Isa Genzken (D)
Clothesline
(Dedicated to Michael Jackson)


Clothesline (Dedicated to Michael Jackson), 2010
Multi-part mixed media installation 2 display cases, 2 wheel chairs Rope stretched over the square with suspended objects

Mariahilferplatz

How does a square become a place of many voices? A forecourt of a baroque church directly adjacent to the city’s river (in which the “Mur Island” – an installation by US American artist Vito Acconci – has been “anchored” since 2003, the year Graz was “Cultural Capital of Europe), that is at the same time the surface of an underground car park, a kind of base for a large tree, and also the result of an urban square design initiative that would seem to have been driven by Cartesian thought. How can a polylogical place be constructed in a square? Sculptress Isa Genzken has already demonstrated this several times with her works created for public space. Not by introducing symbols of dialog and encounter, familiar from modernist sculptures at public squares, and not by beautifying the existing design of the square. Rather, by picking up multiple codes inscribed in public space and causing them to enter into a humorous dialog. Genzken does not draw her language of form and materials from art only. Instead she quotes and collects everyday objects that she presents in their ambiguity, which can at times also be a source for feeling uncanny.
That is how a rope comes to be spanned between the two buildings flanking the church, with oversized textile objects hung up on it. Two display cases (or are they former designer phone booths – Graz is, after all, about to become “UNESCO Design Capital”) take up their position, like chess pieces, on the square’s grid created by the different stone slabs. This appropriation of space is amplified by objects almost aggressively pressed or pressing into the display cases, objects that can be associated, more or less clearly, with current questions of living in the city. Due to their provisional nature, Genzken’s sculptures have the appearance of anti-monuments. Within the mesh of elements of urban design, the illuminated benches, jets of water, glazed lifts, etc., at the same time her square design seems to advocate everyday life and how it manifests itself in terms of design in the city. The quotations from the world of consumer and mass culture, however, are so clear that the artist obviously does not attempt to exclude herself from her criticism of this exuberance of design and representation.






Commissioned by steirischer herbst
In co-operation with the Center for Social Research at the Karl-Franzens University Graz & Institute for Contemporary Art (IZK) of Graz University of Technology
With thanks to Hans Kupelwieser
Project supporter Land Steiermark
Project sponsor Think!, Gebrüder Weiss & Alpenländische Schilderfabrik


24/09 - 02/11
Utopia and Monument II

Fri 24/09, 5 pm
Vernissage at the exhibition pavilion, Tummelplatz

6 pm
Performance
Paulina Olowska
Onethousandsixhundredand-
seventeen Neons in Warszawa

Andreas-Hofer-Platz
(Roof of carpark)

Interventions of the Institute for Contemporary Art
at the exhibition pavilion


Thu 30/09, 4 - 7 pm
Performative Input

Thu 07/10, 4 - 7 pm
Installation

Thu 14/10, 4 - 7 pm
Sound & media installation

Admission free




Isa Genzken
Born in Bad Oldeslohe (D) in 1948; lives in Berlin (D).


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