ANTI-MONUMENTS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE 21ST CENTURY: Isa Genzken and Irina Korina

* Daniel Bulatov is an art historian and scholar working at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, as well as being the author of the monograph “The Rebirth of Modernism: German Art 1945-1965. Artistic Theory and Exhibition Practices” (2017)

At first glance, the German and Russian art scenes would appear to have had little in common over the past 20 years. On the one hand, you have Germany, occupying a leading position in the global art industry; on the other, you have contemporary Russian art. Global interest in the latter (aroused by the tinge of novelty associated with perestroika) is gradually fading, but, at the same time, it has not yet quite overcome its provincial inferiority complex. In this context, it is even more interesting to note remarkably similar phenomena that have appeared independently in both Russian and German art. One striking example of this is the convergence in a number of features of the artistic methods of Isa Genzken (b. 1948) and Irina Korina (b. 1977) that occurred in the mid 2000s and early 2010s. Given the different contexts in which each artist is immersed, their work shares very little in terms of themes or visual traits. Despite this, they are united by their method of choosing materials, to an extent by their attitude to form and, most importantly, by their profound rethinking of the very concepts of sculpture and installation.

IRINA KORINA. Column. 2009
Installation view, Museum Folkwang, Essen

This rethink is linked to the banishment of the monumental basis from art, which became one of the international vectors in the development of art in the 2000s and achieved its most prominent expression in the “Unmonumental: The Object in the 21st Century”[1] exhibition that opened in New York's New Museum in 2007. This show brought together the work of a variety of artists (including Isa Genzken, representing the older generati on), who had created “sculptural assemblages” that were “conversational, provisional, at times even corroded and corrupted, unheroic and manifestly unmonumental.” The pieces exhibited were called upon to reflect the spirit of the age, which the exhibition's curators formulated as “an age of crumbling symbols and broken icons.”[2] This characterisation of modernity exactly dovetails with the art of Irina Korina, for whom the motif of the Soviet legacy (with the ascetic purism of its forms) is extremely important, buried as it is under the flotsam and jetsam of market culture.[3]

From the point of view of art history, this anti-monumental tendency does not at first glance appear to be a particularly new one. The technique of assemblage, which emerged in the 1910s, constantly developed and reached its zenith in the 1960s alongside movements such as neo-Dada in the USA and New Realism in Europe. However, industrially produced objects and materials were rarely used in early assemblages, and were even more rarely considered to be self-sustained denotationally productive elements. Instead, in the postwar years, mnemonically rich ready-made pieces were at the centre of attention as direct conductors of the current of life. For modern artists, the assemblage is not a cast made of reality using “found objects” (objets trouves), but rather a new figurative ensemble in which the relation of things to reality is akin to that of an index. The difference between these approaches was formulated by Genzken in one of her interviews, in which she said: “I'm not interested in readymades. The meaning is in the combination of things.”[4] The random and chaotic linking of homogenous or heterogeneous elements seen in classical assemblages (such as those of Arman) is opposed by their melding in an integrated descriptive structure. In that sense, the art of modern “anti-monumentalists” owes more to Robert Rauschenberg's “Combines” with their finished sculptural forms. The main thing, however, standing behind Genzken's rejection of ready-made art is the use of new (not possessing their own history or individual aura) objects of industrial production along with building and packaging materials, which are subjected to manipulations and transformed into an organic sculptural mass.

Let us ask ourselves this question: what is the nature of anti-monumentalism in the art of Genzken and Korina? Approaching these artists for the first time, it seems as if they can have no shared background for their creation of anti-monuments, being artists of different generations and artistic environments. However, that is only partially true. We will examine what it is exactly that each considered to be “the monumental”, the base point against which they reacted. In the case of Genzken, whose career began in West Germany in the 1970s, this was Minimalism, with its fixation on autonomous and often monotonous sculptural form and its programmatic rejection of emotional impact on the viewer.[5] In the case of Korina, who graduated from the Set Design faculty of the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts in 2000, this role was played by the official artistic policy of the state, which, despite its support in the 1990s for many initiatives in the realm of contemporary art, had, on the whole, not undergone any fundamental change since the Soviet era, preserving its predilection both for archaic arts unions and methodologies of artistic education, and for thinking in terms of grand bronze memorials.[6]

However, that's not all that the “monumental” comprises. The years of perestroika, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to a new overarching context for the development of art in Germany and Russia: the existence of the totalitarian regime became a thing of the past for all countries of the former Socialist bloc, including the GDR, an experience that formed zones of collective emotional trauma. We should remember, however, that West German society passed through a similar experience of life in a post-totalitarian space decades earlier and that, in all those years, German artists did not cease asking questions about collective guilt and the legacy of Nazism. In the 1960s, for example, this role was played by Georg Baselitz and Gerhard Richter (Genzken's husband, 1982-1993). In the 1980s, the theme of the inglorious deaths of empires and their mythologies appears in both German and Russian art. This is one of the central themes of the art of such dissimilar contemporaries as Anselm Kiefer and Grisha Bruskin (each as important as the other in their time for their respective art scenes). The historic gaze (a sort of X-ray image of the actual envi ronment, in which the ghosts of the past are always to be found lurking behind the realities of the present) was common to both the Russian and German contributions to the Venice Biennale in 1993. In that year, Ilya Kabakov's total installation “Red Pavilion” was echoed by the no less “total” “Germania” of Hans Haacke. The former featured a wooden fence around the Russian pavilion and turned it into a building site (a metaphor for the unending construction projects of Communism) with a sham ziggurat in the yard, distantly reminiscent of the central pavilion at VDNH in Moscow, but the latter smashed the floor of the German pavilion, in order to demonstrate, in the literal sense, its true foundations - marble tiles from the time of Hitler's Germany.[7] In both cases, the public was presented with mausoleums of dead utopias and unrealised ambitions. In the context of this article, these projects are interesting because they were, on the one hand, aimed at the conceptual deconstruction of architectural forms that served a propaganda purpose and were, in this sense, anti-monumental. On the other hand, the other hand they were themselves very monumental, which was due as much to the “totality” of meaning they contained, not permitting loose interpretation, as to their actual physical dimensions. It is difficult or even impossible to imagine any other interpretation of the plywood “Red Pavilion” than that of a parody of the Stalin Empire style or to see in the floor of the “Germania” Pavilion disappearing beneath one's feet anything other than a direct antithesis of the nativism of Nazi ideology.[8]

In this light, the common roots of the “anti-monumen- talism” of Genzken and Korina can be seen in their opposition to the explicit narratives of conceptual art (the acknowledged masters of which are Haacke and Kabakov) and indeed their opposition to the way of thinking in terms of antagonistic categories (largely linked to the global confrontation of superpowers) which was common to many artists in the second half of the 20th century, a thought process that did not entertain the idea of gradations of tone or any form of relativism, including aesthetic. Such an approach could not but become outmoded as the 2000s approached, a decade characterised on the one hand by the triumph of globalisation and the liberal market model and, on the other, by the appearance of hidden threats, the most important of which became, of course, international terrorism.

Genzken's entire creative path can be considered as a consistent movement away from self-contained Modernist sculpture, away from an isolated object in space, towards constellations of different materials, spatial structures and photographic images. Beginning in the 1970s with sculptures in the spirit of Minimalism (her “Ellipsoids” and “Hyperboloids”, carved from wood with the help of computer programs, are both distinguished by their mathematical consistency),[9] in the 1980s, Genzken began to create pieces of a diametrically opposite nature: using reinforced concrete, she addressed the aesthetics of ruins, fragmented and incomplete. The technicism of Minimalism was contrasted with the roughness of the material, the sculptural “possession” of space with anti-monumentalism in terms of the miniature concrete wireless receivers and window frames and constructions cast from the very same concrete, reminiscent of the frames of pre-fabricated “panel houses”, which stand like busts on high pedestals. Although these works occasionally give rise to associations with barriers and collate with the fall-of-empire theme mentioned above, this is not the only possible interpretation to which they are open. Those very concrete boxes can be read as protective shelters or as brittle memory spaces that are unsuitable for reconstruction.

In the 2000s, Genzken rejected materials characteristic of Modernism (wood, gypsum and, above all, concrete) in favour of plastic and synthetic fabrics, as well as everyday objects such as chairs, clothes, toys and the various knick-knacks that alleviate the lives of modern consumers. This was not, however, a rejection of sculpture, but rather a transformation of the very understanding of sculpture into an open and egalitarian system, in which loosely knit parts are not only not subordinated one to another, but, quite the opposite, oppose at all costs the formation of hierarchical links. As Benjamin Buchloh put it, what occurs in Genzken's art is “to have the self succumb to the totalitarian order of objects”, which literally “brings the sculptor to the brink of psychosis.”[10] In Genzken's art, “psychosis” is not only the state of the sculptor, who feels helplessness, having plucked up the courage to bathe in the boundless ocean of things, each of which delights the eye in its own way (here are artificial leaves, gaudy sports equipment, decorative figurines and elegant vases with glass pebbles in their bases). The essence of her work in the 2000s is the mass psychosis of modern consumer society, in which the items piled atop one another enter into a dysfunctional competition, that is to say, not of a qualitative or semantic nature, but rather of a purely retinal one, of the beautiful against the beautiful, to put it plainly. This is kitsch, but again a kitsch that is not monumental in the way that we can see, say, in the art of Jeff Koons, where everything is based on the fetishism of a particular object, which is repeatedly replicated in what are, in some cases, monstrous proportions.[11] It is not a coincidence that one of the spatial forms Genzken returned to most often in the 2000s was a bouquet, sometimes of artificial flowers, sometimes of any imaginable material (“Holiday”, 2004; “Elephant”, 2006).

The resistance of items taken from real life to a comprehensibly organised form or an easily read concept is what unites the anti-monumentalism of Genzken and the installations of Korina. Arguably, the point of greatest similarity between the figurative solutions of the two artists came in 2008-2009, when Korina created three column-shaped installations: “Night Charge”, “Column” and “Fountain”, which was shown in the Russian pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. The main materials used for these pieces were colourful oilcloths and the chopped-up bags of shuttle traders - indispensable attributes of the already historic 1990s and the symbolic pillars of Russia's market economy. In “Column” this material was still structurally ordered, if in a fanciful way that recalled a kubyshka pillar (an element of 17th-century Russian architecture), in “Night Charge” the oilcloth tentacles writhed like intestines and in “Fountain” (which, like a real column, reached the ceiling), they foamed, as is appropriate for streams of water. Playing with the form of a column, Korina disavowed not only the idea of a support, but also the architectural pretensions of modernity: the base of “Column” was a model of a typical garage “shell” (portable garages, once a common site in Russian cities) and its capital was a small sham house jacketed with siding and replete with an air-conditioning unit.

The form of a column, as well as exchanges with architecture, are components of many of Genzken's pieces. As far back as the 1990s, she began a series of sculptures in the form of square columns, the surfaces of which were covered in bright and shiny materials such as mirror tiles, holographic foil and multi-coloured industrial belts. In 2000, she created the series of assemblages “Fuck the Bauhaus”, which were comprised of materials that simply came to hand (including pizza boxes, scotch tape, seashells, and various stationery items), and used to create models of buildings representing the antithesis of the Bauhaus's functional purity of line. In 2008, Genzken shocked the public with her series “Ground Zero”, in which she proposed her ideas for the rebuilding of the space left by the destruction of the World Trade Center. Genzken's “Architectural Ensemble” included a “Memorial Tower”, “Hospital”, “Car Park”, “Osama Fashion Store”, “Church”, “Light”, and the “Disco Soon” construction. In the low room in London's Piccadilly Gallery where the artist's parody skyscrapers were first displayed, they resembled columns - especially “Hospital” with a hospital trolley as a base and a tasteless artificial bouquet as a capital. In this way, Genzken attacked the utopian content of both prewar Modernism and contemporary consumer culture. At the same time, her iconoclastic gesture was carried out with such vitality that it seems to be not entirely bereft of a certain optimism.

That last consideration is also entirely applicable to Korina's installations, in which the phantom of the past comes to life in the form of theatrical props. History repeating itself as farce is the content of a piece as early as “Back to the Future” (2004), in which viewers were welcomed by smiling Soviet cosmonauts made of arranged foam polystyrene tiles, as well as, for example, the installation “When the Trees were Big” (2010), the heroes of which were life-affirming wrought-iron constructions from Soviet times (such as a swallow rocketing upwards) that had had their day and were now plugged into bottles of supposedly telekinetically “charged” water via giant stumps (psychics and “TV healers” were a major feature of the early post-Soviet period). What we see in Korina's work is a carnivalisation not only of the past, but also of modernity, which is presented to the viewer rebuilt into fanciful and garish objects. Such a piece is “Hut” (2012), a market stall decorated with artificial flowers rising up in the forest on “channelled” metal supports. Are we looking at the home of a 21st-century Baba Yaga (in Slavic folklore, a witch inhabiting a house on chicken legs) or perhaps a parody of the architectural tastes of the contemporary Russian elite, in which classical porticos are combined with the kitschiest decorative materials?

In the link preserved by Korina with her national context, we can see the most important substantive difference between her work and Genzken's oeuvre. Genzken, having spent a lot of time in the USA, always conceived herself as standing outside the narrow category of a “German artist”[12]. It was largely for this reason that the creative methods of these two artists began to develop in different directions in the mid 2010s. In Genzken's art, the anti-monumental remained linked with a universal culture of consumption that recognises no political borders. An expression of this was her series of impersonalised “Actors” (2013-2016): mannequins dressed in fanciful combinations of clothes, deprived of even a hint of any identity. In contrast, within Korina's works, two simultaneous tendencies began to show: on the one hand, a social-critical one, appearing as a reaction to the militarisation and stagnation of public life in Russia (the apogee of which was her total installation of 2017 “Good Intentions”) and, on the other hand, simulation, linked with the use of a wide range of textures and images to cover inflatable figures or fapade fabrics and mesh banners. In the latter case, assemblages of real objects have been replaced by the construction of new realities that reflect the modern reality of timelessness, in which the past and present are mashed together in a snowball, an image from childhood that turns out to be inflated, as in the installation “'Isotopes Stop” (2019).[13] Korina's latest works are also anti-monuments, first and foremost, thanks to the fact that what is signified in them is never exclusively determined by the signifier. They leave the viewer in a state of disorientation, or rather, orientate them towards their own life experience. These assemblages are already made not so much of characteristic contemporary textures and materials as from subjective associations and personal reckonings with the past.

As one can judge from the art of Genzken and Korina, the anti-monumentalism that emerged at the beginning of the 21st century implied qualitative changes in the approaches taken to sculpture and installations. This involves not only the rebirth of the assemblage technique but also its combination with fields that have been excluded from art in the past, such as theatrical decoration, environmental design and fashion. If Genzken stood at the wellspring of the rejection of monumentalism and wielded an unprecedented influence on the younger generation of Western artists,14 Korina came to this tendency thanks to her own sharpened sense of time. For the all the differences in perspective from Berlin and Moscow, the anti-monuments of both Genzken and Korina emerged as reactions to the same era - the glamorous 2000s, which heralded the end of classical paradigms in art and a transition to that state of “hybridity” in which we are still living today.

IRINA KORINA. "Isotopes" Stop. 2019
Group exhibition GUM-Red-Line, Moscow. Courtesy: GUM-Red-Line Gallery

ISA GENZKEN (b. 1948, Bad Oldesloe) is a German artist and sculptor. Among the prizes she has received are the Berliner Kunstpreis (2000), the Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis (2002), the Kaiserring Art Award of the City of Goslar (2017) and the Nasher Prize from the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (2019). Genzken has taken part in the “documenta” exhibition three times (1982, 1992, and 2002), in the Venice Biennale many times, and also in the Biennales of Sydney (1988), Istanbul (2001), Taipei (2006), Sao Paulo (2010), Moscow (2015), Berlin (2016) and Montreal (2016). In 2007, Genzken represented Germany at the 52nd Venice Biennale with her project “Oil”. There have been large retrospectives of her works at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, the Museum Ludwig (Koln), the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Wien, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the Kunsthalle Bern and at other renowned institutions.

IRINA KORINA (b. 1977, Moscow) is a Russian artist and theatrical designer. In 1999, she received the theatrical prize “Debut”. She is a winner of the Soratnik professional prize in the field of modern art (2006, 2009, and 2012), the Italian Terna prize (2012), and a finalist of the Kandinsky Prize in the “Project of the Year” category (2011, 2014). Korina twice won the Innovation national competition in the field of contemporary art: in 2007, in the “New Generation” category and, in 2014, in the “Work of Visual Art” category (with the project “Refrain”). In 2009, Korina was one of the contributors to Russia’s pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. In 2017, her installation was presented in the main project of the 57th Venice Biennale (curator: Christine Macel). Korina’s most significant personal exhibitions have taken place at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, GRAD in London, and the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz.

1. Exhibition catalogue: “Unmonumental: the Object in the 21st Century.” London: Phaidon; New York: New Museum, 2007.
2. URL.: https://archive.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/918 (accessed on: 18.09.20).
3. In the artist's own words, “the brightest of my childhood memories are those of Soviet Moscow, made exclusively of architecture and trees” (Rukhina, Eva Irina Korina: There are too many artists in this world and that leads to a crisis of overproduction” // “Artkhronika”. 2011, No.2. P. 56).
4. Schafhausen, Nicolaus (ed.). “Isa Genzken: Oil.” German Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2007. Koln: DuMont, 2007. P. 156.
5. Ibid. P. 155.
6. To this day, those graduates of classic art schools who wish to become modern artists generally find it necessary to undertake additional education. After graduating from the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts, Korina studied at the Institute of Contemporary Art Problems in Moscow and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.
7. Haacke presented the word “Germania” in the apse of the pavilion, echoing the pavilion's title on its architrave. Like the marble floors, the Latin (and Italian) name for Germany appeared on the pavilion's façade during its reconstruction in 1938 (by the architect Ernst Haiger). It was the name Hitler proposed to give Berlin in its new incarnation as capital of the world.
8. The reference to the Fascist ideology of “blood and soil” was also articulated in the name of the album published for the German pavilion of 1993: “Bodenlos” - literally “without floor/soil”.
9. However, as the artist herself has noted, critics already saw these pieces as a challenge to Minimalism, as they included an associative aspect. See: “Diedrich Diederichsen in conversation with Isa Genzken” // Farquharson, Alex; Diederichsen, Diedrich; Breitwieser, Sabine. Isa Genzken. London: Phaidon, 2006. P. 15.
10. Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. 'All Things Being Equal.' // “Artforum.” November 2005. P. 225.
11. Genzken's giant steel street flowers (the first of which, “Rose”, was erected in Leipzig in 1997) are an exception in her art, although they are unique objects that are not scaled-up copies of her other pieces.
12. Schafhausen, Nicolaus (ed.). Op. cit. P. 155.
13. The name of this piece, the forms of which are reminiscent of old Soviet toys, are linked with the Isotopes shop that has been on Leninsky Prospekt since 1959, and which the artist passed regularly on the trolleybus in her childhood.
14. Such as Rachel Harrison (b. 1966), Carol Bove (b. 1971) and Simon Denny (b. 1982).