Innsbruck/Vienna. Isa Genzken is virtually unparalleled in her deft blending of genres and styles, high and low art. She jumps with playful ease between sculpture, architecture, painting, photography, film and video as if she were moving between continents that suddenly snuggled up close. And she does this with an almost eerily precise eye for the mixtures, hybrid structures and unstable constructions that make up our modern world. Isa Genzken doesn’t just penetrate space, she also makes time seem like one single continuum: everything she observes is here and now, always and everywhere.
That at least is the impression conveyed by two exhibitions running in parallel in different venues and offering insight into the work of the artist, born in 1948. Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck is showing a representative cross-section of her works since the late 1980s, when Isa Genzken began to use »cheap« materials and fragments from everyday culture: on display are the two Spiegel series from 1989–91 and 2002, the central installation »Der amerikanische Raum«, together with works produced in 2004 from the series »New Buildings for Berlin« and the video work »Meine Großeltern im Bayerischen Wald« (»My Grandparents in the Bavarian Forest« from 1992. In Innsbruck the two series of black-and-white and colour photos she cut out over an extended period of time from the magazine »Der Spiegel«, each series comprising over a hundred images, are being shown together for the first time. These are actually not series in the usual sense of the term, as the individual press photographs are not linked to each other by the logic of the images or the themes addressed. Torn out of their journalistic context, framed and organised as a wall frieze, they leave many viewers perplexed. Anyone who seeks to identify the objects, situations or actions depicted to satisfy their interpretative urges will find that Genzken leads them astray. Although she has selected sufficiently clear press photos, for example of mass graves, she combines these with much more run-of-the-mill shots of building site or animals, mixing large and small-scale politics apparently without any particular intent. The frieze of images might be compared to an allegorical landscape of rubble, where the creaturely is all that remains of the notion of historical progress – particularly after 9/11, which is implicitly present as a defining event. That makes the images she has chosen silent witnesses to a narrative, which is, so to speak, told from the viewpoint of its tragic conclusion.
The video installation »Meine Großeltern im Bayerischen Wald« (1992) is on the one hand an affectionate portrait of two very old people, who live together in a small house in an idyllic setting. However, political life »in the outside world« also makes an appearance amongst the private activities and concerns of their day-to-day life, when the artist shows her grandfather’s reaction to a call for donations that arrives in the post. The insignia and claustrophobia of power emerge with even more monstrously in her opulent installation »Der amerikanische Raum« (2004). It is dominated by an oversized desk, the kind you might find in any executive’s office. A Donald Duck sprayed in silver is placed on it – one of those unexpected combinations Isa Genzken capitalizes on artistically. The desk is framed by seven pedestals, with various arrangements of artificial flowers, coloured glass, everyday objects, toy figures and knick-knacks standing on them. Similarly to works in the »Empire/Vampire-Serie«, created after 11th September 2001, these arrangements distantly echo living-room altars of souvenirs and memorabilia. The arrangement of the pedestals is reminiscent of a columned hall. Genzken however rejects this kind of architecture of power, just as she abhors monumental sculpture. Her predilection for transparent or reflective, yet also »commonplace«, materials, which can be easily joined together with adhesive tape or silicon, emerges in »New Buildings for Berlin«, which disregards the actual built monumental monotony of Berlin with a wonderful lightness of touch, at the same time fending off the dominant artistic tradition of equally weighty sculpture.
Isa Genzken’s works over the last few years can be likened to expanses of rubble. At the same time they entice viewers with what all too often prove to be treacherous superficial charms. Her dominant allegorical gesture involves arranging found material, draping sets. The tableau becomes an up-to-date history painting in an age in which narrative certainties are vanishing. This is underpinned by the exhibition in the Viennese Secession. In the central exhibition space a sweeping installation by the artist is being shown, composed of several arrangements made up of wheelchairs and walking aids, draped with fabrics and bands, overturned parasols, which are ripped in places, baby dolls and a variety of children’s toys, plastic fishes, horses and sheep, with paint tipped over some parts. She has set toupees and oversized sunglasses or helmets on the baby dolls, concealing their heads. With these trappings of Western prosperity, Isa Genzken draws attention to the other side of this prosperity: compulsive mobility surrenders the diseased or maimed human body to the melancholy of all kinds of prostheses, which in one fell swoop expose belief in progress as mere wishful thinking. These precise arrangements have the brittle charm of fairground attractions and at the same time stir up eerie associations of being exposed, defenceless, to violence – here again contemporary political events (buzzword: Abu Ghraib) are not far removed. This impression is enhanced by the figurines dominating one section of the exhibition room, made up of standard lamps, items of clothing and other materials.
The installation is a single dense space of fears and paranoia. In keeping with this, a portrait pinned to the wall and a drawing by Franz Kafka testify to this sense of not being at home in the world. Here one also thinks involuntarily of Martin Kippenberger’s »Psychobuildings« and his installation about Kafka’s America novel, composed of office desks and limp lampposts. At the same time individual arrangements also bear traits of a self-portrait of the artist. That is at least the impression given by private photographs integrated into a collage filling an entire wall, which in addition cites painterly role models such as Vermeer und Botticelli as masters of light and drapery.
The juxtaposition of the apparently irreconcilable and contradictory bears the signature of the shock effect provoked. Isa Genzken reacts to real catastrophes by re-enacting them with harmless, lifeless actors from the nursery. In the process she grasps structural links between the private and the political in a thoroughly shocking manner: Isa Genzken plays ping-pong with the unreasonable demands of the world in which we live. The two exhibitions in Innsbruck and Vienna reveal her to be equal to international politics and private agony, to the trauma and amnesia that have become hallmarks of our contemporary world.
Translated by Helen Ferguson