Beyond the Yea-sayers

Beyond theYea-sayers

About Isa Genzken’s work of recent years.

by Jörg Heiser

Actors populate the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt, Germany, during the spring of 2015. They are transfixed, sunken in fixed constellations, like star signs controlling our fate. Or, in one space, they are standing around like celebrity party guests, full of themselves, expecting admiration. And visitors are walking among them, so that it’s as if the actors were mingling with them despite their glamorous outfits, half designer clothes, half garage-sale find. In another space, three families stand in circles holding powwow. Who steps among them is entering a silent palaver. Why does a dried red rose rise from the head of one of the kids like an antenna? And what about that tall, muscular dad? Why are his hands as tiny as a small child’s? And why is he made of shiny black plastic, with a venom-green “ISA” sprayed onto his chest?

Since 2012, Isa Genzken has been working on the cycle of works titled Schauspieler (Actors), creating them in her Berlin Studio using store-window mannequins and pieces of clothing, awarding them accessories. She drapes them, covers them with stuff, completes them, breaks them, ridicules them, and jazzes them up, bringing them to flickering life. In the museum, it is mostly works from this current series that are on display—with an important exception from 1974 that we will come back to.

It’s hard not to see this turn in four decades of work by this artist, born in 1948, against the background of a particular fact: That in the past decade, Genzken was awarded a number of important institutional prizes and exhibitions, not least, in the fall of 2013, a major retrospective at MoMA in New York. Is it really just coincidence that there is this recent cycle of work, with which she would continue exploring and expanding her language of form, which arguably started in 1997 when she combined twisted cake tins, metal fruit baskets, and barbecue tongs, sprayed many colors on them, and titled them Schwules Baby (Gay Baby)? It was a language of form that at the time seemed to be in obvious contradiction to her previous, rigorously Minimalist work—the wooden ellipsoids of the 1970s, the concrete sculptures of the 1980s (but, to be precise, the rigor didn’t mean there hadn’t already been a subtle sense of humor at work). The whole thing was like an explosion of aesthetic possibilities after a long period of charging energy, leading to constellations such as the one at the German Pavilion in Venice in 2007, when astronaut puppets hovered under the ceiling like balloons after a party; or the Straßenfest (Block Party) that was part of her retrospective at Cologne’s Museum Ludwig in 2009, for which Genzken already used mannequins, dressing them up with bearskin or fake boobs—probably causing some raised eyebrows among those who consider riotous fun a betrayal of form. Well, Genzken wasn’t going to stop. But it’s not like the cascade of museum shows and prestigious awards didn’t have any effect on her, or rather, her work. Because these works have always been her world receivers, her Weltempfänger—the XXtitle of a key series of hers from the 1980s—the antennae of which receive the waves before the message arrives.