Éric Loret
Drunken Butterfly

From 2013 to 2014, the MoMa organized a broad retrospective of the work of Isa Genzken. In the documentary This is Isa Genzken that was filmed for the occasion, the museum asked visitors, before entering the exhibition, if they were aware of the work of the German sculptor. Unsurprisingly, the answer was no, and most people weren’t even able to pronounce her name properly. In the same documentary, Genzken never speaks. We only see her, sitting behind gallery owner Daniel Buchholz, smoking, and he speaks for her. Others explain to us the extent to which her work is protean. A similar thing occurs at a round-table discussion in February 2016, that can be viewed online, in the series “Public Art Fund Talks” by the Public Art Fund of the New School of New York. For around 75 minutes, Genzken, dressed in canary yellow, briefly comments projected slides of her architectural projects, she avoids questions, laughs, letting Buchholz speak. At a moment, she explains that she simply looks at buildings and, if it seems to her that something is missing, she adds it. Does she want to “connect” elements, to put things in touch ? “I think that people should touch more each other. They are too cold right now. Once I went to a gay bar and said “Is that now fashion that you don’t touch each other anymore ?”. They were like “wow” [rolls her eyes] and they said “could you please touch us ?””.

Among her videos, there is one from 2003, made with artist Kai Althoff, called Warum ich keine Interviews gebe (“Why I don’t give interviews”). And it is true, she rarely does, in any case not for the purposes of theorizing her art. One of her former partners, Benjamin Buchloh, who is also one of her appointed commentators –  wrote  an extensive text that has been translated in this issue about recent developments in her work – she likes to say that he misunderstands his work. We imagined that we might have met her, but unfortunately her health made this impossible. With IG not being accessible, this issue of Initiales was then the opportunity to translate a number of fundamental texts and interviews into French for the first time (including one with Wolfgang Tillmans), for the most part published by the Buchholz gallery and reprinted in catalogues, and also an opportunity to call upon important witnesses like Kim Gordon, ex bass player for Sonic Youth, and the Dutch critic Paul Groot.

This 11^th issue opens with a number of exercises in proprioception. One can do them if one wishes. They were fine tuned by Bruce Nauman, with Isa Genzken performing them in 1973 at the age of 25. It is apparently not advised to involve Sekt, a popular German sparkling wine, when doing them. In his brief text, “Isa Genzken, se réparer ou se repérer, Paravent, 1990” Bernhard Rüdiger raises a number of questions which provide a solid reading guide to this special IG issue. By re-situating Genzken within the history of models as artworks, he shows how “Genzken’s body is there, concretely in space in front of an object, but also at the heart of the object itself, it is in tension. Outside of itself, it exercises perception from a different, other place.” This provides insight, not just into the question of sculpture, but also into  Genzken’s obsession for hearing and the ear, this “Something from the inside out. Coming from the head”, as she explains to Tillmans.

Genzken’s interpretative and corporeal plasticity has made her into a source of inspiration and a beacon for many young artists. We have chosen to highlight a number of them through nine portfolios, and in dialogue with curators and critics. Thus Armando Andrade Tudela explains how Genzken (or more precisely, a commentary by Buchloh) allowed him to relocalize “the modernist impulsion that comes from a traumatic event” in his work, whereas Johnny, alias artist Jean-Alain Corre, provides an exegesis of desiring machines and of the lickability of gold in relation to Genzken’s models. Something similar occurred in the sculptor’s latter period (that of Empire/Vampire) which Géraldine Gourbe has chosen to provide insight into the work of Sarah Tritz as a “queer and [...] pop growth of the gesture”, programming “the obsolescence of an ancient world: the heterosexual libidinal imagination”. Likewise for Camille Azaïs, for whom the work of Florence Schmitt falls under the Genzkenian sign of the liquid and the tentacular, “a manner of holding together the materials and images which oppose the virile arrogance of contemporary sculpture”. As for Claire Le Restif, she finds in the work of Genzken and Alexandra Bircken a similar aesthetic of this “permeability” and “penetrability” which “make us human”.

The issue signs off with a set of texts by artists who highlight Genzken’s relationship with music and hearing through their own experience (Paul Groot, Kim Gordon, Vincent Ceraudo), while theoreticians Benjamin Buchloh and Pierre Tillet reflect upon notions of reconstruction and destruction (Genzken is a child of war), with the latter emphasizing the relationship between two of Genzken’s obsessions: the representation of radio sets and her skull, as if she wanted to be “a receiver of the world’s signs, associating technology, the organic and the inorganic”. Extending this, François Piron and Bernhard Rüdiger reflect upon “mechanisms for communication and opacity” in art, and in particular “the counter space” which “proposes first and foremost an indetermination, something which suspends judgement”. Among the multiple self portraits of Genzken, visible at the Issie Energie exhibition, in König, that took place in Berlin at the beginning of this year, one of them points its camera lens at the visitor: in this game of exchange with the artist, where one moves through to the other side of the mirror, it is the fact of our own abolition that we seize upon, and which in turn seizes us.