Isa Genzken - reflections on
her MOMA exhibition.
http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1345
http://www.creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2008/may/isa-genzkens-proposals-for-ground-zero
The Bauhaus, was a school in
Germany that combined crafts and the fine arts. Founded by Walter Gropius with
the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts,
including architecture, would eventually be brought together, it operated from
1919 to 1933 when the Nazis shut it down.
Isa Genzken’s stunningly moving
retrospective both utilizes and repudiates Bauhaus legacy, brashly demonstrated
by a seminal work entitled "Fuck The Bauhaus". Her retrospective
surprised me with its range of experimental approaches, giving voice to a
unique personal view of life – from the frottage oil paintings that looked like
aerial views of bombed out/flattened terrains to the glitzy pedestal
sculptures.
When I entered the Isa
Genzken show at MOMA I was floored by the beauty of an installation depicting
large formally pristine kayak-like shapes lying on the ground (“ellipsoids” and
“hyperbolos”) – having no contact with one another, but hovering alongside each
other with a do-not-touch-beauty that is rarified. Then I turn around and the
aesthetic has shifted. I chuckle to see cement blocks anthropomorphized with
T.V. antenna’s shooting out of their heads – inanimate becoming animate, making
a point about materials – industrial materials in particular which often seem
remote and inaccessible – but now like a magnet I approach what was once
unapproachable.
The whole show is one of
contradictions in the service of Isa Genzken’s singular humanity. She tosses
off previous restraints, and I imagine her saying “fuck it – I NEED to do
this!” And she does. Experimenting with materials – all kinds of detritus from
the mechanical/manufactured culture to the throwaways of the
consumer-merchandising sphere.
Scale dominates the show not
only the physical but the psychological reaches of hierarchy and structure,
often woven together - most evident in a group of building columns transmuting
into intimate portraits of good friends – each subtly individualized. We are
tossed around by architectural scale reduced to accessible mortal proportions.
American capitalistic scope
and power is explored; the underbelly of shame and greed, the global reach of
violence and mayhem are presented in assemblages utilizing whatever objects
(toy cars, dolls, fast-food wrappers, etc.) and materials that are necessary to
vent her anger at man’s inhumanity to man. These assemblages employ scale to
great emotional effect ie: a building structure becomes larger because a small
plastic tree is placed in the tableaux, delicate and fragile; a dreamlike
ornament floats next to blood and terror. Installations are ripped from the
headlines - the assault on a young schoolgirl being witnessed by her
classmates’ cell phone pictures – a room reeking of horror and voyeurism.
Isa Genzken was in Manhattan
on September 11, 2001 and there is a room devoted to her apocalyptic
architectural proposals for Ground Zero that includes a Church, Disco, Hospital
and Memorial Tower. Monuments that do not memorialize but instead bear witness
to the act of destruction itself. In Car Park miniature cars are upended in a
cage-like structure that is devoid of any possible movement or passage. The
journey has ended.
Isa Genzken’s exhibition can
be unabashedly gaudy wrapping the fragility and vulnerability of the human
condition with the rubble and sediment of everyday objects. The result is
painful and piercingly tender. The sadness enraptures.
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