Ecce homo: Isabelle Graw on art and subjecthood.Print

Author: Graw, IsabelleArticle Type: EssayGeographic Code: 1USADate: Nov 1, 2011Words: 2927Publication: Artforum InternationalISSN: 1086­7058

THE RESURGENCE OF THE HUMAN FIGURE in much recent sculpture cannot beseparated from a renewed attention to the idea of the subject. Although it is so commonplaceas to go unnoticed, the idea of the artwork as a kind of subject in itself was one of the epochalinventions of modernity, crystallized in the radical shift in aesthetic theory in the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries. At that juncture, it was specifically tied to painting: For Hegel,sculpture was able to "create a unity between body and spirit," but painting alone allowed in amore abstract "principle of subjectivity." In recent years, scholars have extended this notion tomake room for considerations of both the changing contemporary status of the subject andchallenges to the notion of medium. Art historian Michael Luthy and philosopher ChristophMenke, for example, argue that all artworks function as "figures of the subject." In theircontinual negotiation between subject and medium, artworks dissolve such stable categoriesin a give­and­take that results in the medium assuming anthropomorphic qualities, while thesubject in turn takes on the properties of a "quasi medium."' (1)

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This notion challenges the high­modernist idea of art as transcending subjectivity, mostfamously posed by Michael Fried in his 1967 essay "Art and Objecthood." As is well known,Fried here both diagnosed and decried "a kind of latent or hidden ... anthropomorphism"(2) atthe heart of Minimalist sculpture. Considered in this light, the objecthood m Fried's essaycould be interpreted quite differently­­ as subjecthood in disguise. Even the obdurate,industrially fabricated objects of Minimalism can, it turns out, be considered as quasi subjects.Consider how Fried compared the "obtrusiveness ... even aggressiveness" of works byDonald Judd or Robert Morris to the feeling of "being distanced, or crowded, by the silentpresence of another person." One could say that it is the "behavior" of these works that hedisliked: They reminded him of how it feels to be bothered by someone occupying the sameliteral space.

If the early post­Minimalists­­think of Eva Hesse with her Sans IT, 1 968, or Vito Acconci withhis Seedbed, 1972­­insisted on the repressed, personal side of Minimalism, this underlyingaspect was forced more strongly into the sphere of identity politics and ideology critique inworks that took up a Minimalist vocabulary in the early 1990s. Janine Antoni's Gnaw, 1992, forinstance, confronted the cube with Antoni's sexual identity and obsessive female behavior,while Mike Kelley's Craft Morphology Flow Chart, 1991, demonstrated how the aesthetic ofMinimalism belongs to a social order that disciplines and punishes.

The attempt to reconcile a Minimalist vocabulary with overt suggestions of the human figureis, however, a more recent phenomenon, typified by artists such as Michaela Meise (e.g., inLiegende [Reclining Figures], 2007), Kai Althoff [Solo for eine hefallene Trompete [Solo for an

Afflicted Trumpet], 2005), and Tom Burr [Addict­Love, 2008), as well as Isa Genzken andRachel Harrison, in whose work it takes on particular resonances I will discuss below.Although Fried used the notion of anthropomorphism to describe a form of intense subjectlikepresence, rather than an actual representation of a human figure (which is how theMinimalists themselves largely understood the term), such works suggest that the conflation ofthese definitions in many of the debates at the time has a renewed relevance today. Not onlyhas the animation of Minimalist forms now become a sculptural convention, but it has itselfoften been conjoined with what Minimalist sculpture most wanted to avoid­­the easyrecognition of the human figure.

ALTHOUGH IT IS POSSIBLE to read human characteristics into Genzken's early, moreemphatically architectural work, over the past ten years her assemblages have become moreand more explicitly anthropomorphic. The 1994­2003 series ''Saulen'' (Columns) operateslargely according to a still­latent anthropomorphism. These pillars are made of rectangularsections of wood, copper, aluminum, glass, and mirrors, and some are titled after her artistfriends: Wolfgang, 1998, for Wolfgang Tillmans; Dan, 1999, for Dan Graham; Kai, 2000, forAlthoff. (One­­Isa, 2000­­ is called after its maker.) But it is not only names that turn thesesculptures into personages of a kind: They also ask the viewer to acknowledge their existenceand relate to them as if they were bodies, since each side has a different "face" or surface. Inaddition, the mirrored sections reflect the viewer, inscribing the spectator's own body withinthe work.

The human figure is represented more literally in many of Genzken's recent sculptures. Someincorporate mannequins or dolls as stand­ins for the human being, such as the action figuresin the twenty­two assemblages that make up Empire/Vampire, Who Kills Death, 2003. Theseplastic figurines not only invite us to read human traits into them but strongly suggest that weare dealing with surrogate people, if not with human beings themselves. Even where the dollsor mannequins are absent, as in the wheelchair sculptures Genzken has made since 2006,we are asked to imagine the presence of an absent person. It is impossible not to project theimage of collapsed people info the wheelchairs, an association encouraged by the fabric thatis typically thrown over them, whose bright colors themselves convey a sensation of life.

The return of the human in Harrison's work similarly demands to be examined alongside itsattendant sociopolitical and art­historical ramifications. Installations such as Trees for theForest, 2007, transform rectilinear Minimalist elements into tall painted pedestals supportingpainted portraits found at flea markets to create what art historian George Baker has called"sculptural objects masquerading as people." (3) In both Genzken's and Harrison's work, thesuggestion of a subject like presence­­even the "subject­hood" of the work itself­­becomesparadoxically even more emphatic through the incorporation of Minimalist forms.

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It is not only their shape or size, however, but also the painted surfaces in both artists' workthat forcefully implies subjectivity. Consider how the specter of modernist color was alreadyconjured up by the metal and mirror plates applied to Genzken's "Saulen," which, like herearlier works, asserted the properties of a "sculptural body in actual space." (4) In Genzken'sUntitled, her assemblage at Skulptur Projekte Munster in Germany in 2007, the brightlycolored parasols function as a canvas ground for the figures­­dolls mistreated and distorted bysilver spray paint. Or consider how many of Harrison's sculptures, not only Trees for theForest but also, for instance, Claude Levi­Strauss, 2007, activate a whole set of painterlygestures, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism to graffiti­like sprays of color. Ibelieve that an expanded notion of painting has a concrete purpose in these sculptures: It

supports their subject­hood by making them seem more alive. (5) Indeed, Harrison andGenzken both activate the traditional role of color as the element of painting by which a senseof vitality can be produced. (6)

The two artists' multimedia installations exemplify what Rosalind Krauss has termed our "post­medium condition," demonstrating once and for all how the borders between genres havedissolved. Within this hybrid framework, however, painting is understood as a specific set ofconventions and as a belief system even as it undergoes a fundamental expansion anddistortion. (Consider Harrison's Al Gore, 2007, a rough­hewn block the height of a tall humanthat David Joselit has aptly described as "painted in patches of green, deep red, and pink in amanner that brings to mind Impressionism without falling into camp reenactment." (7) Hischoice of words rightly implies that painterly codes seem to be deployed without ironic intent.Gestural painting, conventionally seen, suggests an indexical relationship to its producer: Theperson who leaves its traces seems to be contained in the product. But something different ishappening here: What enables Harrison's reenactment of a belief system called "painting" tobe taken seriously is that it occurs in a highly theatrical antimodernist setting­­­a setting,ironically, created by the very "stage presence" that Fried had censured in Minimalism. So,too, many of Harrison's objects (for example, Tiger Woods, 2006) confront Minimalism'sshapes with amorphous forms in order to suggest a lifelike energy­­ an impression that isenhanced in turn by the application of paint.

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Just as Minimalism lost its (fictional) purity, becoming contaminated by what it had sought toexclude, painting, too, is no longer a clearly delineated practice. Genzken demonstratesanother aspect of this shift, by pointing out the ways in which painterly codes have been usedand abused in graphic design and in club culture. Consider her use of colored foil, strips ofnegatives, spray paint, and tape in recent works such as Memorial Tower (Ground Zero),2008. Though one could certainly argue that the tape is here used like pigment, or that thedifferent types of fabric ''expressively" thrown over assemblages such as the "Wind" pieces of2009 act as a kind of painterly animation, all these elements are ultimately just wilddecorations. As much as these seemingly expressive gestures remind us of painting'scapacity to suggest a Hegelian principle of subjectivity, we are also confronted with the loss ofagency within painting, the absorption of painterly traditions by popular design.

If painting and Minimalism are mobilized in Genzken's and Harrison's work m support of arenewed anthropomorphism, then it is significant that both are deployed in a way that makesplain their contamination by other discourses. It is in large part through the ways in whichthese works use the legacy of Minimalism and the codes of painting alike that they convey anew sense of subjecthood, a kind of subjectivity that is itself also corrupted and disfigured(and so one that questions, at least symbolically, its own autonomy).

THIS CONTEMPORARY SENSE of a distorted and contested subjecthood is still more explicitin the recent resurgence of mannequins, masks, and celebrity portraits, not only in Genzken'sand Harrison's assemblages­­see, for example, Genzken's StraBenfest (Street Party), 2008­2009, or Harrison's Alexander the Great, 2007­­but in many other works as well, includingHeimo Zobernig's Untitled, 2008, David Lieske's Imperium in Imperio (Domestic Scene I)(Artist in Compliance with the Requirements I), 2010, and Thomas Hirschhorn's Crystal ofResistance, 2011, his work for the Swiss pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, to name but afew. This anthropomorphic return is emblematic of life under the conditions of celebrity culture,where products become persons, and persons are themselves commodified. Move broadly,the entire emphasis on vitality­­in the use of painting. Minimalist tropes, and anthropomorphicdolls or mannequins­­should also be considered in light of the changing role of the subjectunder contemporary capitalism. The culture of post­Fordism, as many theorists have argued

in recent years, aims squarely at our human resources, seeking to exploit not only our bodiesbut also our affects and desires. (8) What the new form of capitalism is after is life itself.

As soon as a mannequin appears in an art display, we are met with a commodified quasiperson. This strange amalgamation strikingly maintains the difference between product andperson while symbolically collapsing it. Yet if mannequins are symptomatic of the unstableborder between product and person, what does it mean that in the works under discussionthese artwork­subjects do not appear to be coherent, but rather disfigured, dismantled, andout of control? How are we to understand the fact that Genzken's mannequins, dolls, andcheap plastic figurines are so often in bad shape, even mistreated and abused? And thatsome, as in her installation in Munster, are exhibited outside without any shelter? Others havenoted that Genzken's grotesque figures address the state of the subject in the grip ofconsumer capitalism, a subject that has been invaded by the external forces of the spectacle.(9) Indeed, rather than reestablishing the subject, such objects point to its disintegration, evenas they produce a sense of life and vitality in the midst of that disfigurement.

Although these dolls and mannequins present the subject as not master in her own house­­anold psychoanalytic insight­­they still allow the viewer to identify with them as quasi subjects.By presenting themselves as precarious, borderline subjects, they establish reassuring andfamiliar narratives about the pathological subject under what Alain Ehrenberg calls the "newpsychic economy" (10) that we live in and that we can therefore all identify with. They tell ussomething we already know and, in fact, live through. Whereas Genzken's wheelchairsculptures only suggest absent, disabled humans, we encounter a Becky doll­­a handicappedversion of a Barbie doll­­as one component of Harrison's installation Perth Amboy, 2001, inwhich she sits in a wheelchair and contemplates a green screen. Like the mannequin, the dollis a readymade with a human face. This is true even for the can of Slim Last atop FatsDomino, 2007, where it figures as the "head" of a quasi subject. Where Pop art alreadyallowed for a more anecdotal exploitation of the readymade, as Krauss has argued, here thereadymade becomes a vehicle for figuration. (11) Expanding its former role of forcing theworld of commodities into the sphere of art, it now confronts us with the persistence of thehuman form.

There is one further way that these artworks "come to life," one grounded in the increasingstructural likeness between the art world and the fashion industry. The transformations thatoccurred in the fashion world thirty years ago­­individual designers being controlled by largecorporations, the penetration of the laws of celebrity culture­­reached the art world in the late1990s, ushering in its transformation into a global industry specializing in the production ofvisuality and meaning. In art­market transactions, artworks are treated like living beings: Anartwork takes on the qualities of a subject as it becomes "a Koons" or "a Hirst." (12) Note, too,the way a collector expects to get closer to the life of an object's maker by acquiring theobject. When artworks are purchased, their value derives in part from their being saturatedwith the "living labor" of their makers. The artwork as quasi subject thus also points to the factthat artworks are always personalized when they are exchanged.

How could figuration­­the use of the mannequin, for instance­­"address" such a state ofaffairs? One could say that Genzken's and Harrison's anthropomorphic sculptures recognizeand exaggerate the animation of the artwork as a cultural condition. These objects aredesigned to do what the artist of legend is conventionally expected to do­­to perform, expose,and market herself. Since these duties have become widespread not only among artists butamong most of the population, then perhaps the mannequin is actually better equipped thanthe artist­­or the viewer, for that matter­­to execute them. The exhausted self, beaten down bynetworking fatigue, is displaced by a stand­in. The mannequin does what we, like Melville'sBartleby, would prefer not to.

THESE SURROGATES thus reveal the embattled subjectivity at the heart of what LucBoltanski and Eve Chiapello have famously called the "new spirit of capitalism," whichdemands the exploitation not only of labor but of personality, emotions, social relations, andother noneconomic aspects of our individual lives. (13) Since this new regime works on andwithin subjectivity itself, even absorbing it into capital's own flows, Harrison's and Genzken'srecent sculptures could be seen as delivering what is currently most in demand: subjectivity asa product. It is hard to decide, in fact, whether these works merely satisfy the current desirefor staged subjectivity, or whether they exaggerate it in order to point to its problems. In eithercase, though, these disfigured, quasi­human assemblages reinscribe the all too familiar storyof the damaged and even pathological subjects we have all become. Rather than suggestingthat art could be an antisubjective or even purely epistemological activity, these works cannotescape being simultaneously both lifeless and seemingly alive.

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NOTES

(1.) The summary is that of Michael Luthy and Christoph Menke, in their introduction toSubjekt and Medium in der Moderne (Zurich: Diaphanes, 2006), 10.

(2.) Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," in Art and Objecthood: Hassy and Reviews(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 148­72

(3.) George Baker, "Mind the Gap," Parkett 82 (May 2008): 143.

(4.) Benjamin H. D. Bucj=hlod, "Isa Genzken: The Fragment as Model," in Isa Genzken: Jederbraucht mindestens ein Fenster (cologne: Walter Konig, 1992), 137

(5.) Ina Biom was the first critic to note that "aliveness seems to be a key issue" in Harrison'swork. See Blom, "All Dressed Up," in Parkett 82 (May 2008): 134

(6.) The Romatic painter Eugene Delacroix, for example, noted in his diary that "color givesthe appearance of life,"

(7.) David Joslit, "Touch to Begin ...," in Rachel Harrison: Musetum with Walls (Annandale­on­Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2010), 186.

(8.) See, for instance, Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2009).

(9.) I am indebted here to Andre Rottmann's summary of a lecture on Genzken's work byBenjamin H.D. Buchloh at the I. udwig Museum, Cologne, in "Keine Kapitulation, Nirgends:Uber Isa Genzken in Museum Ludwig Koln," Texte zur Kunst 76 (December 2009): 240.

(10.) Alain Ehrenberg, La Societe du malaise (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2010), 226.

(11.) Rosalind Krauss, " The double Negative: A New Syntax for Sculpture," in Passages inModern sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 240.

(12.) Isabelle Gaw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, (Berlin:Sternberg, 2010), 128­30.

(13.) Lue Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirt of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005).

ISABELLE GRAW IS A CRITIC, THE PUBLISHER OF TEXTEZUR KUNST, AND THE

AUTHOR OF HIGH PRICE: ART BETWEEN THE MARKET AND CELEBRITY CULTURE(STERNBERG, 2010).

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