Make Life Beautiful!

The Diabolic in the Work of Isa

Genzken (A Tour through
Berlin, Paris, and New York)*

LISA LEE

A total absence of illusion about the age and at the

same time an unlimited commitment to it—that is
its hallmark.
—Walter Benjamin, “Experience and
Poverty” (1933)

Subtle gray gradations—dove, ash, lead, silver, pewter—tinged with brown

or blue, marked by wooden molds, speckled and streaked with uneven sediment,
pockmarked with air pockets: Isa Genzken’s concrete sculptures of 1986–90 exploit
the irregularities of the material, further exacerbating its grittiness with raw edges
and uneven horizontal breaks. Titles like Zimmer, Saal, Halle, Kirche, Hochhaus,
Korridor, Welle, and Bühne demonstrate that Genzken’s reference points are clearly
architectural, though the roughly model-scaled works seldom mimic the morphol-
ogy of specific architectural typologies. With the exception of a few early examples,
the rectilinear structures in Genzken’s works are never sealed or solid but instead
roofless walls that delineate space. Breaks in the outer walls reveal dark corridors
and niches partially lit by slanting rays that snag on concrete ridges. The pieces
are lifted on their bases to eye level, and the viewer’s wandering gaze navigates
those corridors and occasionally encounters corners that cannot be turned. The
pleasures of parallax are economically produced, as a walk around the sculpture
opens up new lines of sight previously unmappable.
Much like the different pourings of cement that make up the structures, or
like their compositional compounds, layers of often conflicting references settle
and aggregate in these concrete sculptures. The hulking masses conjure derelict
and dimly lit housing projects and bombed-out buildings. (Genzken does not shy
from explicit content or associative properties.1 She one-ups her Minimalist fore-
bears, whose polished metal cubes and tiles look designed and hermetically sealed

* My thanks to Hal Foster and Stanley Allen, who occasioned this paper, and to Brigid Doherty,
Kate Nesin, and Daniel Bosch for their insightful commentary.
1. See “Diedrich Diederichsen in conversation with Isa Genzken,” in Alex Farquharson et al., Isa
Genzken (London: Phaidon, 2006), p. 15.

OCTOBER 122, Fall 2007, pp. 53–70. © 2007 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
54 OCTOBER

compared to her construction-site

frankness.) Simultaneously, the con-
crete works rise like pseudoromantic
ruins, gaping structures that speak elo-
quent ly of a grandeur that has
succumbed to the ravages of nature
and time. For Robert Morris, the ruin
straddled the sculptural and the archi-
tectural, a condition of liminality that
aptly describes Genzken’s works, the
scale of which belies their palpable
presence. Morris writes, “But whether
the gigant ic voids of the Baths of
Caracalla or the tight chambers and
varying levels of Mesa Verde, such
places occupy a zone that is neither
strictly a collection of objects nor an
architectural space.”2 Genzken’s con-
crete works exert a spatial power akin
to architecture rather than to scaled
models (as such, they act less like
miniatures than metonyms for archi-
tectural presence). This is true even as
they maintain sculptural intimacy,
Isa Genzken. Welle. 1988. All images courtesy
up-held, so to speak, by her attention David Zwirner, New York, and Galerie Daniel
to their attenuated steel pedestals, Buchholz, Cologne.
which raise the sculptures to eye level.
Additional conflicting meanings inhere in the sculptures’ material. Sigfried
Giedion’s nearly alchemical view of concrete’s possibilities speaks to its original
promise:
From slender iron rods, cement, sand, and gravel, from an “aggregate
body,” vast building complexes can suddenly crystallize into a single
stone monolith that like no previously known natural material is able
to resist fire and a maximum load. This is accomplished because the
laboratory intelligently exploits the properties of these almost worth-
less materials and through their combination increases their separate
capacities many times over.3

2. Robert Morris, “The Present Tense of Space,” in Continuous Project Altered Daily (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), p. 193.
3. Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete (1928; Santa
Monica, Calif.: Getty Research Institue, 1995), p. 150.
Make Life Beautiful! 55

But even as concrete evokes early and mid-twentieth-century utopian aspirations

for air- and light-filled spaces, and even as Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in
Marseilles compellingly reimagined flexible mass housing in undisguised con-
crete, we have now come to know it better for its degraded manifestation in
postwar low-income housing the world over. The more immediate referent in post-
war Germany would be the ubiquitous prefabricated concrete slab structures built
beginning in the 1960s throughout the German Democratic Republic. Once
embodiments of socialist ideals of progressive housing, the large developments of
GDR prefab apartments, nicknamed die Platte [the slab], were notorious after the
fall of the Berlin Wall for their lack of infrastructure.4 So if Genzken’s sculptures
cite concrete’s utopian promise, their bulky masses aspiring to lightness on thin
legs, they simultaneously bring home its failure to make good on that promise. Yet
far from any simple melancholic reflection of failure, Genzken’s project keeps the
original optimism intact and in play. Utopianism in her work cannot be pried
apart from its perversion. This is clear in the importance to Genzken of Joseph
Beuys, for whom an expanded notion of sculpture as social activism was bound up
with a hyperinvestment of his self with shamanistic power. The steel bases of
Genzken’s concrete sculptures pay homage to Beuys’s vitrines, even as her choice
of concrete stoically refuses any of the properties suggestive of transformation and
energy transfer that Beuys favored (fat, felt, and beeswax).
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh writes that Genzken’s sculptural work in concrete
“insists conspicuously and consistently on addressing the collective conditions of
existing in architecture.”5 She shows these collective conditions to be deeply con-
flicted. In Genzken’s works the same stony face of concrete reads as Kantian
sublimity, Brutalist Je-m’en-foutisme, Corbusian harmony and airiness, GDR drab,
and Giedionesque technological optimism. The suggestive power of Genzken’s
sculptural practice is precisely a richness of reference irreducible to a single posi-
tion. Furthermore, hers is an exploration of those positions and possibilities
active in the present—as legacies to be reckoned with, tested against one another,
deployed, or transformed. More specifically, in the case of the concrete series and
the New Buildings for Berlin, the present to be explored would be Germany’s in the
decades leading up to and after reunification.
Like the GDR Platte, the Berlin Wall—first a literal barrier and then a differ-
ently insurmountable “wall in the mind” post-1989—can be seen as an unavoidable
point of reference for Genzken’s concrete works, executed between 1986 and
1990. The works are by no means tediously editorial or merely topical, however,
but complicated by myriad references and positions and by their sculptural
integrity. In their fissured and ruined states, Genzken’s sculptures suggest a rupture

4. Paul Sigel, “The Future of the Slab,” Goethe-Institut USA, July 2003, http://www.goethe.de/ins/
us/lp/kue/arc/en51834.htm.
5. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Isa Genzken: The Fragment as Model,” in Isa Genzken: Jeder braucht
mindestens ein Fenster, exh. cat. (Cologne: Walther König, 1992), p. 141.
56 OCTOBER

of circumscribed space and a breakdown of inside and outside, interior and exte-
rior. The emptiness emphatically articulated by the structures and their brutal
and unyielding permanence nevertheless speaks poignantly about “existing in
architecture,” as Buchloh put it, and specifically that formidable piece of architec-
ture that was the Berlin Wall.
Rapidly removed, auctioned, or chipped into memento-ready chunks, little
was left of the wall by 1991. In its absence a large swath of no-man’s-land cut
through the center of the city from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz,
Leipziger Platz, and beyond.6 But the voids, about which Andreas Huyssen has elo-
quently written, were destined to be patched in a rushed and uncoordinated
manner, with corporate entities and private developers vying for spots in the new
Weltstadt. Potsdamer Platz, a primary node of activity until it was devastated in
World War II, was transformed from a thriving center to a barren periphery by the
erection of the Berlin Wall. The fall of the wall prompted frantic efforts to rein-
state Potsdamer Platz as the symbolic center of Berlin. Even in the months before
the fall of the wall, the city government of Berlin negotiated the sale of fifteen
acres of Potsdamer Platz to Daimler-Benz at a fraction of their market value. The
controversial sale was finalized in 1990 and site work began in 1992 in accordance
with Renzo Piano’s prizewinning scheme. Only around 1995 were structures seen
above ground.7 The Daimler-Benz building was finished in 1998 and the Sony
headquarters in 2000, with still other buildings in progress over the next few
years. Friedrichstadt Passagen, Checkpoint Charlie, and Alexanderplatz were also
being reenvisioned as commercial and corporate centers in these years. With
considerable leeway in regard to design and materials, the fir st of these,
Friedrichstadt Passagen, was built according to the envelope dictated by berlinische
Architektur, a policy of conservative and illusory historicism upheld by the Senate
Building Director, Hans Stimmann. Francesca Rogier summarizes the policy thus:
Berlinische Architektur, an allusion to classical convention, is a homoge-
nization of Prussian tradition blended with the severe architecture of
the Third Reich. . . . Berlinische Architektur is, in practice, a rudimentary
formula of closed, squat volumes with cornice lines at twenty-two
meters and roofs no higher than thirty meters; sober punched-window
facades, restrained ornament if any, and preferably drab materials such
as stucco or stone.8
Alexanderplatz, with little surviving “historic fabric,” was exempted from these
regulations. (Its more recent history as the rebuilt center of East Berlin was all too
readily dismissed.) Against the bitter protest of community groups, big-business

6. Andreas Huyssen, “The Voids of Berlin,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Autumn 1997), p. 65.
7. Francesca Rogier, “Growing Pains: From the Opening of the Wall to the Wrapping of the
Reichstag,” Assemblage 29 (April 1996), p. 49.
8. Ibid., p. 48.
 Make Life Beautiful! 57

Genzken. Installation view

of New Buildings. 2004.

representatives dominating the Alexanderplatz jury rallied behind Hans Kollhoff

and Helga Timmerman’s winning scheme, which proposed the construction of
thirteen high-rises and garnered the nickname “Little Manhattan.”9
Critics have described the postwall refashioning of Berlin’s image, with faux-
historicism on the one hand and cookie-cutter globalism on the other, as a
making of a theme park, media city, and Schaustelle [site of viewing and spectacle];
as a sign of willed ignorance of Germany’s Weimar-era legacy of advanced archi-
tecture by figures like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Bruno
Taut; as a troubled reckoning with the Nazi past; and as a stale debate between
berlinische Architektur and kritische Rekonstruktion—stale because both positions ulti-
mately reduce to a fictionalized notion of a European city of uniform building
structures.10 It is against this backdrop of architecture as image and of reconstruc-
tion as theater that we must see Genzken’s series New Buildings for Berlin, begun in
2001 and continued in 2002 and 2004. Rectangular strips of jewel-toned, clear,
and textured glass, eighty centimeters high, lean one against another like Richard
Serra prop pieces made luminous (if precarious) skyscrapers, or like streamlined
descendents of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International (1919). But are
these Serras made luminous or simply Serra “lite”? After all, Serra’s meticulous
architectonics of gravity and weight hold hefty slabs and plates in perfect suspen-
sion—and we feel this tension. Genzken’s New Buildings, on the other hand, are
held together with sticky tape and silicon. (She asks us to move, in other words,

9. Ibid., pp. 55–57.

10. Ibid., p. 48.
58 OCTOBER

from heavy industry’s mills to the organized rows of Home Depot—or of Bauhaus,
by which I mean Germany’s version of DIY heaven.) Genzken pays homage even as
she travesties Serra’s work, taking to task the hypermasculine tendencies and blue-
collar pretensions of some of the rhetoric surrounding it. This element of travesty
is characteristic of many of Genzken’s works: Tatlin’s Corner Reliefs made flaccid,
jangling mobiles of mangled cake pans, rakes, and other household wares, for
instance. Or Genzken’s Social Facades of 2002, compositions on panel of mirror foil
in saturated colors and disco-ready finishes, which suggest gleeful perversions and
amped-up iterations of abstraction’s opticality. Gridded foil taunts the stoic mod-
ernist grid; the purported nonreferentiality of geometric abstraction gives way to
glittering facades; and sublime uplift is trumped by the specular ecstasy of the
dance hall and club culture. Consider also Genzken’s public sculpture for Leipzig,
Rose —an eight-meter-tall stainless-steel, aluminum, and lacquer rose, which could
be read as a kitschy, banal, and ludicrous literalization of Beuysian utopianism à la
Rose for Direct Democracy, in which a fresh bloom in a graduated cylinder enlivened
each of the one hundred days of Documenta 5 in 1972. Beuys writes, “Bud and
bloom are in fact green leaves transformed. So in relation to the leaves and the
stem the bloom is a revolution, although it grows through organic transformation
and evolution.”11 The revolution is arrested in Genzken’s Rose, a steely column
memorializing the loss of transformative potential, a public punch line to Beuys’s
outsized romanticism. With sculptural intelligence and keen wit, Genzken bal-
ances her objects on the line between homage and travesty—a line she shows to
be remarkably fine.
In the 2006 Phaidon monograph on Genzken, the artist included Charles
Baudelaire’s prose poem “The Bad Glazier,” from his collection Petits poèmes en
prose, alongside reproductions of 2004 versions of New Buildings for Berlin. The
poem begins, “There exist characters, purely contemplative and completely
unsuited for action, who, however, influenced by a mysterious and unknown
impulse, sometimes act with a speed of which they would not have believed them-
selves capable.”12 The narrator proceeds to relate instances of “harmless dreamers”
“abruptly hurled into action by an irresistible force,” finding an “excess of courage
for executing the most absurd and often even the most dangerous acts.” He ends
by retelling his own brush with demonic inspiration. Flinging open his window to
the grimy Parisian air, he hears the discordant cry of a glazier hawking his wares.
“Seized by a hatred for this pitiful man as sudden as it was despotic,” the narrator
calls the glazier up to his room, up seven flights of narrow stairs. Examining the
fragile wares, the narrator cries in disbelief, “What? You have no colored panes?

11. Quoted in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
1979), p. 273.
12. All excerpts taken from Charles Baudelaire, “The Bad Glazier,” in The Parisian Prowler: Le Spleen
de Paris, Petits Poèmes en prose, trans. Edward K. Kaplan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989),
pp. 13–15. This is a different translation than the one published in the Phaidon catalog.
Make Life Beautiful! 59

Genzken. Soziale Fassade. 2002.

No pink panes, no red, no blue, no magic panes, no panes of paradise? You are
shameless! You dare walk through poor neighborhoods, and you don’t even have
panes which make life beautiful!” Having wrestled his wares back onto the street,
the disgruntled glazier is knocked on his back by a falling flowerpot, his precious
cargo crushed. The narrator, perpetrator of senseless violence, recalls, “drunk with
my madness, I shouted at him furiously, ‘Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!’”
Whether or not Baudelaire’s poem directly proposed the terms for New Buildings
for Berlin, it describes an aesthetic attitude critical for understanding Genzken’s
work, and particularly its development into the twenty-first century. Baudelaire
deftly illustrates that the call for beauty and for life’s betterment is implicated in
violence, irrationality, and intoxication [ivresse]; that the dystopian inheres in its
more idealistic opposite; and that advocacy may erupt in antagonism.
Baudelaire describes the clamor of the glazier’s crushed glass as “the bril-
liant sound of a crystal palace smashed by lightning,” a likely reference to the
Crystal Palace built for the 1851 London exhibition. Dolf Oehler extends the link
to the rapid changes to the Parisian urban fabric brought about by Baron
Haussmann’s impetus to modernize, sanitize, and make rational the medieval
city.13 For my part, I relate the wholesale reconfiguration of Baudelaire’s Paris to
the reenvisioned Stadtbild of Genzken’s Berlin. In the context of the Friedrichstadt
Passagen development, with its strictures of false historicism, Genzken’s glass tow-
ers raise the specter of Mies’s 1921 competition entry for Berlin’s first skyscraper,

13. Sonya Stephens, Baudelaire’s Prose Poems: The Practice and Politics of Irony (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1999), p. 67, n. 80.
60 OCTOBER

also to be built on Friedrichstrasse. Mies’s crystalline structure, with its expression-

ist, skyward thrust, bespoke a utopian belief in transparency brought about by
technology: steel construction would free the glass walls from their load-bearing
function. Mies’s fascination with “the rich interplay of light reflections” is mir-
rored in the shifting perspectives offered to the ambulatory viewer of Genzken’s
New Buildings, which additionally offer the delights of shifting colors and texture’s
subtle distortions. Genzken could be said to give us a taste of glass architecture as
figured in Paul Scheerbart’s ecstatic vision of “the Earth clad . . . in jewelry of bril-
liants and enamel.”14 Writing in the 1910s, Scheerbart imagined the opening out
of living spaces
through the introduction of glass architecture that lets the sunlight
and the light of the moon and stars into our rooms . . . simultaneously
through the greatest possible number of walls that are made entirely of
glass—colored glass. The new environment that we shall thereby create
must bring with it a new culture. . . . Then we shall have a paradise on
Earth and would not need to gaze longingly at the paradise in the sky.15
Does this call for cultural change through the liberating effects of colored glass
remind us of Baudelaire’s narrator, who demands that the glazier remake the
world in rose-tinted lenses? (“No colored panes . . . no magic panes, no panes of
paradise?” he asks.) Deliberate irrationality and perversion quickly become nasti-
ness; soon prismatic hopes shatter into shards. In Genzken’s work, too, we begin
to wonder if the glittering facets of color circumscribe emptiness. For even as her
kaleidoscopic towers invoke glass architecture’s utopian promises, they reflect the
evacuation of Miesian optimism and rigor from the ubiquitous curtain walls of the
anonymous corporate structures such as those rising rapidly at Alexanderplatz
and elsewhere in the city. Colin Rowe diagnosed commercial architects’ deploy-
ment of the curtain wall as the creation of “a suitable veneer for the corporate
activities of ‘enlightened’ capitalism.” 16 Taking Genzken’s title literally, for a
moment, might we suspect that her “buildings” offer us pure veneer, empty of
function or program? If architect Dagmar Richter perceives “that Berlin will
become the first state-organized media city of surface,” surpassing even “our expec-
tations of Las Vegas, Disney, and City Walk,” do Genzken’s glass facades reflect the
apotheosis of image culture, of surface pure and simple?17 Does Scheerbart’s
vision of culture reconfigured by glass architecture morph into the nightmare of
culture dulled by flickering lights and image saturation? Does Genzken show glass
to be a cut-rate substitute for an authentic “jewelry of brilliants”? Or, alternatively,
could she be seen to pointedly literalize the recent trend among star architects to

14. Paul Scheerbart, “Glass Architecture (excerpt),” in Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-century
Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), p. 32.
15. Ibid.
16. Quoted in Reinhold Martin, “Atrocities. Or, Curtain Wall as Mass Medium,” Perspecta 32 (2001), p. 68.
17. Dagmar Richter, “Spazieren in Berlin,” Assemblage 29 (April 1996), p. 75.
Make Life Beautiful! 61

wed literal and phenomenological transparency into sculptural preciousness, as

diagnosed by Hal Foster?
Sometimes . . . skins and scrims only dazzle or confuse, and the archi-
tecture becomes an illuminated sculpture, a radiant jewel. It can be
beautiful, but it can also be spectacular in the negative sense used by
Guy Debord—a kind of commodity fetish on a grand scale, a mysteri-
ous object whose production is mystified.18
Of Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin wrote, “To interrupt the course of the
world—this is Baudelaire’s deepest wish. . . . From this wish sprang his violence,
his impatience and his anger. From it too sprang the ever renewed attempts to
strike at the heart of the world, or to sing it to sleep.”19 Not prone to lullabies,
Genzken’s impulse to burst the glass bubble of our complacency cannot be extri-
cated from an urge to effect change. However, to “strike at the heart of the world”
is an ambivalent motion that can either still the life-sustaining organ or induce it
to beat again. The dialectical tension between destruction and construction propels
effective action—“to see, to know, to tempt fate,” as Baudelaire’s speaker says—while
the alternative is ineffectual ennui.20 Richard Burton articulates the coexistence of
opposing forces in Baudelaire’s poems thus:
The appalling fascination of “Le Mauvais Vitrier” and “Une mort hero-
ique” lies in their insinuation that creation and destruction, the urge
to bind, combine, and unite and the counter-urge to break, draw ulti-
mately from the same reservoir of energy. . . . For Baudelaire, it cannot
be stressed too often, is both the vitrier and his tormentor . . . sado-
masochistically united in their very dividedness and opposition, a con-
geries of antagonistic urges whose truly explosive conflicts are acted
out on and beneath the textual surface of the Petits poèmes en prose.21

If Genzken’s sculptures in concrete and glass hold the two poles in balance, or at
least refuse to tip her hand, it is partially due to their restrained visual vocabulary
and limited materials. Substantial and conflicting stakes play themselves out on
the gritty surface of concrete and across the glossy planes of glass, but the forms
are more or less articulations of post-Minimalist and architectural structures. Even
the object-pedestal distinction of traditional sculpture is clearly maintained.
For those viewers most familiar with Genzken’s early series in concrete and
glass (as well as her other sculptures with clearly architectural morphologies, such
as the series of windows and paravents of the early to mid-1990s or the series of

18. Hal Foster, “The ABCs of Contemporary Design,” October 100 (Spring 2002), p. 194.
19. Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985), p. 39.
20. Baudelaire, “The Bad Glazier,” p. 13.
21. Richard D. E. Burton, “Bonding and Breaking in Baudelaire’s Petits poèmes en prose,” Modern
Language Review 22, no. 1( January 1993), p. 72.
62 OCTOBER

slender, clad columns succeeding them) the radical breakdown of sculptural

restraint, if not of sculptural control, embodied by her suite of assemblages collec-
tively titled Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, begun in 2003, comes as something of
a shock. The antinomies economically alluded to and evoked in the earlier struc-
tures now rupture the surface and wage full-blown war in the combat zone of the
pedestal. The dystopian, destructive, and negative clearly win the day: Genzken
gives free rein to the travesty, the comic-grotesque, the diabolical act, and the hys-
terical outburst.
With Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, post-Minimalist form explodes into the
myriad surfaces and shapes offered by consumer culture: action figures, denim
jeans, straws, cheap glass goblets, sunflower seeds, plastic flora, boots, and bread.
Exuberantly spattered with glossy paint (in blinding white or Day-Glo colors) and
topped or wrapped in sheets of mirror foil, these mad constructions defy all rules
of compositional harmony, visual cohesion, or sculptural integrity. The architec-
tural is hardly absent, but it has suffered grotesque and hilarious disfigurement.
Glass architecture is reduced to glass goblets and vases; soaring arches are mimed
(and maimed) by rubber tubing or by a sheet of bent foil, held in place by liberal
distribution of tape. (In her gratuitous use of tape, Genzken thumbs her nose at
the architectural fetishization of the joint and seam.) The cheapness and tackiness
of her materials, too, is a reflection on the architectural context in Germany:
The awful thing about architecture here is that everything, almost
everything, is done in the cheapest construction style, the cheapest.
They don’t make sure people use the best materials, they just use what’s
cheapest. Just look at Potsdamer Platz, it’s like a piece of scenery!22
The new term here is scenery, for Genzken’s sculptures are now clearly stagings. In
scenes of destruction and deconstruction, armies of tchotchkes play out grisly war-
fare, both ludicrous and unnerving. A figurine of a goalie guards the mouth of a
wine glass containing plastic prisoners. Another figure (friend or foe?) lies
splayed on the battlefield of a crumpled brown jacket, spray-painted garish red
and white. Discordances in scale and of genre (sleek sci-fi fighters, porcelain
ballerinas, clumsy cartoon characters), heightened by seemingly haphazard con-
struction, give the sense that a sadistic child has wreaked havoc on a world of
unsuspecting playthings. The diabolic fervor and perverse humor of these works
seem to be carried out under the aegis of the same sudden, irrational impulses
that incite the idle dreamers of “The Bad Glazier” to action and that drive
Baudelaire’s narrator to torment the hapless glazier. He confesses, “More than
once I have been victim of such attacks and outbursts, which justify our belief that
some malicious Demons slip into us and, without us knowing it, make us carry out

22. Isa Genzken, “Interview with Wolfgang Tillmans,” in Isa Genzken: 1992–2003, Ausstellungen, Arbeiten,
Werkverzeichnis, exh. cat. (Cologne: Walther König, 2003), p. 137.
Make Life Beautiful! 63

Genzken. Detail from

Empire/Vampire, Who
Kills Death. 2003.

their most absurd wishes.”23 In his letter of June 26, 1860, to Gustave Flaubert,
Baudelaire writes, “I realized that I’ve always been obsessed by the impossibility of
understanding certain of man’s sudden thoughts or deeds, unless we accept the
hypothesis that an evil force, external to man, has intervened.” 24 The diabolic,
demonic, and evil as motivating forces in Baudelaire’s work, particularly in Les
Fleurs du Mal and Paris Spleen, have been dismissed by Fredric Jameson as the
expressions of the “second-rate post-Romantic Baudelaire, the Baudelaire of dia-
bolism and cheap frisson, the poet of blasphemy and of a creaking and musty
religious machinery that was no more interesting in the mid-nineteenth century
than it is today.” 25 Jameson wants, instead, to home in on the postmodern
Baudelaire, the one who speaks to his moment of late capitalism and image cul-
ture with an affectless euphoria. But if for Jameson, writing in 1985, the diabolic
smacks of old wives’ superstitions and symbolist gloom, there is a way in which our
present moment, when postmodernism’s endgame of simulacrum has dead-
ended, might reach back to the diabolic—a pact with the devil to escape the end
times—to find in it strategies for drastic action.

23. Baudelaire, “The Bad Glazier,” p. 14.

24. Rosemary Lloyd, ed. and trans., Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 155.
25. Fredric Jameson, “Baudelaire as Modernist and Postmodernist: The Dissolution of the Referent
and the Artificial ‘Sublime,’” in Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 247.
64 OCTOBER

Benjamin seemed to understand the gambit of Baudelaire’s invocation of

the diabolic. “Spleen,” he wrote, “is that feeling which corresponds to catastrophe
in permanence.”26 That haunting phrase “catastrophe in permanence” would
describe our inheritance from the twentieth century, heightened, renewed, and
compounded by the opening bars of the twenty-first century. Genzken has stated
that Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death responds to the attacks of September 11, 2001
(Genzken was in New York at the time), to America’s political machinations in its
aftermath, and to the threat of the Iraq War. Empire and vampire refer to
American hegemony by metonymic proxies: the Empire State Building and its
“vampiric” counterpart, the Chrysler Building. On the world stage the theater of
war plays itself out in encore after encore (featuring frequent set, cast, and cos-
tume changes):
The course of history as represented in the concept of catastrophe has
no more claim on the attention of the thinking than the kaleidoscope in
the hand of a child which, with each turn, collapses everything ordered
into new order. The justness of this image is well-founded. The concepts
of the rulers have always been the mirror by means of whose image an
“order” was established.—This kaleidoscope must be smashed.27
In a decisive gesture, Genzken slams the kaleidoscope against the sculptural
pedestal on which she lets the pieces fall. The mesmerizing subterfuge of mirrors
is diffused in the utter banality of mirror foil. In dropping the flowerpot-turned-
missile, the narrator of “The Bad Glazier” does his part as well, irreparably
shattering the myth of transparency. In “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin
describes the poet’s artistic project as a “parrying of shocks” dealt by the city and
by existence—one might add to this list those shocks dealt by catastrophe.
Benjamin writes, “[Baudelaire’s] shock defense is depicted graphically in an atti-
tude of combat.” Seized by a diabolic paroxysm, the Baudelairean figure takes aim.28
At her exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2006, Genzken expanded on
the sculptural idiom initiated in Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death and subsequently
continued in Wasserspeier and Angels and The American Room, both from 2004. The
untitled 2006 works, effectively installed as a motley group, are for me the culmi-
nation of a no-holds-barred, head-on strike against the sculptural form. In terms
of shock value, these works offer the most devastating parry. For here—even more
so than in Empire/Vampire, where the pedestal remained intact and the scenic
aspect palpable—Genzken sabotages sculptural integrity, pushing it to its limits. If
the earlier series addressed the catastrophe of architecture become theater, war
turned deadly play, and world morphed into an aggregate of interchangeable

26. Benjamin, “Central Park,” p. 34.

27. Ibid.
28. Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah
Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 163.
Make Life Beautiful! 65

commodities, these new works turn up the decibel of her commentary with stri-
dent effectiveness. Wheelchairs and walkers take the place of the base—how
much more succinctly could Genzken convey the crippled state of sculptural prac-
tice? Sculpture’s body collapses into the wheelchairs as so many lengths of ribbon,
unbuckled belts, and crumpled sheets of fabric and plastic sheeting; sculptural
structure is deflated, flaccid, and formless. We are looking at the sorry degrada-
tion of sculpture’s meticulous imitation of the fall of drapery. Long a means of
implying an underlying form while transforming matter—marble into chiffon,
wood into silk—drapery here is a formless heap of coarse ticking and polyester
net. For all the seeming lack of restraint, however, these untitled works are
remarkably economical sculptural puns: the walkers are armored vehicles that
double as complex torture devices as well as rehabilitation aids for the war-
wounded. High-tech crutches lean against the wall like rail-thin automatons or

Genzken. Untitled. 2006.

66 OCTOBER

Genzken. Untitled. 2006.

sci-fi firearms. The enlightened human comes in the form of a some-assembly-

required torchiere lamp outfitted with stick-figure arms, legs, and head. Infant
dolls are shaded by slashed beach-umbrellas—like pint-size Buddhas, wise before
their age. Two more dolls slouch over their plastic ponies, mockeries of the heroic
genre of equestrian statues that are acute enough to elicit laughter. A figure sports
something on its head that looks like Napoleon’s bicorne. They will never make it
across the Saint Bernard Pass.
Such a decoding of these untitled works belies their sculptural radicality;
aggressive in address, trespassing on all conventions, they are decidedly in excess
of comprehension or pithy summary. They distinguish themselves from similar
contemporary aggregations that seem studied and caption-ready. Without mytholo-
gizing Genzken’s artistic process as spontaneous release or id run amok, however,
I assert that Genzken’s works exhibit a deliberate unmooring from tested aesthetic
formulas or conventions, the results of which read as ecstatic outburst. The struc-
tures—constructions built of destruction, held together by sheer force of will and
Make Life Beautiful! 67

exuberant energy—threaten at every moment to splinter into irretrievably dis-

parate elements. These are works on the “brink of psychosis,” as Buchloh usefully
diagnoses. For Buchloh, the permanent catastrophe these works address is that of
consumer culture and universal equivalence:
To have the self succumb to the totalitarian order of objects brings the
sculptor to the brink of psychosis, and Genzken’s new work seems to
inhabit that position. However, since total submission to the terror of con-
sumption is indeed the governing stratum of collective object-relations,
that psychotic state may well become the only position and practice the
sculptor of the future can articulate.29
For both Buchloh’s psychotic and Baudelaire’s splenetic the spasm of inspira-
tion—which physicians perceive as hysterical, the speaker of “The Bad Glazier”
tells us—is a tenuously sustained refusal of total submission.30 The “Baudelaire of
diabolism and cheap frisson,” or his proxy in “The Bad Glazier,” would be
Genzken’s patron saint (or imp?), whose call to “Make life beautiful!” is accompa-
nied by a convulsive, spontaneous action that results in shattered structures.
The flâneur, with his detachment and desire for incognito, is the figure
whom we most often associate with Baudelaire. But taking a cue from Jameson, we
should specify that while the flâneur may be exemplary for the Baudelaire of high-
modernism, he is hardly so for the Baudelaire of diabolism. Instead, as Benjamin
suggests, we have a figure in whom “composure has given way to manic behav-
ior.”31 Hardly at home in the crowd, unable to quietly blend in, this figure calls
attention to himself when suddenly seized by inspiration. He takes a combat
stance against the world. With a reputation for being “a legendary fighting figure
in the streets and bars of Manhattan,” Genzken can productively be seen to
inhabit such a persona.32 In a 1996 conversation with Genzken, her friend Neil
Logan recalls Genzken’s destructive and aggressive attitude after her initial arrival
in the city:
What it seemed you were doing was putting yourself in the situation
where you would be most vulnerable, and then lashing out at that situa-
tion. Like putting yourself on Avenue A at five in the morning, and see-
ing what happens. . . . You told me that your favorite thing to do was to

29. Buchloh, “All Things Being Equal,” Artforum 44, no. 3 (November 2005), p. 224.
30. “Notice, if you please, that the spirit of mystification which, among certain persons, does not
result from effort or scheming, but from a chance inspiration, if only because of the desire’s fervor, has
much in common with that humor, hysterical according to physicians, satanic according to those who
think a little more lucidly than physicians, which drives us irresistibly toward a multitude of dangerous
or improper actions.” Baudelaire, “The Bad Glazier,” p. 14.
31. Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” p. 172.
32. Adrian Dannatt, “Dealers Gazette: Adrian Dannatt’s Choice of New York Contemporary and
Modern Galleries,” The Art Newspaper, November 2000.
68 OCTOBER

go somewhere and make a scene. You told me at one point that after
five o’clock you liked to get aggressive.33
Without banking too much on art-world gossip, cult of personality, or prurient
fascination with self-destructive artists, in this context we ought to consider
Genzken’s obvious vulnerability, aggressiveness, and provocation to the world in
relation to the “parrying of shocks” that returns blow for every blow dealt by
experience and urban life. In this case the particular city would be New York,
where Genzken came in the mid-1990s. Genzken made three collage books in
1995–96, which were published in facsimile a decade later as I Love New York, Crazy
City. Part diary, part archive, part uninhibited self-exhibition, the barrage of
images and text coarsely attached with wide strips of colored packing tape
embody an as-found rawness generated by the friction of pleasure and loathing.
Takeout menus, hotel bills, ATM printouts showing dwindling funds, torn maga-
zine pages, faxes to Germany asking for money, calendars of events (long since
outdated), performance programs, business cards, and casual photographs of
nothing in particular (the fluorescent pall of cheap eateries, skyscrapers viewed
from the ground up, dimly lit interiors, construction sites): Genzken intended the
collaged volumes to be a guidebook to New York. This seems ludicrous when one
first encounters the dissociated, gritty contents. Scrapbook at most, it is certainly
no guidebook. And yet, as with much of Genzken’s work, its perverse logic makes
itself felt in time. In fields of visual non sequiturs, tangents, and fragments,
Genzken takes pains to show phone numbers, addresses, menus, and maps. I Love
New York, Crazy City travesties the guidebook genre’s predication on vetted,
scrubbed-down, and bite-size versions of urban experience. Genzken’s is a guide-
book contra guidebooks, a walking tour for the walking wounded that enacts the
shocks of urban reality across its ruptured pages. Driven by impulses, governed by
no rules, Genzken models for us an attitude that subverts the tourism bureau’s
best intentions. Instead, she gives the city as good as she gets, parrying shocks,
dealing blows, and showing us how to do the same.
The development of Genzken’s work over the past twenty-odd years exempli-
fies a strategy of wholesale (even hyperbolic) embrace of an evacuated condition
as precisely the only way out of that condition. It is a strategy found in Siegfried
Kracauer’s hotel lobby and in Benjamin’s notion of poverty. “We have become
impoverished,” Benjamin declares.
We have given up one portion of the human heritage after another,
and have often left it at the pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true
value, in exchange for the small change of “the contemporary.” . . .

33. Isa Genzken, “Interview with Niel [sic] Logan held in New York, at a bar near the Brooklyn
Bridge on Wednesday, July 9, 1996,” in I Love New York, Crazy City, ed. Isa Genzken and Beatrix Ruf
(Zurich: JRP Ringier, 2006), n.p.
Genzken. Page from I Love New York, Crazy City. 2006.
70 OCTOBER

Holding on to things has become the monopoly of a few powerful peo-

ple. . . . Everyone else has to adapt—beginning anew and with few
resources. They rely on the men who have adopted the cause of the
absolutely new and have founded it on insight and renunciation. In its
buildings, pictures, and stories, mankind is preparing to outlive cul-
ture, if need be. And the main thing is that it does so with a laugh. This
laughter may occasionally sound barbaric. Well and good.34
Barbaric—or diabolic, perhaps. Between spasms of convulsive laughter prompted
by Genzken’s constructions, we are commanded to “Make life beautiful!” even, or
perhaps precisely, at our own risk.

34. Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” in Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, ed.
Michael Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999),
p. 735.