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A few sheets of glass lean against one another, dark red, ripple green, pale blue: the New Buildings for Berlin stand on gray pedestals, baseplates projecting somewhat. They are more than two metres in height, although the glass is cut to heights of roughly less than half that dimension. They are slender and fragile. Like this construction of stainless steel and aluminum from the fairgrounds in Leipzig. Its form and title indicate it is a rose, but it rises to a height of more than eight metres, taller than the birch trees distributed throughout the complex. For the work Basic Research, Isa Genzken unrolled canvas onto the floor, speading oil paint across it with a scraper. The gray and green images look as though someone had sprayed something very quickly onto a kitchen floor, as though something of the paint mist had remained. There are photographs by Isa Genzken showing an x-ray image of a human skull, but that which is normally registered as white appears here black on white. And photographs of high-rise façades in New York: gratings, T-beams, columns. She glides by Chicago’s architecture with her camera (Chicago Drive, 1992), then makes a film approximately one hour long in a cramped, badly lit apartment (Meine Großeltern im Bayrischen Wald/My Grandparents in Bayrischen Wald, also 1992). A while back, she made concrete bridges which look like houses, concrete frames which look like windows, or, furnished with real antennas, shortwave receivers. Der Spiegel I and Der Spiegel II (Mirror I and Mirror II) consist of two long strips of framed photos from the German news magazine Der Spiegel: Andy Warhol, soldiers, a mushroom cloud above New York, masked figures, street scenes, factories. The older series, begun in 1989, is in severe black-and-white, the second version, dated 2002, consists of colored illustrations.

Antitheses

One always hears about Isa Genzken, the sculptor, but everything she does is part of a whole. In New York City, Isa Genzken stopped passersby in the street and photographed their ears. Large-format close-ups, just a few strands of hair allowed to fall across each one, in darkly elegant tonalities. That was in 1980, a year before she began to photograph newspaper advertisements for hi-fi equipment. The photographs are the ideal antitheses: ear versus a black turntable, chromed knobs, endless stackable cubes with fronts resembling cockpits. ‘This is the newest, most modern thing that exists today,’ she thought at the time. ‘So my sculpture has to be at least as modern as that, to stand up to it. Then I hung the photographs on the wall and laid out an ellipsoid on the floor, and I thought: the ellipsoid has to be at least as good as the advertisement. At least as good. That is how good a modern sculpture needs to be.’ Whatever is ambiguous, juxtaposed, dissimilar – that works. It is difficult to determine whether Isa Genzken accepts her forms, appropriates them, engages in competition with them, or instead simply implants a few images and forms into reality or into the studio. As explanations go, ‘only Isa Genzken would dare’ is inadequate and sounds too anecdotal.If we were to draw a line under her oeuvre (as the German expression goes), to reduce them to their common denominator, what would we find? Where the brush is absent, where the clay has not been kneaded, we have to come up with a concept, a formula or formulation capable of explaining everything. We set this line in place like a pedestal. Set upon it is the art, beneath it a brief explanation: Lawrence Weiner paints with words; Gerhard Richter paints abstractly or hazily and photorealistically; photographer Wolfgang Tillmans hangs abstractions from the laboratory alongside whatever finds itself in front of the camera, from flowerbeds to London nightlife.

Milder

For years, throughout the 70s and 80s, Genzken seemed rigorous and unapproachable. In fact, her ellipsoids and hyperbolas were something like compass needles or pointers, and whatever entered their vicinity quickly came to appear passé and antiquated, including art. The concrete works on their steel feet were as coarse as her demand that ‘every person needs a window’. This is reminiscent of the prison cell rather than of Utopia. Her piece ABC, devised in 1987 for the Skulptur Projekte Münster, was found so hideous by the city fathers that they compared the concrete double arch, upon which two steel frames sat like openings in the sky, to a guillotine, and quickly had it destroyed after the exhibition. Only Mond (Moon), installed several years later on a lake, like a globular, somewhat larger-than-life streetlamp, was allowed to remain. Had Isa Genzken softened? ‘When I’m considering doing something for a location, I usually make photographs of it. I don’t say I, I, I have to insert something of mine, mine, mine, instead I ask what is missing from this place.’ This could then be a rose, a freestanding steel frame, a displaced double-window of concrete and metal frames. Isa Genzken insists that you could improve the architecture of the AT&T Building (Philip Johnson’s Manhattan high-rise which terminates in a broken gable roof) with a pair of wide outstretched antennae. Disappointed with the competition for Ground Zero, she designed a discotheque for the place of catastrophe, meant to remain open 24 hours a day; a hospital with rooftop flowers; a boutique and a parking garage: social places where people could feel comfortable. In 2000, a series of rather roughly patched together architectural models were inscribed with ‘Fuck the Bauhaus’. They consisted of transparent, colored plastic tape, artificial flowers, foil, netting, pedestals of the cheapest wood, taped together, ruinous. Friendly, not necessarily functional, definitely a progeny of classical modernism. To some extent, it is a question of emphasis. Fucking can also be referred to as desire. A desire that becomes voracious with time. Which in the building supply store grabs for colorful foil and imitation surfaces, helps itself capably in the furniture store. Which decorates a luxurious Eames design with a plastic toy, covering it efficiently with paint. A disaster, both small and large scale. Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, a series begun at the start of the millennium, has no scale any longer: dolls, glasses, vases, foil. Because there is also a 40-minute-long silent film, they could be regarded as little backdrops. They are splatter scenarios in the format of a box of toys, a rubbish heap full of ready-mades, an eerie cosmos filled with baleful stars. At the same time, Isa Genzken remains with the still-life format. Glasses, dolls, flowers. It could also be Morandi. Or a Dutch master. Only today, it is garish, and three-dimensional. Things got even bigger: Kinder filmen (Children Filming), shown for the first time in 2005 in Galerie Buchholz in Cologne, combined real furniture with ceiling-height accumulations. It looked as though an underage film team on location – an elegant villa – had really pushed things to the limit after the last shot. Items of clothing in the pool? No, not that. But paint on the leather seats, overturned garden furniture, scattered chairs. Leaning on the walls were pictures made of protective foil, but hardly even noticable.Then she took wheelchairs, walkers, construction helmets. In Venice, ultimate goal of touristic yearnings: suitcases, trolleys. Suspended above were monkeys on cables. Description takes delight in so much that is substantive, verbs too proliferate unmanageably. What does Isa Genzken do? Cuts and glues, slices open, layers, binds together, inserts, lashes together, plants, photographs, collages, films, casts, drips, sprays, arranges. But with precision. ‘The flaneur-style, and relaxed, passive features stand rather for an unconstrained freedom of workmanship – not for some sort of indifference, some type of endearing complacency,’ as Diedrich Diederichsen aptly put it. It is certainly no accident that there are always mirrors in these works. As steel frames in the middle of the city, as raw material in a newspaper kiosk, as idea, as reflective glass in the window crossbars of façades, in grid formation in a disco mosaic, applied practically as adhesive foil. Reflective, too, is the silver paint Isa Genzken drips onto her sculptures, sprays onto her T-shirts. To confront the reality of the mirror? Or to help that old lady Earth a little bit with looking good? When she transcribed the title Oil onto the German Pavilion before the Biennale in Venice in 2007 and clad it in orange-red plastic perforated protective sheeting, the heavy, history-laden building looked cheerfully forward to the future for a couple of months. Some things could have changed. A great promise. Yves Klein once pointed to the sky and said: this color belongs to me from now on. Throughout the entire world, wherever anything is built, which is everywhere, Isa Genzken, this cheap, perforated orange sheeting belongs to you. In reaction, Lawrence Weiner wrote: ‘Spiegel Geist (with & without a reflection) [Mirror spirit (with & without a reflection)]. Cerith Wyn Evans says Isa Genzken’s art is distinguished by its dimensions. Art historians say: there are astonishingly few models by Isa Genzken, she keeps almost nothing. Young artists say that Isa Genzken freed them of their fear of materials. ‘She banished the feminine from the concept of sculpture,’ says Anne Chu. Now everything goes. Oil says, I am the lubricant, we live beyond bronze and concrete. Art says that this artist is contemporary, unconditionally. Isa Genzken says: ‘Every person needs a window.’Catrin Lorch is an art critic and regular contributor to the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Cologne.Work by Isa Genzken can be seen in Sesam öffne dich, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, 15 August through 5 November 2009.Translation: Ian Pepper.1. Diedrich Diedrichsen, ‘Die Poetik der Psychocities’, in the catalogue Isa Genzken, 1992 – 2003, Museum Abteiberg Mönchengladbach / Kunsthalle Zürich, 2003.