Isa Genzken

A strikingly original analysis of Isa Genzken’s move towards merging sculptural and architectural morphologies into a trailblazing practice of contemporary assemblage.

Fuck the Bauhaus, a series of audacious architectural models for future high-rise buildings in Manhattan, marks a poetic and provocative shift in Isa Genzken’s artistic oeuvre. Made in the year 2000, out of quotidian objects and cheap materials foraged in the streets and stores of New York, these sculptural assemblages depart from the German artist’s ‘post-Minimalist’ works begun in the 1970s. The earlier works conjured the haunting spectres of catastrophe, destruction and failed utopia, as well as the potential for freedom amidst the ruins of post-War reconstruction culture.

Analysing Genken’s post–2000 penchant for appropriation, collage and montage, André Rottmann draws on the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, Bruno Latour and other theorists of "assemblage," to show how her ‘late style’ is not a return to (neo-)avant-garde traditions but a powerful reimagining of them for the contemporary moment."Probing a transitional moment in the career of one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Rottmann carefully assesses and helpfully reframes how we are to understand assemblage as an aesthetic procedure. In his telling Genzken explodes sculpture only to offer new principles of modelling adequate to our commodity-choked world."
—David Joselit, Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard University

"Rottmann’s fascinating reading of Isa Genzken’s Fuck the Bauhaus takes us on a beautifully crafted critical journey. Genzken emerges not only as a brilliant and often hilarious interlocutor with modern architecture and its failed promise, but as marking out a consequential contemporary aesthetic methodology."
—Felicity Scott, Professor of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia UniversityAndré Rottmann is an Assistant Professor for Art and Media Theory at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and the editor of the October Files volume John Knight.