Beyond the
Yea-sayers About Isa Genzken’s work of recent years. by Jörg Heiser
Actors populate the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt,
That in the past decade, Genzken was awarded a number of
Germany, during the spring of 2015. They are transfixed,
important institutional prizes and exhibitions, not least, in the
sunken in fixed constellations, like star signs controlling our
fall of 2013, a major retrospective at MoMA in New York. Is it
fate. Or, in one space, they are standing around like celebrity
really just coincidence that there is this recent cycle of work,
party guests, full of themselves, expecting admiration. And
with which she would continue exploring and expanding
visitors are walking among them, so that it’s as if the actors
her language of form, which arguably started in 1997 when
were mingling with them despite their glamorous outfits,
she combined twisted cake tins, metal fruit baskets, and
half designer clothes, half garage-sale find. In another space,
barbecue tongs, sprayed many colors on them, and titled
three families stand in circles holding powwow. Who steps
them Schwules Baby (Gay Baby)? It was a language of form
among them is entering a silent palaver. Why does a dried
that at the time seemed to be in obvious contradiction to her
red rose rise from the head of one of the kids like an antenna?
previous, rigorously Minimalist work—the wooden ellipsoids
And what about that tall, muscular dad? Why are his hands
of the 1970s, the concrete sculptures of the 1980s (but, to
as tiny as a small child’s? And why is he made of shiny black
be precise, the rigor didn’t mean there hadn’t already been
plastic, with a venom-green “ISA” sprayed onto his chest?
a subtle sense of humor at work). The whole thing was like an explosion of aesthetic possibilities after a long period of
Since 2012, Isa Genzken has been working on the cycle
charging energy, leading to constellations such as the one
of works titled Schauspieler (Actors), creating them in her
at the German Pavilion in Venice in 2007, when astronaut
Berlin Studio using store-window mannequins and pieces
puppets hovered under the ceiling like balloons after a party; or
of clothing, awarding them accessories. She drapes them,
the Straßenfest (Block Party) that was part of her retrospective
covers them with stuff, completes them, breaks them,
at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig in 2009, for which Genzken
ridicules them, and jazzes them up, bringing them to flickering
already used mannequins, dressing them up with bearskin or
life. In the museum, it is mostly works from this current series
fake boobs—probably causing some raised eyebrows among
that are on display—with an important exception from 1974
those who consider riotous fun a betrayal of form. Well,
that we will come back to.
Genzken wasn’t going to stop. But it’s not like the cascade of museum shows and prestigious awards didn’t have any
It’s hard not to see this turn in four decades of work by this
effect on her, or rather, her work. Because these works have
artist, born in 1948, against the background of a particular fact:
always been her world receivers, her Weltempfänger—the
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