Rosemarie trockel is famous, world famous. She has been one of the most influential artists for many decades. She taught at the Kunsthochschule in Düsseldorf until 2016, had dozens of exhibitions in the most important museums in the world, and influenced generations of young artists. She knows Germany, at least for her “Knit Pictures” like Gerhard Richter for his “Candle”. In the mid-1980s, the artist recognized the “feminine cultural technique of knitting”, as it is always laboriously called in art-historical articles, as a symbol for the role of women and stretched pictures made of wool onto stretcher frames occupied by men.
However, she did not take the needles into her own hands, but commissioned the pictures on machines. At that time a powerful act of emancipation from the dominant painters like Richter, Lüpertz, Baselitz. And unforgotten to this day. Also because the colorful wool pictures develop an extraordinary intensity.
Reminiscent of American color field painting or abstract expressionism, but is knitted: Rosemarie Trockel’s “Water” from 2004
Source: © The artist & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022/Photo: Axel Schneider
But how little one understands Trockel’s entire oeuvre if one only knows these pictures is shown by her retrospective at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, which the artist planned together with the director Susanne Pfeffer on the occasion of her 70th birthday has now developed in weeks of painstaking work. Four days before the opening, Pfeffer and Trockel could still be seen roaming the rooms discussing things. People climbed over works on the floor, followed the deliveries of their wool pictures from the Venice Art Biennale. In the end, there were several hundred works. New works were created especially for the exhibition, and things that had never been shown were excavated.
prisoners of ourselves
Pfeffer cleared the entire MMK for this tour de force of preparing a long life, in which every day culminated in the production of a drawing, a pottery, a collage. What would have been unthinkable a few years ago, because the museum’s unique collection also demands attention, has been put into practice by Pfeffer. However, the people of Frankfurt have had three locations at their disposal for a number of years: the “pie piece”, as Hans Hollein’s idiosyncratic MMK is called, the small customs office directly opposite and the “Tower” high-rise building in the banking district.
Trockel can also do ceramics: “Louvre” 2 from 2009
Source: © The artist & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022/Photo: Axel Schneider
Right at the beginning, Trockel captures the visitor with a blue, tightly knitted net pattern that is screen-printed on the walls of the large hall. It is titled “Prisoner of Yourself” and is from 1998. Are we the prisoners of ourselves? In any case, one is really stuck visually and begins to dissect the individual pieces of fluff. A window work is set into the beautiful and unsettling wall pattern. The actually hopeful “picture as an open window”, seen a thousand times in the history of art from Alberti, Vermeer and up to the present, is secured by thick locks. This window protects from the outside world and thus closes itself off from art.
Trockel combines good and bad allusions with playful joy. A 2.9 meter high hairpin leans against the wall like a noble designer piece; it was used to tame women’s hair for centuries. But what else can you do with it? Today, museum-goers might associate the tool used by mass-murdering Alexia in Julia Ducournau’s feminist scandal-winning Cannes film Titane, or another vengeful woman.
Murder tool or hair tamer? This needle by Rosemarie Trockel is three meters high – it bears the title “Notre-Dame”
In any case, the viewer is caught in Trockel’s net here at the latest, room for room more associations and dissections accumulate. In the dark film chamber, a woman (Trockel himself) smacks another woman’s nose until it bleeds while searching for the “best artist”. Trockel accompanies the girl “Julia” from the age of 10 to 20, and she tells her that it is looking forward to adulthood because then you don’t have to be afraid anymore. Back in the light of day, monumental ceramics shimmer enticingly, but are reminiscent of sharp graters up close. For her “Cluster” series, Trockel plunders her busy daily news feed routine; the artist follows socio-political events like an addict.
Michel Houellebecq meets Franz Josef Strauss
They are pictorial friezes whose composition makes little sense at first glance; when writer Michel Houellebecq meets artist Jeff Koons and Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauss, each has to construct their own meaning. It’s never about manual skills. Trockel had motifs for the “Rush Hour” series painted in China, and “White Hope” with Julian Assange by an assistant. For her, the myth of the painting genius is more of an act of showing off.
Trockel’s heroes? “White Hope” from 2021
Source: © The artist & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022/Photo: Axel Schneider
Their thoroughly wild mixture culminates in “Replace Me”, in which Trockel quotes Courbet’s “Origin of the World” motif from 1866 and covers the woman’s vagina with a tarantula. In the face of the poisonous animal, the viewer wonders how Rosemarie Trockel’s furious humor, in which the women are the thinkers, the men are the objects and the animals are just somehow human, actually affects younger generations today. The vagina as danger rather than birth would fit well into contemporary “vulva” liberation scenarios for women.
However, the film “Heiliger” shows how historic Trockel is. There, a camera glides as if in love along the white oven model of the same name, scans the small openings in the sheet metal in an erotic manner, pauses, moves on, and the sad and beautiful voice of Marilyn Monroe sounds. An anachronistic motif, such as a rotary telephone or a fax machine, one thinks of today’s induction cooker with a digital display. And the role of women has also changed radically, at least in Germany, also thanks to Trockel’s generation.
Rosemarie Trockel’s stove picture “Unplugged” from 1994
Source: © The artist & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022/Photo: Axel Schneider
So not all art ages well. Trockel’s large generation of artists, Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, is now entering a new phase of historicization. Sherman’s fifty-year-old early work, for example, has held up effortlessly to this day, but in retrospect Holzer’s art of theses sometimes seems strangely banal and in need of explanation. Kruger, on the other hand, showed again at the last Venice Biennale that her work is rooted in the present. And Trockel? Her magnificent cast woman’s leg comes to mind – entitled “There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who craves a woman’s slipper and has to be content with a whole woman”. It’s from 1991.
A large-format photograph is closer to the present; she shows Trockel herself, beautiful, naked, confident, crouching on the stovetop, sunglasses on, and with an aura that couldn’t be further from a servant housewife.
Childish self-determination: “Ichi auchi”, 1990 by Rosemarie Trockel
Source: © The artist & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022
And so one wonders oneself how much this exhibition inspires visually, how upright and defiant, why one cannot get enough of this idiosyncratic, spun world of women artists. It is Trockel’s subtle irony that is so enthralling. She herself sees in it a protection against cynicism, completely free from ideological struggles and sensitivities. This modesty has become rarer. The artists are often in the service of a socio-political task and are now integrated into manifestos in the museums, as is currently the case in the Wolfsburg Art Museum for “empowerment”. The description of the exhibition is already a requirement there. It is said that “feminist approaches have been gathered”, analyzing the societies of the world with the means of art and showing possible ways out of the global crises.
The programmatic freedom of the retrospective in Frankfurt escapes this pressure of effectiveness. It is an exhibition that serves no man or woman, but solely art. The grand gesture of dedicating the entire museum to this exceptional artist reinforces this effect: space and time belong to her, only her. So this exhibition is a homage to Rosemarie Trockel, one of the most important artists of our time – and a clear statement against any hasty viewing.
Rosemary Trockel. Until June 18, 2023 at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt. A booklet accompanying the exhibition has been published