ISA GENZKEN, ARCHITECT

It is difficult to love the world and to see it clearly. The problem is, to some degree, architectural: we inhabit a built environment that is often poorly designed, in which considerations of humanity are subordinated to the exigencies of business. Our world is made of plastics, concrete, steel, and glass—brute materials festooned with the brash polychrome of advertisements and safety warnings. What would it mean to love this world? And who can bear to see it clearly? Those questions animate the two legacy-defining shows of Isa Genzken’s work in New York, presented in tandem at Galerie Buchholz and David Zwirner. Genzken, now 77, has largely retreated from public life. The shows are retrospectives that cement her place in the art world firmament, but they also suggest that Genzken might have something to teach us about the possibilities for architecture in the current moment.

Genzken’s show at Buchholz, Projects for Outside: ISA USA inaugurates the gallery’s new New York home. A pillar of the Buchholz roster since 1987, this is Genzken’s 18th show with the gallery. The subject of the show are her outdoor works — sketches, photographs, sculptures, and maquettes from the 1980s to the present that engage with public sculpture, directly and obliquely. Her early Modell für eine Gartenskulptur (1986), the show’s overture, proposes a niche formed by intersecting crude concrete walls, their tops rough as though unfinished or partially demolished (the sculpture was meant to sit in the garden of a collector couple in Cologne, and it did before it really was demolished at Genzken’s request). We see in this early work the concerns that wend through Genzken’s engagement with architecture: outdoor sculpture as site-specific intervention, a certain punk attitude, an interest in the indoors, outside.

Concrete reappears in one of Genzken’s most famous works — the Weltempfänger (1982), or “world receivers,” radio antennas that have been submerged in concrete. They feature prominently at VACATION at David Zwirner’s Tribeca location. Weltempfänger were shortwave radio receivers and transmitters produced in West Germany during the Cold War — they were able to pick up signals unavailable behind the Iron Curtain. Perhaps more importantly, they were sleek, modern design objects (Dieter Rams designed a notable example for Braun). Genzken has said: “A sculpture must be at least as modern as the most modern hi-fi systems.” So why not, then, cast them in concrete? She elaborates Duchamp’s original insight that “sculpture” is in fact a dimension of the objects and buildings already in the world; the artistry lies, in part, in an ability to see the latent potential of art where it has not been intended. Of interest to her are those icons of modernity and consumer consumption like the radios, but also the John Hancock building and press photos of Leonardo DiCaprio, for example, that she can reconfigure into altars of her own cargo cult. The radios are mini-monuments — dead receivers that stand, assembled together like the figures on Easter Island, waiting for a signal.

The AT&T building is but one of her proposed acts of monumental sabotage. In a series of maquettes commissioned in 2015 from older drawings, she suggests a building-size mirror for Willy-Brandt-Platz in Bielefeld, such that this ugly building could look at itself (the frame was built but there was no glass). There is the 1991 interbuilding Washing Line for Frankfurt (to aid in the money laundering); the nylon cords of Two Lines (1991) strung between buildings in Toronto; the enigmatic Ring (1988) — a massive loop of metal that looks like it had fallen and gotten wedged between buildings in Rotterdam. The works owe a certain debt to minimalism, but their content is more explicit (even if the aim seems primarily to antagonize the building’s owners). They function as rejoinders to whatever the buildings themselves aim to dictate (though I wonder how much they really gain from being realized — the God’s eye view offered by the maquettes feels sufficient).

Her wry sensibility emerges from such proposals, which are simultaneously naive and elegant. These bold gestures are untutored by the reality principle — problems for an engineer to resolve, not Genzken. They also suggest taking the world a little less seriously, that another set of rules for public space might be possible. In this way, Genzken’s public works participate in the postwar German movement of anti-monuments or counter-monuments, Gegendenkmäler, which aim to subvert the dictatorial impulses of the traditional monument. The movement has no single aesthetic style, encompassing the minimalism of Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz’s famous Monument Against Fascism (1986) and Sol LeWitt’s Black Form (Dedicated to the Missing Jews) (1989) in Hamburg alongside the cartoonish interventions of Claes Oldenburg. The movement has no single ideology, but it does share some core preoccupations — defiance towards “official” history, an insistence on individual narrativization, a strategy of subversion that often parasitizes other monuments. Genzken’s practice, of course, was not tied to the particular political and aesthetic problematics of public commemoration. Her work is, thankfully, less programmatic, freer in that it serves her own impulses first.

One may see the difference most clearly in her ideas for New York’s Ground Zero, her Program for Freedom. What would ultimately be built was a textbook Gegendenkmal; a retread of the basic conceptual moves of Maya Lin’s then-groundbreaking Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. Where Lin offered an invaginated black granite incision, architect Michael Arad offered two sunken pits. Genzken saw things differently. Included in the show at Buchholz is Genzken’s alternative: a demented assemblage of plastic, acrylic, mirror foil, and LED light tapes that make, in Genzken’s distinctive manner, a maquette for a gay disco. The disco, along with a hospital, car park, and “Osama Fashion store” (the latter three having been shown in 2008 at Hauser and Wirth) cohere with Daniel Liebeskind’s masterplan for the site, technically if not in spirit (that is, the building footprints align with the masterplan, but they are a far cry from Liebeskind’s office park cum memorial). The models are a garish fantasy that could not be further from the Zaras and Sweetgreens that would ultimately be built. If only.

At Buchholz, I found myself drawn to Genzken’s photos of New York perhaps even more than to her direct architectural propositions. She made a habit of shooting moments where the city had, effectively, intervened on itself. The Christmas wreath that the New York Public Library places around the lion sculptures at the main branch every winter; the reflections of one skyscraper in another; the superimposition in a window or a neon sign across a stone façade — all suggesting a dimension of fantasy readily available within the city’s architecture, for those with the eyes to see it. The city is already an assemblage of sculptures; the world is a readymade. Genzken just helps us to see it.