Skulptur Projekte Münster, the legendary decennial exhibition of public sculpture commissioned by the city of Münster, Germany, was founded in 1977 as a response to public outrage. The American artist George Rickey, well-known now for making quietly mesmerizing kinetic sculptures for outdoor space, scandalized the city’s residents with his then-provocatively simple work Three Squares Gyratory II (1973-75). To the citizens of Münster (which number under half a million), the sculpture’s radically basic form was less of a concern than its position in the city’s precious public space. Detractors sent angry letters to the local press, city council meetings were held to discuss its removal; a few residents even sent in counter-proposals to replace Rickey’s work with something presumably more palatable. All of this prompted the art historian Klaus Bussman, then curator of Münster’s Westphalian State Museum of Art and Cultural History, to conceive of a festival, organized by the city and in conversation via public forums with its residents, to commission cutting-edge public sculpture by the world’s leading contemporary artists. The first iteration of Skulptur Projekte, co-organized with a young Kasper König, took place in 1977.
Over the next four decades, the German artist Isa Genzken would contribute four artworks to the festival, each time displaying her astonishingly diverse range as an artist. The proposals for these projects (scale model maquettes, preparatory sketches, collages, photographs, and various bits of exhibition ephemera), alongside other proposals for public sculpture throughout her 55-year career, formed the basis for the inaugural show at Galerie Buchholz’s new three-story gallery across the street from MoMA. Genzken’s natural predilection for the scale and site-responsive reflexivity of public sculpture was brought across in the Buchholz show as an obvious fact, as though she were born to do it. It felt just as obvious that Buchholz, Genzken’s dealer and collaborator since 1987 (the year Genzken first participated in Skulptur Projekte), was born to curate this exceptional and underseen facet of her oeuvre. If an artist’s practice is only ever conceivable in its various parts, subjugated to the brevity that an exhibition often demands (even in the form of a retrospective, like the one held for Genzken across the street in 2014), this show would be a rebuttal to that sad ontological problem. Elegantly situated amongst the show’s 20+ beautifully crafted maquettes, which one slowly waded through like Godzilla, were various excerpts from Genzken’s equally rigorous and enigmatic forays into other media. Paintings from her Light Research series, hand-doctored photographs and postcards, sculptures that resemble earlier sculptures (particularly her famous concrete-and-steel structures) that are technically also models for larger projects, and merchandise from institutions where the sculptures were staged commingled into a whole that felt charged with what can only be termed Genzkenness. The show was a mini-survey of an artist whose voracious vision could stretch from raw material exploration, always in service of a concrete idea, to boldly inexplicable and clearly felt exercises in humor and play. Compare for example the curt, readymade simplicity of 2007’s OIL— a “sculpture” that imagined the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale as a building under construction, replete with scaffolds and orange netting— to Untitled (Macy’s Parade), which brought a Sonic The Hedgehog balloon to the quaint, old-world German town of Münster. Placed next to a sculpture like 2006’s Untitled, which consists of a couple of crutches splattered with paint, or the dyed-concrete bench by Kai Althoff that was commissioned specifically for the exhibition, one was left exhilarated by the pure weirdness of her approach to art-making. As Rickey’s example indicates (and Bussman and König’s ambitions for public art reinforce), artworks made for “the people” are almost invariably a challenge to them, urging those that facilitate it and those that receive it to either reject or accept said challenge. Genzken’s work is difficult for any audience or curator, let alone the uninitiated passerby. Her achievement, and the triumph of the Buchholz show, is one of translation: how to distill a kaleidoscopic vision that actively resists categorization down to the scale of a commercial gallery, without compromising any of its complexity— particularly when that complexity is trained toward something as fraught as art made for the public.
Another Isa Genzken show was on view at the same time as the Buchholz show, downtown at David Zwirner’s Tribeca space (previously known as 52 Walker). Though never made explicit, the two shows appeared to be two halves of a whole retrospective spread across the city. While Buchholz handled Genzken’s “projects for outside,” Zwirner dealt with a smaller array of citations from the artist’s various phases and modes. Walking into the Zwirner exhibition after seeing the show uptown felt like stepping into a warehouse where art just happened to be sitting. A lack of context seemed to be the issue. Once one had learned that the artist’s iconic Ohr (Ear) was used to anthropomorphize the town hall in Innsbruck, as though the building itself could listen to its surroundings, the work’s iconicity appeared flattened by comparison. What does a Wolfgang Tillmans photograph of the artist offer when there’s no rose in a vase calling back to her famous Rose sculpture, the same one that sat in MoMA’s sculpture garden for years? Even the “World Receiver” sculptures— clumsily built concrete casts with radio antenna sticking out— which featured prominently in the Zwirner show, lose some of their power when there isn’t a real Cold-War-era Weltempfänger there to drive the point home. The problem isn’t that art needs a brochure to be experienced properly (in fact the opposite is almost invariably true), but that exhibition-making is a craft whose subtleties speak loudest, and context is often the invisible glue that holds a great show together. Germans are famous for their ability to contextualize; the micro-movement known as Context Art was all the rage in and around the Rhineland in the early 90s. Perhaps Zwirner, by being New York’s (and therefore the United States’s) powerhouse blue-chip gallery, has wandered a bit too far from home. In either case, Isa Genzken, now 77 years old, has proven to us once again that art is capable of making our strange existence that much stranger.