Rosemarie Trockel’s Suspicious Kitchens – Vivek Narayanan

Rosemarie Trockel’s Suspicious Kitchens

Vivek Narayanan

style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>In the mercurial tradition of those
German grandmasters – Gerhard Richter or Joseph Beuys – who came before her,
Rosemarie Trockel has stayed one step ahead of the critic’s easy gloss by
embracing apparent contradictions, and by working obsessively through a wide
range of interwoven themes and media. Like Richter and Beuys, she has
manifested a visual art that is by turns both abstract and figurative, formally
and thematically innovative; and, like theirs, her work somehow seems – in the
midst of its multiplicity – to have followed a solid, if restless, line of
thought. In terms of form, Trockel has repeatedly investigated drawing,
composition, and interlocking patterns, as well as methods of blurring or
distorting a flat plane in ways that might suggest movement or time, as a
hyper-physical presence. In terms of theme, she has been concerned with
womens’ work; that is, she has introduced processes such as knitting – which
previously might have fallen into the category of “female craft” – into high
art, represented “womanhood” not in terms of simplistic feminist clich�s but as
a complex intersection of social, biological and political rhizomes and,
finally, explored parts of the domestic sphere – kitchens, for instance – as
somewhat sinister places that can never be divorced from the violence of the
larger society that begets them. Moreover, form and content in Trockel’s work
are not so easily separated; instead, like the two sides of a m�bius strip,
they are constantly surprising and transforming into each other. Her interest
in interlocking patterns derives from her interest in knitting which derives
from her interest in women’s work, so far so good, but then she chooses to knit
a balaclava, which suggests war and violence. Her interest in stoves leads her
to present stovetops as abstract forms; later, as in the current exhibition,
she dissembles the stove completely and uses aluminum plates from its side to
build the surfaces of her installations, leaving only the choice of material
half a chance to signify.

Since this
is her first major exhibition in the United States, Trockel’s current
exhibition in New York is surely meant to encapsulate her work. Here, form and
content quite literally make up two sides of the same art object. Each of five
freestanding walls is covered by a mosaic of adjustable aluminum tiles on one
side and by a full-size video projection on the obverse. The aluminum works
are sometimes named obscurely after Hollywood flicks or, in one case, a Bob
Marley hit, and their tiles vary in shape – from square to rhomboid to
different kinds of parallelograms – and color – from, for instance, a slightly
tasteless bathroom gray to a more benign off-white. In each mosaic, the
adjustable tiles are set at slightly different angles from the wall, sometimes
in a coordinated, “rippling” manner, sometimes in a more jarring, disjunctive
way. In every case, for this viewer, the surface of the installation creates a
wish for flatness that is delicately, disturbingly refused: it becomes hard to take
in the shifting plane of the mosaic as a whole. This kind of disturbance
reaches its height in the aptly named Phobia
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> (2002), which consists of only
five highly reflective plates at different angles to the wall, two of them
bordered by a black cotton trimming, which falls, in one place, behind and in
front of the plate. The body of the viewer, reflected in the tiles, is a
splintered self; the cotton re-introduces Trockel’s knitting motif; and the
cutting of the trimming by the sharp-looking tile becomes an upsetting rupture.

On the
other side of each wall, five videos in the series Manu’s Spleen
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> ride, by contrast, on a surplus of
narrative energy. Manu is a real woman, a friend of the artist’s, but she is
also a slightly befuddled Everywoman in Trockel’s design. She is put through a
series of episodes where banality, transcendence, mortality and silliness
commingle: in one, she is at her birthday party drinking a glass of wine, and
her apparently pregnant stomach bursts like a balloon to uproarious laughter;
in another, she lies down for a spell next to a lifeless male body in an open
grave, while a body double, fingering her necklace or answering an inopportune
telephone call, looks distractedly on.

These
videos play with the formal idea of flatness, since movement in them occurs
almost exclusively from left to right, never toward or away from the camera.
They also ask difficult questions. Manu’s Spleen 4
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> (2002) is, for instance, both a
reading and a bizarre re-staging of Brecht’s Mother Courage
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>, with Manu in the title role, the
saintly Kattrin recast as Joan of Arc, and the prostitute Yvette played by
Jackie Kennedy – selling her country, perhaps – while an older and younger
Brigitte Bardot serves as prompter and duplicitous model. Mother Courage’s canteen
cart is hung with reflective pots and pans; once again in Trockel’s work, the
domestic arena is circumscribed by war. Whatever is going on here, it is not
merely politics, theory, or abstraction, even if it derives from all three; it
is a sensual, spellbinding hall of mirrors. Or, to quote Trockel’s own
quixotic script for Manu’s Spleen 2, “I am speaking for myself as the other! Actually I have
never been asked, so I want to give a misplaced answer to a question that
hasn’t been addressed to me.” It is precisely this sense of unasked questions
and misplaced answers that fuels the sophistication and mysterious completeness
of Rosemarie Trockel’s art.