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Isa Genzken
Sculpture as World Receiver
By Lisa Lee The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-40997-9
CHAPTER 1
Geometries of Lived Perspective
For seven days in the summer of 1973, Isa Genzken, then a student of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and of art history and philosophy at the University of Cologne, carried out Bruce Nauman's Instructions for a Mental Exercise at Konrad Fischer's Düsseldorf gallery. According to Nauman's rubric, two exercises were each to be performed for a half an hour daily:
A: Lie down on the floor near the center of the space, face down, and slowly allow yourself to sink down into the floor. Eyes open.
B: Lie on your back on the floor near the center of the space and slowly allow the floor to rise up around you. Eyes open.
Nauman offers some pointers to the would-be performer: "In exercise A it helps to become aware of the peripheral vision — use it to emphasize the space at the edges of the room." Genzken kept a daily log, subsequently published in the 1974 issue of the avant-garde journal Interfunktionen, through which we gain insight into her psycho-physiological responses to the exercises. "The first impression was that the perspective of the room was getting lost; the line of the floor along the two side walls became a single horizontal with the end wall." Genzken's concentration on the architectural seams warps space, such that the planes of the room — walls set at right angles — fuse along a single, continuous line. Genzken goes on to describe the optical blurring of floor and wall, which heightens her sense of the "bright, glowing strip" of the horizontal. Although exercise B entailed a corresponding deemphasis of peripheral vision, the initial sensation Genzken records seems to have been the same: the melding of floor and wall. Her concentration is uneven during the seven days' performances, but she makes progress. During exercise B on day four she reports, "I felt very strongly that the floor was concentrating itself in my body along the line of my spine from both sides at the same time, and was rising with me." She claims to have attained the goals of sinking into the floor and allowing the floor to rise on days five and seven.
Similar instructions served as the basis for two videos Nauman produced in a New York studio that same year: Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down (fig. 13) and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up over Her, Face Up. The motivation for making the videos, according to Nauman, was to create "a record, to see if you could see what was happening." This strikes one as quite perverse, for unlike any number of videos by Nauman from the late 1960s that train the lens on overt manipulations of the body (pinching, stamping, stretching, bouncing), the phenomena to be "seen" in Tony Sinking into the Floor and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up involve "a purely mental activity as opposed to a purely physical situation which might incur some mental activity." Nor are the performances structured by built space (as with the corridors, corners, and walls Nauman constructed in those years) so much as means of structuring space, again in the perceptual experiences of the performers. Across fade-ins and shifts in camera angle, what one "sees" in Tony Sinking into the Floor, Face Up and Face Down is the performer's "purely physical situation," as it were: twitches, coughs, and measured or labored breath. Thus an interviewer voices reasonable skepticism when he admits, "I'm not sure it is possible to really understand what is happening in [Tony Sinking into the Floor]." Without a doubt, it is precisely this impossibility that Nauman is keen to investigate.
Genzken, too, takes up the questions of whether it is possible to make visible perceptual experiences like those induced by Instructions for a Mental Exercise and, crucially, of how one might do so. In contrast to Nauman's use of the time-based medium of video, Genzken confronts the concrete terms of an art object. This choice is no less perverse, given the intractable materiality so long perceived to be sculpture's liability. I don't mean to suggest that Genzken explicitly set out to find a corollary to Nauman's exercises or to address the limitations of Tony Sinking into the Floor and Elke Allowing the Floor to Rise Up. But by Genzken's own account, the Ellipsoids that launched her career in the late 1970s were influenced by Nauman. The precise nature of this influence, and how Genzken plumbed her experience to generate new terms for sculpture, has yet to be adequately understood in the critical and scholarly reception of the works.
Genzken's Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos are highly attenuated wood sculptures, ranging from 400 to 1180 centimeters in length, whose forms are defined geometrically: an ellipsoid is "a solid of which all the plane sections through one of the axes are ellipses, and all the other sections ellipses or circles," while the hyperboloid is "a solid or surface ... some of whose plane sections are hyperbolas, the others being ellipses or circles." Genzken's iterations of these forms are particularly striking because the lengths of their longitudinal axes far exceed those of their lateral and vertical axes — 62:2:1, the approximate ratio of longitudinal to lateral to vertical axis of Blau-grüngelbes Ellipsoid "Joma" (Blue-Green-Yellow Ellipsoid "Joma," 1981), is typical. In sculptural terms, the works activate maximum space while occupying minimal volume and having little mass. Or rather, in these works volume and mass are distributed in such a way as to lessen their magnitude in the perception of the viewer. This is especially the case when they are exhibited directly on the ground, as was the original intent. Inhabiting the periphery of the viewer's field of vision, the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos animate space without obstructing it.
The first three Ellipsoids are unitary, closed forms. Notably, given Genzken's now career-long engagement with the legacy of modernist abstraction, each gestures toward a primary color. In form and hue, then, Gelbes Ellipsoid (Yellow Ellipsoid, 1976; fig. 14), Rotes Ellipsoid (Red Ellipsoid, 1977), and Blaues Ellipsoid (Blue Ellipsoid, 1977) constitute the point of departure for subsequent works in the series. From the outset, Genzken plays with different profiles and proportions (circular or elliptical cross sections, narrowness or breadth vis-à-vis total length), such that the individuality of each Ellipsoid or Hyperbolo eclipses any sense of seriality or of a single mathematical ideal.
Genzken states in an interview that she sought to capture in her floor sculptures a "horizon-like quality," and follows the remark by citing Nauman's influence. Thus a curator has been prompted to write, "As Genzken explains it, the phenomenological experience of the Nauman exercises inspired her to conceive of her sculptures lying horizontally on the floor." While this is a sensible conclusion, it is not entirely satisfying. After all, horizontality was not in itself new to sculptural production. The most immediate referent for radical horizontality would be Carl Andre's metal "rugs," which had a profound impact on Genzken during her student years. (As I noted in the introduction, Andre's Altstadt Rectangle, with which Konrad Fischer inaugurated his Düsseldorf gallery in 1967, was a signal moment in the reception of American minimalism in Germany.) Furthermore, and perhaps more significantly, Genzken made two vertical wood sculptures in the mid-1970s (after her performance of the Nauman exercises and before the first Ellipsoid) that articulate concerns elaborated in the floor works. A consideration of these precursors to the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos reveals that orientation to the ground plane was hardly of the essence.
Untitled of 1974 (fig. 15) comprises two tapering, spearlike wooden elements of unequal height that lean against the wall. Each is painted partially gray and partially black on the front — a pattern repeated, though inverted, on the back. Yellow paint, applied with an emphasis on facture, covers the sides. Approached head-on, the forms register as lines — one long and thin, the other shorter and thicker. Deviate from the frontal view, and one sees that each is a volume, however slight, composed of four planes. Or is it six? The black and gray segments of a given surface begin to distinguish themselves optically, with the gray "plane" canting ever so slightly — an effect deriving from our familiarity with conventions of rendering geometric volumes through shading. The viewer wavers between a sense that the colored planes reinforce physical characteristics and a suspicion that they produce optical illusions. The shorter of the two elements was shown in 1981 at the Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt as a stand-alone sculpture under the title Parallelogramm Nr. 2 (Parallelogram No. 2). This title, subsequently abandoned, offers a clue to the logic of the form: the object and its taller partner can be imagined as parallelepipeds so stretched that their obtuse angles approach 180 degrees. "Untitled" gives less away, leaving intact the perceptual ambiguity that is crucial to its workings. The viewer is left to negotiate perceptual slippages between line, plane, and volume; between optical illusion and geometric actuality; between sculpture and painting. Genzken's admiration for the work of Barnett Newman comes into focus, for the abstract expressionist's canvases of saturated color and dynamic "zips" rendered moot the distinctions between line and plane, figure and ground, and (especially in the case of the skinny paintings of 1950, like The Wild) painting and object.
In 1976 Genzken made another vertical work, Ellipse Nr. 1 (fig. 16). Here, a strip of wood, one centimeter thick and 1.8 meters tall, takes the shape indicated in the title. Front and back are painted black and the edge limned with yellow. Leaning against the wall, Ellipse Nr. 1 is evidently an object projecting into real space and dependent upon the architecture. Yet, seen head-on, its matte black face reads as a fissure in the expanse of the wall. The literal object gives way to an illusion of indefinite recession, infinite space. Untitled and Ellipse Nr. 1 may seem modest when one considers the technical sophistication and exponentially greater perceptual complexities explored in the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, initiated later in 1976. But they offer insight into Genzken's preoccupations during these years, and they help us to think more subtly about what she might have meant, beyond matters of orientation and placement, by a "horizon-like quality."
We might begin to unpack this phrase by revisiting the notes Genzken wrote during her seven-day performance of the Mental Exercise: "The first impression was that the perspective of the room was getting lost; the line of the floor along the two side walls became a single horizontal with the end wall. The colors of the floor and walls got mixed up; the black of the floor became a transparent gray and the horizontal seemed like a bright, glowing strip." That "bright, glowing strip," observed time and again, was the initial stage, one might even say the requisite stage, in the space- and mind-bending acts Nauman outlined. With the Ellipsoids, as in the vertical works preceding them, Genzken transfers such embodied perceptual experience to the viewer. The horizon is, after all, a perceptual phenomenon — the apparent meeting point of sky and earth, contingent on the observer's ever-shifting point of view. From an oblique angle, one follows an Ellipsoid's attenuated course: its contours seem parallel in the midsection but veer toward convergence at either end. This deviation from the straight line, I wish to argue, corresponds to the warped space Genzken perceived during her execution of the Nauman exercise. Concomitantly, the curved surface of the Ellipsoid renders as continuous discontinuities involved in the intersection of flat planes, which is a basic principle of architecture as well as of linear perspective. The undoing of cubic space, and of the modes of vision it structures, is enacted via the surfaces of differential geometry. In this way, the Ellipsoid encompasses and supersedes the ambiguities put into play by the minutely canted planes of Untitled.
A more compelling assessment of the horizontal comes into view, one with epistemological implications. If perspectival space, associated with rationality and idealism, is predicated upon the erect and static figure, then a contingent experience of space is associated with the axis to which it is opposed. From the "radical reversibility" of El Lissitzky's Prouns, analyzed by Yve-Alain Bois, to the operations suggested by the "flatbed picture plane," elaborated by Leo Steinberg, the orientation to the horizontal corresponds to shifts in the political, social, and cultural realms, or at least to the ambition to effect those shifts in and through art. The development in the 1950s of a picture surface as receptacle of heterogeneous material and inputs partakes "of a shakeup which contaminates all purified qualities," Steinberg tells us. In this phrasing one might detect a resonance with Georges Bataille's notion of the Informe, the operation that serves "to bring things down in the world." However differently inflected, these artistic and theoretical models of horizontality signal an altered address to the world — an address that is nonhierarchical, antirational, and anti-ideal. Crucially, their animosity toward the "dictatorial perpendicular," to use Walter Benjamin's indelible characterization, was not necessarily expressed in physical placement or orientation, but was enacted via the inbuilt logic of the work and its mode of confronting the viewer.
The skeptic might ask whether Genzken exchanges the reductive organizational principles of single-point perspective, and all that they suggest, for more complex systems of spatial understanding. In which case, she could be seen to upgrade rather than eschew idealisms. Sophisticated mathematical calculations were in fact integral to the realization of the Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos, to such a degree that Genzken enlisted the help of Ralph Krotz, a PhD candidate in physics at the University of Cologne. Genzken provided Krotz with the length of prospective works, the shapes and dimensions of crucial cross sections (often at the midpoint and, in the case of the Hyperbolos, at each end), and, as the iterations grew increasingly complex, additional information about deformations, excisions, and so on. Using these specifications, Krotz calculated exact vertical and lateral measurements at ten-centimeter longitudinal intervals, on the basis of which Genzken produced the final forms (fig. 17). For the catalog of Documenta 7, where four Ellipsoids were shown, Genzken invited Krotz to pen a text that stood in place of a traditional artist's statement. In contrast to "linear approaches, which allow only rough, simplified approximations," Krotz explains,
These fundamental forms [the ellipsoid and the hyperboloid] find their equivalents in the idealized physical space where, from the macro domain — galaxies, planetary systems — down to the micro domain — atoms, elementary particles — trajectories and structures can be described by quadratic functions (ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas).
Krotz proffers quadratic functions as universal principles for mapping macro and micro phenomena. Seen thus to be instantiations of "fundamental forms," Genzken's Ellipsoids and Hyperbolos could be set within a tradition of sculptural visualizations of mathematics. Their basis in geometric minimal structures would signal their affinity with Naum Gabo's evocations of ruled surfaces and Max Bill's sensuous elaborations of the Möbius band. One might even consider the various excisions from Genzken's wooden forms to perform something akin to the revelation of structure offered by Gabo's stereometric method.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Isa Genzken by Lisa Lee. Copyright © 2017 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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