Of two minds
Of two minds
Rosemarie Trockel’s Post-Menopause
In the 1980s Rosmarie Trockel (1952) was viewed as an outspoken feminist whose work seemingly demonstrated her disdain for the macho art world of that time. It has become clear since then that Trockel’s work is anything but evidently political or obviously feminist. Trockels’s work may be qualified as emancipatory, but in philosophical rather than political terms.‘Rosemarie Trockel, she’s the one with the wool pictures and the hot-plates.’ Anyone characterizing the artist thus, in terms of her trademarks, would be well aware of the inadequacy of the description, considering the diversity of her oeuvre (drawings, videos, sculptures, installations). In spite of this, her wool and hot-plate pictures are always accompanied by a reference to her feminist angle on traditionally female materials, and by the fact that Trockel became successful in the 1980s, a macho phase during which the Cologne art scene was dominated by painters like Polke, Baselitz, Lüpertz, Kippenberger and Oehlen. Such a depiction of Trockel’s work is at best dubious. Not without reason did she and her gallerist Monika Sprüth allegedly reply, when asked why their magazine Eau de Cologne (1985, ‘87, ‘89) only featured women artists, that no men came to mind. Reading Trockel’s oeuvre as exclusively feminist won’t help. Her installation Sleeping Pill (1999) for the German pavilion in Venice is so fundamentally unlike the wool pictures that it might just as well be by a different artist. Having been confronted in the entrance area with a video of an eye looking down on them, visitors could lie down in a kind of ethereal blue lit sleep laboratory to find peace within the hustle and bustle of the biennial. In the life-size video projection in the adjacent room, one could observe people using the space, including the plastic transparent cocoons hung against the walls. This sci-fi setting created a meditative atmosphere in which one could lose oneself like a sleep-walker. Haus für Schweine und Menschen (House for Pigs and Humans), which Trockel presented together with Carsten Höller at documenta X in 1997, also imitated a scientific observation set-up. In a modernist, concrete pavilion, visitors could take a break on mattresses while watching a family of pigs (boar, sow and piglets). Referencing Dan Graham’s pavilions, man and beast were separated by a pane of mirror glass. The pigs saw only their own reflection. Trockel and Höller point in this piece to a dominance of the gaze which in science and art alike reduces the state of life under observation to that of an object. Unsurprisingly, did Germany’s federal president, unpractised in dealing with artistic codices, allegedly associated the sight of this animal family idyll with ‘Kassler’, a kind of German pork roast.1
Post-Menopause
Installations that include the viewer and facilitate participation do not feature in Trockel’s current exhibition at Museum Ludwig in Cologne. It is her first retrospective show in the city. The show’s original title, Menopause, was intended as mildly malicious. Besides the more neurotic connotations of mid-life crisis, it refers to the point in time when women cease to be fertile, are as such no longer desirable and thus old enough for a retrospective. But Trockel had no intention of granting her audience a leisurely contemplation of her popular key works, and by the time the show opened, it had been renamed ‘Post-Menopause’. In fact she flipped the idea of retrospective to a more pro-active situation, showing as-yet-unfinished works such as draft titles for unwritten books and objects from her studio recently emptied for an impending move. These are presented alongside drawings, photographs, a hotplate picture and sculptures. The second room with wool pictures in a salon-style hanging, feels like a carpet shop at a bazaar. All partition walls have been removed from the exhibition architecture causing the individual works to contradict and question each another. Different lines in the series of works become visible, at times with incompatible results. What, for example, do monochrome wool pictures have in common with a life-size black-and-white photograph of an empty courtroom with a hairy-chested hermaphrodite robot clearly at pains to remove the milky liquid squirting from its bosom? What is the connection between this installation -an obvious analogy to the exhibition situation- and the sculpture of a stone-grey right arm that rests as if amputated on the arm of a chair? More body fragments of this kind are displayed as though relics in a wide, oppressively grey shelving unit: black hair welling up out of a cardboard box, or the trisected body of a sleeping woman where each section depicts a different identity. This multitude of component-like body parts is slightly disconcerting. There is something anthropological about them, as they reveal ‘the other’ and address the unconscious with a surreal echo no longer familiar. A curious parallel can be drawn between this dismemberment and Trockel’s oeuvre: any homogenizing explanation along the lines of ‘Trockel’s work is an ironic, feminine take on Minimalism’ will ultimately fall short. Her work should not be read in terms of a rigorous, linear development. Each statement is cancelled out by another. This contradictoriness prompted Gudrun Inboden to describe Trockel’s work as rhizomorphic. Quoting Deleuze and Guattari, she writes that it contains ‘no points or positions (…), such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines.’2One objection worth noting here, however, is that at no time does Trockel deny her influences. On the contrary, she ceaselessly declares her attachment to role models and colleagues, who, besides Dan Graham and Paul Thek, also include Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Blinky Palermo and Sigmar Polke. The sense of humour she shares with artists like Georg Herold and Martin Kippenberger, typifies her as an artist of her generation. Furthermore, the jumble of shelved objects references Marcel Broodthaers’ questioning of the museum and its means of producing truth. These objects could also be read as text fragments à la Magritte. They seem to say: ‘This is not a head. This is not a chicken coop. This is not a stove.’ The viewer laughs with the artist in Erdloch (für Fledermäuse)/Burrow (for bats), which in fact is not a shelter for animals but a moss-covered helmet made of plaster.
Multifaceted
It comes as no surprise that Trockel herself prefers a ‘desiring gaze’, a gaze which theory traditionally holds as the ‘male gaze’. This becomes clearer in the case of her fetish-like objects. The title Stell Dir vor/ Imagine, for example, causes the life-like wax bust of a blonde woman to mutate according to the projection of the viewers’ desires. The bust is a portrait of the graphic designer Manu Burkhardt, also the stylish subject of Trockel’s series of films entitled Manu’s Spleen. Manu usually appears in these films as the alter ego of Brigitte Bardot, as well a recurring figure in Trockel’s work often associated with Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage. Trockel is interested in the role models embodied by these women. Even early feminists like Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir were fascinated by Bardot, as if they sensed that someone like Judith Butler would later come along postulating gender difference as a matter of self-confident masquerade.3 In contrast to her earlier, more emancipatory tactics, Trockel uses the possibility of sexual parading as well as an open attitude in keeping with Derrida’s appeal for the dissolution of binary gender logic in favour of a multiplicity of sexual differences.4 This more ambiguously fragmented position vis-à-vis sexuality becomes clear in her wool pictures and masks, in the hermaphrodite robot and in her films, but also in the way she photographs women. Art historian Brigid Doherty persuasively argues that Trockel’s work is about delimiting the borders of gender, in the sense of Derrida’s concept of marking gender, without the works themselves being part of the gender in question.5 To make her point, Doherty cites Trockel’s continuing engagement with Brigitte Bardot, Bertolt Brecht, and Brecht’s Mother Courage as ‘an engagement that concerns the interpretation of gender in various ways, including the social, sexual, psychical, and ethical dimensions and the effect of the construction of human types and the function of certain individuals (especially film stars) as models for others, as well as the transformative potential of works of art that seek to reconfigure those constructions, functions and effects.’6Rosemarie Trockel. Post-Menopause29 October 2005 – 12 February 2006Museum Ludwig, CologneThe exhibition will travel to Rome.
Anja Dorn