“You have to start somewhere, with something, and it may well be with something that has already been fully thought out. Freedom will be acquired through the principle of contradiction, which is continually active and vocal in all of us… [If you] create such an impression of naturalness that one can no longer interpose one’s judgment, imagination or reactions, [one] must simply conform by sharing in the experience and becoming one of ‘nature’s’ objects.”—Bertolt Brecht
I’m tempted to propose that the retrospective exhibition “Rosemary Trockel: A Cosmos”—currently on view at the Serpentine in London, and which I saw in January at the New Museum in New York—begins in what curator Lynne Cooke calls the “epicentre” of the exhibition: a small white ceramic tiled room that was almost blazingly bright when one stepped into it from the dimness of the New Museum’s second floor.
But to propose that this exhibition begins or ends anywhere firmly is to suggest that a narrative chronology winds through its installation, which in New York spread out over three floors of the museum. Instead of a following a time-based architecture, we move—fascinated or repelled, engaged or indifferent—amid a spatial web that is conceptually deep, ontologically intense and linguistically rife (puns and incisive plays on words abound). The installation often mimics and also turns on its head the categorical divisions and installation strategies of a Linnaean, pre-Darwinian museum: a Natural History, as Trockel titled the New Museum’s second-floor installation.
Trockel’s prior retrospective “Werkgruppen 1986–1998,” which toured several European galleries, classified her works under the following categories: wool, hen-house, B.B. (short for Bridget Bardot and Bertolt Brecht, who both, in their way, have served as major influences), plastic models and designs, beauty, videos, drawings, couples and seaworld. This time, Trockel’s cosmos is more free-floating, perhaps; the categories are less fixed and fewer.
In “A Cosmos,” Trockel has also incorporated the work of other artists, often ‘outsiders’ in one way or another, mostly little known or forgotten, a few of them devoted to scientific research.
Of the works of some these artist-scientists that were on view in New York—namely by Maria Sybilla Merian, José Celestino Mutis, and Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka—Cooke has written in the exhibition catalogue that they
originated within the realm of natural history. Almost all were created in the period stretching from the late seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth century; that is, in an era in which enormous and rapid developments were being made in the fields of botany and zoology as a consequence of imperial expeditions. ‘Natural history was reconceived in this period,’ art historian Elizabeth Cropper contends, ‘as the examination and experience of knowledge, not the compilation and reconciliation of authorities.’
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To return briefly to Trockel’s bright white room that is tiled even on the ceiling: It is reminiscent of a room in a madhouse or a hospital, a kitchen, a servant’s workspace in the modern era, or of H.P. Berlage’s 1930s Municipal Museum in the Hague, and we find that it is itself a work titled Ceramic Room (2012).
A kind of wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities, this room houses other Trockel works. In New York, this array consisted of one work on each of the room’s walls and another hanging from its ceiling. Made in China (2012), attached at waist height to one surface, is a white-glazed ceramic receptacle that looks like coral or sponge growth—an arrested, formally fecund thing resembling some domestic issue from the ceramic studio of Georges Bataille.
It’s apparent that the Brechtian Trockel often gives us “nature” without “naturalness,” and this strategy continues in a large plastic palm tree suspended upside-down from the room’s ceiling, its arc of foliage not quite reaching the ground. Among other things, this work invokes thoughts of Marcel Broodthaers (indeed Broodthaers’s influence very much inhabits other aspects of Trockel’s “cosmos”) even if his palms and fronds are ostensibly of the right-side-up variety. Possibilities (1999), a flat white metal square holding an image of a single black stovetop burner, hung on one wall, its on/off switch housing present, but the switch itself missing.
Hanging in Ceramic Room in London as well as New York is an oblong, white-metal birdcage with three stuffed birds on branches, one of them mounted on a motorized rail that keeps bird and branch moving from time to time, back and forth in a sprightly regular, punctually oppressive clockwork. One bird on a branch sits under a glass bell jar. The fifth work in the room in New York, also on view there in London, is Replace Me (2012), a small black-and-white digital photograph of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde—the 19th-century painting which focuses on the vagina of the prone torso of his naked model. In Trockel’s version, her dark bush has been obscured with the image of a large tarantula.
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The Trockelian cosmos on the second floor of the New Museum exhibition belonged to a natural history conceived on a classificatory, pre-19th-century model, yet it was run through with Freudian and later conceptions of the psyche. That Ceramic Room has a name which separates it (in part) from its contents is a clue as to how to approach the ontology and eschatology of this retrospective. The overall exhibition is very much a work in itself. It lived, breathed, and died in its allotted time and space at the New Museum in New York, just as it did in its iteration before that at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and is currently doing and will do at the Serpentine.
Although Trockel has used many of the same works in the Reina Sofia, New Museum and Serpentine shows, it is relevant that each exhibition as it was will not be exactly repeated. There is a tension between the absence of chronology (for what is a retrospective normally, if not the logical development of a chronology?) and the deeply time-immured uniqueness of each exhibition in particular. Not only do the relationships between the works change as they move from city to city and are involved in new installation strategies that reconfigure the visual pressures put upon each work—the meaning of the show also changes when Trockel and Cooke’s selection of works change.
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In a fourth-floor gallery at the New Museum were Trockel’s small books, pamphlets and zine-like ephemera: prototypes for editions not pursued, or unique works that dated back to her late teenage years. They were chronologically displayed one after the other on shelving that ringed the gallery. But even this single instance of careful chronology was remarkable for the consistency of themes, techniques, images and texts one found between its beginning in 1970, and its not quite (we suspect) end in 2003. This consistency undid expectations of any persistent chronological “development,” as almost any example in the room seemed remarkably interchangeable with any another.
Trockel has said in conversation with Lynne Cooke that “to me, Brecht is interesting because instead of presenting an ideal model he makes the contradictions and inconsistencies the subject matter of his play [Mother Courage].” She has also noted that another “position may be represented by Marguerite Duras. In the work of Duras…everything is just the way it is. Contradiction as such is predominant.”
Trockel seems to convert Duras’s attitude about “everything” to things specifically. Many of Trockel’s multitudes of objects have a strange kind of nonpresence/presence. Like Duras’s “everything,” they are also just the way they are.
In sculptural works such as Landscapian Shroud of My Mother (2008), where a low platform of shiny white ceramic rectangles, striated or scarred with small imperfections, have a sheet of the thinnest black fabric pooled over them, and Unbreakable Connection to Ruth (2012), a movingly offhand cast of an assembly of three long pieces of notched wood that references Brancusi’s Endless Column—as, in fact, in most of her work—Trockel seems to be minimizing or restricting uniqueness and auratic power.
In this restriction, Trockel seems very much against the Beuysian approach and toward certain stances in Brecht. She leaves the aura to reside in her viewers and their “judgment, imagination or reactions” to her work within the world. That she takes this approach while making indelible works is one of her great contributions.
