ISA GENZKEN’S BEAUTIFUL RUINS BY JUDITH THURMAN NOVEMBER 27, 2013 NEX FS

“Rot-gelb-schwarzes Doppelellipsoid ‘Zwilling’ (Red-Yellow-Black Double Ellipsoid “Twin”)” (1982). Photograph courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz/Cologne/.

“Hospital (Ground Zero)” (2008). Photograph courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz/Cologne/Berlin.

“Fuck the Bauhaus #4” (2000). Photograph courtesy AC Project Room/New York.

“Disco Soon (Ground Zero)” (2008). Photograph courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz/Cologne/Berlin.

I spent the summer researching a Profile of the German artist Isa Genzken, whose first American retrospective opened last week, at the . Genzken, who lives in Berlin and turns sixty-five today, spent the summer hospitalized with a head injury, so our plans to meet kept being postponed, and we eventually had to cancel the story. I couldn’t quite let Genzken go, however. She is, in some respects, one of those lost women who have been my specialty as a writer.

“Lost” is a relative notion. Genzken, an art star in her native country, represented at the 2007 Venice Biennale. She is an important figure in Europe, and her exhibition history fills pages of small print in the show’s catalogue. American museums have not overlooked her, and younger artists, especially women, have been inspired by her heretical vitality. But few New Yorkers, I discovered, seem to have heard of her. When her name did ring a bell, it was usually in connection with . In the early nineteen-seventies, Richter was Genzken’s professor at the Dusseldorf Art Academy. They married in 1982 and divorced about twenty years ago. It is time to disentangle them.

The retrospective occupies most of the gallery space on the museum’s sixth floor, and part of its lobby. It is fitting that Genzken’s belated consecration comes from MOMA: New York, the Ur-metropolis, has been her wolf mother, and the connection is primal on several grounds. Urban architecture—its beauty and desolation—is a central theme of Genzken’s work, which mirrors the city’s seething heterogeneity and embodies its extremes of rawness and refinement. An incurable wild child, she haunted the downtown club scene of the seventies and eighties, and that experience helped to define her. (She made her first visit as a teen-ager, and she returned often, sometimes annually.) Genzken’s art and life are narratives of defiance. She is too restless to be faithful to a medium or a genre. She has always courted danger, with predictable results—the life force and the death wish are at odds in her. The desire to please is not part of her character. She suffers from alcoholism and from bipolar disease. And perhaps because self-promotion is an aspect of self-preservation, she has resisted that, too. But sexism, it seems, has also contributed to Genzken’s relative obscurity, at least until lately. She is a major female artist who doesn’t do women’s work.

The details of Genzken’s biography are as hard to pin down as she is. Her father was a doctor who loved music. Her mother (still alive at close to a hundred years old) renounced her dreams of a stage career to work for a pharmaceutical company. The family moved from the small northern town where Isa was born to West Berlin. She grew up comfortably enough, but during a period of national soul-searching, Cold War tension, and epic reconstruction that transformed a country in ruins. That cleansing—of Germany’s rubble and of its guilt—was the unstable scaffolding of her childhood.

Genzken is, par excellence, a child of the sixties who embraced the sometimes violent leftist idealism of her generation. She may or may not have once lent her passport to the terrorist Andreas Baader. A boyfriend of her student years, Benjamin Buchloh, became the eminent art historian who now teaches at Harvard. Buchloh introduced her to a circle of artists with radical ideals and practices, including Sigmar Polke, Bruce Nauman, , Lawrence Weiner, and Richter. In 1974, while studying with Richter, Genzken made her début as a conceptual artist, with a pugnacious film in which two women, one short and plump, one tall and skinny, strip for the camera and exchange clothing. (Genzken was the skinny one; at the time, she was earning money for her art by modelling. The scrapbook pictures of her, at nineteen, in an ad for a tailored suit—a pretty, dark girl with hair as glossy as her smile—are poignant in their remoteness from the androgynous figure, weathered and scrappy, that she cuts today.)

The film is called “Two Women in Combat,” and , one of the curators of theMOMA show, interprets its significance in her astute catalogue essay. Genzken, she writes, was publicly shedding the prescribed feminine roles that she had inherited, and was trying on the outsize ambition that she would grow into.

* * * The alpha males of the German art world forty years ago, with the notable exception of Joseph Beuys, were not much engaged with performance art, a newborn genre with little prestige or money and without a hierarchy—a perfect niche for women, in other words. But Genzken’s fling with performance was ephemeral. By the time she left Dusseldorf, in 1977, to travel to America on a study grant, she had begun making large-scale sculptures (“ellipsoids” and “hyperbolos”) in lacquered wood. They were engineered with the help of a computer; she was one of the first artists to experiment with digital technology. These ravishing constructions are cerebral and sensuous. They range in size from ten feet to about thirty feet, and Richter nicknamed them “the knitting needles.” (“Weapons,” Genzken retorted.)

Her next foray involved sound, which she represented in material form: as prints, photographs, and small sculptures on pedestals. The sculptures—of radios, speakers, receivers, and such—have the eerie charm of clay burial artifacts, the sort of thing a boy pharaoh obsessed with his stereo system might commission for his tomb. Their precision and severity are classical, but, like much of Genzken’s work, they have a nerd’s macabre sense of humor.

Studies of light and space evolved from her interest in acoustics. A series of monumental freestanding windows pose questions about perceptual triage: the way art gives salience to a fragment of reality and excludes alternative versions of it. (The windows are beautifully installed under a skylight that frames a sliver of sky and the façades of surrounding buildings.)

Throughout this period, Genzken was, typically, working with toxic materials, like epoxy resin, and macho materials, like concrete and steel. She also exposed herself, who knows for how long, to an X-ray machine that photographed her skull as she smoked and drank, two favorite activities.

* * * After her divorce from Richter, and entering middle age, Genzken changed course once again. In the nineteen-nineties, she gravitated toward a coterie of younger gay men who introduced her to Berlin’s techno-music culture and to a new brand of militance: for gay rights, for the environment, and against the Gulf War. Her art also shifted radically: from the creation of elegantly austere objects to deceptively makeshift assemblages of crap and garbage that Genzken collected on her urban prowls. (She has always refused to delegate her professional grunt work to an assistant.)

One of her assemblages is a cluster of buildings, like the kind of model that an architect submits to a competition, but fashioned from plywood, pizza boxes, spray paint, construction netting, police tape, and other detritus. It is a picturesque slum whose squalor is both depressing and festive. Laura Hoptman, the retrospective’s chief curator, interprets this composition, which Genzken called “Fuck the Bauhaus,” as a critique of modernist hubris—a Teutonic ideal of control, order, and rationality that collapsed under Hitler like a house of cards. But she also discerns a redemptive impulse to it. Genzken, she writes, would like to replace dehumanizing, corporate urban development with a livelier, more soulful “accidental modernity.”

The retrospective concludes with a trilogy of room-sized assemblages from the new millennium, “The American Room,” “Empire / Vampire, Who Kills Death,” and “Ground Zero.” (Genzken was in Manhattan on the morning that the towers fell). These are considerably more sinister and disorienting than anything else she has done. Try to imagine the fallout from an apocalypse as the contents of gigantic piñata full of cheap toys that have been tortured, then arranged in vignettes like graveyard offerings for a murdered child, on the Day of the Dead. But its power is proof against pathos.

* * * No one knew if Genzken would make it to New York to celebrate her opening, but she did. She looked a bit unsteady as she drifted through the galleries, lost in reverie and largely unrecognized, but with an odd stateliness that reminded me of Don Quixote. In a sea of designer black, her motley chic set her apart: a jean-style leather jacket in shiny cobalt blue and a red newsboy cap, from which untidy wisps of colorless hair poked out. You might have guessed, by a process of elimination, that this lanky outsider was the artist. I was about to introduce myself when one of Genzken’s minders motioned me away. “She needs her space,” he said. It’s about time she got it.

Thurman, Judith. “Isa Genzken’s Beautiful Ruins.” The New Yorker. (November 27, 2013) [online] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/11/isa-genzkens-beautiful-ruins.html#slide_ss_0=1