CULTURE DESK

ISA GENZKENS BEAUTIFUL RUINS

By Judith Thurman November 26, 2013

VIEW FULL SCREEN

Rot-gelb-schwarzes Doppelellipsoid Zwilling (Red-Yellow-Black Double Ellipsoid

Twin) (1982). Photograph courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz/Cologne/Berlin.

I spent the summer researching a Profile of the German artist Isa Genzken,
first
whose first American
first American retrospective
American retrospective opened
retrospective opened last
opened last week,
last week, at
week, at the
at the Museum
the Museum of
Museum of Modern
of Modern
Modern
Art
Art. Genzken, who lives in Berlin and turns sixty-five today, spent the summer
Art
hospitalized with a head injury, so our plans to meet kept being postponed, and
we eventually had to cancel the story. I couldnt quite let Genzken go, however.
She is, in some respects, one of those lost women who have been my specialty as a
writer.

Lost is a relative notion. Genzken, an art star in her native country, represented
Germany at the 2007 Venice Biennale. She is an important figure in Europe, and
her exhibition history fills pages of small print in the shows catalogue. American
museums have not overlooked her, and younger artists, especially women, have
been inspired by her heretical vitality. But few New Yorkers, I discovered, seem to
have heard of her. When her name did ring a bell, it was usually in connection
with Gerhard Richter. In the early nineteen-seventies, Richter was Genzkens
professor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. They married in 1982 and divorced
about twenty years ago. It is time to disentangle them.

The retrospective occupies most of the gallery space on the museums sixth floor,
and part of its lobby. It is fitting that Genzkens belated consecration comes from
MOMA: New York, the Ur-metropolis, has been her wolf mother, and the

connection is primal on several grounds. Urban architectureits beauty and

desolationis a central theme of Genzkens work, which mirrors the citys
seething heterogeneity and embodies its extremes of rawness and refinement. An
incurable wild child, she haunted the downtown club scene of the seventies and
eighties, and that experience helped to define her. (She made her first visit as a
teen-ager, and she returned often, sometimes annually.) Genzkens art and life are
narratives of defiance. She is too restless to be faithful to a medium or a genre.
She has always courted danger, with predictable resultsthe life force and the
death wish are at odds in her. The desire to please is not part of her character. She
suers from alcoholism and from bipolar disease. And perhaps because self-
promotion is an aspect of self-preservation, she has resisted that, too. But sexism,
it seems, has also contributed to Genzkens relative obscurity, at least until lately.
She is a major female artist who doesnt do womens work.

The details of Genzkens biography are as hard to pin down as she is. Her father
was a doctor who loved music. Her mother (still alive at close to a hundred years
old) renounced her dreams of a stage career to work for a pharmaceutical
company. The family moved from the small northern town where Isa was born to
West Berlin. She grew up comfortably enough, but during a period of national
soul-searching, Cold War tension, and epic reconstruction that transformed a
country in ruins. That cleansingof Germanys rubble and of its guiltwas the
unstable scaolding of her childhood.
Genzken is, par excellence, a child of the sixties who embraced the sometimes
violent leftist idealism of her generation. She may or may not have once lent her
passport to the terrorist Andreas Baader. A boyfriend of her student years,
Benjamin Buchloh, became the eminent art historian who now teaches at
Harvard. Buchloh introduced her to a circle of artists with radical ideals and
practices, including Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Lawrence
Weiner, and Richter. In 1974, while studying with Richter, Genzken made her
dbut as a conceptual artist, with a pugnacious film in which two women, one
short and plump, one tall and skinny, strip for the camera and exchange clothing.
(Genzken was the skinny one; at the time, she was earning money for her art by
modelling. The scrapbook pictures of her, at nineteen, in an ad for a tailored suit
a pretty, dark girl with hair as glossy as her smileare poignant in their
remoteness from the androgynous figure, weathered and scrappy, that she cuts
today.)

The film is called Two Women in Combat, and Sabine Breitwieser, one of the
curators of the MOMA show, interprets its significance in her astute catalogue essay.
Genzken, she writes, was publicly shedding the prescribed feminine roles that she
had inherited, and was trying on the outsize ambition that she would grow into.

***

The alpha males of the German art world forty years ago, with the notable
exception of Joseph Beuys, were not much engaged with performance art, a
newborn genre with little prestige or money and without a hierarchya perfect
niche for women, in other words. But Genzkens fling with performance was
ephemeral. By the time she left Dusseldorf, in 1977, to travel to America on a
study grant, she had begun making large-scale sculptures (ellipsoids and
hyperbolos) in lacquered wood. They were engineered with the help of a
computer; she was one of the first artists to experiment with digital technology.
These ravishing constructions are cerebral and sensuous. They range in size from
ten feet to about thirty feet, and Richter nicknamed them the knitting needles.
(Weapons, Genzken retorted.)
Her next foray involved sound, which she represented in material form: as prints,
photographs, and small sculptures on pedestals. The sculpturesof radios,
speakers, receivers, and suchhave the eerie charm of clay burial artifacts, the sort
of thing a boy pharaoh obsessed with his stereo system might commission for his
tomb. Their precision and severity are classical, but, like much of Genzkens work,
they have a nerds macabre sense of humor.

Studies of light and space evolved from her interest in acoustics. A series of
monumental freestanding windows pose questions about perceptual triage: the
way art gives salience to a fragment of reality and excludes alternative versions of
it. (The windows are beautifully installed under a skylight that frames a sliver of
sky and the faades of surrounding buildings.)

Throughout this period, Genzken was, typically, working with toxic materials, like
epoxy resin, and macho materials, like concrete and steel. She also exposed herself,
who knows for how long, to an X-ray machine that photographed her skull as she
smoked and drank, two favorite activities.

***

After her divorce from Richter, and entering middle age, Genzken changed course
once again. In the nineteen-nineties, she gravitated toward a coterie of younger
gay men who introduced her to Berlins techno-music culture and to a new brand
of militance: for gay rights, for the environment, and against the Gulf War. Her
art also shifted radically: from the creation of elegantly austere objects to
deceptively makeshift assemblages of crap and garbage that Genzken collected on
her urban prowls. (She has always refused to delegate her professional grunt work
to an assistant.)

One of her assemblages is a cluster of buildings, like the kind of model that an
architect submits to a competition, but fashioned from plywood, pizza boxes,
spray paint, construction netting, police tape, and other detritus. It is a picturesque
slum whose squalor is both depressing and festive. Laura Hoptman, the
retrospectives chief curator, interprets this composition, which Genzken called
Fuck the Bauhaus, as a critique of modernist hubrisa Teutonic ideal of
control, order, and rationality that collapsed under Hitler like a house of cards.
But she also discerns a redemptive impulse to it. Genzken, she writes, would like
to replace dehumanizing, corporate urban development with a livelier, more
soulful accidental modernity.

The retrospective concludes with a trilogy of room-sized assemblages from the

new millennium, The American Room, Empire / Vampire, Who Kills Death,
and Ground Zero. (Genzken was in Manhattan on the morning that the towers
fell). These are considerably more sinister and disorienting than anything else she
has done. Try to imagine the fallout from an apocalypse as the contents of
gigantic piata full of cheap toys that have been tortured, then arranged in
vignettes like graveyard oerings for a murdered child, on the Day of the Dead.
But its power is proof against pathos.

***

No one knew if Genzken would make it to New York to celebrate her opening,
but she did. She looked a bit unsteady as she drifted through the galleries, lost in
reverie and largely unrecognized, but with an odd stateliness that reminded me of
Don Quixote. In a sea of designer black, her motley chic set her apart: a jean-style
leather jacket in shiny cobalt blue and a red newsboy cap, from which untidy
wisps of colorless hair poked out. You might have guessed, by a process of
elimination, that this lanky outsider was the artist. I was about to introduce myself
when one of Genzkens minders motioned me away. She needs her space, he
said. Its about time she got it.

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a sta writer in 2000.
She is the author of Isak
Isak Dinesen:
Dinesen: The
The Life
Life of
of aa Storyteller.
Storyteller.

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