Taking a closer look at Isa Genzken. I’m feeling some kinship with her. I appreciate her rebelliousness and her “irregular body of work.”
“Isa Genkzen, always unpredictable and often rebellious, confronted the boy’s club known as the “art world” with a young female artist who subverted the mythically masculine discipline of sculpting with her own uncompromising works. After the Ellipsoids came the similarly symmetrical Hyperbolos, before Genzken would start using concrete for her bulky grey ruin-like objects that would stand on simple pedestals and have names like “Stage”, “Roof” or “Blue Room”. In the 1990s, these concrete constructions would become “windows,” but by that time Genzken had already taken up photography and developed a serious interest in architectural form as well.
Despite all this, in my view, Isa Genzken has always been a filmmaker first. Her films are rarely shown because she exclusively demands a cinema for their screenings. Aside from which, only a few of her films are actually films in the proper sense because Genzken has been translating her cinematic views and ideas into other fields of the fine arts since the 1980s. The “idea” of film is in fact the golden thread that runs through her ever–surprising and refreshingly irregular body of work.”
“Genzken is always thinking in cinematic terms, although the output is rarely film. This is no coincidence: Before applying for art school, her application to film school had been rejected, meanwhile the fascination with the medium is something that has haunted her since childhood. In an art catalogue titled Notizen für einen Spielfilm (Notes for a feature film, 1993) she narrates her life as a series of film scenarios, starting with her father rushing to hospital for her birth. Genzken describes how she was street-cast for a film production as a young girl, and that as a 19-year old she was “a stunning beauty” who everyone from film school wanted to cast in their film projects. Interestingly, her bold and naked exposure to a film camera as an adult in Women in Combat happens in a self-directed art project. The same kind of rare exposure would happen later in a series of hospital snap shots which depict the interiors of a hospital room with a naked Genzken squatting in a bath tub. All in all, these images remain a marginal and little known note in her work.”
http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/feature-articles/film-as-art-and-art-as-film-the-cinematic-concept-in-isa-genzkens-art-practice/
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