Lynne Cooke on the art of Rosemarie Trockel

Sep 28, 2023

IN THE SUMMER OF 2022, Susanne Pfeffer, director of Frankfurt's Museum für Moderne Kunst, deinstalled the institution's storied collection in anticipation of an upcoming exhibition. Titled simply "Rosemarie Trockel," the comprehensive retrospective would occupy the entirety of Hans Hollein's postmodern masterwork.1 Next, Pfeffer addressed the inherently disorienting character of the architect's labyrinthine design. Spurning a strictly chronological layout and didactic forms of institutional guidance on the walls, she would invest her audience with an unaccustomed degree of agency. As visitors navigate the galleries, passageways, mezzanines, balconies, overlooks, and sundry alcoves in which the 350-plus works are installed, their circuitous pathways mime the lineaments of Trockel's recursive, rhizomatic, and iterative practice.

When they embark on these self-directed journeys, the first work they encounter is Prisoner of Yourself, 1998. Scaled to the soaring dimensions of the MMK's triangular vestibule gallery and silk-screened directly onto its walls, the vibrant blue dado enfolds in its embrace all who enter the skylit space. With a looping pattern derived from a swatch of knitted fabric, Prisoner of Yourself also serves as a decorative support for three recent sculptures: Challenge, 2018; Dans la Rue, 2019; and Cage Doré, 2021. Prisoner calls to mind the machined wool paintings that catapulted Trockel to international acclaim in the mid-1980s and that, for the general museumgoing audience, remain her signature contribution. By contrast, even Trockel aficionados would be hard-pressed to identify the author of the modest ceramic reliefs if chanced upon elsewhere. High above the end wall, one of the artist's most iconic works, a life-size bronze seal garlanded with a choker of artificial blonde hair, is suspended from a chain around its flippers.2 Still higher, Miss Wanderlust, 2000, perches on a window ledge in the vestibule gallery, surveilling the disparate ensemble below through binoculars. Familiar and unfamiliar, recently minted and vintage, this nexus of works should not be passed (over) lightly. The installation is echt Trockel: economical, elegant, elliptical.

In today's art world, a high-profile signature style has become double-edged, both a source of professional repute and a site of deep-seated anxiety. Pressured by success and critical acclaim, the richly rewarded artist too often upscales production of their reliably marketable offerings at the expense of creative growth. No such charge can be laid at Trockel's door.3 Her opening gambit conjures this specter of entrapment performatively—only to dispatch it with a bravura gesture. For more than thirty years, commentators on her work—artists, art historians, critics, curators, and cultural theorists—have uniformly hailed the shape-shifting quality of her art. As if with one voice, they herald the indeterminate, unfixed, elusive character of what has become a vast corpus in a formidable range of genres, forms, media, and techniques.4

In 1988—that is, before any hallmark style threatened to dominate her practice—Trockel identified the "constants" that fueled her protean vision as "woman, inconsistency, reaction to fashionable trends."5 Woman, broadly speaking, is the focus of three of the remaining four galleries on level one.6 Devoted mostly to the artist's early years, the trio of dark, densely installed rooms include numerous canonical works featuring such key motifs as blown eggs, hot plates, and corporate logos. Consider Sabine, 1994, a digital print that depicts a naked brunette in sunglasses poised precariously on a small stove in a humble kitchen. Rhyming her subject's pose with that of the Crouching Aphrodite, Trockel injects a mordant note into the misogynistic scenario. When installed at the MMK at the apex of a tall triangular gallery, Sabine literally acts out its governing thematics: constraint and confinement. The video Mr. Sun, 2000, projected on a hanging screen nearby, is more abject: As the camera crawls lasciviously over a gleaming stove, Brigitte Bardot's voice croons, "Stay awhile, Mr. Sun." Dominating the adjacent wall is a large knit painting, Made in Western Germany, 1987, the eponymous anglophone trademark repeated serially across its surface. Coined in 1973 to guarantee the high quality of products manufactured in the FDR (as opposed to the GDR) for an international market, the logo symbolizes the Wirtschaftswunder, the postwar economic miracle during which Trockel came of age in the Rhineland. In this context, the merchandising brand serves to localize the significations of an oppressive patriarchal society endemic throughout the Western world. The centerpiece of the following gallery, Daddy's Striptease Room, 1990, reveals more of the character of that chauvinist hegemonic regime: Through a TV-shaped aperture cut into the side of a cardboard box, viewers may spy an architectural model of the Cologne Cathedral. Aus: Briefe an Gott (From: Letters to God), 1994, by contrast, pinpoints the pain and disappointment young women feel when faced with the inexorable vulnerability of role models, pinups, and idols. To a short clip of the soon-to-be-wed Marilyn Monroe, unnerved by invasive scrutiny from (off-camera) paparazzi and clinging to her stoic consort Arthur Miller, Trockel added a voice-over excerpted from another context: "Physically, I’m in pretty good shape, but mentally, I’m comatose," the actress explains. Placed within this charged context, Childless Figure, 1970/2011, takes on a bleak self-referentiality. Forty-one years after she limned the spare drawing of a lone woman, Trockel affixed it to a board whose empty spatial expanse reinforces the subject's aura of alienation and exclusion.

Taken together, the streamlined selection, tight juxtapositions, and loaded sequencing of these galleries suggests Pfeffer's curatorial hand.7 No previous Trockel retrospective has homed in so relentlessly on representations of women as subordinated, disempowered, humiliated, and voided by entrenched religious, social, and cultural structures and ideologies. Nor have attendant shifts in the affective register, between rapier-sharp anger, simmering frustration, desolation, and, less often, tender regard and hard-won empathy, been so clearly exposed. The cumulative effect seems designed to underscore the urgent timeliness of Trockel's project today. In the last of this trio of ground-floor galleries the focus shifts to the art world. Over eighteen long minutes, Continental Divide, 1994, spotlights the artist herself, berated and beaten up by her alter ego for her repeated failure to correctly name the greatest among her contemporaries. Albeit temporarily—for the video projection is looped—and at considerable physical and psychic cost, a stubborn resilience comes to the fore.

Lest viewers suppose the subject to be done with, they are confronted when exiting this hellish maelstrom by a recent work tellingly titled Misleading Interpretation, 2014. The digital photograph, printed in saturated red ink, reveals a woman, eyes masked, blood dripping from one nostril. Did it not caution explicitly against facile attribution, it might be taken to be a self-portrait. As so often in Trockel's art, the title proves at once important and profoundly confusing. When installed at this juncture, Misleading Interpretation serves to derail deterministic critical readings and thwart closure in biography-based explanations.

As the artist's eviscerating critique of postwar German society, its gendered ideologies, and an art scene dominated by overbearingly macho, power-obsessed cliques of painters evinces, these subjective experiences were deeply impactful. Yet Trockel's art can no more be reduced to personal narrative than it can be defined (and marginalized) as feminist art tout court. To return to her 1988 statement, "inconsistency" excludes, by definition, the repetition of a predictable sameness. Not only did her work range widely in that first decade, her artistic and political position, never polemical or didactic, was not easily located. Embracing strategies of proximity and dissociation from the art scene's centers of power, she sought agency and inclusion on her terms.8 What Trockel may have meant by the third of her constants, "reaction to fashionable trends," is not spelled out in that exceptional interview. It's worth noting, however, that the previous year, she did not hold back when expressing reservations about what is now known as second-wave feminist art, centered on "women's work," domestic crafts, self-experience, confessional modes, and essentializing tropes.9

In 1983, Trockel had her first solo exhibition in Cologne at the gallery of her close friend Monika Sprüth, which began by representing mostly women artists, notable among them the Americans Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler, and Cindy Sherman. Their conceptually driven practices resist being sidelined in a ghetto of female artists in favor of a centrist position, in which agency manifests in terms of power and inclusion. In these peers, Trockel found her closest intellectual and aesthetic community, one that continues to provide context and kinship.

Before ascending to level two, visitors are confronted with one last pair of related works; each features weapons.10 Placed at a height suited to the reach of a toddler, Less Sauvage Than Others, Contribution for a Children's House, 2012, comprises seven bronze-cast toy pistols. Der göttliche Funke (The Divine Spark), 1998, an acrylic on paper, depicts the closely cropped face of a figure, eyes staring wildly, a gun pressed to their skull. Trockel's title likely references The Act of Creation, a seminal text she had read in which the cultural theorist Arthur Koestler examines what he calls the "divine spark" (whence her citation). Replacing habitual thinking with an original response, "the spontaneous flash of insight . . . shows a familiar situation or event in a new light."11 Trockel's puzzling conjunction of referent with an image replete with violence, fear, and aggression suggests that Koestler's concept of transcendent illumination is ignited by danger and dominance. And thus, as a paradigm of creativity, it is antithetical to the whimsical, aleatory, playful, and exploratory modes rooted in the mundane—the everyday and ordinary—that fire her imagination. And which, in turn, become models for constructing meaning as audiences move through the exhibition on levels two and three. For here, the show changes gear, and the contrapuntal curatorial methodologies that formerly shaped visitors’ experiences dovetail: Display strategies loosen up and open out. A rhizomatic, decentered, nonhierarchical logic of connectivity comes into play that underscores the necessarily contingent, circumstantial, and contextual nature of meaning in Trockel's world.

Anchoring the suite of diverse spaces on this floor, the largest gallery is organized mostly by reference to animals and animality. (Several smaller galleries are devoted to single bodies of related work: Hoffnung [Hope], 1984, a cycle of drawings in gouache, watercolor, ink, pastel, and chalk, takes primates as its subject; another features a suite of variously titled natural-history shadow boxes from 2012–13.) An enduring constant in the artist's vision, nonhuman species—birds, insects, mammals, arachnids—dominate the medley of diverse works in a plethora of media assembled here. (Although the key site-related work A House for Pigs and People, 1997—made with Carsten Höller for Documenta 10—is necessarily absent, Ohne Titel [Prototyp für ein Hühnerhaus], 1993, alludes to it and similar projects.) Interspecies relations encompass cohabitation, interdependency, exploitation, similitude, and otherness that manifest in acts of predation, nurturing, care, empathy, mimicry, indifference, and much else. At the heart of this fresh and compelling ensemble, an oil painting of a musket commissioned from an online source, Fate, 2022, is lashed to a column.12 One of a few pieces in this diverse array in which the artist's hand was not directly involved, this latest work destabilizes the ambient intimacy with a phlegmatic chill, an undertone that reverberates elsewhere in constellations of recent works.

Rosemarie Trockel, Fate, 2022, oil on canvas, 19 7⁄8 \u00d7 23 7⁄8\". \u00a9 Rosemarie Trockel\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.","copyright":"","pathSquare":false,"pathLarge":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article15_1064x.jpg","path":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article15.jpg","numericKey":10,"crops":{"original":{"270":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article15_270x.jpg","430":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article15_430x.jpg","810":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article15_810x.jpg","1064":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article15_1064x.jpg"}},"pathOriginalCrop":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article15_1064x.jpg","orientation":"landscape"},{"mediatype":0,"item_id":90640,"id":430657,"mimetype":"image\/jpeg","caption":"*Carsten H\u00f6ller and Rosemarie Trockel, _Ein Haus f\u00fcr Schweine und Menschen_ (A House for Pigs and People), 1997,* mixed media. Installation view, Documenta 10, Kassel. Photo: Heribert Proepper\/AP. ","captionFormatted":"Carsten H\u00f6ller and Rosemarie Trockel, Ein Haus f\u00fcr Schweine und Menschen (A House for Pigs and People), 1997, mixed media. Installation view, Documenta 10, Kassel. Photo: Heribert Proepper\/AP. ","copyright":"","pathSquare":false,"pathLarge":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article03_1064x.jpg","path":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article03.jpg","numericKey":12,"crops":{"original":{"270":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article03_270x.jpg","430":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article03_430x.jpg","810":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article03_810x.jpg","1064":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article03_1064x.jpg"}},"pathOriginalCrop":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article03_1064x.jpg","orientation":"landscape"}]" class="mobile-full-width">

Exhibition making, with its particular protocols and display strategies, plays a crucial role in Trockel's practice, shaping content and affective responses. The interspecies dialogues proliferating so richly here become the fulcrum and cornerstone of MMK's remarkable scenographic installation. As always in Trockel's highly choreographed presentations, the autonomy of each discrete artwork is respected, but here questions of proximity and distance take on a unique urgency. Affirming our commonality within the animal kingdom, Trockel proposes that "our affinities are not simply elective," art historian Johanna Burton argues; they are "also deeply elemental."13

Rosemarie Trockel, CLUSTER V—Subterranean Illumination, 2019, twenty-five ink-jet prints mounted on Forex. Installation view, Museum f\u00fcr Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, 2022. Photo: Frank Sperling. \u00a9 Rosemarie Trockel\/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York\/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.","copyright":"","pathSquare":false,"pathLarge":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article00_1064x.jpg","path":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article00.jpg","numericKey":13,"crops":{"original":{"270":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article00_270x.jpg","430":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article00_430x.jpg","810":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article00_810x.jpg","1064":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article00_1064x.jpg"}},"pathOriginalCrop":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article00_1064x.jpg","orientation":"landscape"},{"mediatype":0,"item_id":90640,"id":430665,"mimetype":"image\/jpeg","caption":"*View of “Rosemarie Trockel,” 2022–23,* Museum f\u00fcr Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. From left: _A Bush Is a Bear_, 2012; _Musicbox_, 2013; _Picnic_, 2012; _Picnic_, 2012. Photo: Frank Sperling. ","captionFormatted":"View of “Rosemarie Trockel,” 2022–23, Museum f\u00fcr Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt. From left: A Bush Is a Bear, 2012; Musicbox, 2013; Picnic, 2012; Picnic, 2012. Photo: Frank Sperling. ","copyright":"","pathSquare":false,"pathLarge":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article11_1064x.jpg","path":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article11.jpg","numericKey":11,"crops":{"original":{"270":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article11_270x.jpg","430":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article11_430x.jpg","810":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article11_810x.jpg","1064":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article11_1064x.jpg"}},"pathOriginalCrop":"\/uploads\/upload.002\/id25104\/article11_1064x.jpg","orientation":"landscape"}]" class="mobile-full-width">

Level three, by contrast, often appears to group works primarily by reference to materials and genres: textiles/paintings, ceramics/sculptures, and photography. Notable among camera-based works are the "Clusters," the newest typology in the artist's repertoire. Revision and recursion are as fundamental to this series, comprising reconfigured photographic prints on paper, as they are to the choreography of the exhibition as a whole. Organized into permutable grids of up to thirty or so examples, many of the images have appeared in different formats and contexts over the course of Trockel's career. Provisional and speculative, the "Clusters" resist narrative explication in favor of a wayward cross-referencing that sparks associative glancing and whimsical gaming.

Also foregrounded is Trockel's deep-rooted obsession with painting—or, better, with painting's privileged status in the traditional hierarchy of fine arts and, more specifically, with modernist abstraction. With wry and occasionally caustic wit, she has long contested the masculinist designation of the monochrome and of geometric abstract styles as modernism's preeminent language. Directly and indirectly reproducing the scale and semblance of late-modernist abstraction, her diverse wool and yarn works highlight abstraction's materialist origins in textile. Prizing pioneering works made by such artists as Anni Albers and Liubov Popova in the aftermath of World War I, Trockel nonetheless homes in on the late-modernist legacy she inherited as an ambitious art student. Consider an untitled series of serigraphs from 1993. Based on a length of finely woven fabric riven by the depredations of moths, they slyly travesty the transcendent spatial claims made on behalf of Lucio Fontana's slashes and punctures. Or think of the many modestly scaled works she began in 2000 that consist of parallel strands of woolen thread stretched across a canvas frame and stapled to its sides. Some draw inspiration from paintings by Agnes Martin, an artist Trockel has long revered; others appear to take delight in such vernacular sources as Red Bull's distinctive striped b(r)anding.

Sculpture in the medium of ceramics—or ceramics in the form of sculpture? In the early aughts, amid a spate of heightened invention, Trockel rendered moot that tired distinction. Nestled amid a group of ebullient coagulated reliefs in a small gallery that, for many visitors, marks the show's apex—and the point from which they begin their descent—is a second work titled Prisoner of Yourself, this one from 2016. In contrast to its ’90s namesake, the revenant is a compact clay slab fired then glazed with white slip and decorated with a blue molding. A cumbersome chain holds the deadweight inert against the wall. Figured as shackles and restraining anchor, that haunting fear of imprisonment within the self now takes form as immobilizing stasis rather than surplus.

Trockel's modeling of an exigent, principled practice has proved germinal for generations of younger artists. Leery of the art world's protocols and infrastructures, she has long refused to serve as the authoritative voice—the primary spokesperson and principal apologist—for her vision, art, and aesthetic. She consequently refrains, for the most part, from giving interviews and lectures and from writing expository texts. Similarly, she shies away from the spotlight trained on art-world celebrities and brings a quizzical skepticism to the major markers of professional achievement (national representation in biennials, late-career retrospectives, high-profile prizes, etc.), recognizing that though intended to laud their honorees, too often they embalm them.14 In 1993, German painter and critic Jutta Koether spelled out the implications of this singular modus operandi: "I regard as a significant part of Trockel's work the practice of working as an artist for other artists, in defining, constructing and disseminating an attitude which differs from other male-dominated-and-occupied artists’ identities." Koether supported her argument by highlighting strategies that inform "both the decision-making process in her [Trockel's] art practice and her attitude to the art business," tactics and methods her fellow artist experienced "sometimes as exemplary; sometimes as inspirational; sometimes as documentary revelation."15

At the MMK Trockel's well-tuned arsenal of practices is fully in play. With the scene meticulously set, visitors are entrusted to see for themselves.

Lynne Cooke is senior curator for special projects at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She is currently at work on "Woven Histories," a planned 2023 exhibition that will explore affiliations and interchanges between abstract artists and textile designers and producers.

NOTES

1. To put Pfeffer's bold move in context: Earlier in 2022 she similarly cleared the building for a Marcel Duchamp retrospective.

2. Ohne Titel ("Es gibt kein unglücklicheres Wesen unter der Sonne als einen Fetischisten der sich nach einem Frauenschuh sehnt und mit einem ganzen Weib vorlieb nehmen muss." K.K.:F), 1991.

3. Lucky Devil, 2012, also included in this exhibition, suggests that any anxiety Trockel felt about the dangers of becoming beholden to the source of her success was far from fleeting. In 2012, she cut into pieces a group of early knit paintings that she had held on to for years—her pension, she wryly called them—and embalmed the scraps in a Plexiglas container. Her action may be read as an exorcism of any lingering investments—literal and metaphorical—that might support that charge. When first shown, in 2012, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in the exhibition "A Cosmos," the Plexiglas box served as a plinth for the display of a remarkable specimen of large crab. At MMK, Lucky Devil is exhibited, sans crab, in dialogue with a group of recent wool works.

4. See, for example, Silvia Eiblmayr, "Rosemarie Trockel: Laudatory Speech on the Occasion of the Wolfgang Hahn Prize 2004," in Rosemarie Trockel: Post-Menopause (Cologne: Walther König, 2006), 14.

5. Quoted in Sidra Stich, "The Affirmation of Difference in the Art of Rosemarie Trockel," Rosemarie Trockel, ed. Stich (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1991), 12.

6. Set apart from the trio of aligned galleries, the fourth contains a group of unrealized book drafts, 1982–97, that Trockel began including in her shows in 2002. They serve as both an archive of aborted obsessions and a repository of dormant projects that may have future issue.

7. Compare, for example, such exhibitions of early works as "Rosemarie Trockel," Kunsthalle Basel/Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1988), with its focus on knit pieces; "Projects: Rosemarie Trockel," Musuem of Modern Art, New York (1988), comprising two sculptures and drawings, was reviewed by Holland Cotter, who speaks about the work as "historiated expressionism," "Rosemarie Trockel at MoMA," Art in America, April 1988, 207; and the 1991/1992 North American retrospective of the artist's work, in which cocurator Elisabeth Sussman, following James Clifford, writes persuasively of "ethnographic surrealism." In Stich, Rosemarie Trockel.

8. Johanna Burton offers an insightful analysis of Trockel's role within the milieu of the Monika Sprüth Gallery in "A Will to Representation: Eau de Cologne 1985–1993," in Witness to Her Art, ed. Rhea Anastas with Michael Brenson (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY: Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 2006), 191–99.

9. See Jutta Koether, "Interview with Rosemarie Trockel," Flash Art, 134, May 1987, 42. "What is most painful, what is most tragic," Trockel argues, "is that women have intensified this alleged inferiority of the ‘typically female.’ . . . Art about women's art is just as tedious as the art of men about men's art."

10. Other visitors may begin their tour of level one here and circle around to gallery four, containing the book drafts, before taking a different staircase to level two.

11. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation (New York: Macmillan, 1964). I am indebted to Barbara Schroeder for directing me to Koestler's book.

12. More precisely, this motif is based on a nonfunctional decorative replica of a Brown Bess flintlock rifle, available online. Produced between 1772 and the middle of the nineteenth century, the musket was a standard rifle of the British line infantry and one of the first industrially manufactured weapons.

13. Johanna Burton, "Rosemarie Trockel: Primate," in Rosemarie Trockel (Bregenz, Austria: Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2015), 149–53.

14. Emblematic in this regard is her response to an invitation offered by the Museum Ludwig in her hometown of Cologne in 2006. At the entrance to the extensive survey show, which she titled "Post-Menopause," Trockel installed Yes, but, 2005. Visitors passed through domestically scaled doorways in the monumental portal made from strands of bloodred and white woolen yarn. In several of the galleries beyond, shelving units installed along the walls of several galleries functioned primarily as makeshift storage containers for small works. Some provided restricted visual access to their contents; others precluded even cursory scrutiny of their contents.

15. Jutta Koether, "Out of Character: The Strategies for Visual Practice of a Female Artist in Germany," in Rosemarie Trockel, ed. Gregory Burke (Wellington, New Zealand: City Gallery, 1993), 23.