MY EXPERIENCE:
I found myself completely enamoured with the first room of the exhibit: sleek, graceful, minimalist, javelin-like "ellipsoids and hyperbolos," which were made in the 70's, accompanied by a ready-made "world reciever" (a radio). The sculptures showed a wonderful fascination with materials. Genzken had used a computer to calculate some sort of ratio, and then used that equation to carve out the wooden shapes. She then laquered and varnished them by hand, so they looked almost like beautiful thin surfboards, or giant toothpicks.
The next room I loved even more (I believe the rooms showed roughly from decade to decade, but I may be wrong). Genzken had created a set of concrete and steel sculptures which she poured and constructed herself. The concrete was poured in blocks which created a sort of room with an open end, or open part which one could look inside. The concrete sat atop a steel platform which was supported by long steel legs. The effect I received was pretty brilliant. The spaces created by the concrete were exciting, and the juxtaposition of the mass of concrete on top of the comparably spindly metal created a threatening feeling, especially considering some of the concrete started near eye level and loomed over me just a bit. I got a touch of what one feels in a Richard Serra installation. A little bit of danger, a little bit of space, and a love for the physicality of the materials. Interspersed with the aforementioned sculpture were constructions made out of resin reinforced with a sort of thin rebar. Apparently Genzken was a pioneer of this medium at the time, but what I connected with was the sleekness (in some cases) of the minimal structures that I had found in the javelins, and the love for the matter, the materials, and again, the physicality. There were amber frames evocative of screens, doorways, and windows, and a big cube created by four "X" shapes that were sleekly contrived.What love I myself have for space and materials connected on a personal level. On the wall were some paintings she made with oil paint and a squeegee, and others which she made with spray paint and stencils. I think these made more sense considering she had studied with Gerhard Richter, and the fascination with the paint certainly was genuine and brilliant, and carried through. In the corner, resin-soaked rags, bunched up like some alien forms, spun weirdly and slowly on tall rods, revealing intricate spaces and strange colors created by the process.
On to the third room: I need to re-check the dates of this group, but it seemed that a fascination with urban life which had been sort of present but dormant in the other two rooms suddenly burst out. City photography, scrapbooks with mundane city activities, and x-ray photos (of her skull, drinking wine) filled the room. Thin plastic/resin or glass rectangles about two or three feet high were bunched up on pedestals to look like apartment buildings. This room introduced more found objects that were reminiscent of city life: small toy cars, action figures, posed about, some on plywood constructions, which echoed the steel pedestals in the other room but had more of a home-made feel. There were accompanying videos projected onto the walls and ceiling which dealt with topics related to the city.
The next few rooms I group together in my mind, partly because I felt that the third room showed a certain ideological break (which I will elaborate on later). These rooms were occupied mainly with assemblage, which included lots of glass mosaics, tall poles which reminded me of Louise Nevelson made of shiny plastic, mirrors, and lots of installations. These installations were created with lots and lots of found objects. I saw action figures, sunflower seeds, more shiny objects, pizza boxes, string, bags, photographs, more mirrors, duck statues, desks, umbrellas, fans, and a myriad of other sort of mundane objects related to commercial city life. The last room was a room devoted to 9/11. Apparently Genzken had been in New York City during the attacks, was deeply affected, and had responded to the event with various installation pieces. Unfortunately, I had to spend less time in this last room because the museum was closing and I was told to leave by a guard. Oh well. At least I had seen everything again. The walk out was on a pathway made of photographs covered by glass, out to the entrance of the exhibit, where there was a crowd of manikins posed with lots of objects (suitcases, scooters, etc.) and covered with a strange assortment of clothing, brightly colored, feathery, sometimes joined with duct tape, furry, etc. A menagerie of fashion reference and city-based excitement. I thought it was something strange, seeing the exodus of leaving museum goers compared to the still but somehow busier manikins.
MY RESPONSE:
The Genzken show opened up a couple things in my mind. Like all the exhibits I decide to write about, it made me conscious of myself, and caused me not just to think, but to record my thoughts (I was writing on the subway on the way home), and then post it online. I think if an exhibit can make me do this, it's worth a visit again. Anyways, it made me think about how I relate to my materials, and contrasted that with the eclectic way that Genzken related to hers (we'll call that "eclecticism"). My own experience with art has led me to fall in love with paint and canvas, for various reasons which I should probably articulate better in another post, but it has something to do with the infinite exploration and manipulation of pure color, leading to an almost fanatically intense love for the world, physical matter, and my relationship to it. But at the end of the day, I connect with these materials in a way that nothing else really does. That's my bit. Perhaps that explains a frustration I encountered my first time through the Genzken exhibit. I actually felt that she was doing something sacrilegious from room to room, in a way I couldn't really articulate at the time. For example, I found in each room a very special connection to certain materials that could occupy the mind of an artist for an entire lifetime, forget 40 years. Yet over the course of the exhibit, from room to room, the materials changed almost too quickly, considering the obvious excitement and relationship that I felt she had with each group of work. It was surprising to me that she could manipulate concrete and steel in such a passionate way, then move on to resin, then ditch that to move on to mirrors, then so on and so forth, until the end of the exhibit, she was literally taking everything she could find and pose it together. The deep connection to simple materials that I found so exciting seemed like it was gone from the later work.
CONCLUSION:
My second time around the show relieved some of the discomfort I had with the retrospective show because I feel that I had perhaps pre-defined what kind of an artist Genzken was with rooms one and two. I think the "world receiver" radio ready-made in room one should have tipped me off, but it made much more sense the second pass. Genzken is not the type of artist I am. She does love materials, but not in the monogamous sense. In my opinion, she loves the idea of materials and responding to them in a very broad way. I suppose I could relate it to a woman who loves "men" but can never settle down for one in particular (strip that concept of any moral judgment or related connotations). That's just the type of artist she is. I made a scale to place types of artists on which goes: MATERIALS <------------>INFLUENCE. I think every individual artist, who they are, at any given point in time, sits at some point along this scale, either prioritizes materials or influence, to a greater or lesser degree. I think in Genzken's case, she actually slid evenly (at the same pace as walking through the show) along the scale, from extremely close to materials, to equally close to influence. At the beginning of the show she was working inventively and intimately with the minimal materials which commanded her interest. By the end of the show, she was responding to personal experiences with an instinctual assemblage of found objects, with no allegiance to any given material to filter her artistic response. There was nothing she made herself except the world of her installation. Perhaps her material became the space and world she was moving the found objects around in. Either way, it showed a key element of what sort of artist she was, and what kind of an artist I'm not. But I suppose it marks an understandable progression. But that just gets me wondering. Right now I'm connecting most with what Genzken made 40 years ago, and I can swear by painting. Who knows what I'll be making in 40 years?
Here's another marathon drawing:
39"x39" Charcoal on Paper.
