File Note 12: Isa Genzken

To situate sculpture between two mutually exclusive discursive conventions, or between two equally intolerable governing conditions, has been one of the motivating principles of Isa Genzken’s sculpture from the very beginning. It is hard to trace the prohibitions, geopolitical or gendered, that posed the most obdurate barriers Genzken would have to scale when starting to sculpt in the mid-’70s, against all odds. After all, sculpture had not been made in Germany by women (no Hepworth, let alone a Hesse, to draw upon). And if any influence from prewar sculpture had carried over into postwar practice, it was that of Arp. Worse yet, if prewar Constructivism turned into cold-war constructivism, it was the kind of sculpture that decorated the new corporate office towers of Frankfurt and Düsseldorf — what Joseph Beuys once called, inimitably and untranslatably, “Stahl-und-Eisbein Skulptur” (steel-and-pig’s-knuckle sculpture).

So Genzken situated herself (as did Blinky Palermo, whom she encountered at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1973) between Beuys on the one hand and Barnett Newman and Ellsworth Kelly on the other, to confront the massive onslaught of Minimalism. It seems that only artistic dialogue and aesthetic reception are capable of synthesizing profoundly incompatible epistemes, as is evident once again — to cite a more recent example — in the fusion of Beuys and Warhol in Thomas Hirschhorn’s current work, whose idiom of chaos sculpture Genzken would seem to have anticipated in certain ways.

In her almost herculean ambition to bridge the chasm that separated the absence of sculpture in Germany from the affluence of sculpture in American Minimalism, Genzken emerged as one of the most serious artists after the famed generation of Palermo, Polke, and Richter. Undoubtedly, the strain to be accepted by that generation drove her sculptural projects into considerable dimensions. One of her ambitions was a programmatically antimasculinist idiom of sculpture. Its extraordinary fusion of stereometrical and biomorphic forms resulted from Genzken’s radical decision in 1975 to deploy computer design to create the extremely elongated curves first of her Ellipsoids (1976 – 82) and later of her Hyperbolos (1979 – 83), mathematically exact sinuosities that seemed to suddenly stand the techno-scientistic Minimalist boxes on their male blockheads. Genzken produced these complex ellipsoids and mathematically polymorph models of stereometry by computer twenty years before Richard Serra discovered Frank Gehry’s tool kit. Unfortunately, these wooden hulls rarely crossed the Atlantic (her 1992 retrospective at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society having remained exceptional in every regard).

Her early forays into photography were equally astonishing and even less recognized. Having been engaged at the academy in dialogues with the soon-to-be-prominent members of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s class — in particular, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth — Genzken produced “Hi-Fi” (1979), an extraordinary series of photographs that presaged her future deployment of endless accumulations of mass-cultural imagery in collage books as an integral complement to her sculptural disarticulation of the terror of the daily object world. In this series Genzken traced the most seductive — i.e., rigorous — designs of what was then contemporary Japanese stereo equipment (in manifest opposition to the Becher school’s fixation on architecture) as a visual regime in which all avant-garde aspirations for the transformation of everyday life now lay entombed. 

In a second series (from 1980), strangely complementary to the first in its focus on aurality, Genzken photographed the ears of friends in large-scale color close-ups. These metonymies of the ear, strangely echoing and displacing both Constructivist metonymies of the hand and Surrealist metonymies of the foot, not only demarcated Genzken’s departure from her preoccupation with sinuous organic forms in her sculpture but also responded to the increasingly reactionary resuscitation of photographic portraiture by her peers. Shifting the portrait genre to the physiognomic (and criminological) bodily detail of utter singularity, Genzken’s photographs pointed simultaneously to the infinite differentiation of subjectivity and to the determinism inherent in the mythical claim that subjectivity could in fact still be recorded in a photographic portrait.

In her most recent work, Genzken confronts one of the prime calamities of sculpture in the present: a terror that emerges from both the universal equivalence and exchangeability of all objects and materials and the simultaneous impossibility of imbuing any transgressive definition of sculpture with priorities or criteria of selection, of choice, let alone judgment (be it artisanal skills, choice of objects or materials, or the analytical intelligence to identify the specific structure of a contextualized readymade). To have the self succumb to the totalitarian order of objects brings the sculptor to the brink of psychosis, and Genzken’s new work seems to inhabit that position. However, since total submission to the terror of consumption is indeed the governing stratum of collective object-relations, that psychotic state may well become the only position and practice the sculptor of the future can articulate.