“Sociology Is the Science of Love,” reads the message written out in prim cursive on a blackboard before a hand starts erasing the phrase. Long fingernails make the task difficult; they look artificial, and the hand is acting up a bit about being oh-so-poor at purging the blackboard of this pseudo-academic fact. The sequence is short, looping on a small screen, yet hard to let go of – and however futile it may seem to look for a key or some explanatory model to unpack Rosemarie Trockel’s work, this video work (Ann de nuit, 1992) has a certain emblematic feel.
The work hangs in an egg-shaped space between several large halls, rather like some kind of parenthesis, but the words and the hand popped up in the back of my mind again and again in the encounter with the abundance of precision, romance, chilliness, anger and in-the-know references which makes up Trockel’s art, currently sprawled throughout the entire Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (MMK). The practically incomparable German artist turned 70 in 2022, and so, this highly acclaimed Frankfurt institution has put together a retrospective. Here, a huge selection of her so-called life’s work (which is most assuredly still going strong) is presented.
Trockel has made everything. Her work can perhaps be said to be its own sociology; a sociology of objects and motifs. Video and photo works, collages, substantial or understated sculptures, readymades, oil paintings, drawings, strange ceramics, strange installations – and a little (that is, a lot) of everything is on display at MMK. Any attempt to systematise or impose order on the work, to outline the contours of a coherent formal development or to even just catch glimpses of recurring logics, is futile – perhaps just as it would be pointless to squeeze a lived life into a regular string of causality.
And as art writing really do like correlations and explanatory models, the latent rejection in Trockel’s work of a deciphering gaze is, above all, quite wonderful: she has two eyes that see a reality, process it in all sorts of materials, and then leave the result – which can both appear like coincidence and hardcore intention – open like a book without sentences. Her work is not really readable, the approach must be different: to simply look, wonder, surrender to this wonder, enjoy discovering certain threads of motif and material, enjoy when these threads are cut with grim determination, try to take in as much in as possible and accept that our heads will inevitably fall short. Her body of work spans five decades, and venturing into the sheer massiveness – in scope as well as expression – coalescing in this exhibition is utterly overwhelming.
The beginning is bright and quite grand, a kind of architectural overture. A blue serigraph print of a loosely knitted endless pattern (Prisoner of Yourself, 1998) runs through the high-ceilinged atrium space like a frieze. Placed directly on the wall, it points unequivocally to the perhaps closest thing Trockel has even gotten to a trademark: her large, knitted pictures from the 1980s (and onwards). It’s pretty cool to open your biggest retrospective exhibition to date with this kind of self-referential hit, perfectly suited to the odd mix of municipal churchiness pervading the space itself. Knitting acts as a recurring motif as well as a blue prison. But here it also becomes a backdrop for, for example, tasteful ceramic reliefs, which look a bit like sculptural breasts, slightly skewed hotplates, or fans (Training, 2011 and Challenge, 2018).
Further on towards a darkness, a triangular and dramatic space where black-painted walls and spotlights inject some theatrical flair into the self-confident dryness of the art. The space is pervaded by a stove-y and erotic atmosphere; several variations of Trockel’s iconic hotplate relief works are on display (such as Untitled, 1992 and Unplugged, 1994), as well as videos, photos, and sculptural assemblages, all engaging with kitchens and desire – and possibly submission. Sabine (1994) is a black-and-white photograph of the artist’s sister posing naked and sunglass-clad on top of a stove, as if about to seduce it or be cooked. In the video work Mr. Sun (2000), cameras swarm tenderly and intrusively around a Heiliger stove, almost too intrusive as if the lenses were snooping on a human body; the soundtrack is Brigitte Bardot softly singing the love song Mister Sun in the typically soft 1960s-coquettish and lascivious way, so the entire murky room is buttered up with low-voiced sexiness. A slightly steamier eroticism well fit for the restrained minimalism that the hotplate-studded steel reliefs also speak of – or speak with.
Feminist readings of this trajectory in Trockel’s work are obvious and, naturally, not unimportant, but this only makes it all the more wonderful to see the works presented in an atmosphere that contains a critical ambivalence, too: glimpses of a more explicit sexuality. BDSM, fetish, eggs, and Georges Bataille all appear as little hints throughout the room. This softens the formal gravity and rigour possessed by the hotplates themselves and it leaves perspectives on gender and domestication more ambiguously open.
Trockel’s exhibition is – like her work – almost boundless. Trying to describe it exhaustively feels like taking the deepest breath possible before a dive, knowing full well that it won’t be deep enough to defeat the ocean. There really are a lot of works on display here, too many one could think, but there is also an admirable shamelessness in (being a 70-year-old woman and) spreading across three full floors with gleeful abandon. In devoting a lot of wall and floor space to some truly zany explosions of glazed ceramics (including the Louvre series, 2009), in dedicating a room to an almost caricatured white cube-hang of bizarre photorealistic oil paintings that the artist had fabricated in China (including Rush Hour, 2021 and White Hope, 2021).
I could easily have done without those particular works, yet the pervasive presence of ultimate idiosyncrasy, so symptomatic of Trockel’s work, seems to vindicate even the most design-like ceramics, even her most unpredictable dashes of romantic herbarium frilliness à la Karl Blossfeldt: dried flowers, seed pods, and other fragments of nature, neatly installed in Wunderkammer-like glass display cases (Musicbox, 2011) – there are layers of references to Jane Goodall and Marcel Duchamp, but still mysterious.
It seems as if virtually every whim, every good musing on any subject, big or small, has been allowed to step out of the artist’s headspace to become a physical thing in the world. But that feeling in no way compromises the precision of the works or the sense of mild revelation I felt in encounters with inexplicable juxtapositions of subject matter. A hanging – almost hanged – life-size bronze seal with a wreath of light hair around its head (Untitled [“There is no more unfortunate creature under the sun than a fetishist who yearns for a woman’s shoe and has to settle for the whole woman”], 1991). A severed leg of glistening ceramic on a sterile white-tiled table, served with a tilted whiskey (Less Sauvage than Others, 2006/2011). A tiny kangaroo figure placed inside the mouth of a portrait of a semi-nude woman pulling an orgasm face (Kangaroo Admiring the Jaws of a Beauty, 1983). A kind of styrofoam lower body clad in crocheted knickers and a plastic skirt, paired with a hanging glove gripping a water hose (Aus Yvonne, 1997). There examples are countless – and trying to describe the works in this reductive way certainly does them no favours.
Perhaps this is why Trockel is such a literally overwhelming artist – unambiguously value-laden superlatives about her work feel inadequate precisely because it often looks as if her art doesn’t care about being aesthetically consistent, doesn’t care about being ‘good’, ‘beautiful’, ‘cool’, or ‘intelligent’ (although it is often all those things). There seem to be no limits in terms of the materials used, the level of abstraction, figuration, trippy imagination, and conceptual minimalist jamming. But throughout the multitude of things making up this exhibition, there is the sense that every decision is saturated with artistic devotion, however out-there it may appear.
If sociology is the science of love, then Rosemarie Trockel must be both sociology and love, and her exhibition at MMK is truly a profound experience (as well as a piece of impeccable curation). It is thorough, composed, and analytically observant like science; it is chaotic, melting, trusting, and hungry like a warm heart. And it is all those other moments of lucid vision and seductive illogic that makes language fall short.
