I enjoy connecting things that were previously isolated; this contact is similar to a handshake between two people.
- Isa Genzken

There is a remarkable photograph of Isa Genzken taken in her Düsseldorf studio in 1982. In it she is holding one of her hyperboloid sculptures and is standing amongst others that rest on the floor but extend beyond the picture's frame. These linear wooden sculptures which measure approximately 600 centimetres appear surprisingly lightweight for their formidable size. Indeed, photographed from below the image confers upon the artist a sense of omnipotence, a mastery over her objects as well as the viewer. The photograph can be seen as a re-inscription of the traditional 'artist in their studio' narrative where aesthetic labour is meant to be conceived. Here, against the grain of the venerable male sculptor in situ, we are presented with a female artist, coolly returning our gaze, unencumbered by the 'unwieldiness' of her artistic practice, of the objects she makes and the role she is rewriting.

The picture signals a literal shift in the orientation of the work from the horizontal to the vertical. It also rehearses a shift in the artist's use of materials and the exploitation of site-specificity in the work. The most striking instance of this is Genzken's ongoing engagement with outdoor public sculpture.

In 1987 Isa Genzken presented her first outdoor work. Entitled ABC, the piece was commissioned by curators Kasper Köning and Klaus Bussmann for the Münster Sculpture Projects and was installed adjacent to the city's university library.¹ The title ABC references the group of Swiss-based architects from the twenties including El Lissitzky whose Proun Room (1923) inaugurated what Benjamin Buchloh saw as a move from 'pictorial to sculptural, from sculptural to architectural space' as both socially and discursively constructed.² And similar to her concrete sculptures on plinths from the same period, ABC is at once sculpture and architecture. It calls attention to the slipperiness of these two terms as they mediate one another through the work's own construction and location: reinforced concrete columns and supports with steel frames situated in an outdoor concourse. The sculpture looks and acts like an extension of the library but has no architectural purpose, neither as structural support nor as functional necessity. However, the materials used for the sculpture's fabrication are the very same ones routinely used for building construction, like the library itself. The work becomes a kind of exoskeleton, a fragment of the building's own foundation. It also becomes a model of the building with its vertical and horizontal supports and steel frames that echo the library's own windows. Genzken's sculpture in the midst of an urban university campus takes on a synecdochal relationship with its context as a part of the whole and vice versa. It is both a marker (index) and a location (interstice), a site and non-site whose identity trades on this irreducibility.

Since the mid-1980s Genzken has realised at least ten public sculptures, each accompanied by an architectural maquette prepared beforehand. Some other projects have not been realised, yet are nonetheless instrumental to an understanding of the artist's works in general, and compelling in their own right. These works relate to Genzken's production over the past fifteen years as potential models of space that inscribe what Isabelle Graw calls a 'phenomenological representation of the social'.³ That social body must he posited, however, through and beyond the failed projects of constructivism's functionalist utopianism and minimalism's 'subjectless' phenomenology of perception.⁴

Genzken's titles invoke a kind of (urban) social architectonics such as in the concrete works Bühne (Stage), Zimmer (Room) or Hochhaus (Skyscraper), or in her more recent, tower-like Column series that incorporates patched bits of actual building materials and photographs. One can also see evidence of the social in her maquettes, with their miniature figures and cars, or even Genzken herself as in the photo-collage entitled Entwurf für ein Gartenskulptur (Proposal for a Garden Sculpture). And in as much as her architectural maquettes are couched in a potential social sphere as they imagine a certain subjectivity, they also conjure up a 'resolution' to what that space is missing. Speaking about her approach to the problem of site-specificity, about how a work becomes both an integration and an intervention within a circumscribed arena, Genzken has stated: 'The point is ... to make something that this place, this particular location is lacking.'⁵ This statement is taken to its logical conclusion with the proposals Tor für Amsterdam (Gateway for Amsterdam) and Tulpen (Tulips) (both works 1988). With Tor, the artist has literally 'filled-in' the Dutch landscape with what is absent, with what the potential collective cultural unconscious 'lacks': a mountain gateway straddling a motorway in the flatlands of Holland. This literal gaming is destabilised as the gateway itself is composed of concrete, a kind of 'artificial stone', which renders nature as artifice in much the same way as her early wooden floor pieces from the late seventies and early 1980s - the hyperboloids and the ellipsoids - render their own organics 'artificial'.⁶ In addition, it is worth noting not only this double play of absence and presence, natural and artificial, but to recognise that Genzken takes the work one step further by placing the gateway itself on stilts, thereby undermining any clear recourse to nature whatsoever.

Nature is once again put between inverted commas with Tulpen. Placed on opposite sides of a motorway (with two flowers each), the tulips' blossoming stems gracefully sway over the road, high above the motorists below, whilst their giant green leaves are 'windswept' to the ground. Genzken's proposal envisions the tulip, a national signifier for 'Dutchness', as a 30-metre-high steel sculpture, one which would give permanence to (and perhaps invoke fear of) Holland's most identifiable and reproducible 'natural' commodity.

In 1993, Genzken realised another floral-inspired large-scale sculpture. Rose is situated on the grounds of the Villa Schriever in Baden-Baden. Made of steel and aluminium, this towering 'horticultural caprice' with its attendant red- coloured bloom, green leaves and knife-sized thorns, mirrors its stately environment as an emblem of kitsch sentimentality, a single cut flower. But then Genzken inverts this effusive cliché through the sheer incongruity of the work's eight-metre height, inflicting the viewer with a humourous sense of threat. In the catalogue for the Münster Sculpture Projects of 1997 we see two photographs: one of a lake surrounded by trees and another of Genzken amongst the same trees looking upward towards the sky. Both images have a crudely rendered spherical form scribbled into the skyline. These sketches relate to Genzken's work entitled Vollmond (Full Moon), which alternatively could be called Twenty-four Hour Moon, as it was illuminated day and night throughout the exhibition. The artist's contribution combined a metal pole fashioned with a two-and-a-half-metre glass sphere. The entire structure reached over 20 metres in height and showered its park environs with white 'moonlight' both night and day. Genzken relates the genesis of the work to German Romanticism's notion of the moon as a mirror of the state of the soul, along with a host of other associations ascribed to a full moon such as longing, madness, moonshine alcohol or even to moon one's arse. A full moon, of course, is like a blank screen where cultural mythologies, fears and superstitions are projected onto it. By erecting an always-illuminated 'moon' we are able to pick apart this tight weave of associations and myths through denaturalising the artifice of Genzken's sculpture. And like the gateway for Amsterdam, the maquette Vollmond eventually 'eclipses' the real moon by filling in for it when it 'lacks' in daylight.

In describing her sculpture Fenster (Window) (1998), Genzken has noted that 'the moment that it tilts is the moment of its greatest tension', and that the sculpture's 'centre isn't defined by harmony but by crisis'.⁷ This description would also be appropriate for an earlier piece of work called Camera (1990) as both sculptures are orientated on a permanent tilt that 'reinforces a conscious physical experience of ... power, place and scale'.⁸ Fenster is sited on the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens's vast lawn facing the 'ordinary houses' on its perimeter as opposed to the 'rich villas' on the other side. This immense sculpture measures eight by ten metres and is made from polished stainless steel dwarfing the average adult by over 400 per cent. And much like her other outdoor works, whose immediate legibility as common objects quickly displace the viewer by their very stature or location, so Fenster acknowledges its own 'power, place and scale' as an abstracted fragment of urban architecture perpetually in the state of imminent collapse.

Camera is a tilting sculpture which must rely on technology to sustain its 'imbalanced' orientation much like Fenster does, but alternatively it is physically lodged in a radically different fashion somewhere between the domains of public and private space. The piece was commissioned by collectors in Brussels as an outdoor sculpture for a roof terrace on top of a four-storey building. Genzken created this five-by-four-metre work - the exact size of the building's windows - as a windowless structure that would literally frame the city as a continuous 'filmic' experience. The sculpture leans against the terrace railing with the bulk of its frame hazardously suspended above and out towards the street, extending and finally puncturing the bond between public and private. As such, the work becomes paradigmatic of Isa Genzken's entire project with site-specific public sculpture: it is both an integration and an intervention at the same time.

— David Bussel