NOT EXACTLY A READYMADE, BUT IT COULD BE ONE: SCULPTRESS ISA BENZKEN BUILDS PLAYGROUNDS OF POP-GLITZ AND DECAY IN VIENNA, INNSBRUCK, AND BERLIN
By EVA KARCHER

If one were to survive the end of the world, the post-apocalyptic awakening might look something like this: tattered neon-colored umbrellas, and under them, dolls with sunglasses on lawn chairs, gone mad in the radioactive heat, wheelchairs draped in purple and gold foil like hysterical thrones, and bleakly skeletal walkers, an armchair and two sofas besotted in psychedelic color and material, the frayed legacy of some delirious interior decorator.

Isa Genzken’s recent installation at the Wiener Secession transformed the light-filled main hall into a disco dance floor gone haywire, a playground for glittery pop decomposition where idyllic glamour tumbles into an inferno of rubbish. And because her sculptural styling is so breathtakingly precise, it was difficult to decide in the first stunned second or two what one was drawn to first – the crapulent, mundane charm of the scenery, or its frosty feverishness?

The artist’s objects, figures and wall hangings are hybrids of sculpture and design, oscillating between hopeful promise and decay. Folds and draperies of slick, translucent, and cheap materials, such as plastic sheets or patterned nylon, frill up accessories for the handicapped – wheelchairs, crutches – like a fragile old revue star. A sofa done up in cow skin and reflective plastic bares the distinctive finishing touch of two knives rammed into the furnishings, perhaps a housekeeping idea for a practically- or martially-inclined host, never mind the guests.

The Vienna exhibition was the sensation of the summer; its success highlighted by a second show at the Galerie im Taxispalais in Innsbruck, and a third this fall at Neugerriemschneider gallery in Berlin. At Innsbruck, Genzken set her dysfunctional, decoratively deconstructed, amorphously futuristic object-collages for Der amerikanische Raum (“The American Room,” 2004) on classical plinths. Yet the heroic modernism of skyscrapers and superpower fantasies that Genzken admired up to 9/11 only seem to offer support here – atop the plinths, every texture, every microfiber of the assemblages of spectacularly arranged knick-knacks and high-tech ephemera is shot through with the blues. In Berlin, Genzken’s sculptures are at once explosive and melancholic, their color and sass heavy under three-dimensional collages of every conceivable medium.

With these presentations and her recent nomination to represent Germany in the 2007 Venice Biennale, Genzken has proven herself to be the most vital sculptor of her generation, as well as one of the most visionary working today. After 30 years of work at the intersection of sculpture, architecture, design, photography and film, her work remains defined by its plastic ingenuity.

In 1976, Genzken, born in 1948 in Bad Oldesloe and currently working in Berlin, laid the long Ellipsoiden and Hyperboloiden of wood and varnish out on the floor; this is the period in which she studied with Gerhard Richter, who she would marry in 1983. Almost a decade later, after their separation, Genzken was invited to documenta and a new, expressive phase saw Fenster (“Window”) sculptures made of colorful epoxy resin and concrete on thin steel pipe frames. Yet it is with her series of Hauben (“Hoods”) and Säulen (“Pillars”) that followed, that she finally, in her words, “finds the courage to do something entirely different, completely crazy and impossible or even just plain wrong.” With home improvement materials such as wood, perforated sheet metal, glass, laminate, and mirrors, she has built narrow, colorful, and elegant stele on which photographs of the view from her studio window or of streets in New York are pasted.

This summer, Genzken for the first time entered into a dialogue with the viewer, who finds himself in front of a mirror, confronted with the pillars as elements of his own environment. “This is what a sculpture needs to look like,” Wolfgang Tillmans has said. “It has to have a certain relation to reality. That is, nothing meditative or even thought out, but something off the mark and courteous.” The work she did with Tillmans in 2001, Science Fiction/Hier und jetzt zufrieden sein (“Science Fiction/To Be Satisfied Here and Now”), indeed rose to this challenge with monumental, mirrored walls in which interior and exterior fall into each other and art becomes camouflage.

“Formulate with every sculpture: this isn’t exactly a readymade, but it could be one.” This is the formula Isa Genzken has been following since the turn of the millennium when, with Nicolaus Schafhausen – then head of the Frankfurt Kunstverein and now director of the Witte de With in Rotterdam and now German superintendent of the Biennale in Venice – she realized the buoyant exhibition Urlaub (“Holiday”), featuring orange-tinted awnings and miniature containers, Strandhäuser zum Umziehen (“Beach Huts for Changing Clothes”).

Mirrors and light-reflecting surfaces, the superficial indicators of pop and its performers’ images, have become some of Genzken’s primary working elements. In them, the parallel worlds of high and low, Bauhaus design and handyman aesthetic, Jackson Pollock drippings and street graffiti collide. In 2003, the artist presented her Empire/ Vampire series with total musical grace and sovereignty; then as now – as we can begin to taste, or at least to imagine, the works that will gild the German pavilion in Venice next June – terror, too, is unable to unlearn how to dance.