. Certainly, traditional definitions of sculptural plasticity seem vitiated in the face of contemporary object production. Yet, the artist maintains ultimate control, such that the merely decorative is marshaled, through combination and composition, to something that potentially exceeds it. As the chair assemblages attest, Genzken engages plastics only as preformed commodities, high or low, and never as raw material. Her approach to the material is therefore as distinct from those driven by technological optimism or phenomenological inquiry as from those motivated by process-­and performance-­based practices. It was not the light-­diffusing or light-­transmitting possibilities of plastics that inspired postminimalist artists working in the late 1960s, but their capacity to embody and dramatize a dialectics of form and formlessness. I am thinking, in particular, of Lynda Benglis’s polychrome pools and pneumatic swells of poured plastic that straddle painting and sculpture. “I first mix the pigment . . . with the resin,” Benglis explains, “and then I mix the catalyst in. Once the catalyst and resin are combined it causes a chain reaction which causes the foaming.”24 With the decidedly chemical substance that resulted, she pursued organic forms—­“what nature itself would suggest to me.”25 César, an artist associated with Nouveau ­Réalisme, spectacularized polyurethane’s transformation from liquid into solid in a series of happenings, in which audiences observed the “metamorphic magic of this chemical reaction,” in Pierre Restany’s words.26 The metamorphic magic of plastics is important to Genzken only insofar as it is tied to the “mystical character” of the commodity.27

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Whether as decorative surface, tawdry imitation, democratic material, biochemical threat, or technoscientific shape-­shifter, plastic smacks of the unsubstantial. (Unsubstantial, that is, in a way that is quite distinct from what Gabo and Moholy had hoped for in terms of the dematerialization of sculpture.) How else the self-­evidence of the formulation “Is this real or plastic?” Roland Barthes’s reflections upon an exhibition of plastics in Paris, circa 1954, elaborate upon the source of plastic’s seeming unreality:

Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy. At the entrance of the stand, the public waits in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transmutation of matter. An ideally-­shaped machine, tabulated and oblong (a shape well suited to suggest the secret of an itinerary) effortlessly draws, out of a heap of greenish crystals, shiny and fluted dressing-­ room tidies. At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-­god, half-­robot.28 The magical aura that Barthes describes results from two types of abstraction, first in the chemical transformation of pellets of polymer resin into an object of daily use, and second in the absence of human labor in the production of that object. The two are deeply involved, for this trick is no sleight of hand, the hand having little to do with the process. “Half-­ god, half-­robot,” the attendant is anything but human and his task hardly seems like work.29 (Mailer, virulent opponent of plastics, opts for a baser register when he declares: “We looked to new materials which were cooked in vats, long complex derivatives of urine which we call plastic.”30) If in Moholy’s and Gabo’s early twentieth-­century moment, plastics offered a dazzling, new technical capacity; and if Barthes, writing in midcentury, regarded plastics with distrust; in the late twentieth century and early twenty-­first century, our relation to plastics is characterized by a moral and practical bind: we decry their long-­term environmental impacts even as we remain daily implicated in their proliferation. Plastic’s “transit,” to borrow Barthes’s word, is the subject of Le Chant du Styrène (The Song of Styrene, 1958), Alain Resnais’s short film commissioned by Pechiney, the French plastics maker.31 The film is an “anti-­ allegory,” according to Yve-­Alain Bois, that presents the manufacturing process in reverse, starting with the finished product (bowls and ladles); passing through the molding, sifting, extrusion, drying, and polymeri­ zation stages; extending beyond the refinery; and ending finally with an ­image of the ocean, indication of the natural resources that are plastic’s ­ ueneau, distant source. The film’s narration is written by Raymond Q French poet, novelist, and founding member of the group O ­ ulipo. ­Queneau composed his text in strict alexandrine verse, which lends the voice-­over a mock gravitas.32 It begins, “O time, suspend your bowl. O plastic, where do you come from? Who are you? And what explains your rare qualities? So what are you made of? And where did you come from?”33 While the film purports at some basic level to answer these

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questions (Pechiney is footing the bill, after all), it ultimately maintains in its visual and textual rhetoric the lack of transparency of plastic’s manufacture. The “magical” qualities of the process—­the molding matrix is deemed a “mysterious being,” the raw materials seen to “[circulate] endlessly, effectively, and secretly”—­are reinforced in Le Chant du Styrène through evocations of mechanical fecundity and steely erotics.34 The “heap of greenish crystals” (here shown in yellow, blue, and red as well) is alternately transformed into a rectangular basin and a set of plastic dining utensils, again with minimal human aid or intervention. Designers and users are also absented, lending the process and product an autonomy that renders use-­value moot.35 As the film concludes its visual journey, the narration is hardly conclusive: “Does petroleum not come from masses of fish? Nor is too much known about where coal comes from. Does petroleum come from plankton in labor? Controversial questions . . . obscure origins.” In his reading of Le Chant du Styrène, film historian Edward Dimendberg argues that alongside the film’s celebration of plastic’s saturated colors and streamlined forms (enhanced through abstract compositions of objects against dark backgrounds), Resnais and Queneau introduce covert commentary that undercuts the commercial interests they were commissioned to serve. Toward the end of the film, the narrator intones, “Now it is necessary to ask where these essential products ethylene and benzene come from. They are extracted from oil, magical liquid/ treasure, that is found from Bordeaux to the heart of Africa. They are extracted from oil and also from coal.” The two locations correspond to the geographical reach of Pechiney’s plastics manufacturing. The former is the home of one of its processing plants, and the latter would provide its raw materials. By 1950, Dimendberg recounts, the French petroleum industry had tapped reserves in the Congo, Angola, and Tunisia. Pechiney maintained operations in Cameroon and French Guinea.36 Queneau’s text “assert[s] the primacy of geopolitics, especially the flows of petroleum, as the ultimate domain where matters can get too hot and explode,” ­Dimendberg argues.37 Over fifty years after Resnais’s film and Barthes’s essay, one might say that the explosive moment in geopolitics has been reached and exceeded. Regarding Oil, her 2007 installation for the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, Genzken says, “I like the title because that is what the whole world is about. Whether there’s war or not, that’s what it’s all about. Energy and oil.”38 The installation doesn’t treat in any literal way the cost of crude oil that continued to rise precipitously in 2007 (culminating in what economists call the oil shock of 2007–­2008), nor does Genzken take up America’s ongoing war in the Middle East, rooted in the former’s long-­term economic interests in the latter’s resources,

though these dynamics would have been foremost in the mind of any visitor to the Biennale that year. Under the banner of “Oil,” Genzken also contemplates consumption more generally: how we as subjects are consumed by it, how it consumes our history and our future. The banner is literal, one might say, as she draped the entire exterior of the pavilion in orange construction-­site netting (see fig. 6), of which she observes incisively, “Das ist Plastik, also auch Öl.” (It’s plastic, thus oil also.)39 “They come from all over the world,” Genzken asserts of her purchased materials. “One component is from Taiwan, the next from Mexico, and the third from somewhere completely different.”40 As interested in the conditions of production of consumer goods as in their depicted motifs, Genzken shows herself to be attuned to the mechanisms of commodity chains and the exploitation of cheap, unskilled labor by multinational corporations. Not only has the manufacture of goods long since been displaced from the craftsman’s workshop, it has been dispersed across an international network of producers of parts only subsequently assembled into wholes. A lack of transparency governs every stage of commodity production, a fact that finds its analog and material expression in the absence of traces of production from the reified objects.41 Genzken’s assemblages don’t render commodity production any more transparent, but in their chaotic pileups and inscrutable scenarios they make the commodity’s opacity confrontational and monstrous. As a point of contrast, Genzken’s own labor is made utterly legible. Unlike traditional sculptural processes like carving and casting—­the former exhibiting finely honed craft, the latter requiring the expertise and resources of a foundry—­the basic act of juxtaposition that governs her assemblage is both visually evident and mundane. Genzken’s rudimentary gestures of piling, taping, grouping, fitting, leaning, bending, and splattering find a corollary in the circumscribed actions of unskilled workers under current systems of manufacture. At the same time, the unruly combinatory imagination governing these ­assemblages and their narratives of destruction must be seen as outcries against the division of labor and the dehumanization of the worker. In other words, even as Genzken employs a vocabulary of alienated labor she manifests the workings of fantasy, which Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge have described as the subconscious remainder that cannot be appropriated (or can be, but only with difficulty) to the purposes of capital.42 As the last preserve of human relations, intellectual vitality, and genuine yearning in the face of fragmentation, fantasy may be the means of protest and defense. The fantasies played out in Genzken’s assemblages are multiple and sometimes conflicting. On the one hand, monstrous animation of the inanimate and the subject’s acts of aggression against such unnatural vividness. On the other hand, the subject’s strange e ­ mpathy

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with the alienated object, whose pathos the subject understands as mirroring her own. Thus, assemblages that might seem at first only to express Genzken’s individual psychosis or her impulse toward diabolical play, in fact engage important issues that bear upon any subject alienated from her labor.

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In drawing on the wide realm of consumer goods for her materials, Genzken has been seen to elaborate upon the Duchampian t­ radition. She nonetheless insists, “I am not interested in readymades. The meaning is in the combination of things.”43 Here Genzken calls upon a standard, if ultimately limited, understanding of the operations involved in the readymade in order to deprioritize “aesthetic indifference” and the conceptual act of designation. As discussed in chapter 1, Genzken was keen to court meaning and association even with the early and rigorously formal Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos. She was never seduced by minimalism’s reductionism, just as she refuses the indifference and the ironic distance of the Duchampian stance. In the context of her assemblage work, she insists upon meaning making and locates it in the act of combination. My aim in the remainder of this chapter is to argue that the mode of Genzken’s meaning making is fundamentally allegorical.44 Given titles like Empire/Vampire, American Room, and Oil, one might say that Genzken’s allegorical intention is far from subtle. Atop an executive’s desk, a statuette of Scrooge McDuck—­that emblem of avarice dispatched by the Disney empire—­brandishes a fistful of cash (fig. 64). Dime-­store figurines of bald eagles, each more ridiculous and crude than the last, perch on white pedestals flanking the desk. Here’s one such tableau: an eagle spreads its wings in a predatory pose, another stands watch over a silver bowl, while a comparatively miniscule human figure sits dejected on the rim of a red glass. And another: among a jumble of vanity cases and knickknacks, one identifies a toy police car and a puppet, its head obscured by a red covering. Perhaps the hooded figure alludes to torture at Abu Ghraib, images of which caused an inter­national uproar when disclosed in 2003, or more generally, to interrogation measures undertaken under the rubric of counterterrorism. Orchestrated as a set of stations leading up to a desk where an empty chair beckons the viewer (and thereby implicates her), American Room (2006) is an allegory of American-­brand democracy that draws an equation between corporate and military might (and indeed, the control of the latter by the interests of the former), depicts the diminishment of the public sphere and of the rights of the private citizen in the name of the greater good,

and highlights the violent acts of inhumanity that give the lie to the rhetoric of justice and democracy. In Oil, Genzken offers us a carnival of death and decay that collapses consumerism, tourism, and imperialism as expressions of a single drive to annex. The future, represented by faceless or blank-­eyed astronauts, is shown to be no more alive than the past. At the same time, the past carries on with all the restless energy of the undead: skulls mug from behind Venetian carnival masks and designer sunglasses. Occupying the central atrium of the German Pavilion are rolling carry-­ons, metonyms for the curious and curio-­seeking globetrotter, not to mention the art-­loving visitor to the Biennale (see fig. 5). They are pointedly empty, devoid of substance and seeking to fill a lack. Oil constitutes a multi­ layered allegory about the root causes, manifestations, and implications of the economic and cultural politics of 2007.

Fig. 64 Isa Genzken, Amerikanischer Raum (American Room), 2004. Installation, mixed media. Twelve parts, dimensions installed variable. Installation view, Galerie im Taxispalais, Innsbruck, 2006. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

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Individual works and entire installations, such as Kinder Filmen (Children Filming, 2005) and Genzken’s 2007 installation for Skulptur Projekte Münster, lend themselves to this sort of parsing. While it is undeniable, then, that Genzken’s allegorical intention is manifest in overt thematics (whether tackling modern warfare, terrorism, imperialism, urban planning, or human vices), more remains to be said about her structural engagement with allegory. Specifically, the aggressive combinatory aspect of Genzken’s sculptures, as well as their emphasis on cheap, mass-­produced things, can be productively understood as allegorical in nature. In his fragments on late nineteenth-­century Paris and in various other texts on Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin laid out a distinctive theory of allegory that proves resonant.45 For Benjamin, the allegorical emblem finds its counterpart in the commodity: just as the commodity fetish, according to Marx, severs the object from the labor that produces it, abstracting human relations into relations between things, the allegory severs the organic relations between the emblem or thing and its meaning. The exchange value of goods in a capitalist economy finds its analogue in the arbitrary significance assigned by allegory to its emblems. “Hence,” in Benjamin’s view, “the allegorist is in his element with commercial wares.”46 Crucially, Benjamin saw in allegorical procedures the means to revolt against the ubiquitous commodity: insofar as they embody, exaggerate, and therefore estrange conditions of arbitrariness, such procedures can resist these conditions from within.47 At work is what Benjamin calls the “progressive tendency of allegory,” which results from a destructive energy that dispels any illusion of wholeness.48 We are to understand that allegory as traditionally defined—­that is, the imposition of a stable framework of meaning upon a narrative—­constitutes its regressive tendency. It is on the basis of allegory’s regressive tendency that Goethe and Schelling valued the supposedly organic and unitary symbol over the artificial allegorical construct in the eighteenth century.49 Benjamin’s description of the allegorist as one who “rummages here and there for a particular piece, holds it next to some other piece, and tests to see if they fit together” readily applies to the collage or assem­ blage artist.50 Collage and assemblage are allegorical processes par excellence insofar as the combination of things accentuates rather than ameliorates arbitrariness. That Genzken’s chosen material is plastic gives added depth, meaning, and emphasis to her allegorical manipulation of commodities. For if in allegory “any person, any object, any relationship can mean anything else,”51 in plastic’s molecular structure resides the capacity to realize an infinite number of forms. As an abstract and in­ organic material, one without essential materiality and characterized by a mysterious transmutability, plastic is perhaps the ideal material for the production of a contemporary allegory. The mass-­produced plastic thing can be held up as the perfect emblem of our alienated times.

In insisting upon the object as a material entity resulting from specific social and economic forces, however, Genzken’s work exhibits a powerful materialist impulse that might seem to contradict—­but in fact gives depth to—­her allegorical impulse. On the one hand, then, the utter instability of meaning and value; on the other hand, the intractable ­presence of the material thing. Indeed, a perverse “truth to materials” plays itself out in her work. For what might this modernist edict mean when the material at hand is seen to be fundamentally untrue?52 To ponder this question is to enter a hall of mirrors (acrylic, of course, not glass). One need only think of Nikolai Tarabukin’s gloss on constructivism, “The material dictates the forms, and not the opposite,” to realize the impossibility of enacting this principle in relation to a material whose very quality, whether vaunted or loathed, is a lack of intrinsic form.53 Plastic’s truth is not one, but infinite. Put differently, if plastic is “ubiquity made visible,”54 any proper expression of its essence would make visible that ubiquity. In contrast, then, to the succinctness of Vladimir Tatlin’s Selection of Materials (1914)—­rolled iron, milled wooden rod, triangle of cut glass—­Genzken’s assemblages of accumulated wares are sprawling, overstocked, and overwhelming. Comprehensiveness is obviously impossible, but with her spatial arrays of motley constructions she achieves something of the gratuitousness of the commodity spectacle. To say that plastic has no intrinsic form or texture is not to indicate that it is without defining characteristics. As many commentators have noted, plastic’s hollow sound and unidimensional colors are its dead giveaways.55 Indeed, one of the most notable aspects of Genzken’s assem­blage work in this vein is its heightened palette of synthetic ­colors, exuberant and grating, forcefully unharmonious. The visual impact is one of great and sometimes difficult intensity. To varying degrees in each work, Genzken maintains both the terrors of this intensity and its pleasures. As much with plastic as with her uses of plaster, concrete, and glass, Genzken’s work raises the issue of the material’s characteristics, its means of production, its social uses and connotations, and its mass-­produced forms. Indeed, the material is constitutive of the work and its meaning. Few, if any, of the artists who might have partaken of the so-­called allegorical impulse in the 1980s engaged so directly with material.56 Most were concerned with the mass-­circulated image. Genzken’s materialism, and her attunement to color in particular, brings her allegory down to earth and up to date. She sets the arbitrary in dialectical tension with the materially (and historically) specific. In so doing, Genzken avoids the melancholy that can befall the allegorist, just as she escapes the reductivism that can plague the materialist. The artist Josiah McElheny, offering a typology of contemporary approaches to the readymade, applies the label cynical (not dis­ approvingly) to Genzken’s mode of assemblage.57 While in every other

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regard, ­McElheny’s assessment of Genzken as one who “protests the modern power structures that create the manufactured objects of global culture” is apt, I would argue that “cynical” is precisely what this work is not. At least not in terms of the “detached negativity” with which Peter ­Sloterdijk characterizes the latter-­day cynic. Indeed, according to Sloterdijk, cynical reason would obviate protest, as hope and energy for ideology critique are vitiated in the face of “enlightened false consciousness.”58 Rather than withdraw into embittered dissatisfaction, Genzken’s approach is too impassioned and too public in its address to be deemed cynical. Though hardly devoid of doubt, her attitude is one of profound attachment to the possibility of criticality. Her choice of materials and techniques, her development of certain themes through narratives and titles, and her pointed engagement with art history bear this out. If attached negativity is one facet of Genzken’s assemblage work, and perhaps the most conspicuous one, another must also be considered: what one might call a passionate empathy. “Something that bothers me with some of my students,” Genzken confesses, “is that their works are so cold towards the viewer. I have always told the students that they have to imagine how the viewer sees something, too. You’ve got to put yourself in the viewer’s shoes when you do something.”59 This remark is a touch banal in its phrasing, but the ways in which Genzken’s works bear out the values expressed are hardly so. Genzken’s insistence that her works have content, convey meaning, and relate to reality amounts to a commitment to the viewer. Her allegorical impulse must be seen in this light as well. In expounding allegory’s demands upon and relationship to the viewer, Stephen Melville writes, “As a trope of revelation and concealment, [allegory] is a mode at once public and private, and if allegorical works appear to embody the deep and obscure promptings of the self, they do so successfully only to the extent that these promptings are communicable, are already what we might call ‘public.’”60 While much ink has been spilled elaborating upon the formal aspects that characterize allegory in postmodern art (fragmentation, repetition, accumulation), Melville emphasizes the communicability that is its premise and thus also, one might add, its utopian promise: “Allegorical works do not exist except in a universe of continuing allegoresis, commentary, and interpretation.”61 They open onto and provide fodder for discourse, in other words. It is in this aspect of Genzken’s allegorical impulse—­in its commitment to communication—­that her practice breaks through a fixed contemplation of present threats under late capitalism (alienation, reification, spectacle) to make its bid on the future. If the plastic commodity is the material of Genzken’s assemblages, and allegorical combination their means, the possibility of criticality is their underlying concern.

4 Radical Exposure “Everyone needs at least one window,” Isa Genzken has avowed. As if to make her assertion tangible, she produced in 1990 a series of Fenster (Windows), first in concrete and then in epoxy (see fig. 4).1 Heads, jambs, and sills sit as if aloft on Genzken’s signature steel bases. In contrast to the Concretes that preceded them, the scale of the Fenster is 1:1 vis-­à-­vis their functional referents. The struggle to depict the world, which has preoccupied many visual artists, is obviated by Genzken, who simply brackets a bit of reality. Furthermore, not one of the apertures is sealed with glass. The boundary between inside and outside is dissolved; space is continuous rather than divided. The window’s function in demarcating interior from exterior, or in bridging the two by making each visible to the other, is rendered moot. The epoxy versions of this motif (1992) up the ante: with their steel armatures visible through translucent, yellow matter, these Fenster are doubly seen through. Genzken’s unglazed apertures frame for us a set of urgent questions pertaining to the possibilities of privateness and publicness, subjectivity and collectivity: Can these works be understood to instantiate in visual terms the collapse of private (i.e., domestic and interior) spheres and public spheres? And what do they say regarding the status of the subject, who not only stands at the (nonfunctional) window but is mirrored by the concrete-­and-­steel ensemble? Do the anthropomorphic Fenster present the prospect of the subject as voided or all-­encompassing, as fragmented or integrated? Scholar and cultural critic Thomas Keenan offers a disquieting vision of this architectural feature when he writes, “The window can breach, tear open, the ‘protection’ that is the human subject, overcome it with a violence that proves remarkably resistant to knowledge (especially that of vision) or representation.”2 Genzken too seems to acknowledge that the window is not only a means by which space is mastered through sight, but also a site of potentially dangerous exposure. Rough-­hewn

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and sometimes fissured, the concrete windows hint at destruction and fragmentation. Her series Paravents (1990; fig. 65), related to the Fenster in form and concept, makes explicit the artist’s interest in the deliberate refusal of protective functions. Empty frames that sit on the floor rather than on pedestals—­and which are therefore all the more anthropomorphic—­the screenless “screens,” far from buffering the wind, flout the French root parare, meaning to shield, guard, or ward off. Understood as images of the subject in the world, and in relation to the world, Genzken’s Paravents and Fenster posit precariousness and exposure as the necessary conditions for the possibility of meaningful contact.3 This conception runs counter to any theoretical model that proffers an ideal of public discourse as frictionless exchange among a unitary group of persons, just as it rejects any paradigm of publicness that does not involve, in some deep, profound, and essential way, the laying bare of the personal.4 Keenan is critical of the conventional definition of the public sphere, which depends upon its separation from the private sphere. Counterintuitively, in his view, it is not separation but breach that constitutes interiority: “Publicity does not befall what is properly private, contaminating or opening up an otherwise sealed interiority. Rather, what we call interiority is itself the mark or the trace of this breach, of a violence that in turn makes possible the violence of the love we experience as intersubjectivity.”5 The detachment of Genzken’s Fenster from any enclosing wall contradicts older models of interiority, predicated upon the subject as a self-­contained monad, opening up onto another model in which rupture, risk, and exposure are the bases for privacy and publicness. Genzken’s unglazed and unwalled Fenster both stand in for the radically exposed subject and serve as the insecure windows at which that subject stands. The subject is not always an abstract or generic entity in Genzken’s work. In Chicago Drive (1992), her paean to the birthplace of skyscrapers, the video camera lingers for a moment on an image of the artist herself contemplating the view from two double-­hung windows. Genzken’s image and perspective appear in her works in ways that are alternately matter-­of-­fact and tongue-­in-­cheek, but always unvarnished. Consider her photographic documentation of her 1991 hospital stay; her self-­ portrait as Spielautomat (Slot Machine, 1999–­2000); or the three collage books she made in 1995–­1996, which were published in facsimile a decade later as I Love New York, Crazy City. The collage books are part diary, part archive, part uninhibited self-­exhibition (figs. 66 and 67). Their barrage of image and text, coarsely attached with wide strips of colored packing tape, embodies an as-­found rawness generated by the friction of pleasure and loathing. Takeout menus, hotel bills, ATM printouts showing dwindling funds, torn magazine pages, faxes to G ­ ermany

Chapter 4 Radical Exposure

Fig. 65 Isa Genzken, Paravent, 1990. Concrete, hinges. 152 × 224 × 9 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

­ sking for money, calendars of events (long since outdated), perfora mance programs, business cards, and casual photographs of nothing in particular (the fluorescent pall of cheap eateries, skyscrapers viewed from the ground up, dimly lit interiors, construction sites): Genzken’s is a guidebook contra guidebooks that subverts the tourism bureau’s best intentions. One gets a sense of Genzken’s omnivorous a ­ ppetite for popular and underground cultures and her precipitous plunge into the spaces of the city. Her wit and sense of irony are also abundantly evident: she includes an ad for cosmetic surgery that reads, “The hands of a sculptor, the skills of a surgeon.” A decontextualized fragment of text, “The world’s largest souvenir? Sweet dreams,” takes on haunting and melancholy resonance. Through the pages of the first two volumes,

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Fig. 66 Isa Genzken, I Love New York, Crazy City, 1995/1996 (detail). One of three artist’s books: printed paper, gelatin silver prints, chromogenic color prints, tape. 39 × 30.5 × 7.5 cm (closed). © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York. Fig. 67 Isa Genzken, I Love New York, Crazy City, 1995/1996 (detail). One of three artist’s books: printed paper, gelatin silver prints, chromogenic color prints, tape. 39 × 30.5 × 7.5 cm (closed). © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz and JRP Ringier.

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one pieces together an ­image of Genzken during a difficult period: itinerant (moving from five-­star hotels to youth hostels and back again), extravagant, a bit dangerous, and more than physically adrift. At times the Genzken of I Love New York, Crazy City seems to be living out, in quite literal ways, the violence and breach only alluded to in the Fenster. Here we see the hospital receipt for sutures, and then, pages later, a series of photos of Genzken, laceration over her right eye, hamming it up for Wolfgang Tillmans’s camera (fig. 67). The third book is more orderly—­ photos are largely laid out in a grid, separated by strips of packing tape that function like muntins—­and less disparate in its makeup. I Love New York, Crazy City ends with an interview with the artist Daniel McDonald that addresses quite directly Genzken’s bouts of aggression and manic depression interspersed with periods of stability. Speaking of a then-­ upcoming exhibition at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Genzken glosses the title, MetLife: it not only refers to the iconic MetLife building but is also meant to conjure the idea of meeting life.6 And this she does, head-­on. That I Love New York, Crazy City is deeply personal goes without saying. And yet it does not amount to a repositioning of the artist—­her self, her body, or her biography—­as the locus of significance. Genzken intended the collaged volumes to be a guidebook to New York. This seems ludicrous when one first encounters the dissociated, gritty contents. Scrapbook at most, it is certainly no guidebook. As with much of Genzken’s work, however, its perverse logic makes itself felt in time. In fields of visual non sequiturs, tangents, and fragments, Genzken takes pains to show phone numbers, addresses, menus, and maps. I Love New York, Crazy City travesties the guidebook genre’s predication on vetted versions of urban experience, scrubbed down and served in bite-­size bits. In acknowledging the viewer as someone who will construct an itinerary—­ both through the city and through the contents of the book—­I Love New York, Crazy City points beyond the person of Isa Genzken to broader concerns: the self as formed in the uneasy negotiation and interpenetration of public and private spheres, the falling apart and the coming together of the subject in the space of the city. In the works that constitute the subject of this chapter, Genzken explores the formal and spatial articulation of inside and outside, surface and depth, opacity and transparency, to insist upon the possibilities of psychic interiority and expressivity as the bases for connection and intimacy with others. The exploration of architectural idioms, then, is hardly arbitrary. There is in architectural discourse a long history of thinking of buildings as bodies: face as façade, architectural skin as corporeal skin, the building’s interior as psychic interior. Beyond suggesting particular ways to frame and shelter the body, architecture and architectural motifs serve as the body’s proxy.

— Fig. 68 Isa Genzken, Sie sind mein Glück, installation view, Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2000. (From left to right: Chris­ topher, 1998; Justus, 1998/2000; Dan, 1999; Christiane, 1998; Wolfgang, 1998; Law­ rence, 2000.) © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

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With only a few exceptions—­the marble tiles of Lawrence (2000), for instance, or the alternating panels of wood veneer and perforated metal that comprise Wolfgang (1998)—­Genzken’s Columns, some three dozen works realized between 1998 and 2003 (figs. 68 and 69), feature a motley array of claddings: a high-­low mix of copper, marble, glass, aluminum, alloy, wood, mirror, reflective foil, tape, and photographs or other printed matter. Intrinsic differences in material are intensified through additional treatment, either in the manufacturing process or by the artist’s hand. Metal plates come matte, polished, perforated, or embossed (gridded or hammered). Wood panels and particleboards may be stained, painted, lacquered, or veneered. Add to the mix the reflective properties of mirror and glass (often tinted) and the optical pizzazz of metallic foil (holographic, gridded, and color-­saturated), and one has all the elements for exuberant play in polychromy and surface effects. Myriad surface treatments and disparate dimensions individuate the Columns, which range in height from 215 to 324 centimeters, with square or rectangular bases that vary between 18 and 38 centimeters in width and depth. Their proportions are perspicaciously worked out: taller than the average human, but slender enough to avoid seeming oppressive, monumental.7 What results is a sense that the Columns are both figures and architecture, even as the viewer recognizes that they are properly neither. Our apprehension of them involves grappling with additional contradictions: geometric reduction and exuberant ornamentation, containment and expressiveness, solitude and sociality, privacy and publicness. Highly articulate in their references to architecture, the Columns evoke both parts and wholes—­pilotis or columns, on the one hand; cubic volumes suggestive of skyscrapers, on the other. (We observed in chapter 2 a comparable dynamic in the Concretes, which oscillate in the viewer’s perception between fragments and scale models.) Whereas the Concretes and the New Buildings for Berlin express the principles of tectonics (through negation, in the latter case), the Columns emphasize architectural surface—­what is variously referred to in the discourse as cladding, skin, or dressing. Lawrence’s white marble tiles, veined in gray and hints of brown, call to mind hushed lobbies. The metal panels, darkened glass, and gridded, mirrored foils of Untitled (1998), Christopher (1998), and Layout (2001) resemble the steely façades of corporate high-­ rises. To underscore the point, Untitled features on one of its sides four evenly spaced, black-­and-­white photographs of the towers of the former World Trade Center and the plaza in front of it. In Justus (1998/2000), marble tiles are interspersed with horizontal bands of photographs.

One such band shows the panes of glass behind Genzken’s desk in her Berlin studio—­to look at this ribbon of windows is simultaneously to look in and to look out of a space. Nearly the entirety of an untitled Column of 2001 is covered with photographs of New York City: the stridently colored billboards of Times Square, the glass-­and-­steel façades of office towers, the non-­place of a terminal at JFK. With their bottom edges curling away from the support, the photographs lie like paper shingles. The Columns that feature a punchy mix of holographic foil and metallic tape evoke an urban stroll, where digital billboards, illuminated marquees, and colored awnings jam the visual field. Wood panels lacquered blue with tufts of white—­featured in A, B, C, D (2002/2003)—­make permanent and opaque the fleeting reflections of the sky on glass curtain walls. Four smaller Columns, each titled Vom Himmel zurück (Back from the Sky, 2003), are entirely lacquered in this manner. “The glass building is virtually eliminated,” writes Dan Graham, Genzken’s longtime friend, regarding the rhetoric of transparency behind which corporate capital shields itself.8 The reflectivity of a glass building functions similarly to dissolve structure and annex nature. Genzken’s 2000 video Work shows this dynamic from within. From an elevated view, the stationary camera fixes upon a pink-­and orange-­streaked sky and a bit of water (a river or a lake) framed by two office towers. As dusk descends, the exterior view is increasingly overlaid with ghostly reflections of a man working at his desk, surrounded by the typical accoutrements of cubicle life. Rather than a “[lookout] dominating the world order,” as Le Corbusier imagined the inhabitant of his office towers, the worker seems captive and strangely insubstantial.9 At first seemingly anomalous, Aquarium (2001) and Kleine Fischsäule (Small Fish Column, 2001) are entirely covered with collaged images of tropical fish. Further consideration reveals their punning logic: Genzken highlights and mimics the natural cladding of fish in the medium of collage, so many paper scales. She also draws a sly analogy between the denizens of glass architecture and those of a fish tank. The spectral protagonist of Work would get the joke. Not just architectural references but art historical ones abound. One face of Lehmbruck (2000) (fig. 70) is painted silver with a central, red stripe. A polished metal plate covers its lower quarter. At its midpoint Genzken has attached four identical postcard reproductions of expressionist sculptor Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s Emporsteigender Jüngling (Standing Youth [also known as Ascending Youth], 1913; fig. 71). Arguably the last significant German sculptor to have practiced figuration in the neoclassical vein, Lehmbruck was invested in presenting an essential image of man, even when, after World War I, that essence necessarily involved

Chapter 4 Radical Exposure

Fig. 69 Isa Genzken, Neue Arbeiten, installation view, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, 1998. (All works: Untitled, 1998.) © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/ New York.

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Fig. 70 Isa Genzken. Lehmbruck, 2000. Wood, metal, aluminium foil, postcards. 320 × 19.5 × 18 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York. Fig. 71 Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Standing Youth, 1913. Cast stone. 233.7 × 85.1 × 68 cm. Gift of Abby Aldridge Rockefeller. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.

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trauma. However attenuated his sculptural physiques then became (Der Gestürzte [The Fallen Man], 1915; Sitzender Jüngling [Seated Youth], 1916), and however wretched their poses, the human figure remained intact. Genzken punctures the profundity of Lehmbruck’s image of introspection in Emporsteigender Jüngling by affixing above it an image of a puppy. But apart from this characteristically humorous mix of lofty sentiment and kitsch sentimentality, Lehmbruck raises an issue crucial to Genzken’s Columns as a body of work, namely the place of the human figure in contemporary sculpture. One witnesses in Lehmbruck’s figures a late, ambivalent assertion of sculpture’s capacity to present paragons of citizenship, morality, and nationalism.10 On the one hand, the idea of an exemplum virtutis was called into doubt in the wake of the war, and with the dissolution of the public sphere more generally. On the other hand, Lehmbruck affirms the human form and the language of bodily gesture as vehicles of universal, if antiheroic, subjectivity. With the ideal social bases of commemorative statuary thoroughly eroded, even this qualified position cannot be maintained. In the postwar period human presence was often conjured as abstract sign or indexical trace—­that is, presence was conjured only partially and often as absence.11 In order to regain legitimacy, figurative sculpture has had to radically rethink its terms, from its established repertoire of gestures and poses to its traditional materials that connote value and permanence, from its monumental scale to its amenability to expressions of power. Genzken’s Columns compellingly reimagine statuary after minimalism, by which I mean in dialogue with minimalism and emphatically not in the vein of monumental neo-­expressionist figures in hewn wood or cast bronze daubed with paint, such as those by Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz that found particular favor in the art market of the 1980s.12 The revival of such heroicizing modes and traditional methods is inimical to Genzken, who, with the Columns, tests the possibility of abstract statuary, though it would seem an oxymoron.13 In their simple, geometric forms, the Columns are minimalist gestalts. In “Art and Object­­hood,” Michael Fried criticized the sculptural volumes of so-­called literalist art for their latent anthropomorphism. Of Tony Smith’s cubic Die (1962), for example, he writes: One way of describing what Smith was making might be something like a surrogate person—­that is, a kind of statue. . . . [T]he apparent hollowness of most literalist work—­the quality of having an inside—­is almost blatantly anthropomorphic. It is, as numerous commentators have remarked approvingly, as though the work in question has an inner, even secret, life.14

Fig. 72 Robert Morris, Columns, 1961–­1973. Painted aluminum. Two columns, each 8 × 2 × 2 feet. © 2015 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo Courtesy Castelli Gallery, New York.

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One might recall in this context that Robert Morris’s first sculptural work, Column (1960), was a plywood box in the hollow center of which the artist could stand.15 His two Columns of the following year (fig. 72) maintained bodily presence even in the absence of his actual body. This anthropomorphism that Fried perceives to be a weakness of literalist forms Genzken courts explicitly. Yet crucial to the allusiveness of Genzken’s Columns is that, unlike Morris’s Columns or his Box for Standing (1961), their proportions are ambiguous: they are not immediately legible as bodies enlarged or edifices miniaturized. To declare an artwork unresolved is often a judgment of its deficiency or at least its state of incompletion, but in the case of Genzken’s Columns, the unresolvedness of scale is a calculated means to engage the viewer in an active and fluctuating perceptual experience analogous to that involved in negotiating one’s place among the things, spaces, and people of the world. In this, at least, the artist continues minimalism’s intensification of phenomenological awareness through sculptural form. But additional formal distinctions must be made between Genzken’s Columns and their minimalist predecessors. Contrary to the one-­thing-­ after-­another logic of minimalist seriality, each of the Columns is unique. If the quintessential minimalist form is a geometric volume rendered in some impervious industrial material by industrial means, Genzken renders the surface of the forms discontinuous with a patchwork of claddings, the application of which is so idiosyncratic as to render the far side of the gestalt unknowable. Even the most colorful minimalist works—­Donald Judd’s Plexiglas and anodized aluminum objects, John McCracken’s planks, and Anne Truitt’s painted volumes come to mind—­ seem restrained by comparison to Genzken’s off-­kilter chromatic sensibility. While Genzken’s Columns are hollow, any “inner life” is lived on the surface. Many of the Columns bear the names of Genzken’s friends and fellow artists. Wolfgang refers to the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans, Genzken’s occasional collaborator, and Lawrence can boast a namesake

in conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner. Kai (2000), fraternal twin to Isa (2000), is named after contemporary artist Kai Althoff. (Both feature yellow-­on-­black racing stripes that double as homage to the “zips” of Barnett Newman, a figure Genzken has identified as an influence.) The Columns are manifestly handmade, an important quality that cannot be captured in photographic reproduction. Excess glue seeps from edges; painted panels show streaks and air pockets; materials are often layered and overlapped rather than set seamlessly one alongside another, producing a subtle dimensionality. In a section of Dan (1999), for instance—­Dan Graham is its namesake—­the wood core is covered with a mirror, then a marble tile, followed by a tinted mirror. This handmadeness stands in contrast to the erasure of any evidence of touch from much minimalist and conceptual art in favor of flawless industrial finish or expedient, nondescript execution. What is at stake is not, however, a return to the idea of the autographic and auratic trace so much as an assertion of intimacy—­the artist’s own intimacies, but also the possibility of intimacy more generally. Exhibited in clusters, as they often are, the Columns constitute group portraits. Individualized through an abstract vocabulary of volume and surface, they offer a model of statuary that ­depends upon neither universal types nor mimetic fidelity for its legitimacy. They are tantalizingly available and unavailable to the viewer, ­demonstrably visible yet elusive, much as an in-­joke or a secret handshake can be heard or seen by all but understood by only a few. Genzken’s Columns embody individuality exteriorized as surface, as cladding. Or, changing the emphasis, one might say that the Columns present surface decoration as constitutive of individuality. The connection between architectural cladding and the delineation of interior and exterior, private and public, is elaborated in the writings of Gottfried Semper and Adolf Loos. “Im Anfang war die Bekleidung” (In the beginning was cladding), writes Loos in his 1898 essay “Das Prinzip der Bekleidung” (The Principle of Cladding).16 In reaching for biblical phrasing, Loos claims for cladding an originary status. The principle promised in the essay’s title dictates that cladding must not be imitative of the underlying structure but should call attention to itself qua cladding. In formulating this principle, Loos refers to the work of Semper, for whom architecture’s origins and essence are to be found in woven coverings that demarcate space. Semper asserts that the basic pen woven of natural materials served “as a means of dividing the ‘home,’ the inner life from the outer life, as a formal construct of a spatial idea.”17 Only after spatial interiority and exteriority are visualized and actualized can the “inner life” of the subject become thinkable. Subjectivity by this definition is a product of the most basic architecture. So too, then, is inter­subjectivity, with “outer life” understood to indicate something like sociality or

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­ ublicness. As Mark Wigley writes in his discussion of Semper’s theories p of Bekleidung, “The evolution of skin, the surface with which spatiality is produced, is the evolution of the social. The social subject, like the body with which it is associated, is a product of decorative surfaces. . . . Interiority is not simply physical. It is a social effect marked on the newly constituted body of the individual.”18 If the clad body has signaled extreme alienation in the history of sculpture, as in the Vorticist imaginary of segmented and armored monsters, Genzken’s Columns suggest subjects that, though hardened, have reclaimed the surface for the possibility of sociality. They render physiognomy as architectural skin, with none of the dissimulation implied by “façade.” In her series of concrete and epoxy windows, Genzken explores subjectivity and intersubjectivity through a formal language of openness and breach. She might be seen to invert the visual terms in the Columns. With this series, individuality and connectivity are investigated via heightened attention to, and literal reinforcement of, the surface. Yet in both cases, Genzken locates her investigation at the very point of contact between inside and outside. Further, both the Fenster and the Columns interrogate—­one might even say challenge—­the ­designation of inside and outside, exterior and interior. This is clear enough in the ­Fenster, which take the form of apertures open everywhere in and around. The Columns operate rather more counterintuitively, perhaps. In emphasizing the surface through an accumulation of claddings, and in making that clad surface the locus of individuality, that which is ­“inner” is made a function of, and inseparable from, the “outer.”

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Both Semper and Loos put great store in the fact that the term Beklei­ dung has as its root kleiden, “to clothe, to dress,” thereby suggesting the textile origins of architecture. Similarly, the German words for wall (Wand) and garment (Gewand) share the same root. Cladding’s etymological and anthropological relationships to the body and to dressing resonate in Genzken’s Columns, on the surfaces of which cladding and clothing converge and the creation of the subject follows fast on the creation of space. Investment in these themes can be traced to the very beginning of her career, to the film Zwei Frauen im Gefecht (Two Women in Combat, 1974; fig. 73). A wonderfully simple conceit drives the eight-­ minute film: a tall, slender woman (Genzken) and a comparatively stout woman (the artist Susan Grayson) share a single ensemble. Traded back and forth, bra, blouse, skirt, and slippers fit both physiques. Are the two women in combat with each other? Their conspiratorial sniggers suggest

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Fig. 73 Isa Genzken, Zwei Frauen im Gefecht (Two Women in Combat), 1974. 16 mm film transferred to video, black and white, silent, 8 min. Performers: Isa Genzken, Susan Grayson. Camera: Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

otherwise. The garments are pointedly generic, perfect for the secretarial pool. (An outfit more foreign to Genzken’s signature style, flashy and androgynous, could hardly be found.) On one level, Zwei Frauen can be seen as a conceptual exercise in surface and volume, cladding and structural core—­as applicable to sculpture and architecture as it is to the body. On another level, it offers witty commentary on the social legibility of the body, which depends upon the specifically gendered markers in which it is attired. It is hardly coincidental that in the year Genzken made her first Columns, 1998, she also produced a series of two dozen paint-­slashed and spray-­painted garments, mainly shirts and jackets but also one dress. Violent and exuberant, expressing the freedom of individuation and the hostility of vandalism, these altered garments have received scant commentary in the literature on Genzken. It is not so difficult to surmise why. Since shifting in the late 1990s from the rigors of single-­material, ­architectonic forms toward motley assemblages of mass-­produced goods, Genzken has continuously tested the bounds of good taste. The vulgarity of her chosen materials, always accentuated by her aggressive treatment of them, is set in tension with formal ingenuity. Consider the way her precarious cairns of stuff animate space, or how she achieves a high-­keyed coloristic coherence. But as a series, the altered garments have proven more intractable. Perhaps we are embarrassed by

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their brazen­ness, irked by their casualness, or nonplussed by their dis­ parateness. Perhaps we are uncomfortable with the linkage they make between art and the openly commercial aims of high fashion. (Though the Hemden [Shirts] are usually shown ranged along a garment rack or suspended singly from a nail on the wall, Galerie Daniel Buchholz took a page from designer presentations, populating its space with willowy male models dressed in Genzken’s one-­of-­a-­kind duds.19) A drooping pelt hangs off the bottom of a shirt stained lurid red and laced with yellow. Synthetic flowers, strands of beads, and two balls of steel wool (cartoonish, unseeing eyes or armored breasts) bedeck a plaid shirt, overlaid with murky gray and silver paint. A white dress shirt, office-­wear workhorse, is emblazoned with spray-­painted dollar signs. In these and other examples from the series, Genzken demonstrates her considerable tolerance for, and artistic interest in, that which is visually, materially, and psychologically nasty. Certainly, there are exceptions; a few examples attain a difficult-­to-­account-­for appeal. Consider the dark blue shirt embellished with scattered deutsche mark coins, silver spray paint, and congealed scabs and skeins of paint.20 Or ponder this black dress shirt, its front divided into blocks of primary color—­red, blue, and yellow expanses involved in an intricate play of line and field, transparency and opacity (fig. 74). Since the advent of easel painting in the sixteenth century, the flat expanse of canvas stretched over a wooden armature has served as the neutral ground upon which artists render entire worlds. To a great extent, pictorial illusionism has both effected and depended upon a suspension of the recognition of the support surface. (Which is not to say, of course, that illusionism was not set in tension with an assertion of the physicality of the materials of painting.21) Modernist artists increasingly insisted upon that surface. The collapse of figure and ground, the building up of the surface itself through collage, and the use of so-­called deductive structures, in which the arrangement of forms within the composition refers to the framing edge—­these are just some of the means by which modernists acknowledged “flatness” as a governing condition of painting. With her modified garments, Genzken shows the extent to which both illusionism and modernist “flatness” (or antimodernist objecthood, for that matter) presumed the neutrality of the support.22 Genzken’s “canvases” are emphatically things of the world. Not blank, but replete with connotation; not ideal, but quotidian; not flat, but cut and stitched to accommodate volume; not the site of figuration, but the potential site of an actual, flesh-­and-­blood person. Indeed, Genzken dons one of the silver-­coated garments in a striking portrait by Wolfgang Tillmans, Isa Mona Lisa (fig. 75).

Fig. 74 Isa Genzken, Hemd (Shirt), 1998. Fabric, paint, postcards, shirt (size M). © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York

Fig. 75 Wolfgang Tillmans, Isa Mona Lisa, 1999. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/ Cologne.

On these altered garments we find a veritable lexicon of painterly marks and modes. Filaments and mists of paint à la Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings; gestural daubs dried in puckered pools; stains and sprays worked into warp and weft; blocks and stripes evoking geometric abstraction; graffiti-­like deformations of script; assemblage accretions of random matter, from reflective shards of CDs to picture postcards. Executed with nonchalance and combined as if by caprice, these marks are emptied of their original significance and historical specificity. Genzken’s appropriation of garments from the realm of mass production finds its analog in her appropriation, as if wholesale, of the repertoire of painterly gestures gleaned from the cultural production of the last hundred years or so. Put another way, industrial readymades and cultural readymades are shown to abide by the same logic. Just as her Columns interrogate statuary’s claim to represent human subjects, whether ideal types or individuals, Genzken’s altered garments confront the myth of the autographic mark as medium of the artist’s subjectivity. Here, the traces of painterly gesture have the quality of remainders, of residues. This is particularly evident when the painterly act approaches (and is combined with) the act of graffiti.23 Yet if these words raise the specter of futility, reckoning with the works themselves prompts recognition of a kind of euphoria and an expressive integrity that seem far from resigned. Genzken’s extravagant and irreverent mash-­ups of painterly marks nod knowingly toward painting as a codified system of signs in which she is always already a belated practitioner. But if these altered garments are any indication, Genzken observes the oft-­pronounced “end of painting” not with a funeral procession, but with a carnival, which embodies anarchic-­transformative potential. Genzken is no naïf. She does not imagine that painting could be reborn, disencumbered of its history. (Nor would she wish it—­modernist and avant-­garde painting held out crucial utopian ambitions that she has not abandoned.) Rather, she has focused on finding ways to invest both painting and sculpture with new possibilities for the personal. Painting’s self-­referentiality will not save it (or us), she seems to suggest. Rather, its survival depends upon its capacity to confront the contemporary status of things, images, and bodies, and to agitate for relevance among them. To attempt to extract expressiveness from a painterly language understood as long depleted might seem a fool’s errand. But Genzken’s hopes for success are predicated upon honest confrontations with, rather than denials of, obstacles. Hence the intractability of her altered garments, their deliberate refusal of the norms of beauty, their affinity with the grotesque and the base, and their binding of art with the

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Fig. 76 Joseph Beuys, Felt Suit, 1970. Wool felt with ink stamp. 177 × 100 cm. Harvard Art Museums/Busch-­ Reisinger Museum, Willy and Charlotte Reber Collection, Patrons of the Busch-­ Reisinger Museum Fund, 1995.231.A-­B. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-­Kunst, Bonn. Imaging Department, © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

everyday. What the Columns share with the altered garments, then, is a kind of exteriorizing of subjectivity in the form of a polychromatic surface, sometimes harmonious, sometimes eccentric. Genzken’s gambit is to take superficiality literally, analytically, and without judgment. Surfaces—­whether sensitive dermis or architectural façade, photographic emulsion or sartorial covering—­constitute the complex social skins through which we come into contact with one another. Suspended from wire hangers, Genzken’s altered garments call to mind Joseph Beuys’s iconic Felt Suit (1970) (fig. 76). Tailored after one of Beuys’s own suits, it is—­or they are, for ­ ultiple—a Felt Suit was produced as a m self-­portrait of sorts that refers to Beuys’s mythic auto­biography, in which nomadic Tartars supposedly saved him from the wreckage of his Luftwaffe plane and healed his wounds by swaddling him in fat and felt. Felt Suit thus encapsulates the role of the matted textile in Beuys’s theory of materials, where it is privileged for its heat-­retaining properties. Any interpretation of the material, formal, and symbolic specificity of Felt Suit must refer to Beuys’s origin story. Correspondingly, the absent body conjured up by the work is inevitably Beuys’s own. Needless to say, Genzken’s altered garments embody a different logic, premised on acts of customization—­where the mass-­produced commodity is individualized or, more radically, détourned—­whereas Beuys’s suit speaks the elite language of the bespoke. That said, Beuys is onto something when he says of the Felt Suit, “On the one hand, it’s a house, a cave that isolates a person from everybody else,” thereby drawing together cladding (that is, architecture) and clothing, and highlighting their relation to the social. “On the other, it is a symbol of the isolation of human beings in our era.”24 But if these statements suggest the negative condition of alienation, elsewhere he associates the suit’s matted material with “spiritual warmth or the beginning of an evolution.”25 Analogous

ambivalences are evident in Genzken’s garments and Columns. The expressive ornamentation of the latter is set in tension with their contained and armored quality, while the former convey demonstrative impulses as well as protective-­repulsive energies. Both visualize something akin to affiliation or identification with a subculture, whether in the form of an abstract group portrait or in suggesting an anarchic, urban uniform. For Genzken, the possibility of intimacy persists in the context of, and despite, social conditions of alienation. Indeed, isolation must be acknowledged for any vision or fantasy of human connection to be credible and productive.

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— Not to dress but to undress, to de-­clad, as it were, becomes the theme of another sculptural series, entitled Strandhäuser zum Umziehen (Beach Houses for Changing, 2000). In one work, six small, square mirrors lean against two coffee cans that serve as the structural core of an effort­ less architectonics. In another, a single, aluminum sheet, casually bent, defines a walled space with an open doorway. Or a three-­sided structure is decorated with striped crepe paper, covered with a mural on its back wall, and stippled everywhere else (inside and out) with confetti, the round forms of which echo the mural’s pebble motif. Or, wrapped in blue, red, and yellow plastic and topped with regular peaks of molded plastic, an upturned box of woven fiber forms a cylindrical chamber awash in tinted light (fig. 77). Here, blue molded peaks—­a repurposed cradle for fruit—­recall waves, an apt motif for a seaside construction. The umziehen of the sculptures’ title means to change one’s clothing (presumably from workaday attire into bathing gear and back again). As changing rooms, these provisional structures provide a place for the shedding of one identity and donning of another. Umziehen also means to relocate. In this case one imagines that the move is from the frenetic city to the seaside. But one might also consider a rarer use of umziehen—­in the sense of “to surround; draw the outlines of; cover, hang with, envelop”—­as a way to describe Genzken’s demarcation of space with bent planes of aluminum and plastic.26 Intimate in scale, constructed of simple materials by simple means, the Strandhäuser series asserts the possibility of private experience—­as an embodiment in­accessible to others—­through an evocation of physical and erotic pleasure. The predominance of curved sheets of colored film emphasizes transparency. Privacy, in this case, is happy to show off its assets. A couple of the huts bear on their exterior walls found images of sunbathing bodies; emblazoned on another are images of two males engaged in anal sex (fig. 78). As exterior projections

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Fig. 77 Isa Genzken, Strandhäuser zum Umziehen (Beach Houses for Changing), 2000 (detail). Installation, mixed media. One of ten parts, dimensions variable. Collection FRAC Nord-­Pas de Calais, Dunkerque. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York. Fig. 78 Isa Genzken, Strandhäuser zum Umziehen (Beach Houses for Changing), 2000 (detail). Installation, mixed media. One of ten parts, dimensions variable. Collection FRAC Nord-­Pas de Calais, Dunkerque. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/ Berlin/New York.

of sexual desires, these changing rooms bring public and private realms into contact on architectural skin. David Bussel writes eloquently on this subject, asserting that the Strandhäuser display 130

correspondences between sexuality and the built environment: social, psychological and corporeal configurations whose foundations are here literally made as foundational as building materials, objects-­ in-­themselves, and disruptive manifestations of an architectural un­ conscious.27

Genzken insists upon making sexuality, including queer sexuality, visible. She literally surfaces it. That which was relegated to the private sphere, and thus excluded from public discourse as traditionally defined, is ­asserted on an architectural scale, at least in imaginative projection. The sexual pleasure made explicit in the wall mural inheres in the structures themselves, specifically in their exhilarated polychromy, transparency, reflectivity, and texture. Erotic excitation is translated for the viewer in the form of optical and tactile experience. In the Strandhäuser the effects of color—­which no less an architect than Le Corbusier deemed a “psycho-­physiological excitant”28—­are sometimes compounded by those of light, which penetrates the transparent and curved planes to envelop the interior with its touch. But darkness can also heighten desire, as when an overturned wood box is lifted on small blocks to offer a glimpse, and only a glimpse, of its depths. We peer as if up the hem of a skirt. These structures are surrogate bodies, decidedly ungendered ones, and the desires they conjure are emphatically polymorphous. It is perhaps because of this power to call forth unfixed and ungovernable bodies and sensations that color and light have been regarded at times with such wariness by architects.29 But what if one did not feel anxiety regarding desire and its potentially destabilizing ­effects? The “architect” of the Strandhäuser seems not to be so tortured. With their transparent and colored planes, the Beach Houses picture what it might look like to give oneself over entirely to color and light, and the results are edenic rather than corrupt. In size, the Strandhäuser bear direct relation to the hands that shape them. The effortlessness of construction, the quotidian aspect of the materials, and the smallness of the works all suggest imaginative play, the taking of some everyday object and investing it with another, imagined, meaning. Certainly the Strandhäuser are suffused with sensuality and sexuality, yet these are pavilions for the enjoyment not only of adult pleasures but of childhood ones as well. The inclusion of paper cutouts of human figures, which ostensibly indicate scale, calls to mind paper dolls and dollhouses. The innocence of play is sufficiently evident that it overtakes, or at least is in tension with, erotics. The bringing together of adult sex and children’s play might be discomfiting, but with these works Genzken suggests, powerfully and provocatively, how the former might be reinvested with the latter (and also, perhaps, ways in which children’s play is not necessarily so innocent). Yve-­Alain Bois writes of this series, “For the first time perhaps in Genzken’s production, plastic is not connoted as the nasty non-­ biodegradable dreck that the postwar economy has forced upon us, the flotsam and jetsam that pollutes our beaches, but celebrated for its . . . plasticity.”30 Indeed, the Strandhäuser must be distinguished from that

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other instance of the hand-­scaled in Genzken’s oeuvre, the assemblages of mass-­produced wares discussed in chapter 3. The tone and substance of these manipulations of material couldn’t be more different: on the one hand, toys and objects given relatively complex, final form by industrial means; on the other hand, simple shapes simply made. Genzken follows avant-­garde and neo-­avant-­garde predecessors, from the Surrealists to Fluxus, in critiquing consumerism and spectacle through a thematics of play, desire, and fantasy. Tapping basic creative impulses and long cultural history, imaginative play, such as the Strandhäuser suggest as their mode of making, holds out against the fragmentation of time. One could argue, of course, that these seaside reveries remain haunted by the concept of leisure as advertising’s construct for alienated labor. Indeed, one might point out that color and light are precisely the terms of the optical effects that conjure phantasmagorical spectacle in the New Buildings for Berlin, as I argued in chapter 2. But to experience the nonchalance and the ludic quality of these intimate, brightly colored constructions is to understand their difference and their openness to the flow of visual, bodily, and tactile pleasures. The Strandhäuser are not anthropomorphic in the manner of the Fenster and Columns. Yet their appeal to the viewer’s sense of embodiedness (as physical condition and psychological state) is palpable. In his writings about postmodernist image culture, cultural critic Mark C. Taylor has mined the significance of the biological fact that human skin is not a mere envelope but the stuff from which the whole is generated: “Since the organism as a whole is formed by a complex of dermal layers, the body is, in effect, nothing but a strata of skin in which interiority and exteriority are thoroughly convoluted.”31 For Genzken the drama of the self and of the self-­in-­relation is negotiated on bodily skin and architectural skin, which are always and already inside and outside. Exploring themes of surface and depth, public and private, interiority and exteriority, she elaborates a vision of subjectivity grounded in the desiring and sensate body. Repeatedly, Genzken shows interiority to be a matter of surface. In her works, subjectivity and intimacy are variously effected by breaching the surface, as in the Fenster; by reinforcing it, as in the Columns; by ornamenting it, as in the altered garments; or by rendering it transparent and polychromatic, as in the Strandhäuser. Ultimately sanguine in outlook, these works nevertheless insist upon rupture, exposure, and hardening as gambits in the effort to attain the pleasures of intimacy and connection.

Coda During a visit to Genzken’s studio in the summer of 2014 I come upon an isolated figure (fig. 79). She stands facing a corner of the room. Her posture is casual. A hookah sits at her feet. Her brunette hair is gathered into the collar of a red, white, and black bomber jacket, draped over her shoulders. That street style stars were being photographed all over New York and Paris that year with precisely this insouciant hair tuck and jacket drape imparts to the figure a decidedly contemporary mien. The spray-­painted letters “N.Y.” emblazon the back of her jacket. Affixed to the walls on either side of the corner are Flugzeugfenster (Airplane Windows), from a series Genzken has developed sporadically since at least 1992.32 The Flugzeugfenster feature the curved molded-­plastic panels of passenger jet interiors, mounted a slight distance from the wall. In the studio tableau, the interval between the windows and the mannequin is so charged, so resolutely private, and the positioning of the figure so emphatically a turning away, that it never occurs to me to enter the space to observe her face. This effect, which one might consider apotropaic, results from the precise relation between figure and architectural frame and fills the air with psychological intensity. At times exuberantly slashed with paint, the works in the Flugzeug­ fenster series are cheeky, even glib, additions to the history of painted panels and sculptural reliefs. They travesty the meticulous seriality of Donald Judd’s metal wall-­mounted works and the precise convex and concave curves of Charlotte Posenenske’s Series B Reliefs (1967). The Flugzeugfenster have an effect and significance distinct from that of Genzken’s freestanding concrete or epoxy windows, not least because they are readymades rather than unique casts. The anthropomorphism of the airplane panels is palpable: with their sliding shades, the pairs of lozenge-­shaped windows resemble cartoon eyes. If they conjure a touristic gaze associated with the commodification of place, they also imagine that the world returns the subject’s gaze unblinkingly. This reciprocation is all the more explicit and terrifying in Flugzeugfenster (Medusa) (2011), in which each aperture is papered over with a reproduction of Caravaggio’s Medusa (ca. 1598). (The Medusa heads overlay and obscure the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, in one instance, and Genzken’s own visage, on the other.) With Flugzeugfenster (Medusa), the implied gaze turns deadly. Other mannequins are ranged about Genzken’s studio, sometimes singly, sometimes in pairs or clusters of three. Any casualness of placement and orientation is belied by the social and psychological dynamics put into play. The assemblages I encountered on that visit belong to the

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series Schauspieler (Actors), begun in 2012, in which mass-­produced mannequins accrue myriad polychrome coverings—­masks, hats, hoods, jackets, cloaks—­some ready-­to-­wear garments, many improvised. The tenor of these recent additions to the Schauspieler family differs from that of their older siblings, which tend to emphasize masquerading and costuming, revelry and exhibitionism. The mode of the earlier works is carnivalesque. (They project an imagined public context in a manner presaged by, and made explicit in the title of, the rowdy Strassenfest [Street Festival, 2009], perhaps the earliest of Genzken’s mannequin ensembles.) The resolute introversion of the figures belonging to Schau­ spieler II, by contrast, is articulated through motifs of buffering and binding. Protective gear abounds: football helmets and shoulder pads, hard hats, life vests. More emotionally charged, even, are the makeshift measures. The funnel of an oversize red sweater is pulled up past the eyes of a child-­size mannequin. He or she stands circumscribed by a foam mat, rolled into a cylinder and secured with lengths of black electrical tape. Insulation and buffering readily convert to isolation and constriction. At a distance from the other mannequins stands another child-­size form, its arms and torso strapped down with lengths of pink and black tape. A single strip of pink tape seals its mouth. The human body has always featured prominently in Genzken’s work. In her sculptural practice, it has largely been conjured by abstract means, whether by analogy to architecture or through relations of scale vis-­à-­vis the viewer’s body. Since at least 2008, however, Genzken has increasingly made use of commercial mannequins, whose anthro­ pomorphism is literal. Obvious differences aside, it is important to recognize that the mannequins elaborate a logic first articulated in the Columns. Both ­establish the structural core of the sculpture using readymades (the rectangular prism or minimalist gestalt is a readymade form, one could argue) and elaborate the surface through an array of dressings. Both conjure human presence and personality, if not quite personhood. But whereas the Columns hold the viewer at a physical distance, a result of their height, the mannequins are more likely to hold the viewer at a psychological distance, even if, or especially because, they stand in one-­ to-­one relation with the viewer’s body. However much one appreciates Genzken’s agility with intractable colors and textures, and though one may admire her audacious flirtation with vulgarity, it is hard not to see the Schauspieler series as ruminating on, and instantiating, the lost possibilities of sculptural plasticity. As I have written elsewhere, the mannequins’ production by industrial means, their standardized proportions, limited repertoire of poses, impassive faces, and uniform surfaces negate the values long associated with

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Fig. 79 Studio view of Schauspieler II, 1 (Actor II, 1), 2014, taken in May 2014. Photo by author.

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­statuary, even modernist statuary.33 For if the artistic and expressive heights attained by Rodin’s bronzes derive in part from an extreme animation of sculptural surface, unmotivated by any structural or anatomical core, Genzken detaches the surface from the body entirely. Thus “liberated,” surface proliferates as if unchecked. The implications extend beyond sculptural form. In Rosalind Krauss’s influential analysis, Rodin’s bronzes picture the self as the contingent coming together of internal and external forces on the surface, rather than as a prior and stable interiority only subsequently exteriorized through gesture: “The surface of the body, that boundary between what we think of as internal and private, and what we acknowledge as external and public, is the locus of meaning for Rodin’s sculpture.”34 The capacity for meaning haunts Genzken’s Schauspieler, for the petrification of the body and the excess of surfaces point up the troubled state of subject-­object relations, of intersubjective connections, and of the self as such. This book opens with signs of radical receptivity: the Weltempfän­ ger’s outstretched aerials, Mein Gehirn’s quizzical antenna, Ohren’s intricate whorls, the Fenster’s unglazed apertures. It closes with objects that seem very much the opposite. Bundled in a life jacket–­turned–­ straitjacket, with a too-­large football helmet bearing down on its head, a child mannequin is equipped not to receive but to guard against inputs (fig. 80). Radical exposure has perhaps taken its toll. And yet, for all the introversion of Genzken’s Schauspieler II, they inhabit the world. They come prepared to absorb its blows and receive our gaze. Through them, we register ambivalence and estrangement, foreboding and discomfort (ours most of all). In that sense, at least, they are powerfully communicative. The Schauspieler populate Genzken’s studio. Perhaps it is better to say that they people her space. She admits that she “feels less alone” in their company. Crucially, many of the garments and accessories donned by the mannequins are drawn from Genzken’s wardrobe. They are as if gifts bestowed, pieces of her self dispersed. Subsequent to my visit to the studio, I have reencountered its cast of characters as they ventured from home—­in Frankfurt, at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, and in New York, at David Zwirner Gallery. I have had multiple opportunities, then, to engage that enigmatic, isolated figure captured in a state of total absorption. I have seen her in the round, but I cannot shake the memory of our first meeting. Like her compatriots, she is an emissary from Genzken’s world, Genzken’s studio, to ours.

Chapter 4 Radical Exposure

Fig. 80 Isa Genzken, Schauspieler II, 8 (Actor II, 8), 2014. Black child mannequin on glass stand, life jacket, silver mirror foil, passport, woolen jumper, American football helmet, spray paint. 154 × 45 × 40 cm. © 2016 Isa Genzken. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin/New York.

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Notes Introduction 1. Diedrich Diederichsen, “Diedrich Diederichsen in Conversation with Isa Genzken,” in Alex Farquharson et al., Isa Genzken (London: Phaidon, 2006), 25; reprinted in Lisa Lee, ed., Isa Genzken (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 120.

2. For Genzken, the ear evokes a specifically gendered sociality. Ohr suggests to Pamela M. Lee a model of “architecture at ‘ear-­level’: at the threshold where the interior space of mental life represented by the ear—­generally conceived as private—­is intertwined with the public space of the architectural environment, experienced in stereo.” Lee, “The Skyscraper at Ear Level,” Parkett 69 (2003): 74; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 86.



3. Georg Simmel, “Sociology of the Senses,” in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed.



4. For more on the history of the German Pavilion and of artistic interventions within it,

David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997), 115. see Elke aus dem Moore et al., Germany’s Contributions to the Venice Biennale 1895–­ 2007 (Cologne: DuMont, 2009); Ole W. Fischer, “In the Shadow of Monumentality,” Log 20 (Fall 2010): 117–­23; Jörg Haspel, “Revisiting the German Pavilion,” in Common Ground: 12. Mostra Internazionale di Architettura, la Biennale di Venezia (Venice: ­Marsilio, 2012), 31–­38.

5. The 24 June 2010 press release from the Bundesarchitektenkammer on the Twelfth Biennale of Architecture concludes, “The historical value of this pavilion does not justify its preservation.” Quoted in Haspel, “Revisiting the German Pavilion,” 31.



6. Christoph Schlingensief, “Immediate Demolition of Venice,” http://www.deutscher-­



7. This was not the first time Genzken approached fascist architecture in the context of

pavillon.org/2011/en/cs_blog-­abriss-­pav (accessed 4 April 2015). the Biennale. In 2003 she reprised Haare wachsen wie sie wollen (Hair Grows However It Wants To), first realized the previous year at Berlin’s Galerie Meerrettich, for Francesco Bonami’s exhibition for the central pavilion. Above the main portal of the rationalist building, Genzken stood bamboo poles on end. This unruly tuft was something of a one-­liner—­a mode of humor that Genzken often embraces—­“because the Nazis always had their hair cut short and stubby. And the bamboo was just up there—­and colored green, to boot! (laughs) I found that pretty funny.” “‘I hate everything to do with sensation’: Isa Genzken on Her Plans for the German Pavilion at the Biennale,” http:// db-­artmag.de/archiv/2006/e/7/5/498.html (accessed 3 November 2007). Gregory Williams contextualizes Genzken in relation to the 1980s generation of artists—­including Martin Kippenberger, Georg Herold, and Rosemarie Trockel—­who turned to humor as a vehicle through which to express their skepticism regarding

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art’s political efficacy. Gregory H. Williams, Permission to Laugh: Humor and Politics in Contemporary German Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 130–­44. The 2002 Berlin iteration of Haare wachsen also responded in some ways to the fascist architecture of a nearby building. See Isa Genzken, “A Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Isa Genzken: 1992–­2003, Ausstellungen, Arbeiten, Werkverzeichnis (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003), 137; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 102. See also Josef Strau, “Hair That Grows As It Will,” in Isa Genzken: 1992–­ 2003, 38.

8. “At some point, you’ve got to say to yourself, ‘It’s okay now. You’ve tried everything,’ A Conversation between Isa Genzken and Nicolaus Schafhausen,” in Isa Genzken: Oil, German Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2007, ed. Nicolaus Schafhausen (Cologne: DuMont, 2007), 157.



9. Genzken, “I hate everything.” 10. Descriptive and explanatory text from the catalog accompanying the installation can be found reproduced in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (New York: Solomon R. Guggen­ heim Museum, 1979), 242–­47.



11. “Okwui Enwezor on the Origins of Haacke’s Pavilion,” http://www.phaidon.com/agenda /art/video/2012/may/29/okwui-­enwezor-­on-­the-­origins-­of-­haacke-­s-­pavilion/ (accessed 2 April 2015).



12. Genzken and Schafhausen, “At some point,” 159.



13. “Who do you Love? Isa Genzken in Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” Artforum 44,



14. Quoted in Götz Adriani et al., Joseph Beuys: Life and Works (Woodbury, NY: Barron’s



15. The West German writer Peter Schneider is often credited with the first articulation of

no. 3 (November 2005): 227. Educational Series, 1979), 114. the metaphor “the wall in the mind.” In a 1982 novel he writes, “It will take us longer to tear down the Wall in our heads than any wrecking company will need for the Wall we can see.” Schneider, Der Mauerspringer: Erzählung (Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1982); The Wall Jumper (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 119. See also Hans-­Dieter Klingemann and Richard I. Hoffebert, “Germany: A New ‘Wall in the Mind’?” Journal of Democracy 5, no. 1 (January 1994): 30–­44.

16. Genzken and Schafhausen, “At Some Point,” 154.



17. Alex Potts discusses this phenomenon in Beuys’s work as a simultaneous hypostatization (of tactility) and desubstantiation (of underlying structure) of qualities traditionally associated with sculpture. Potts, “Tactility: The Interrogation of Medium in Art of the 1960s,” Art History 27 (April 2004): 286.



18. In the late 1960s and 1970s Beuys increased his activities in the political sphere, helping to found the German Students’ Party in 1967 (later recast as the Organization for Direct Democracy) and the Green Party in 1979. For an account of Beuys’s involvement in political organizations, see Lucas Beckmann, “The Causes Lie in the Future,” in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, ed. Gene Ray (New York: D.A.P., 2001), 91–­111. See also Claudia Mesch, “Institutionalizing Social Sculpture: Beuys’ Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum Installation (1972),” in Joseph Beuys: The Reader, ed. Mesch and Viola Michely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 198–­217. Mesch suggests that Beuys’s Documenta projects involving discussion are a form of “rational discourse”

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à la Jürgen Habermas, which is interesting if not entirely convincing.

19. Joseph Beuys, “I am searching for a field character,” in Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, 268.



20. Joseph Beuys, “Thanks to Wilhelm Lehmbruck,” in Beuys et al., In memoriam, Joseph



21. Genzken and Schafhausen, “At some point,” 155.

Beuys: Obituaries, Essays, Speeches (Bonn: Inter Nationes, 1986), 58.



22. Genzken, “I hate everything.”



23. This was by no means Genzken’s first time in America. Beginning in the 1960s, she

Notes to Pages 8–24

made annual visits to an aunt who lived in New York. I have benefited greatly from the detailed chronology of Genzken’s life in the catalog accompanying her 2013 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Stephanie Weber, “Chronology,” in Sabine Breitwieser et al., Isa Genzken: Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 302–­18.

24. I am very grateful to Galerie Buchholz for making images of Genzken’s photo album available to me. Sabine Breitwieser notes that Genzken traveled to Chicago during this trip to view the architecture of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, but the photo album I have been able to consult does not document the stop. See Breitwieser, “The Characters of Isa Genzken: Between the Personal and the Constructive,” in Breitwieser, Isa Genzken: Retrospective, 32n41.



25. Graham’s faux think piece first appeared in the December 1966 issue of Arts Magazine. In 1971 Interfunktionen republished the essay, now illustrated with Graham’s own photo­ graphs. For an excellent discussion of the multiple iterations of Homes for America, see Mark Wigley, “The Reluctant Artist,” in Dan Graham’s New Jersey, ed. Craig Buckley and Mark Wasiuta (Zürich: Lars Müller; New York: Columbia University GSAPP, 2012), 87–­99.



26. Diederichsen, “Conversation,” 15; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 115.



27. “Thomas Ruff Talks to Daniel Birnbaum,” Artforum 41, no. 8 (April 2003): 218.



28. Brigitte Kölle, “Life and Works,” in Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer, ed. Kölle (Cologne:



29. I base my description of Parallelogramme on the sequence shown in a 1975 photograph

Walther König, 2007), 40. of the work in Genzken’s Düsseldorf studio, reproduced in Isa Genzken: Early Works (Berlin: Galerie Buchholz, 2014), 45. It has sometimes been reproduced or exhibited with what I am calling the third and fourth rows at the top.

30. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” in Art in Theory, ed. Charles Harrison and



31. Genzken, “Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” 138; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken,

Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell, 2003), 849. 103.

Chapter 1

1. Bruce Nauman, “Instructions for a Mental Exercise, 1974,” in Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words, ed. Janet Kraynak (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 76.



2. Isa Genzken, “Two Exercises, 1973,” in Isa Genzken, Alex Farquharson et al. (London: Phaidon, 2006), 124; reprinted in Lisa Lee, ed., Isa Genzken (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 1. The performances took place from 30 July to 4 August 1974. Genzken’s notes on her experience were originally published in Interfunktionen, no. 11 (1974), along with two schematic drawings.



3. Jan Butterfield, “Bruce Nauman: The Center of Yourself, 1975,” in Kraynak, Please Pay



4. Ian Wallace and Russel Keziere, “Bruce Nauman Interviewed, 1979 (October 1978),” in



5. Butterfield, “Center of Yourself,” 176.



6. Both definitions, Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com.



7. Already in the 1980s the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos were shown on low plinths, a con-

Attention Please, 176. Kraynak, Please Pay Attention Please, 191.

cession to ensure the safety of these fragile works. In setting them apart from the space of the viewer, the plinths greatly undercut the works’ phenomenal effects.

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8. Genzken’s chosen shades diverge slightly from the “classic” primaries (e.g. vermillion, cadmium yellow pale, and ultramarine blue). One might describe Rotes Ellipsoid, for instance, as tangerine in hue. Such a choice suggests to me a marked disinterest in the purity of color.



9. Diedrich Diederichsen, “Diedrich Diederichsen in Conversation with Isa Genzken,” in Farquharson et al., Isa Genzken, 15; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 116.



10. Sabine Breitwieser, “The Characters of Isa Genzken: Between the Personal and the Constructive, 1970–­1996,” in Breitwieser et al., Isa Genzken: Retrospective (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013), 28. Breitwieser’s understanding of the significance of the Nauman exercises to the floor works is more nuanced than this gloss on Genzken’s remarks might suggest. She writes, “In seeking out the boundaries of phenomenological experience and exploring the mutability of perspective, both spatial and temporal, Genzken uncovered an important stimulus, one that would become the impetus for a number of subsequent works that would also meld her enthusiasm for Abstract Expressionism (Barnett Newman’s work, in particular) and the work of artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, even as her experience compelled her forward on a search for a deeper context for Minimalism” (ibid., 23).



11. The exhibit catalog, Isa Genzken: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Fotografien (Berlin: Karl Schmidt-­Rottluff Förderungsstiftung, 1981), dates the work to 1976 rather than 1974. None of Genzken’s slender vertical works appears in her catalogue raisonné, Isa Genzken: Jeder braucht mindestens ein Fenster (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1992). The recent MoMA catalog gives the earlier date, but the entry for 1975 in the chronology reads, “Works on Parallelgramme (Parallelograms) and Ellipsen (Ellipses), slender sculptures in wood that lean against the wall.” Stephanie Weber, “Chronology,” in Breitwieser, Isa Genzken: Retrospective, 303. Whether this is a matter of predating is not certain.



12. One is tempted to make a connection between the vertical wood works and Newman’s skinny paintings, but Benjamin H. D. Buchloh writes that it is unlikely Genzken knew of them. Buchloh, “Isa Genzken: The Fragment as Model,” in Genzken: Jeder braucht, 135; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 15. (One might note, however, that Newman’s bronze sculpture Here [1950] was exhibited in The Art of the Real, which Genzken saw during its European tour.) The vertical works are just as likely to be in dialogue with Blinky Palermo’s stafflike objects, such as Blaue Scheibe und Stab (Blue Disk and Staff, 1968). For a discussion of Palermo’s staffs, and their relation to Joseph Beuys and German Romanticism, see Christine Mehring, “Objects, 1964–­74: Painting Away the German Way of Painting,” in Blinky Palermo: Abstraction of an Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 15–­31.



13. Genzken, “Two Exercises,” 124.



14. Yve-­Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America 76, no. 4 (April 1988): 160–­81. Lissitzky writes, “We saw that the surface of the Proun ceases to be a picture and turns into a structure round which we must circle, looking at it from all sides, peering down from above, investigating from below. The result is that the one axis of the picture which stood at right angles to the horizontal was destroyed.” Lissitzky, “Proun—­Not World Visions, but World Reality” (1922), in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts,

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ed. Sophie Lissitzky-­Küppers (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1986), 343.

15. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-­Century



16. Georges Bataille, “Informe,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–­39, ed. Allan

Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1982), 91. Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31. See also Yve-­Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997).



17. Invaluable insight into this process is provided by the archival materials reproduced in Isa Genzken: Early Works (Berlin: Galerie Daniel Buchholz, 2014), 98–­121.



Notes to Pages 24–43

18. Ralph Krotz, statement, in Documenta 7, vol. 1 (Kassel: D+V P Dierichs, 1982), 330–­31. I owe special thanks to Jens Stenger for assisting me with the translation and parsing of Krotz’s text.



19. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-­Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Phi­ losophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 121. In this line of argumentation I am indebted to Rosalind Krauss’s influential early text on Donald Judd. Drawing from the sensual experience of his works, which confounded the “polemics of object-­art,” Krauss argued, “They are not developed from ‘assertions’ about materials or shapes, assertions, that is, which are given a priori and convert the objects into examples of a theorem or a more general case, but are obviously meant as objects of perception, objects that are to be grasped in the experience of looking at them.” Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion in Donald Judd,” Artforum 4, no. 9 (May 1966): 35.



20. Merleau-­Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 121.



21. Naum Gabo, “Sculpture: Carving and Construction in Space,” in Modern Sculpture



22. Buchloh, “Fragment as Model,” 136; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 17.



23. Lissitzky was explicit about this itinerary, both in the diagram and in the written state-

Reader, ed. Alex Potts (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2012), 140.

ment about the Prounenraum published in G: “The first form, which ‘leads in’ someone coming from the front hall, is placed diagonally and ‘leads’ him to the broad horizontals of the front wall and from there to the third wall with its verticals.” El Lissitzky, “Proun Room, Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1923,” in Lissitzky-­Küppers, El Lissitzky, 361.

24. Bois, “Radical Reversibility,” 172–­74.



25. See Birgit Pelzer, “Axiomatik auf Widerruf,” in Isa Genzken: Skulpturen, Zeichnungen, Fotografien/ Horst Schuler: Bilder (Krefeld: Museum Haus Lange, 1979); translated as “Axiomatics Subject to Withdrawal,” in Lee, Isa Genzken, 7–­12.



26. Blau-­grünes Hyperbolo (1981) is similarly structured. It was exhibited at Genzken’s second solo exhibition at Konrad Fischer Gallery, Düsseldorf. See Dorothee Fischer, ed., Ausstellungen bei Konrad Fischer: Düsseldorf, Oktober 1967–­1992 (Bielefeld: Edition Marzona, 1993), 190. It does not, however, appear in the catalogue raisonné.



27. Reproduced in Early Works, 98.



28. It is worth considering this nonliteral corporeality in relation to Michael Fried’s discussion of human gesture as bodied forth in the syntax of Anthony Caro’s sculptures. See Fried, “Anthony Caro,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 269–­76. However, unlike the existential drama of “cataclysmic gestures made, in the throes of love or grief or self hate, by the naked spirit” that Fried imagines to animate Caro’s work (ibid., 275), the “gestures” alluded to in Genzken’s floor works are decidedly quotidian.



29. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 3: Notes and Non Sequiturs,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 38.



30. Most notable, perhaps, is Meister Gerhard (Master Gerhard, 1983), which refers to Gerhard Richter, to whom Genzken was married at the time. One can understand the honorific to be tongue-­in-­cheek. The title may also refer to the architect of the Cologne cathedral, which Genzken has affectionately referred to as her atelier. (See Wolfgang Tillman’s series of portraits of Genzken entitled Atelier.)



31. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in Johnson, Merleau-­Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 64.

143



32. Krauss, “Allusion and Illusion,” 25.



33. Simon Denny, “Out to Lunch with Isa Genzken,” Mousse 22 (February–­March 2010),



34. Genzken’s commercial palette should be seen in relation to American pop (Andy

http://moussemagazine.it/articolo.mm?id=508 (accessed 9 April 2010). Warhol in particular), to the minimalist paintings of Frank Stella and Jo Baer, among others, and to Blinky Palermo, who was so sensitive to the connotative power of color. For a discussion of Palermo’s use of color, especially as it regards mass production, see Mehring, “Cloth Pictures, 1966–­72: Modernism by the Yard,” Blinky Palermo, 46–­65.

35. Diederichsen, “Conversation,” 15; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 115–­16.



36. Genzken saw the exhibition The Art of the Real (1968–­1969), which featured several of Kelly’s paintings and sculptures, during its European tour. Buchloh, “Fragment as Model,” 135; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 15. It was in E. C. Goossen’s catalog essay that the real-­world referents for Kelly’s Parisian works were first revealed. For discussion of Kelly’s noncompositional method, see Yve-­Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-­Composition in Its Many Guises,” in Bois et al., Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948–­54 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 9–­36.



37. Diederichsen, “Conversation,” 15, 18; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 116.



38. It was certainly not the first such collaboration. In 1970, for instance, experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were enlisted to write a computer program for Hans Haacke’s contribution of a visitor’s poll to the Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum. The poll was not realized because of problems with the equipment. Hans Haacke, “Polls,” in Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 82.



39. In a letter dated 8 March 1980, Genzken requests such drawings from Krotz. See Early Works, 105–­7. As noted in the introduction, Genzken exhibited one such drawing at her first exhibition at Galerie Konrad Fischer.



40. Some of the working process can be extrapolated from documents in Krotz’s archive that have been published (see previous footnote); the gaps have been filled in by research done by the curators of Genzken’s 2013–­2014 retrospective, originating at the Museum of Modern Art. I am indebted to the exhibition catalog, especially Sabine Breitwieser’s essay and Stephanie Weber’s chronology, for crucial details.



41. See letter dated 27 January 1980 in Early Works, 100.



42. This collaboration was facilitated by a grant from the Federation of German Industries.



43. Roland Barthes, “Toys,” Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,



44. Diederichsen, “Conversation,” 15; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 116.



45. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Isa Genzken: Fuck the Bauhaus. Architecture, Design and



46. Isa Genzken, “A Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Isa Genzken: 1992–­2003,

Breitwieser, “Characters of Isa Genzken,” 32. 2012), 60.

Photography in Reverse,” in Early Works, 11–­12; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 45. Ausstellungen, Arbeiten, Werkverzeichnis (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003), 138; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 103.

47. Genzken’s admiration for Sophie Taeuber-­Arp is illustrative, for the Dadaist’s turned-­ wood objects from 1916–­1918 are rigorously abstract sculptures that have undeni-

144

ably thing-­like authority. The dynamic at work may be compared to the one described by Rilke in his unforgettable writings about Rodin in which a newly made thing “took its place amongst the other things, assumed their indifference, their quiet dignity, and looked on, as it were, from a distance and from out its own permanence with melancholy consent.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Rodin—­Book Two” (1907), reprinted in Potts, Modern Sculpture Reader, 15.

Chapter 2

1. Emily Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin (Pittsburgh: University



2. Ibid., 222–­23



3. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Isa Genzken: Fuck the Bauhaus. Architecture, Design and

Notes to Pages 45–63

of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), 31–­33.

Photography in Reverse,” in Isa Genzken: Early Works (Berlin: Galerie Buchholz, 2014), 6; reprinted in Lisa Lee, ed., Isa Genzken (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 36.

4. Ekkehard Kneer, interview with author, 12 June 2014.



5. Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 5. Some of the more precarious planes (whether because of height or thinness) are reinforced internally with steel bars, though the Concretes involving rebar are in the minority. Thanks to Ekkehard Kneer for confirming this fact.



6. “Die Rohbau-­Konstruktionen der Neubauten finde ich interessanter, weil das rationale Denken der Ingenieure mehr mit Wahrheit zu tun hat, als das routinemäßige Verdecken der Fassaden mit pseudoedlen Materialien.” Isa Genzken, untitled statement in Hanna Hummeltenberg, Isa Genzken. Künstler—­Kritisches Lexikon der Gegenwartskunst (Munich: Weltkunst und Bruckmann, 1990), n.p.



7. The development of the endoscopic camera in the 1980s allowed the camera to move



8. Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Exten­

through a model to simulate passage through a building. sion of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 244. One might think of Sergius Ruegenberg’s sketch (circa 1925) of Mies crouching before the model of this same hypothetical building, adopting something like the vantage point of the camera that captured the images.

9. Beatriz Colomina writes, “Mies’s place in architectural history, his role as one of the so-­ called fathers of the modern movement, was established through a series of five projects, none of them actually built (or even buildable—­they were not developed at that level).” Colomina, “Media as Modern Architecture,” in Thomas Demand (Munich: Schirmer/ Mosel, 2006), 28. Colomina argues that the iconic status of Mies’s “paper” architecture instantiates the role of media in the construction of modern architecture.



10. Arthur Drexler, “Engineer’s Architecture: Truth and Its Consequences,” in The Architec­



11. See Oliver Elser, “On the History of the Architectural Model in the 20th Century,” in

ture of the École des Beaux-­Arts, ed. Drexler (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977), 27. The Architectural Model: Tool, Fetish, Small Utopia, ed. Elser (Frankfurt: DAM, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 2012), 11.

12. Diedrich Diederichsen, “Diedrich Diederichsen in Conversation with Isa Genzken,” in Alex Farquharson et al., Isa Genzken (London: Phaidon, 2006), 29; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 123.



13. Robert Smithson, “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967),” in The



14. In this reading, my sense of these works differs not only from that of Genzken, who

­Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 72. insists that the concrete works never read as 1:1, but also from Yve-­Alain Bois, who feels that these works operate exclusively in the scale of 1:1. For additional consideration of scale, see Bois, “The Bum and the Architect,” in Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!, ed. Kaspar König, Nina Gülicher, and Andrea Tarsia (Cologne: Walther König, 2009), 12–­25, esp. 18–­19.

15. Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 193.

145



16. Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-­Concrete (Santa



17. Pugh, Architecture, Politics, and Identity, 225.



18. See Christine Hannemann, Die Platte: Industrialisierte Wohnungsbau in der DDR (Wies-

Monica: The Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 150.

baden: Vieweg, 1996), and Joachim Palutzki, Architektur in der DDR (Berlin: Reimer, 2000). See also Paul Sigel, “The Future of the Slab,” Goethe Institut/Online-­Redaktion, July 2003; and Jan Otakar Fischer, “Cut and Paste: Cold War Housing for the Masses Is Dismantled and Reformed,” Architecture 95, no. 6 (June 2006): 74–­79.

19. This is clear in the importance to Genzken of Joseph Beuys, for whom an expanded notion of sculpture as social activism was bound up with a hyperinvestment of his self with shamanistic power. The steel bases of Genzken’s concrete sculptures pay homage to Beuys’s vitrines, even as her choice of concrete stoically refuses the properties suggestive of transformation and energy transfer in the materials that Beuys favored (fat, felt, and beeswax).



20. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Isa Genzken: The Fragment as Model,” in Isa Genzken: Jeder braucht mindestens ein Fenster (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1992), 141; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 31.



21. Of course, the structure of the Wall changed from the time of its hasty erection in 1961 to its destruction in 1989. It was only in its third and final iteration, begun in the 1970s, that prefabricated concrete slabs were systematically employed. See Pugh, Archi­ tecture, Politics, and Identity, 3–­4; and Frederick Baker, “The Berlin Wall: Production, Preservation and Consumption of a 20th-­Century Monument,” Antiquity 67 (1993): 709–­33.



22. Though both Wand and Mauer are translated as “wall” in English, the former “indi­cat[es] a screenlike partition such as we find in wattle and daub infill construction,” while the latter “signif[ies] massive fortification.” Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture, 5.



23. Rem Koolhaas, “Field Trip: A(A) Memoir (First and Last . . .),” in Small, Medium, Large, Extra-­Large: Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mao (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 226.



24. “In unserer Realität ist beton kein wertfreies Material mehr geblieben. Beton isoliert und trennt Menschen, Beton versteckt und verbirgt etwas und schließlich wird das Material zum Symbol des versteinerten des ausweglosen Zustandes. Der Beton der Mauer lastet unsichtbar, aber um so schwerer auf allen Menschen, die sich mit diesem Phänomen auseinandersetzen oder vom Desaster betroffen sind.” Quoted in Anke Kuhrmann, Doris Liebermann, and Annette Dorgerloh, Die Berliner Mauer in der Kunst: bildende Kunst, Literatur und Film (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2011), 137. Thanks to Christine Mehring for impressing upon me that Vostell must have been a point of reference for Genzken in her use of concrete. She observes that Vostell’s Ruhender Verkehr (Stationary Traffic, 1969), a public sculpture consisting of an Opel Kapitän encased in concrete, was a fixture in Cologne near where Genzken and Richter lived.



25. Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997): 65.



26. Wolf Vostell addressed the wasteland that was Potdamer Platz in the 1972 work Beto­ nierung (Potsdamer Platz), in which he applied concrete to an aerial photograph of the area.

146



27. Francesca Rogier, “Growing Pains: From the Opening of the Wall to the Wrapping of the



28. Ibid., 48.



29. Ibid., 55–­57.



30. Ibid., 48.



31. Consider Serra’s gendered reading of tectonics: “I think, if it comes down to little girls

Reichstag,” Assemblage 29 (April 1996): 49.

liking silk and little boys liking corduroy, that little boys like bridges.” Quoted in Annette

Michelson, “The Films of Richard Serra: An Interview,” in Richard Serra, ed. Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 30. A number of scholars

Notes to Pages 63–77

have made the comparison between New Buildings for Berlin and Serra’s monumental prop pieces. See, for instance, Bois, “Bum and the Architect,” 21, and Alex Farquharson, “What Architecture Isn’t,” in Farquharson et al., Isa Genzken, 87.

32. Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 58, 71. The idea that parody “authorizes” the original is noted by Seymour Chatman, “Parody and Style,” Poetics Today 28, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 25, citing Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-­Century Art Forms (New York: Methune, 1983).



33. In its translation and transposition of the heroic, historical, and grand into everyday idioms, travesty “updates” the original, Genette asserts. It is thus tethered to the contemporary. While this increases its topical interest in the present, travesty’s contemporaneity destines it to be quickly outmoded: “Travesty is by nature a perishable commodity, unfit to survive its age and ceaselessly in need of being modernized: i.e., replaced by another, more topical update.” Genette, Palimpsests, 62. To the extent this is true, then, Genzken’s penchant for travesty destines her works to a fate similar to that of the commodities of which they are sometimes composed.



34. This connection is admittedly speculative on my part, but the peculiarity of the mannequin’s contorted pose struck me as terribly specific. That the Schauspieler debuted at Genzken’s 2013–­2014 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, where Maillol’s The River is a centerpiece of the sculpture garden, fuels my assertion.



35. For more on the connection between Genzken’s work and club culture, see Diedrich Diederichson, “The Poetics of the Psychocities,” in Isa Genzken: 1992–­2003, Ausstel­ lungen, Arbeiten, Werkverzeichnis (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2003), 27–­29.



36. Quoted in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,



37. Excerpts here are from Charles Baudelaire, “The Bad Glazier,” in The Parisian Prowler:

1979), 273. Le Spleen de Paris, Petits Poèmes en prose, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 13–­15. This is a different translation than the one published in the Phaidon catalog.

38. Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (Oxford:



39. Paul Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture,” in Glass Architecture by Paul Scheerbart, and



40. Ibid., 41, 46.



41. Dan Graham, “Essay on Video, Architecture and Television,” in Writings on Video and

Oxford University Press, 1999), 67n80. Alpine Architecture by Bruno Taut, ed. Dennis Sharp (New York: Praeger, 1972), 46.

Video Works 1970–­1978, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1979), 74. Colin Rowe diagnoses commercial architects’ deployment of curtain walls as the creation of “a suitable veneer for the corporate activities of ‘enlightened’ capitalism.” Quoted in Reinhold Martin, “Atrocities; or, Curtain Wall as Mass Medium,” Perspecta 32 (2001): 68.

42. Dagmar Richter, “Spazieren in Berlin,” Assemblage 29 (April 1996): 75.



43. Isa Genzken, “A Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Isa Genzken: 1992–­2003, 137; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 100.



44. Hal Foster, “The ABCs of Contemporary Design,” October, no. 100 (Spring 2002), 194.



45. Ernst Kállai, “Ten Years of Bauhaus (1930),” in Hans Maria Wingler et al., The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 161. Barry Bergdoll addresses the myth of Bauhaus style as well as its actual building and design practices in “Bauhaus Multiplied: Paradoxes of Architecture and Design in and after the Bauhaus,”

147

in Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman, Bauhaus 1919–­1933: Workshops for Modernity (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 41–­61.

46. Hal Foster, “Herbert Bayer: Advertising Structures 1924–­25,” in Bergdoll and Dickerman,



47. Walter Gropius, Internationale Architektur, Bauhausbücher no. 1 (Munich: Albert Langen,

Bauhaus 1919–­1933, 181. 1925), 99. Quoted in Wallis Miller, “Architecture, Building, and the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-­Chakraborty ­(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 75. See also Gilbert Herbert, The Dream of the Factory-­Made House: Walter Gropius and Konrad Wachsmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).

48. It is worth noting that a number of the elements employed in the Ground Zero series are actually quite expensive designer goods from Italian plastic furniture manufacturer Kartell. See discussion of plastics in chapter 3.



49. David Bussel, “24 Hour Ground Zero,” in Ground Zero (London: Steidl Hauser & Wirth,



50. Reinhold Martin, “Architecture at War,” Angelaki 9, no. 2 (August 2004): 217–­25; quote,



51. “The architect’s job, with respect to the future of ground zero as framed by this context,

2008), 27–­28. 224. becomes one of assisting in the foreclosure of any real public debate regarding the historical dimensions of the event itself. Instead, architects were essentially asked to plant a three-­dimensional (neo-­) modern flag on the site that pointed toward a triumphant future, symbolically opening the door to cultural and economic imperialism while declaring the historico-­political case closed, ready for assimilation into the memory industry. . . . Thus, as a pretext for further aggression, ‘9/11’ had only just begun.” Ibid., 218.

Chapter 3

1. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 43 (thesis 66).



2. Claude Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 23.



3. Alex Potts has remarked upon a similar “negation of armature” in relation to Beuys’s exploration of matter, in particular with the Felt Suit (1970). Potts, “Tactility,” Art History 27, no. 2 (April 2004): 288.



4. Leah Dickerman, “Merz and Memory: On Kurt Schwitters,” in The Dada Seminars, ed.



5. See Jaimey Hamilton, “Arman’s System of Objects,” Art Journal 67, no. 1 (Spring 2008):



6. See Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-­Avant-­Garde

Dickerman (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005), 100–­125. 55–­67. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Rosalind Krauss, “Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image,” Artforum 13, no. 4 (December 1974): 36–­43; and Leo Steinberg’s groundbreaking text “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 55–­91.

7. Only by laying stress on the frame and on the “discrete, unified image” within it, Megan R. Luke argues, was Schwitters able to assert the “equal validity” (Gleichgültigkeit) of the disparate contents of his Merz paintings and objects. Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image,

148

Exile (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 16–­20.

8. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard Univer-



9. See discussion of travesty in chapter 2.

sity Press, 1999), 79 (B9,1; B9,2).

10. Hal Foster, “Dada Mime,” October, no. 105 (Summer 2003), 166–­76, and The First Pop Age: Painting and Subjectivity in the Art of Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol, Richter, and Ruscha (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 113.



11. Yve-­Alain Bois, “The Bum and the Architect,” in Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!, ed. Kaspar König, Nina Gülicher, and Andrea Tarsia (Cologne: Walther König, 2009), 13;

Notes to Pages 78–98

reprinted in Lisa Lee, ed., Isa Genzken (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), 166.

12. In German, plastic art and the chemical substance are distinguished grammatically:



13. Diedrich Diederichsen, “Diedrich Diederichsen in Conversation with Isa Genzken,” in

the former is a feminine noun (die Plastik), while the latter is neuter (das Plastik). Alex Farquharson et al., Isa Genzken (London: Phaidon, 2006), 11–­12; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 113.

14. “At some point, you’ve got to say to yourself, ‘It’s okay now. You’ve tried everything,’ A Conversation between Isa Genzken and Nicolaus Schafhausen,” in Isa Genzken: Oil, German Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2007, ed. Nicolaus Schafhausen (Cologne: DuMont, 2007), 156.



15. The idea of the timeliness of certain modes of artistic production is expressed by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh when he poses the rhetorical question “How can one—­under conditions of a highly industrialized society—­continue atavistic modes of production (modeling, carving, casting, cutting, welding) and apply them convincingly to semi-­ precious or so-­called ‘natural’ materials (bronze, marble, wood)?” Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture,” in Neo-­Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays in European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 2–­3.



16. When Walter Benjamin writes, “With the new manufacturing processes that lead to imitations, semblance is consolidated in commodities,” one can easily imagine that he is speaking of plastic. Benjamin, “Central Park,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2006), 146.



17. On the economic importance of the plastics industry in East Germany, as well as the material’s symbolic importance in the imagining of a socialist society, see Eli Rubin’s excellent study, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); on the utopian dimension, see in particular page 25. Apropos of plastics’ role in the turn toward an economy of planned obsolescence, the vice president of Du Pont asserted during a workshop regarding the peacetime conversion of the plastics industry that “a satisfied people is a stagnant people.” In order to survive and expand, the plastics industry would have “to see to it that Americans are never satisfied.” Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A ­Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 176.



18. Renate Ulmer et al., Plastics + Design (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 1997), 28,



19. Edward Dimendberg, “‘These Are Not Exercises in Style’: Le Chant du Styrène,” Octo­



20. Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: Berkeley Medallion, 1970), 159, 178–­

55–­57. ber, no. 112 (Spring 2005), 88n74. 79. For a discussion of Mailer’s attitudes toward plastic in relation to a general cultural fear of the health hazards (imagined and real) posed by plastics, see Meikle, American Plastic, 242–­76.

21. László Moholy-­Nagy, The New Vision: Fundamentals of Bauhaus Design, Painting, Sculp­



22. For an excellent discussion of the problematic distinction between so-­called West

ture, and Architecture (Minneola, NY: Dover, 1944/2005), 227. Coast minimalism and its New York counterpart, see James Meyer, “Another Minimalism,” in A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–­1968, ed. Ann Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 33–­49.

23. Many of the pieces Genzken employs are manufactured by Kartell, an Italian company whose products are also prominent in the Ground Zero series, discussed in chapter

149

2. Within the assemblages can be found Maarten van Severen’s LCP chair, Philippe Starck’s Louis Ghost chair (and its variants), Starck’s Eros chair, Patricia Urquiola’s Frilly chair, Tokujin Yoshioka’s Ami Ami chair, and Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec’s Papyrus chair.

24. Quoted in Jan Butterfield, “‘Poured Art’ Sculptor Reveals Technique, Approach to Style,”



25. Interview with Ned Rifkin in Lynn Gumpert, Ned Rifkin, and Marcia Tucker, Early Work



26. Pierre Restany, “César and the Poetry of Industrial Chemistry,” http://www.domusweb.

Fort Worth Star-­Telegram, 14 June 1970, sec. 1:6. (New York: New Museum, 1982), 11. it/en/from-­the-­archive/2011/05/05/cesar-­and-­the-­poetry-­of-­industrial-­chemistry.html (accessed 7 April 2012).

27. Karl Marx, “Section 4: The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” in



28. Roland Barthes, “Plastic,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and



29. Consider this alongside Meikle’s more recent history of plastics production: “Physically

The Marx-­Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 216. Wang, 1972), 97. and visually, each of these plastic artifacts seemed to announce its integrity as a single housing or shell, moulded rather than put together, created instantaneously in a manner outside the experience of a carpenter, welder, machine-­tool operator, or assembler of cast metal parts. . . . No clearly contrived series of human actions, indeed no human action at all, lay between conception and final form.” Jeffrey L. Meikle, “Into the Fourth Kingdom: Representations of Plastic Materials, 1920–­1950,” Journal of Design History 5, no. 3 (1992): 173–­74.

30. Mailer, Presidential Papers, 159, 178–­79. The tendency to relate this laboratory material with bodily effluvia (shit, urine, and vomit) is not uncommon in journalistic and literary texts. The image of plastic extrusion lends itself to this association.



31. I owe sincere thanks to Yve-­Alain Bois for bringing this film to my attention and for facilitating my viewing of it. My understanding of this film is greatly indebted to Edward Dimendberg’s analysis of it. Dimendberg, “Not Exercises in Style,” 63–­88.



32. Walter Benjamin identifies alexandrine as the characteristic poetic form of German tragic drama: “Every bit as characteristic of this verse is the contrast between the logical—­if one will, the classicistic—­structure of the façade, and the phonetic violence within. . . . The language of the baroque is constantly convulsed by rebellion on the part of the elements which make it up. . . . In this way language is broken up so as to acquire a changed and intensified meaning in its fragments.” The convulsion of language as exhibited by phonetic excess—­anagrams, onomatopoeia, and so on—­liberates word and sound from the strictures of meaning; they are “flaunted as objects.” Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1985), 206–­7.



33. Dimendberg, from whose essay I draw the transcriptions of Queneau’s text, details ­Queneau’s sources and parses layers of meaning that accrue in the narration. Identifying the phrase in Alphonse de Lamartine’s poem “Le Lac” upon which the opening lines of the narration are based—­“Ô temps, suspends ton vol” (O time, suspend your flight)—­ Dimendberg writes, “At once deflating the Romantic project of transcendence from the ravages of temporality, the pun in Queneau’s text reinforced by the image track of the film also introduces a prosaic materialism. The flight of time, subject of mythological

150

fabulation and philosophical speculation since the dawn of human culture, is eclipsed by an ordinary plastic bowl as the object of the poet’s attention.” Dimendberg, “Not Exercises in Style,” 69. This materialism can be compared to Genzken’s own.

34. Ibid., 70, 73.



35. Ibid., 72.



36. Ibid., 85.



37. Ibid., 86. Here Dimendberg alludes to a crucial passage in Queneau’s text: “Purified,

Notes to Pages 100–106

distilled, and redistilled, and these are not exercises in style. Ethylbenzene can and indeed must explode if the temperature reaches a certain point” (ibid., 82).

38. Genzken and Schafhausen, “At some point,” 157.



39. Susanne Von Beyer and Ulrike Knöfel, “‘Ich bin gerne frech,’” Der Spiegel, no. 23 (4 June



40. Diederichsen, “Conversation,” 11; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 113.



41. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Structural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham:



42. “That which, from the standpoint of valorization, appears particularly difficult to

2007): 197.

Duke University Press, 1991), 314–­15. control—­the residue of unfulfilled wishes, ideas, of the brain’s own laws of movement, which are both unprocessed and resist incorporation into the bourgeois scheme—­is depicted as fantasy, as the vagabond, the unemployed member of the intellectual faculties. In reality, this fantasy is a specific means of production engaged in a process that is not visible to the valorization interest of capital: the transformation of the relations of human beings to one another and to nature, and the reapproriation of the historically marked dead labor of human beings. . . . It is the specific work process whereby libidinal structure, consciousness, and the outside world are connected with one another.” Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972/1993), 37.

43. Genzken and Schafhausen, “At some point,” 156.



44. A connection between Genzken’s assemblage process and Benjamin’s conception of allegory is also drawn in Vanessa Joan Müller, “Allegory and the Everyday,” in Schafhausen, Isa Genzken: Oil, 165–­67.



45. “Baudelaire’s allegory bears traces of the violence that was necessary to demolish the harmonious façade of the world that surrounded him,” Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project. The violence discussed in chapter 2 remains active in allegory. Benjamin’s texts on Baudelaire include “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” “On Some Motifs on Baudelaire,” and “Central Park.” The first of these was to be the second chapter of an unrealized book project; at the urging of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Benjamin developed the essay’s central section into the shorter text “On Some Motifs on Baudelaire.” For an analysis of the various iterations and elements of Benjamin’s Baudelaire project, see Michael W. Jennings’s introduction to Walter Benjamin, in ­Jennings, The Writer of Modern Life, 1–­26. The concept of the commodity does not feature in the discussion of Baroque allegory in Benjamin’s Habilitationsschrift, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, which predates Benjamin’s engagement with Marxism. That said, the alignment of commodity and allegory appears in the epigram to the chapter “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” in which it operates as a governing metaphor: “Whosoever would grace this frail cottage, in which poverty adorns every corner, with a rational epitome, would be making no inapt statement nor overstepping the mark of well-­founded truth if he called the world a general store, a customs-­house of death, in which man is the merchandise, death the wondrous merchant, God the most conscientious bookkeeper, but the grave the bonded drapers’ hall and ware house.” Christoph Männling, Theatre of Death, or Funeral Ora­ tions, quoted in Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 159.



46. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 369 (J80,2/J80a,1).



47. “What resists the mendacious transfiguration of the commodity world is its distortion into allegory.” Benjamin, “Central Park,” 148.

151



48. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 331 (J57,3).



49. Benjamin is at pains to refute such earlier dismissals (and misapprehensions) of the nature of allegory: “perfunctory dismissals of the allegorical form by their excessively logical character, which, in accepting the distinction between ‘the expression of a concept and the expression of an idea,’ accepts precisely that untenable modern view of allegory and symbol.” He contradicts the understanding of allegory as “a conventional relationship between an illustrative image and its abstract meaning.” Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 162.



50. Benjamin, Arcades Project, 368 (J80,2; J80a,1).



51. Benjamin, German Tragic Drama, 175.



52. I am reminded of Debord’s haunting claim: “In a world that really has been turned on its



53. Quoted in Margit Rowell, “Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura,” October, no. 7 (Winter

head, truth is a moment of falsehood.” Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 14 (thesis 9). 1978), 91. The challenge that plastic posed to conceptions of form was presaged by a similar crisis in the nineteenth century prompted by the discovery of rubber. Megan R. Luke has discussed the problem presented by this “factotum of industry” to Gottfried Semper’s theory of style. Luke, “The Adhesive Surface: Rubber, Gypsum, Electricity, and Light,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the College Art Association, Washington, DC, February 3–­6, 2016.

54. Barthes, “Plastic,” 97.



55. Barthes writes, “But what best reveals it for what it is is the sound it gives, at once hollow and flat; its noise is its undoing, as are its colours, for it seems capable of retaining only the most chemical looking ones. Of yellow, red and green, it keeps only the aggressive quality.” Ibid., 98.



56. An “allegorical impulse” was much theorized in the early 1980s, beginning with Craig Owens in his influential two-­part essay “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” which characterized a range of “postmodernist” practices as allegorical in nature. Citing a suppression of allegory in modernism and in formalist art history, Owens recuperates the term for postmodernism, linking allegory’s characteristics to specific trends in artistic practice. Allegory’s textual doubling, its embodiment in the ruin, its suspension of the transitory, its piling up of fragments, and its resistance to narrative find, for Owens, correspondences in appropriation art, site-­specificity, photography, photomontage, and repetitive structures, respectively. Owens, “Allegorical Impulse,” October, no. 12 (Spring 1980), 75. Central premises in Owens’s text are called into question by Stephen Melville, who traces the allegorical impulse through the formalist discourse of Michael Fried, thereby arguing against the idea that allegory had been discounted in modernism. Melville, “Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism,” October, no. 19 (Winter 1981), 55–­92. Other writers on the topic of allegory in the period include Douglas Crimp, Benjamin Buchloh, and Joel Fineman.



57. Josiah McElheny, “Readymade Resistance,” Artforum 46, no. 2 (October 2007): 326+



58. “[The new cynicism] has withdrawn into a mournful detachment that internalizes its

(accessed via Biography in Context database). knowledge as though it were something to be ashamed of, and as a consequence, it is 152

rendered useless for taking the offensive.” Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7. In the art historical context, Hal Foster has discussed “a crisis of criticality” after appropriation art. In its capitulation to commodity fetishism, commodity sculpture is for Foster a manifestation of cynical reason. Foster, “The Art of Cynical Reason,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-­Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 100–­124.



59. Isa Genzken, “A Conversation with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Isa Genzken: 1992–­2003, Ausstellungen, Arbeiten, Werkverzeichnis (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther

Notes to Pages 106–114

König, 2003), 138; reprinted in Lee, Isa Genzken, 104.

60. Melville, “Allegory,” 88.



61. Ibid.

Chapter 4

1. One might extend this inquiry to Genzken’s related works realized outdoors, which include ABC (1987) for Skulptur Projekte Münster, Spiegel (Mirror, 1990), Camera (1990), and Fenster (1998). Each of these works consists of a large-­scale frame or set of frames, often made of steel. ABC, situated next to the library of the University of Münster, featured two concrete gates topped with rectangular, steel frames. Hoisted high into the air, the two horizontal frames bracket only sky. (The work was dismantled after the exhibition.) Genzken evokes the specific types of objects identified in the titles (most notably with Fenster, which is divided into four quadrants as if by muntins) but does not seem particularly invested in parsing the distinctions between them. Her interests seem more overarching: windows, mirrors, and cameras are all means by which the subject regards the self or the world.



2. Thomas Keenan, “Windows: Of Vulnerability,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce



3. Precariousness is also instantiated in some of the public sculptures mentioned in note

Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 127. 1. Fenster (1998), Spiegel (Mirror, 1992), and Camera (1990) are tall flat structures that are threateningly canted. Of Camera, a large steel frame (418 × 520 cm) hovering over the third-­floor balcony of an apartment building in Brussels, Genzken says, “I had a fourth window placed up on the balcony, tilting over the balustrade, so that when you are walking on the street under it you really think, ‘Oh God, I hope that doesn’t fall on my head.’” Kasper König and Isa Genzken, “Outdoor Projects,” in Isa Genzken: Open, Sesame!, ed. Kaspar König, Nina Gülicher, and Andrea Tarsia (Cologne: Walther König, 2009), 107.

4. The ideal of the classical public sphere was presented in Jürgen Habermas’s epochal 1962 book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere). Habermas’s study presents Öffentlichkeit as a historically determined phenomenon subject to transformation and yet possessing an ideational core: “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason [öffentliches Räsonnement].” Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of ­Bourgeois Society (1962), trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 27.



5. Keenan, “Windows,” 133–­34.



6. Isa Genzken, I Love New York, Crazy City (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2006), n.p.



7. Genzken’s acute attention to the scale of the Columns is reminiscent of Tony Smith’s remarks regarding the dimensions of Die (1962). A six-­foot cube, he avows, cannot be understood as either a monument (towering over the viewer) or an object (smaller than the viewer). Quoted in Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” in Continuous Proj­ ect Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 11. The implication, as Michael Fried draws out, is that Smith’s Die functions as “something

153

like a surrogate person.” Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 156.

8. Dan Graham, “Essay on Video, Architecture and Television,” in Writings on Video and Video Works 1970–­1978, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1979), 74.



9. Quoted in Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Architecture as a Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 206.



10. The entry for sculpture in Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie states that the medium’s highest purpose, “considered from the moral point of view, is to perpetuate the memory of famous men and to provide models of virtue.” Étienne-­Maurice Falconet, “Sculpture,” The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project, trans. Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas Cassirer (Ann Arbor: MPublishing, University of Michigan Library, 2003), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.166 (accessed 3 February 2014). Originally published as “Sculpture,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1765), 14:834–­37. For more on late eighteenth-­ century commemorative sculpture, see Erika Naginski, Sculpture and Enlightenment (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009).



11. See Rosalind Krauss, “Tanktotem: Welded Images,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), for a discussion of sculpture as sign for human presence. For a discussion of nonliteralist gesture, see Michael Fried, “Two Sculptures by Anthony Caro” and “Anthony Caro,” in Art and Objecthood, 180–­84, 269–­76.



12. Asked whether she felt the need to separate herself from Beuys during her artistic formation, Genzken responds, “To tell you the truth, it was even more important for me to distinguish myself as being worlds apart from German painter and sculptor Markus Lüpertz.” “Isa Genzken, The Artist Who Doesn’t Do Interviews,” http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/isa-­genzken-­retrospective/print/ (accessed 3 September 2014). Benjamin H. D. Buchloh detects in so-­called neo-­expressionist painting and sculpture an embrace of “atavistic production modes.” See his “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” in Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art; Boston: D. R. Godine, 1984), 123. Other critics have granted more self-­consciousness to an artist like Lüpertz, and have called into question the apparent opposition between conceptual and expressive practices. See, for instance, Isabelle Graw, “Conceptual Expression: On Conceptual Gestures in Allegedly Expressive Painting, Traces of Expression in Proto-­Conceptual Works, and the Significance of Artistic Procedures,” in Art after Conceptual Art, ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 119–­33.



13. I first worked out these arguments regarding anthropomorphism, minimalism, and cladding in “‘Im Anfang war die Bekleidung’: Isa Genzken’s Clad Columns,” Pidgin 9 (September 2010): 139–­48. Isabelle Graw has recently written on the anthropomorphism of Genzken’s Columns. Graw, “Ecce Homo: Art and Subjecthood,” Artforum 50, no. 3 (November 2011): 241–­47. See also Tom McDonough, “‘A Certain Relation to Reality’: Isa Genzken between Subject and Object,” in I’m Isa Genzken, the Only Female Fool, ed. Nicolaus Schafhausen and Vanessa Joan Müller (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 84–­93.

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14. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 156.



15. Morris’s Column (1960) was adapted for a performance of the Living Theater in New York, during which the upright box was tipped over after three and a half minutes and allowed to lie flat for an equal length of time. The toppling, triggered by the tug of a string from offstage, would have appeared to the audience as if animated by the “inner, even secret, life” of the form. Initially, Morris planned to stand in the column during the

performance and to topple the structure from within it. See Robert Morris: The Mind/ Body Problem (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1994), 90.

Notes to Pages 117–132

16. Adolf Loos, “The Principle of Cladding,” in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–­ 1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 66–­69.



17. Gottfried Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics (Los



18. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture



19. The presentation took place on 1 May 2015, after which the garments were shown on a

Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 248 (italics in original). (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 12–­13. rack for the duration of the exhibition. The Hemden were first exhibited the year prior in “I’m Isa Genzken, the Only Female Fool” at the Kunsthalle Wien (28 May–­7 September 2014). For the opening of the exhibition, Genzken staged a photo shoot, with live models dressed in the Hemden, that was inspired by the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”

20. This Hemd reappears in Untitled (2012; from the Schauspieler series), draped over the shoulders of a child-­size mannequin of ambiguous sex. A photo of Genzken is attached to its forehead, as if a thought-­bubble materialized. The mannequin’s head still bears the manufacturer’s foam protective mask and plastic wrapper.



21. See Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria (New York: Oxford University



22. Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns developed various strategies to tackle this

Press, 1972), 68–­77. same issue. These include suspending disparate materials in the canvas and interrupting or rupturing the canvas with embedded objects.

23. With regard to Cy Twombly’s graffitilike marks, Rosalind Krauss writes, “In this sense graffiti makes clear that the idea of the painting as the mirror of the painter—­an idea suggested by Harold Rosenberg’s theory of Action Painting—­is an impossible utopia, the dream of an art of presence. Even as graffiti’s graphic lash strikes in the present, it registers itself as past, a mark whose violence dismembers the very idea of the image in the mirror, the whole body, Narcissus.” Krauss, “Cy’s Up,” Artforum International 33, no. 1 (1994): 70+ (accessed via Biography in Context database).



24. Keto von Waberer, interview with Beuys, in Eine innere Mongolei, ed. Carl Heinlein



25. Jörg Schellmann, “Questions to Joseph Beuys,” in Joseph Beuys, The Multiples, 8th

(Hannover: Kestner-­Gesellschaft, 1990), 206. English edition, ed. Schellmann (Cambridge, MA: Busch-­Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums; Minneapolis: Walker Art Center; Munich: Edition Schellmann, 1997), 16.

26. In this usage, the stress is on the second syllable.



27. David Bussel, “Time Off,” in König et al., Open, Sesame!, 153.



28. Le Corbusier, When the Cathedrals Were White: A Journey to the Country of Timid



29. For fear of “intoxication,” “unrestrained debauchery,” and “insanity,” the erotics of

People (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), 216; quoted in Wigley, White Walls, 221. light must, as with color, be kept in check. The architect’s role is to utilize the effects of color and light, while keeping them from overwhelming the subject. Wigley writes, “The ‘masterly play of forms and light’ is erotic. Yet it is only ‘masterly’ inasmuch as its excesses are controlled, regulated by an architect so that the observer of a building can preserve a stable identity. The architect shelters the occupant of a building psychologically from the ambivalence of the physical shelter itself.” Wigley, White Walls, 207.

30. Yve-­Alain Bois, “The Bum and the Architect,” in König et al., Open, Sesame!, 22.



31. Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 12.

155



32. Genzken revisited the Flugzeugfenster in 2003, 2007, 2009, and 2011. Airplane windows, or the views from them, have also appeared in Genzken’s photographs, namely, in the 1977 album recording her US trip (discussed in the introduction), in her series New York, N.Y. (1998/2000), and in images published in the catalog Isa Genzken: Jeder braucht mindestens ein Fenster (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1992), 74–­75.



33. Lisa Lee, “Bodies Politic,” in The Human Factor: The Figure in Contemporary Sculpture,



34. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 28–­29.

ed. Ralph Rugoff (London: Hayward Publishing, 2014), 42–­47.

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Index ABC (Genzken), 153n1 A, B, C, D (Genzken), 117 abstract expressionism, 14, 26, 142n10 abstraction, 13, 17, 24, 49, 69, 118, 127 Accumulations (Arman), 90 Adorno, Theodor, 151n45 Akai (Genzken), 49 Alexanderplatz, 65, 67, 72 allegory, 101, 104–­5; art, allegorical impulse in, 107–­8, 152n56; and commodity, 106, 151n45; in modernism, 152n56; in postmodern art, 108; as public and private, 108; and self, 108; and symbol, 106, 152n49; textual doubling, 152n56; theory of, 106 allusion, 45–­46, 67 Altbauten, 55 Althoff, Kai, 121 American Room (Genzken), 14, 104 Andre, Carl, 16, 24, 34, 45–­46 anthropomorphism, 42, 133, 135; and figuration, 19; literalist art, 118, 120 antirationalism, 32 Aquarium (Genzken), 117. See also Column series (Genzken) Arcades Project, The (Benjamin), 151n45 architecture, 7–­8, 14, 26, 28, 32, 53, 57, 86, 88, 114, 135; architectural models, 61; Bauhaus-­style of, 77; Berlin Wall, 64–­65; and the body, 112; built space, 18–­19; and cladding, 123, 128; color in, 78–­80; fascist architecture, 139–­40n7; in Germany, 11–­12, 55, 67, 73; glass architecture, 72–­ 73, 117; as image, 67; listening architecture, 2; modular architecture, 79; paper architecture, 145n9; progressive architecture, and nationalism, 82; reconstruc-

tion, as spectacle, 67; and sculpture, 123; sculpture and commodity, conflation of, 73; space, demarcation of, 121; and spatial logic, 61; structural logic of, 61; and subjectivity, 121; textile origins of, 122; utopian architecture, 56; visionary architecture, 77, 82 Architektons (Malevich), 53 Arman, 90 “Art and Objecthood” (Fried), 118 “Art of the Real, The” (exhibition), 142n12, 144n36 Artschwager, Richard, 16 Asher, Michael, 14 assemblage, 10, 80, 95, 100, 123, 131–­33, 135; as allegorical, 106; Genzken, assemblages of, 19, 80, 85–­87, 90–­91, 93, 98, 103–­4, 107–­8; mass-­produced materials in, 74, 79, 90–­91 Atelier (Tillmans), 143n30 Atget, Eugène, 74 “Bad Glazier, The” (Baudelaire), 70–­72 bakelite, 95–­96 Balkenhol, Stephan, 95 Barthes, Roland, 48–­49, 88, 100–­102, 152n55 Baselitz, Georg, 30, 118 Bataille, Georges, 28 Baudelaire, Charles, 70–­72; and allegory, 106, 151n45 Bauhaus, 74, 77 Bauhausbücher no. 1 (Gropius), 79 Baukasten im Grossen (Gropius), 79 Bayer, Herbert, 77–­78 Beginning of the World (Brancusi), 30 Bekleidung, 121–­22. See also cladding

157

158

Benglis, Lynda, 100 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 28, 87–­88, 90, 149n16, 150n32; and allegory, 106, 151n45, 152n49 Berlin (Germany), 55, 86; Berlin Wall, 11–­12, 64–­65, 83, 146n21; post-­Wall fashioning of, 67, 72–­73; reconstruction in, 79 Berlin, 1973 (Genzken), 19, 55, 61, 73 Berlinische Architektur, 65, 67 Beuys, Joseph, 5, 8–­9, 11–­13, 140n17, 148n3, 154n12; Genzken’s engagement with, 11–­ 13, 146n19; materials, use of, 12, 128, 146n19; romanticism of, 69; social activism of, 140n18, 146n19; and Social Sculpture, 12 Bill, Max, 29 Bird in Space (Brancusi), 30 Blaue Scheibe und Stab (Blue Disk and Staff) (Palermo), 142n12 Blaues Ellipsoid (Blue Ellipsoid) (Genzken), 24 Blau-­grau-­gelbes Hyperbolo “Elbe” (Blue-­ Gray-­Yellow Hyperbolo “Elbe”) (Genzken), 43, 45 Blau-­grünes Hyperbolo (Genzken), 143n26 Blau-­grün-­gelbes Ellipsoid “Joma” (Blue-­ Green-­Yellow Ellipsoid “Joma”) (Genzken), 24, 31 body, 18, 22, 39, 88, 120, 135, 137; as absent, 128; architectural motifs, 112, 132; and cladding, 122–­23; and the gaze, 61; as inhabited, 42; social legibility of, 123; strata of skin, 132; thematics of, 19, 42, 45–­46 Bois, Yve-­Alain, 28, 93, 101, 131, 145n14, 150n31 Bonami, Francesco, 139–­40n7 Box for Standing (Morris), 120 Brancusi, Constantin, 30 Breitwieser, Sabine, 141n24, 142n10, 144n40 Brutalism, 64 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 15–­16, 32, 34, 46, 49, 55, 63–­64, 142n12, 149n15, 152n56, 154n12 Bühne (Stage) (Genzken), 57 Bundesarchitektenkammer (Federal ­Chamber of German Architects), 7 Buren, Daniel, 49 Bussel, David, 130 Camera (Genzken), 153n1, 153n3 capitalism, 5, 56, 79, 82, 96, 108, 147n41; consumer capitalism, and pop art, 74; and imperialism, 19

Caravaggio, 133 Caro, Anthony, 143n28 Car Park (Genzken), 80–­81 celluloid, 95–­96 César, 100 Chant du Styrène, Le (The Song of Styrene) (film), 101–­2 Checkpoint Charlie, 65 Chicago (Illinois), 14, 141n24 Chicago Drive (Genzken), 110 Christopher (Genzken), 114 cladding, 114, 117, 121–­22; and architecture, 123, 128; body, relationships to, 122–­23; clothing, converging of, 122, 128; originary status of, 121; and sculpture, 123; and subjectivity, 114, 120–­23 collage, 34, 78, 106, 117, 124 Colomina, Beatriz, 145n9 color, 17, 24, 26–­27, 31, 34, 39, 43, 45, 48, 57–­58, 65, 69–­70, 72, 78, 82, 86, 90–­91, 93, 102, 107, 110, 117, 123–­24, 135, 141n8, 144n34, 155n29; and light, 131–­32; and polychromy, 77, 80, 114, 131 Column (Morris), 120, 154–­55n15 Columns (Morris), 120 Column series (Genzken), 123, 127, 132, 135; A, B, C, D, 117; Aquarium, 117; and claddings, 114, 120, 122, 128; Dan, 121; as group portraits, 121, 129; as handmade, 121; human figure, in contemporary sculpture, 118; individuality, embodying of, 121; intimacy of, 121, 129; Isa, 121; ­Justus, 114; Kai, 121; Kleine Fischsäule (Small Fish Column), 117; Lawrence, 114, 120–­21; Layout, 114; ornamentation of, 129; sociality, possibility of, 122; uniqueness of, 120; Vom Himmel zurück (Back from the Sky), 117; Wolfgang, 114, 120 commodity, 13, 18, 51, 73, 78, 85, 90, 93, 103, 107–­8, 153n4; and allegory, 106, 151n47; concept of, 151n45; as détourned, 128; as fetish, 106, 152n58; mystical character of, 100; as perishable, 147n33 conceptual art, 18, 48–­49, 121 concrete, 1, 3, 12, 14, 19, 57–­58, 61–­62, 79, 85, 88, 107, 109–­10, 122, 133, 146n19, 146n24, 146n26, 153n1; petrification, symbol of, 64–­65; as ruins in reverse, 64; utopian promise of, 63 Concrete series (Genzken), 57–­58, 61, 64, 67, 79, 109, 145n5; Bühne (Stage), 57; Durchgang (Passageway), 57; Halle (Hall), 57; Hochhaus (High-­rise) 57; interiority of, 65; Kirche (Church), 57; Rosa Zimmer (Pink Room), 65; as ruins in reverse,

62–­63; tectonics, principle of, 61, 114; Tür (Door), 57; Zimmer (Room), 57 Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 55 Construction in Enamel 1, 2, and 3 (Moholy-­ Nagy), 47 constructivism, 107 constructivist sculpture, 18 consumerism, 91, 105, 132 Corner Reliefs (Tatlin), 69 corporeality, 39, 42, 143n28; and embodiedness, 132 Crimp, Douglas, 152n56 Crystal Palace, 71 cynicism, 63, 80, 91; cynical reason, 108 Dada, 91, 144n47 Daimler-­Benz building (Berlin), 65 Dan (Genzken), 121 Darboven, Hanne, 16 David Zwirner Gallery, 137 Debord, Guy, 73, 85; and spectacle, 67, 152n52 Design for a Cigarette Pavilion (Bayer), 78 Design for a Newspaper Sculpture (Bayer), 78 de Stijl, 78 Dickerman, Leah, 90 Die (Smith), 118, 153n7 Dimendberg, Edward, 102, 150n31, 150n33, 151n37 Disco Soon (Genzken), 82 Drexler, Arthur, 62 Duchamp, Marcel, 104 Durchgang (Passageway) (Genzken), 57 Düsseldorf (Germany), 5, 15 Düsseldorf Art Academy, 14 East Berlin, 67 East Germany, 55, 63–­64, 96 Elefant (Genzken), 93, 95 Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up over Her, Face Up (Nauman), 22 Elliot House (Schindler), 14 Ellipse Nr. 1 (Ellipse No. 1) (Genzken), 26 Ellipsoids (Genzken), 18, 23–­24, 26–­31, 34–­35, 37, 42–­43, 45–­46, 48–­49, 51, 53, 104, 141n7 embodied perception, 18, 23, 27 Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death (Genzken), 14, 85–­88, 95, 104; and household items, 87; and toys, 87 Emporsteigender Jüngling (Standing Youth/ Ascending Youth) (Lehmbruck), 117–­18 Enwezor, Okwui, 10

exemplum virtutis, 118 exposure, 109–­10, 132; radical exposure, 137 exteriority, 121, 132

Index

Federal Republic of Germany. See West Germany Felt Suit (Beuys), 128, 148n3 Fenster (Windows) (Genzken), 2–­3, 5, 109–­10, 122, 132, 137, 153n1, 153n3 fiberglass, 42, 48 figuration, 80; and anthropomorphism, 19; in sculpture, 8, 100, 117–­18, 124 Fischer, Konrad, 11, 16, 18, 24 5 x 20 Altstadt Rectangle (Andre), 16, 24 Flugzeugfenster (Airplane Windows) ­(Genzken), 133, 156n32 Flugzeugfenster (Medusa) (Airplane ­Windows [Medusa]) (Genzken), 133 Fluxus, 64, 132 Fog in the Elbe Valley (Friedrich), 45 Foster, Hal, 73, 78, 91, 152n58 Frank Lloyd Wright House (Wright), 14 Freedom Tower (Libeskind), 80 Fried, Michael, 118, 120, 143n28, 152n56, 153n7 Friedrich, Caspar David, 45 Friedrichstadt Passagen, 65, 67, 72 Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project (Mies), 72 Frühlicht (journal), 61, 62 Fuck the Bauhaus (New Buildings for New York) (Genzken), 74; Fuck the Bauhaus #2, 78; Fuck the Bauhaus #3, 77; Fuck the Bauhaus #4, 77–­79; Fuck the Bau­ haus #5, 79; Fuck the Bauhaus #6, 79; prefabricated architecture, parody of, 79 Gabo, Naum, 29–­31, 32, 96, 98, 100–­101 Galerie Daniel Buchholz, 124, 141n24 Galerie Konrad Fischer, 16, 21, 24, 143n26, 144n39 Galerie Meerrettich, 139–­40n7 Gateway Arch (Saarinen), 86 Gehry, Frank, 74 Gelbes Ellipsoid (Yellow Ellipsoid) (Genzken), 24 Genette, Gérard, 70; travesty, characterization of, 67, 69, 77, 147n33 Genzken, Isa, 16–­17, 81, 102, 120, 131, 139–­ 40n7, 141n23, 141n24, 142n8, 142n10, 142n12, 143n26, 143n30, 144n34, 144n39, 144n40, 144n47, 145n14, 146n19, 146n24, 149–­50n23, 153n1, 153n3, 153n7, 154n12, 155n19, 156n32; aesthetic attitude, 70; alienated labor, vocabulary of, 103;

159

160

Genzken, Isa (continued): ­allegorical impulse of, 104–­8; altered garments, 123–­ 24; altered garments, and customization, 128; altered garments, and myth of autographic mark, 127; architectural form, evoking of, 61, 117; architectural motifs, and the body, 112, 132; architecture and built space, preoccupation with, 14–­15, 19, 21–­22, 34, 79; architecture and commodity, 73, 78; architecture establishment, parodying of, 80; art historical ­references, 5, 79–­80, 117–­18, 127; assemblage process of, and reification, 19; ­assemblages, repurposing and depurposing of commodities in, 85–­87, 90–­91, 93, 98, 103–­4, 107–­8; attached negativity, and passionate empathy, 108; “Bad Glazier,” affinity with, 71–­72; body, thematics of, 19, 42, 45–­46, 135; cheap materials, use of, 95, 98; collage books of, 110, 112; color, precise use of, 31; concrete, turn to, 57, 63–­65; Concrete series of, 57–­58, 61–­ 65, 67, 79; consumer goods, use of, 103–­ 4; and consumption, 103; contemporaneity of, 5; contemporary materials, use of, 80; Ellipsoids of, 18, 24, 27–­31, 34–­35, 37, 42–­43, 45–­46, 48–­49, 51, 53, 104, 141n7; embodied perception of, 27, 37; fiberglass, use of, 42, 48; foil, application of, 69; found materials, use of, 90; Germanness, ambivalence toward, 5, 13; German Pavilion project, 5–­8; Glasarchitektur, lampooning of, 86; glass, work in, 13, 19, 67, 72–­73, 77, 82, 107, 109, 114, 117; global capitalism, 56; good taste, testing of, 123–­24; haptic experience, of objects, 88; Hyperbolos of, 18, 23–­24, 28–­31, 34–­35, 37, 39, 42–­43, 45–­46, 48–­49, 51, 53, 104, 141n7; influences of, 34; interiority, as matter of surface, 132; and intersubjectivity, 122; lived experience and perspectival rendering, 43; mannequin ensembles of, 133, 135, 137, 147n34, 155n20; mass-­produced objects, turn toward, 74, 77–­79, 90; and materialism, 150n33; materials, use of, 12, 47–­49, 56–­58, 80, 93, 104, 107–­8, 121, 123; meaning making of, as allegorical, 104; and minimalism, 45; myths of national identity, dispelling of, 83; non-­art object world, pull of, 18, 26; object sensibility of, 93; photographs by, 14, 55, 111, 114, 117; Plaster series of, 56–­ 57, 61, 79; plastic commodities, use of, 79, 93, 95, 98, 100, 103, 106–­7; pop ­cultural imagery, sympathy for, 80;

post-­Wall Berlin architecture, condemnation of, 73; pro-­American stance of, 13–­14; process of, 19, 91; and rationalism, 32; and readymade, 1, 49, 51, 104, 107, 127, 133, 135; receptivity, model of, 1–­3, 5, 10–­11, 19; relevance, pursuit of, 47; scale, complexity of, 62; sculptural forms, 18–­ 19, 23–­24, 29–­30, 42, 57; sculptural plasticity, 93, 95, 100, 135; subjectivity of, 19, 122, 127, 132; traditional craftsmanship and technology, wedding of, 48; travesty, function of, 69, 82, 147n33; urban planning, position on, 56; and utopianism, 63, 69–­70. See also individual works German Democratic Republic. See East Germany Germania (Haacke), 9–­10, 16 German Romanticism, 43, 45 German Students’ Party, 140n18. See also Organization for Direct Democracy Germany, 5–­6, 19, 24, 55, 63, 67, 79, 96, 110–­11; architecture, state of in, 11–­13; ­national identity, 10; and reunification, 10, 12, 64. See also West Germany Geschwister (Genzken), 91, 93, 98 Gestürzte, Der (The Fallen Man) (Lehmbruck), 118 Giacometti, Alberto, 93 Giedion, Sigfried, 63–­64 glass, 13, 19, 67, 71–­73, 77, 82, 90, 107, 109, 114, 117 Glass Skyscraper (Mies), 61–­62 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 106 Graham, Dan, 14–­15, 72, 117, 121, 141n25 Grau-­grünes Hyperbolo “Jülich” (Gray-­ Green Hyperbolo “Jülich”) (Genzken), 39 Grau-­schwarzes Hyperbolo “MBB” (Gray-­ Black Hyperbolo “MBB”) (Genzken), 42, 48 Grayson, Susan, 122 Great Berlin Art Exhibition (1923), 32, 34 Greenberg, Clement, 51 Green Party, 140n18 Gropius, Walter, 67, 79 Ground Zero series (Genzken), 80–­82, 148n48, 149, 150n23; Car Park, 80–­81; Church, 57, 82; Disco Soon, 82; Hospital, 82; Light, 80; Memorial Tower, 80; Osama Fashion Store, 80–­82 Grün-­graues offenes Ellipsoid (Green-­Gray Open Ellipsoid) (Genzken), 31 Grün-­orange-­graues Hyperbolo “El Salva­ dor” (Green-­Orange-­Gray Hyperbolo “El Salvador”) (Genzken), 37, 39

Haacke, Hans, 8, 9, 144n38 Haare wachsen wie sie wollen (Hair Grows However It Wants To) (Genzken), 139–­ 40n7 Habermas, Jürgen, 140n18, 153n4 Haiger, Ernst, 6, 10 Halle (Hall) (Genzken), 57 Hallelujah (Yellow) (Genzken), 98 Hanging Spatial Constructions (Rodchenko), 91 haptic experience, 88 Haussman, Baron, 71 Hemden (Shirts) (Genzken), 124, 155n19 Here (Newman), 142n12 Hertel, Hermann, 48 Hi-­Fi series (Genzken), 18, 49, 51 Hitachi (Genzken), 49 Hitler, Adolf, 9 Hochhaus (High-­rise) (Genzken), 57 Homes for America (Graham), 14–­15 horizontality, 21, 24, 27–­28, 31, 33, 42, 45, 53, 58, 61, 77, 98, 114, 142n14, 143n23, 153n1 Horkheimer, Max, 151n45 Hospital (Genzken), 82 Hyperbolos (Genzken), 18, 23–­24, 28–­31, 34–­35, 37, 39, 43, 45–­46, 48–­49, 51, 53, 104, 141n7; as vertical, 24, 42 illusion, 26, 34, 72–­73, 88, 106; in the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, 31–­32, 37, 45–­46 I Love New York City, Crazy City (Genzken), 19, 110, 112 “I’m Isa Genzken, the Only Female Fool” ­(exhibition), 155n19 individuality, 24; and connectivity, 122; on surface, 121–­22 “Informe” (Bataille), 28 Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, 26 Instructions for a Mental Exercise (Nauman), 21–­22, 23; Genzken’s performance of, 26–­27 Interfunktionen (journal), 21 interiority, 65, 110, 112, 121–­22, 132, 137 International Style, 14 intersubjectivity, 110; and sociality, 121–­22 Ioganson, Karl, 91 Iraq war, 8 Isa (Genzken), 121 Isa Genzken: Jeder braucht mindestens ein Fenster (catalog), 156n32 Isa Mona Lisa (Tillmans), 124 Jackson, Michael, 155n19 Johns, Jasper, 155n22

Judd, Donald, 45, 51, 80, 120, 133, 143n19 Justus (Genzken), 114

Index

Kai (Genzken), 121 Kartell (manufacturer), 148n48, 149–­50n23 Kawara, On, 16 Keenan, Thomas, 109–­10 Kelly, Ellsworth, 46, 142n10, 144n36 Kirche (Church) (Genzken), 57 Kleine Fischsäule (Small Fish Column) (Genzken), 117 Kluge, Alexander, 103 Klutsis, Gustav, 91 Kneer, Ekkehard, 145n4, 145n5 Kollhoff, Hans, 67 Koolhaas, Rem, 64 Koons, Jeff, 90–­91 Krauss, Rosalind, 45, 137, 143n19, 155n23 Krotz, Ralph, 28–­30, 39, 48, 144n40 labor, 101, 106, 151n42; as alienated, 103–­4, 132; dehumanization, of workers, 103; Genzken’s labor, 103–­4 Lautner, John, 14 Lawrence (Genzken), 114, 120–­21 Layout (Genzken), 114 Lebenslauf/Werklauf (Life Course/Work Course) (Beuys), 11 Le Corbusier, 63–­64, 117, 131 Lee, Pamela M., 139n2 Lehmbruck (Genzken), 117–­18 Lehmbruck, Wilhelm, 117–­18 Leonardo da Vinci, 80, 133 Lévi-­Strauss, Claude, 88 LeWitt, Sol, 16–­17, 45 Libeskind, Daniel, 80 Light (Genzken), 80–­81 Lissitzky, El, 28, 32–­34, 142n14, 143n23 literalist art, anthropomorphism of, 118, 120 Loos, Adolf, 121–­22 Luke, Megan R., 148n7, 152n53 Lüpertz, Markus, 118, 154n12 Mailer, Norman, 96, 101 Maillol, Aristide, 69, 147n34 Malevich, Kazimir, 53 Marden, Brice, 45 Märkisches Viertel, 55 Martin, Reinhold, 82, 148n51 Marx, Karl, 106; and Marxism, 151n45 mass production, 79, 90, 95, 127, 144n34 materialism, 107, 150n33 materials, 15, 63, 65, 67, 73–­74, 77, 96, 98, 101–­2, 124, 129, 130–­31; Beuys, use of, 12,

161

materials (continued): 128, 146n19; capacity to mean, 83; Genzken, use of, 12, 47–­49, 56–­58, 61, 79–­80, 90, 93, 95, 98, 100, 103–­4, 106–­8, 118, 121, 123; materiality, 12, 23, 106. See also concrete; fiberglass; glass ; plaster; ­plastics McCracken, John, 120 McDonald, Daniel, 112 McElheny, Josiah, 107–­8 Medusa (Caravaggio), 133 Meikle, Jeffrey L., 150n29 Mein Gehirn (My Brain) (Genzken), 1, 137 Meister Gerhard (Master Gerhard) (Genzken), 42, 143n30 Melville, Stephen, 108, 152n56 Memorial Tower (Genzken), 80–­81 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 30 Merz (Schwitters), 90 Messerschmitt-­Bölkow-­Blohm, 48 “MetLife” (exhibition), 112 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 13, 55, 61–­62, 67, 72, 145n8, 145n9 Mietskaserne (rental barracks), 55 Ming Pei (Genzken), 53 minimalism, 13–­16, 18, 24, 45, 49, 98, 104, 118, 120–­21, 142n10; and postminimalism, 5 Möbius band, 29 models, 13, 30, 53, 61, 62, 77, 110, 114, 145n8 modernism: and allegory, 152n56; and ­architecture, 14, 53, 55–­56, 61; and painting, 124; and postmodernism, 152n56; truth to materials, 107; utopianism of, 70, 127 Moholy-­Nagy, László, 47, 77, 96, 98, 100–­101 Mona Lisa (Leonardo), 133 Monument für die Zukunft (Beuys), 9 Monument to the Third International (Tatlin), 67, 77 Morris, Robert, 42, 63, 120, 154–­55n15 Müllberg (Pile of Rubbish) (Genzken), 53 Muschamp, Herbert, 82 Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 137 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 62, 144n40, 147n34 MUSIX, 1 162

Nauman, Bruce, 14, 16, 21–­24, 27–­28, 34, 142n10 Nazism, 67 Negt, Oskar, 103 Neubau (Genzken), 53, 55–­56 Neubauten, 56, 64, 83; satellite cities of, 55 Neues Bauen, 55–­56

New Buildings for Berlin (Genzken), 13, 64, 67, 70, 72–­74, 114, 132, 146–­47n31; ­tectonics, negation of, 114 Newman, Barnett, 14, 26, 121, 142n10, 142n12 New York (New York), 14, 112, 117, 133, 141n23 New York, N.Y. (Genzken), 156n32 Nickel Sculpture (Moholy-­Nagy), 77 Nouveau Réalisme, 100 Ohr (Genzken), 2, 18, 137, 139n2 Oil (Genzken), 5–­6, 7–­8, 10–­11, 13, 102–­5 Organization for Direct Democracy, 140n18. See also German Students’ Party Origins of German Tragic Drama, The ­(Benjamin), 151n45 Osama Fashion Store (Genzken), 80–­82 Oulipo, 101 Owens, Craig, 152n56 painting, 155n23; deductive structures, 124; “end of,” 127; and flatness, 124; and ­graffiti, 127; and illusionism, 124; painterly act, autographic mark, myth of, 127; and sculpture, 26, 32, 100; as system of signs, 127 Palermo, Blinky, 45, 142n12, 144n34 Parallelogramme (Parallelograms) (Genzken), 16–­18 Parallelogramm Nr. 2 (Parallelogram No. 2) (Genzken), 26 Paravents (Genzken), 110 Pechiney (plastics maker), 101–­2 Pei, I. M., 53, 56 Pelzer, Birgit, 34 perception, 24, 37, 39, 42, 61, 80, 114, 143n19; embodied perception, 18; perceptual experience, 22–­23, 27, 120 perspective, 21, 26–­27, 30, 72, 110, 142n10; aerial perspective, 43, 45; linear perspective, 28; “lived perspective,” 42–­43; single-­point perspective, 28, 34, 45 Petits poèmes en prose (Baudelaire), 70 phenomenology, 24, 34, 42, 45, 73, 100, 120, 142n10 Piano, Renzo, 65 Pioneer (Genzken), 51 plaster, 19, 30, 53, 85, 96, 107; in art-­ making, role of, 56–­57 Plaster series (Genzken), 56–­57, 79; as pictorial, 61 plasticity, 131; molecular plasticity, 95; sculptural plasticity, 93, 95, 100, 135 plastics, 93, 95–­96, 102, 149n16, 150n29;

as allegorical, 106; Genzken, assemblages of, 19, 85–­87, 90–­91, 93, 98, 100, 103–­4, 107–­8; planned obsolescence, economy of, 149n17; plastic art, confluence of, 96; unreality of, 100–­101 Plattenbauten (concrete-­slab structures), 63–­64 Plexiglas, 96, 98 Pollock, Jackson, 127 pop art, 14–­15; color in, 144n34; consumer capitalism, 74; neo-­pop, 90–­91 Posenenske, Charlotte, 133 postminimalism, 5, 13, 48 Potts, Alex, 140n17, 148n3 “Prinzip der Bekleidung, Das” (“The Principle of Cladding”) (Loos), 121 process, 12, 42, 46, 53, 56–­57, 102, 106, 151n42; casting process, 58; manufacturing process, 101, 114, 149n6; process-­ based art, 16, 18, 48, 100; sculptural process, 48, 91, 100, 103 Prounenraum (Proun Room) (Lissitzky), 32, 34 Prouns (Lissitzky), 28, 32 pseudomorphism, 30 publicness, 109, 121–­22; and privacy, 110, 114, 129. See also public sphere public sphere, 12, 109, 118, 153n4; private citizens, rights of, 104–­5; private sphere, separation from, 19, 109–­10; and self, 112 Queneau, Raymond, 101–­2, 150n33, 151n37 rationalism, 32, 82 Rauschenberg, Robert, 90, 155n22 readymade, 46, 49, 51, 104, 107, 127, 133, 135 receptivity, 137; as aural, 2; signifiers of, 1–­3, 5 Resnais, Alain, 101–­2 Restany, Pierre, 100 Richter, Gerhard, 15, 73, 143n30 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 144n47 River, The (Maillol), 69, 147n34 Robot Portraits (Arman), 90 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 91 Rodin, Auguste, 93, 137, 144n47 Rogier, Francesca, 65, 67 Rosa Zimmer (Pink Room) (Genzken), 65 Rose (Genzken), 69 Rosenberg, Harold, theory of Action Painting, 155n23 Rotes Ellipsoid (Red Ellipsoid) (Genzken), 24, 142n8 Rothko, Mark, 45

Rot-­gelb-­schwarzes Doppelellipsoid ­“Zwilling” (Red-­Yellow-­Black Double Ellipsoid “Twins”) (Genzken), 46 Rot-­graues offenes Ellipsoid (Red-­Gray Open Ellipsoid) (Genzken), 31 Rückriem, Ulrich, 8 Ruff, Thomas, 15 Ruhender Verkehr (Stationary Traffic) (Vostell), 146n24 Saarinen, Eero, 86 Sandback, Fred, 16 scale, 12, 70, 73, 79, 85–­87, 109, 120, 129, 135; architectural scale, 62, 131; complexity of, 62; monumental scale, 88, 118; scaled to the hand, 5, 88, 131–­32 Schafhausen, Nicolaus, 13 Schauspieler (Actors) (Genzken), 69, 133, 135, 137, 147n34, 155n20 Schauspieler II (Actors II) (Genzken), 135, 137 Scheerbart, Paul, 13, 72–­73 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 106 Schindler, R. M., 14 Schlingensief, Christoph, 7 Schmerzraum (Pain Room) (Beuys), 11 Schmid, Arno Sighart, 6–­7 Schneider, Peter, 140n15 Schwarzes Hyperbolo “Nüsschen” (Black Hyperbolo “Little Nuts”) (Genzken), 35, 37, 39 Schwitters, Kurt, 90, 148n7 Schwule Babys (Gay Babies) (Genzken), 69 sculpture, 5, 12, 48, 56, 96, 122, 154n10; ­architectonic sculpture, 19, 61, 67, 73; and the body, 88; and cladding, 123; constructivist sculpture, 18; human figure in, 118; illusion in, 26, 32, 34, 37, 45–­46, 72–­73, 88, 106; intractable materiality of, 23; and mathematics, 29–­30; as modern, 49, 51; and painting, 26, 32, 100, 127, 154n12; plasticity of, 93, 95, 135, 100; ­reality, relation to, 49; as social activism, 146n19; and spatial logic, 61 Selection of Materials (Tatlin), 107 self, 108, 112, 132, 137, 146n19, 153n1 Semper, Gottfried, 121–­22, 152n53 September 11 attacks, 80–­82, 95, 148n51 Series B Reliefs (Posenenske), 133 Serra, Richard, 67, 146, 147n31 Simmel, Georg, 5 situational aesthetics, 14 Sitzender Jüngling (Seated Youth) (Lehmbruck), 118 Sloterdijk, Peter, 108

Index

163

Smith, Tony, 118, 153n7 Smithson, Robert, 16; ruins in reverse, 62–­ 64 sociality, and intersubjectivity, 121–­22 Sony headquarters, Berlin, 65 Soziale Fassaden (Social Façades) (Genzken), 69 Soziale Plastik (Social Sculpture) (Beuys), 12 spectacle, 67, 73, 82, 107–­8, 132, 152n52 Spiegel (Mirror) (Genzken), 153n1, 153n3 Spielautomat (Slot Machine) (Genzken), 110 Stadtbild (cityscape), 72 Starck, Philippe, 91, 149–­50n23 statuary, 42, 95, 118, 121, 127; and mannequins, 135, 137 Steinbach, Haim, 90–­91 Steinberg, Leo, 28 Stimmann, Hans, 65 Strandhäuser zum Umziehen (Beach Houses for Changing) (Genzken), 129–­ 32; color, effects of, 131–­32; de-­cladding, as theme of, 129; play in, 131–­32; private experience, assertion of, 129; sensuality of, 131 Straßenbahnhaltestelle (Tram Stop) (Beuys), 8–­9 Strassenfest (Street Festival) (Genzken), 135 Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) (Habermas), 153n4 Sturges House (Wright), 14 subjectivity, 19, 109, 118, 121–­22, 127–­28; and the body, 132; and intimacy, 132 Sullivan, Louis, 141n24 surface, 5, 17–­18, 24, 26, 31, 33–­35, 37, 39, 48, 55–­58, 61, 69, 73, 85, 93, 100, 112, 124, 131, 142n14; as anthropomorphic, 42; of body, 137; and cladding, 114, 120–­23; of Ellipsoids, 28, 46; of Hyperbolos, 46; and individuality, 121; and interiority, 132, 137; as polychromatic, 120, 128; proliferation of, 137; sculptural surface, 137; and skin, 19, 114, 122; surface effects, 114 Surrealism, 90, 132

164

Taeuber-­Arp, Sophie, 144n47 Tarabukin, Nikolai, 107 Tatlin, Vladimir, 67, 69, 77, 107 Taut, Bruno, 55, 61–­62, 67 Taylor, Mark C., 132 Technical Research (Genzken), 49 tectonics, 12, 61, 114, 146, 147n31; and ­atectonics, 73

Tillmans, Wolfgang, 112, 120, 124, 143n30 Timmerman, Helga, 67 Tischler House (Schindler), 14 Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down (Nauman), 22–­23 Trashcans (Arman), 90 Truitt, Anne, 120 Tür (Door) (Genzken), 57 Two Cubes (Gabo), 30–­31 Unité d’Habitation (Le Corbusier), 63 United States, 14, 79, 95–­96, 102, 141n23 Untitled (1974) (Genzken), 24, 26, 28 Untitled (1998) (Genzken), 114 Untitled (2006) (Genzken), 96, 98 Untitled (2012) (Genzken), 155n20 utopianism, 63–­64, 69–­70, 91, 96, 108, 127 Venice Biennale, history of German Pavilion at, 5–­8 Vienna Secession (2006), Isa Genzken ­exhibition at, 88 Violett-­graues Ellipsoid (Violet-­Gray Ellipsoid) (Genzken), 31–­32 Vom Himmel zurück (Back from the Sky) (Genzken), 117 Vorticism, 122 Vostell, Wolf, 64–­65, 146n24 Warhol, Andy, 14, 91, 144n34 Weiner, Lawrence, 14, 16, 120–­21 Weltempfänger (1982), 51 Weltempfänger (World Receivers) (Genzken), 1, 137 West Berlin, 55–­56 West Germany, 11, 15, 19, 55–­56, 63, 74, 83. See also Germany Wigley, Mark, 122, 155n29 Wild, The (Newman), 26 Williams, Gregory, 139–­40n7 Wolff Residence (Lautner), 14 Wolfgang (Genzken), 114, 120. See also ­Column series (Genzken) Work (Genzken), 117 World Trade Center, 19, 56, 82–­83, 114 World War I, 90, 96, 117–­18 World War II, 65, 96 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 14, 141n24 Yamasaki, Minoru, 56 Zimmer (Room) (Genzken), 57. See also Concrete series (Genzken) Zwei Frauen im Gefecht (Two Women in Combat) (Genzken), 122–­23