"Cool Hardcore Glamour"
Press reactions to Isa
Genzken at the German Pavilion
The Venice
Biennale is considered one of the most important international forums
for contemporary art. For the German
Pavilion, which this year has as its main sponsor Deutsche
Bank, Isa Genzken has created a project called Oil. The artist has
covered up the historic building and in the interior, she has installed
assemblages of colorful wheeled suitcases, transparent plastic furniture,
calendar pictures, floating astronauts, rogues and plastic toys.
International critics had varying reactions to the work, which is full of
allusions. For some, the German Pavilion is a highlight of the event,
while others find it awful.
Isa
Genzken, "OIL" (detail),
German
Pavillon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
mixed
media,
courtesy German Pavillon
2007,
Photo: Jan Bitter
Benno
Schirrmeister has written a veritable hymn to Isa
Genzken’s work in the taz.
For him, Oil is simply "breathtaking", and following his visit to the
German Pavilion, he wondered why he should go look at anything else, when
he felt he’d already seen the best work there. He says the orange plastic
construction site netting with which the artist has covered the building
signalizes that "here something is being built and remodeled on a massive
scale. It’s a promise that Oil fulfils in every aspect. Genzken (...) has
interpreted the pavilion (...) as a colossally sized sculpture. She just
maintains a sense of the interior walls and rooms as a framework: these
become an expanse for free flight of the eye and thoughts – it’s movingly
beautiful. Whoever enters this artwork and surrenders to its associations
and the play of color and explores its details will certainly find himself
changed by it."
Isa
Genzken, "OIL" (detail),
German
Pavillon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
mixed
media,
courtesy German Pavillon
2007,
Photo: Jan Bitter
Elke
Buhr from the Frankfurter Rundschau
sees the covering of the building as a "clever move to repudiate the stony
imposition of the neoclassical structure." In the interior as well,
"Genzken, with her sensibility for materials and forms, easily gets the
not uncomplicated pavilion space under control." "She has called the whole
things Oil, the name of the substance that holds the globalized world
together and simultaneously threatens to blow it apart. But anyone looking
for a clear thesis on this will be disappointed – that is not how Isa
Genzken’s aesthetic world functions. This is no bombshell, but a
headstrong production, coherent in its mysteriousness." Ute Baier of Die
Welt says Genzken has created an "enchanted world of mirrors." But
adds, "the installations do not allow for much more than descriptions and
associations. Behind the colorful or silver-painted surface of the art
lurks – according to each viewer’s personality and imagination – amusing
irrelevance or profound emotion. That is more than most artworks can
promise and fulfill."
Isa
Genzken, "OIL" (detail),
German
Pavillon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
mixed
media,
courtesy German Pavillon
2007,
Photo: Jens Ziehe
Genzken’s
assemblages have been especially controversial. To Geert van der Speeten
of Brussels' Standaard, they
appeared like "Star Wars in plastic, in which carnival-like toy figures
play the main roles". Laura Cumming, in Britain’s Observer,
writes of the "bathos of a sort of disco apocalypse (...) except that it
felt more like a theme-park for rubbish." Writing for Freitag,
Ingo Arend praises the work’s "cool hardcore glamour". For him, Genzken’s
arrangements condense into "an image of a doomsday vision that leaves
behind a feeling of icy anxiety." And Ulf Poschardt from the German
edition of Vanity Fair is also
impressed by the installation’s "oppressive effect." But the lifestyle
specialist also has an eye on the hipness factor: "The best bag is the one
from the German Pavilion. The noose for the hanged man on a white
background with a plastic animal is the accessory in Venice."
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Isa Genzken, "OIL" (detail),
German
Pavillon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
mixed
media,
courtesy German Pavillon
2007,
Photo: Jan Bitter
Stephen
Maine takes a more art history-influenced view in his article for Art
in America: "The specter of German Dada hung in the air. (…) With this
haunting, ferocious body of work, Genzken can assume a prominent place in
the lineage of zeitgeist-tapping assemblage artists." But Walter Robinson
from artnet seems a bit baffled in the
face of the skulls, carnival masks and mannequins in spacesuits: "All
these mannequins are trying to tell us something... maybe that Surrealism
is back?" He describes both the work and the artist as "unhinged".
Genzken’s "nightmares of macabre beauty" (Linde Rohr-Bongard in Capital)
are simply "appalling" to Michael Kimmelmann of the New
York Times.
Isa
Genzken, "OIL" (detail),
German
Pavillon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
mixed
media,
courtesy German Pavillon
2007,
Photo: Jan Bitter
But
Andreas Schlaegel of Flash Art
says of Genzken’s pavilion: "The world she shows is falling apart, it
can’t contain the things in it anymore, because implicit notions of
structure and order have become obsolete." Holger Liebs writes in the Süddeutsche
Zeitung of a "shiny metallic trip to a cold death, shimmering between
discount-store flair, science fiction and military severity." His final
assessment is thus: "This vision of a gaudily colored, reflected coldness,
a rending of the sculptural concept into its smallest pieces, is a daring,
perhaps too daring, undertaking, and too caught up in detail."
Isa
Genzken, "OIL" (detail),
German
Pavillon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
mixed
media,
courtesy German Pavillon
2007,
Photo: Jens Ziehe
Tim
Ackermann, who reviewed the Biennale for the Welt am Sonntag, encountered
in the German pavilion "astonishingly mysterious works" whose "openness to
interpretation" he found especially fascinating. But that was precisely
what bothered Tobias Timm from Die Zeit:
"With Oil, Genzken simultaneously opens so many areas of association (...)
that one wonders if someone was afraid; afraid of insignificance and a
lack of persuasiveness of the art itself." Peter Richter, writing in the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, complains that it is precisely the
ambiguity of the work that is criticized: "Anyone who finds this all too
inaccessible and demands a central theme as if it were a pull tab must
first explain why he or she does perfectly well without it when it comes
to Schlingensief, Meese
or John
Bock." Isa Genzken herself says in an interview with Spiegel
online: "I present the viewer with art, not with a cake and the recipe
for it."
Isa
Genzken, "OIL" (detail),
German
Pavillon, Venedig Biennale, 2007
mixed
media,
courtesy German Pavillon
2007,
Photo: Jan Bitter
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