IN A typically WRY,
feminist twist on the trauma of a midcareer retrospective, Rosemarie Trockel
named her current exhibition at the
How brave and how funny to
choose this title, inviting us to haul the body of the fifty-three-year-old
artist from the distaff side of the still-quite-sexist German art world and to
read it back into the cramped display of three decades’ worth of production,
including “moving walls,” mechanical sculptures, studies for books, and, above
all, wool pictures. Ariadne, Penelope, Rumpelstiltskin’s moll, as well as the
nameless and numberless females “manning”
textile looms, mills, and fiber-wielding machines around the world are
all called forcefully back into the picture (for me, at any rate) by Trockel’s
titular gesture. But this could certainly be a minority view. No one really
wants to talk about her “knitting” anymore (that’s old news). In the catalogue,
the young scholars Brigid Doherty and Gregory Williams offer often-brilliant interpretations
but largely ignore Trockel’s “issues” with gender, leaving curator Barbara
Engelbach to bring the topic occasionally into view. “Post-Menopause,” equipped
with the dramatically canonizing apparatus of a catalogue raisonné of “wool
works and works related to wool,” at once nods to and refuses the gendered
discourse of the (female) weaver, knitter, and manipulator of hair. Its title
literally acknowledges female body history, while its cheeky prefix declares “I’m so over that!”
And in many ways Trockel
has always been “so over” feminism-at least the yearning, angry type that must
have motivated Faith Wilding, for example, in her crocheted installation piece Womb Room, 1972. But Trockel is also
generationally over Minimalism and post-Minimalism, reducing Robert Morris’s
canonical Threadwaste with Mirror, 1968, to just so much raw
material—an informe
tangle that refuses to posit the body In relation to its own industrial state.
No doubt some will be annoyed
by my insistence on Trockel’s feminism—aren’t we so over that, too? But I would
argue that the Installation In Cologne begs for
precisely such a reading, opening as it does with an enormous new wall work, Yes, but, 2005, that consists of hanging
white wool yarn, dipped to varying degrees in bloodred
paint. On adjacent wails hilarious labels reinforce the abject comedy of the
piece, warning visitors (in German and English): “Touch at your own risk! Color
of wool rubs off!” (I tested it, but it didn’t.) Lest the whole thing seem Just too maudlin, with its ebbing and flowing “graph” of red
that finally trickles to pure white, Trockel gives us a final punch lane:
Ceramic dashes push their way through the wall of now-white fiber to collect a
few red-flecked strands into pales, like so much cooked spaghetti. Introducing
the show’s generally rollicking tone, Yes, but melds
Vienna Actionism with The Dinner Party catered by a Raggedy Ann Chef Boyardee.
Never monolithic, the
feminism I’m bringing to this work came of age when Trockel did (in the ‘70s
and ‘8os), offering a loose and evolving set of frameworks that treated gender,
in Joan Scott’s formulation, as a “useful category of analysis,” with embodied
experience written into It as both culturally determined and negotiable. It’s a
particularly powerful tool for analyzing Trockel’s hometown installation, where
we see her tackling all the male Icons on view elsewhere in the Ludwig—icons
she must have memorized as the chocolate king’s holdings became public over the
years. My favorite of these dialectical pairings is Trockel’s engagement with
Donald Judd’s elegant, eight- unit channeled-steel-floor piece (on view
upstairs) In her wall work, Phobia, zoom. Here, Judd’s hard-hat posture is styled as a form of
heterosexual panic, induced by gleaming panels of anodized aluminum that are
canted off the wall, crisscrossed, and fringed like a belly dancer’s halter
top.
The connection runs deeper
than the visual pun implied between Phobia’s
“stack” and Judd’s classic use of that form, since the treasure trove of funky
Buchentwürfe (Drafts for Books), 1985-95/2002, contains a 1988 volume also
titled Phobia, which Trockel
described as “a commentary on the psychological classification of Judd’s
attitude toward the female sex.” The cover features an early photograph of the ur-male artist contemplating his work, an image Trockel
fiendishly altered by airbrushing out the fly of Judd’s jeans, giving his shirt
a pointedly curvaceous contour, and styling his long hair into a Breck girl
flip. I’m not claiming, of course, that Trockel’s wall piece is “better” than
Judd’s floor units upstairs (or James Rosenquist’s equally related crisscross
hanging picture made of “fringed” Mylar downstairs). Rather, her work puts into
question the whole system of valuation and determination itself (who gets put
where), making Judd’s work more interesting in the process (and, as we know
from the Man himself, “a work needs only to be interesting’’). Trockel cooks up
her responses and moves on, letting us munch on the results. It’s tremendous
fun seeing her rethink Jasper Johns and Bruce Nauman (with partially clad or
bewigged body casts), Andy Warhol (his products become her logotypes), Sigmar
Polke (from dots to plaids), Chuck Close (fingerprints disaggregated from
figuration and made into Rorschachs), Richard Serra (whose rusting vertical
plates get outfitted with stove-top burners), et al. All these sources come out
gleaming with glamour and fuzzy with feminist wit.
Perhaps not surprisingly,
the German-born sculptor Eva Hesse emerges as the most sympathetic mentor for
an understanding of Trockel’s work: Witness the humor, subtle feminist
commentary, and generative grammars, as well as the sustained fascination with
fiber. What marts Trockel’s generational position, though, is her capacity to
process the burden of art history through both the organic and machinic phyla. Those dual modes,
hybrid in Trockel’s practice, made her work seem absolutely contemporary when
it burst onto the scene in the mid- to late ’80s, poised like that of other
sophisticates (Peter Halley, for example) between Minimalist abstraction and Pop
mediation.
If feminism of the type I
have been referencing sometimes privileged the organic, its reinvention by
Trockel is crucially engaged with the machinic.
(Quite literally, since there is even an automated sculpture here in which a
mechanized, bewigged male manikin repetitively plies his sponge between a
wall-mounted mirror and the gallery floor.) The edge of cruelty (malice is his term) Gregory Williams
notes in his essay on Trockel’s animal houses is the calling card of the
machines phylum. For example, in It’s a
Tough Job But Somebody Has to Do It, 1991 (with its Kruger-like English
title), the connections between four plastic tubes and the teats of an actual
cow’s udder are experienced as simultaneously funny, pathetic, and painful—not
unlike Trockel’s hanging stove tops, comic in their verticality and drooping
electrical plugs but threatening to singe the unwary all the same.
Trockel thus interrogates
the two sides of our anthropocentric epistemologies--animal and machine-both of
which constitute sustained threads In what I am
calling her feminist ethics. The foundational wool pictures, after all, depend
on the hair of lowly ungulates, but this animal substance must be spun by
machines into strands, further twined into yarn, and fed into other machines
with a low tolerance for variation, before Trockel’s programs can drive the
fiber into discernable knitted patterns. This animal/machine continuum was
harder to notice at the time the wool pictures first appeared. The wool seemed “dead,”
processed into comical repeated patterns: Francesco Saroglia’s
Woolmark logo from 1964, Communism’s hammer and
sickle, the Playboy bunny, or the export phrase MADE IN WESTERN GERMANY
reiterated elegantly in gray on black.
But the new work Menopause takes us to a different place.
Perhaps we might call It the post-Dolly present, In
which the sweater made from the cloned sheep’s fleece drew the largest crowd ever
registered at the
But it is the product of
our contemporary moment, which begs us to interrogate the organic and machinic phyla anew-revealing that the body of the hybrid
is mortal, and sags, and faces an end more like humus than rust. Something must
be made, after all, of the hand knitting in Menopause
and two other related large-scale works. The only precedent occurs in a smile
hand-knitted piece from 1986, Eisberg,
in which the knitted white wool is stretched over a blue-painted canvas. Rightly celebrated by Doherty in her catalogue essay as an
indication of Derridean “re-marking” of genre, the “iceberg.”
at thirty centimeters square, is
unprepossessing-salient in the show only for being a near pendant (and
reversal) of Für die, die keine Strickbilder mögen, aber
trotzdem Kommunisten sind (For Those Who Do Not Like Wool Pictures, But Are
Communists Nevertheless), 1988, another work of exactly the same size but this
time with primed canvas stretched over the now-invisible wool. Eisberg would have remained as unique as
the “Commie” picture, except for the audacious monumentalizing of its premise
in Menopause, which is nearly ten
times as large. Clearly conceived as summit, reversals, and renewals of her
life In stitches, Menopause
and its two sibling works transpose hand for machine, framed for merely
stretched, and monochrome for pattern or figuration.
Each of these departures
has important ramifications to be worked out over time by Trockel and her
audience. The one I’d like to emphasize here is the artist’s crucial shift from
machine to hand—neither nostalgic nor Luddite, since Trockel is not necessarily
the one doing the labor. The handmade quality here is emphasized by the artist’s
reversal of the knit to its “wrong,” or purled, side, revealing divagations in
fiber tension that would be much less visible on the smooth, or “right,” side
of the knit. Since the hand knitter can never feed the wool into the crux of
the needles with exactly the same tension each time, there is an unavoidable
rhythm in the purl stitches, an index of the yarn slowly becoming tight and
relaxing as a new length of fiber is
pulled from the hank. The body rhythms of the knitters, themselves disciplined
models for the regular shuttling of the knitting machine,
become visible in the surface. With Menopause
and its companion works, Trockel has shifted from pattern to process, taking us
from the logos of our subjectification-whether Woolmarks or Playboy bunnies-to
its embodied, internalized, and regimented modes.
CAROLINE A. JONES IS
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF ART AT THE MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF
TECHNOLOGY (SEE CONTRIBUTORS.)