Rosemarie Trockel and the Body of Society

Feminism and Postwar Germany

Coming of age in the postwar period of the late seventies and early eighties, Trockel and her generation of West German artists faced an evolving set of concerns. In the aftermath of the social revolutions of the sixties, the idealism accompanying these earlier upheavals had largely waned, a condition that would be rendered more acute over a decade later during the often painful processes of reunification. During this period, the possibilities for political engagement were profoundly altered, and tenets of revolutionary struggle shifted from the belief in wholesale societal transformation to more localized interventions.

As in the United States and other countries of Western Europe, a new feminist consciousness, affiliated with the ‘second wave’ feminist movement of the seventies, emerged. Yet while the internationalism of these efforts is inescapable, the situation faced by West German feminists cannot be entirely assimilated to their counterparts in other contexts. As Sigrid Weigel (1982) has convincingly argued, issues of gender and sexual difference took on a specific resonance in postwar Germany, as they were inevitably tied to larger – and often troubling – questions of national identity. In the context of West German culture, the very premise of ‘difference’ (a key theoretical construct in feminist theory that posited a specifically ‘female’ subjectivity) was uniquely embroiled in the tragic events of history. ⁵ The result was a conflicted relationship to, and even outright ambivalence about, the social and critical value of ‘difference’ itself. ‘The Nazis’ concerted efforts to mark Jews as other(s) and to exclude their bodies from German culture’, she writes, ‘became in postfascist society an exclusion of Jewish realities from cultural and political representation: a shift from an emphasis on otherness to a denial of differences altogether’ (Weigel, 1982: 45, emphasis added).

Weigel’s observations underscore the ongoing presence of fascist reality and its lingering effects in periods seemingly at a historical remove from those of the war: a situation in part due to the repression of historical reflection and assertions of guilt and responsibility on the part of postwar German society (as most famously argued in Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s seminal study, Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour, 1975). While the generation of ’68, in an unearthing of fascism’s repressions, had pursued ‘a revolt against their fathers’, to quote Weigel (1982), their daughters subsequently instigated a women’s movement that was in part a rebellion against fathers and sons. Theirs was an attack aimed at the entrenched patriarchy that had reverted women back to traditional roles of gender subordination during postwar reconstruction, and, perhaps more urgently, had rendered gender an unspoken subject: a stigma that inevitably conjured ghosts of a troubling past. The nature of this rebellion, moreover, in part conflicted with the ambitions of the broader counter-culture, given the open hostility of Leftist movements grounded in Marxist thinking, where feminism’s focus on gender identity was deemed as detracting from the primary issue of class struggle. ⁶

Dagmar Herzog (1998), in a fascinating analysis of post-Holocaust memory and the sexual revolution in West Germany, explores the troubling and intertwined role that gender and sexual identity experienced during these years, and the degree to which this coupling was filtered through the lens of history. For the generation of ’68, there was an implicit (and sometimes explicit) connection between sexuality and fascism, bearing a profound impact upon how the sexual revolution and the larger issue of sexual politics (inclusive and beyond the case of feminism) unfolded, as well as the internal conflicts that marked the leftist movement. With the national sense of guilt and moral crisis, processes of memory and recollection were tethered to those of sexual conflict. There was, however, no consensus as to where this linkage led. As Herzog explains, while ‘New Leftists suggest[ed] it was sexual repression that engendered the Nazi capacity for cruelty and mass murder’, German feminists invoked the specter of Nazism for different ends: ‘invok[ing] the Holocaust in their own assaults on male sexual aggression and male disinterest in female pleasure’ (p. 398). As a result, feminists within the New Left mounted a particularly vitriolic campaign against men in their ranks (most emblematically captured, as Herzog notes, in the acerbic slogan, ‘Liberate the socialist pricks from their bourgeois dicks!, p. 419).

Despite these internal differences, the effects of a more libertine sexuality – whether in the context of a generalized sexual revolution that sought to unlock the conformity of the fifties, or a specifically feminist embrace of female pleasure – were met with similar anxieties: namely, ‘that the release of libido might be, not just liberatory, but rather dangerous, and that the pursuit of pleasure might not lead to social justice, but to evil’ (p. 398). Gender in this context represented a doubly charged sign: to confront its terms meant potentially to take apart a society that desired nothing but to be whole and wholly reformed. The situation was further exacerbated in the renewed quest for an originary national identity after the political collapse of East Germany, a socialist state that, while in some respects having made more progress towards female equality, had its own conflicted relationship to feminism. ⁷ As a result, over the decades, gender continually rears its head as a potential challenge to the social order. Gender lurks, one might say, as a taboo.

The Gendering of Trockel’s Objects

Trockel’s many references to gender – both as cultural sign and as biological reality, which itself constitutes a refusal to settle the essentialist/constructionist debate along partisan lines – replicate the concept’s status as a conflicted idea. Her 2005 retrospective, Menopause, offers insight into this perspective. Renamed Post-menopause at the last minute, it offered, to quote Caroline Jones (2006: 213), a ‘feminist twist on the trauma of a mid-career retrospective’. Included were such typically hybrid works as Living Means Not Good Enough (2002) (Figure 8), a floor sculpture comprised of a life-size photograph of a semi-nude woman lying on her stomach, intently reading a Madonna interview published in The Face magazine, while surrounded by piles of (actual) books and magazines that form the sculptural (i.e. three-dimensional) aspect of the installation. In reproduction, both the slippage between photographic and actual space, as well as the titles of the prominently displayed publications are hard to discern; but, as in many of Trockel’s works, the references and imagery of the latter provide rich fodder for interpretive exploration, particularly as many of them represent mock-ups created by the artist herself (another format that constitutes a significant portion of her oeuvre). ⁸ In this case, as critic Jorg Heiser (2005: 113) identifies, one of them contains a cover spoof where the title Ich bin Dan Graham, (or I am Dan Graham) referring to the well-known male conceptual artist, is accompanied by a photograph of young Trockel standing next to a swimming pool.

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Figure 8

Living Means Not Good Enough, mixed media, 2002 Trockel: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Such references to prominent male artists crop up in other works as well: in Trockel’s many stove (or Herde) pieces comprised of abstract formal patterns, themes of domesticity are cleverly married to minimalist strategies of repetition and seriality – a reference made more explicit in the wall piece Phobia (2002) that remakes Donald Judd’s famous stack piece into a series of anodized slabs of aluminum that disrupt the latter’s regularity with oblique angles jutting from the wall, capped with a decorative bit of fringe hanging from the right side. The piece offers a companion to one of Trockel’s earlier book draft works, also titled Phobia, in which an image of Judd (Figure 9) is manipulated so that the artist appears in drag gazing at one of his revered objects. A similarly tongue-in-check engagement with the forms and persona of a famous male artist is found in the 2004 photo-collage piece, RAF (Recycled Arnulf Rainer). Here, Trockel pictures a woman wearing an open-backed garment (presumably one of the artist’s knitwear pieces), with unraveling strings emerging from its sides, while lying over her knees in a pose reminiscent of the Yoga child’s pose position; above the photograph is a drawing of a head shot through with an arrow.

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Figure 9

Phobia, book draft, 1988 Trockel: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

The work’s title, RAF (Recycled Arnulf Rainer), at once conflates the name of the German terrorist organization with famed Viennese Aktionismus artist, Arnulf Rainer, who is known for self-portrait drawings, prints and photographs that are marked by the painterly gestures of surrealist automatism and expressionism in thickly overlaid surfaces. In Trockel’s piece, the irrational transgressions of the Aktionismus artists (known for extreme, yet mostly faked bodily performance pieces informed by ritualistic tendencies) is conjoined with the irrational exuberance of terrorist violence that plagued West Germany in the 1970s, the time of Trockel’s formation as an artist. Similarly, among the many books scattered within the Living Means Not Good Enough installation, several take a far more sober tone: for example, a book found directly above the reclining woman’s head in the outer ring of publications is titled Schrecksekunden (Seconds of Terror). The image is of a young Trockel standing inside the now notorious stadium erected by the Nazis for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. ⁹

History and Taboo

The pairings in Living Means Not Good Enough emphasize a consistent pattern in Trockel’s oeuvre, where reflections upon gender are never too far from reflections upon Germany’s political and cultural past: the former seemingly a vehicle through which historical memory is channeled, and societal sins are revealed. The ‘lessons of the Holocaust’, to return to Herzog’s (1998) analysis, were partially understood through the lens of sexual and gender conflict, and Trockel’s art seems intent to both insist upon and engage with this dialogue. The well-documented Nazi predilection toward gender stereotyping – including the feminization of weakness, marking Jews and other ‘undesirable’ groups as feminine – was coupled with what Herzog describes as the often ‘titillating relationship between pleasure and Nazi evil’, as documented by postwar testimonials by survivors and participants, where sadistic drives were often couched in sexual terms. ¹⁰ As Herzog espouses, the disturbing memories of Nazi sexual practices and conflicts played a central role in the sexual revolution of the following generation, where the revolution itself acquired meanings outside the bounds of anti-bourgeois counter-culture, inevitably linked to recollection and the fascist past. An outpouring of ‘autobiographical memory essays’ published, (significantly, as Herzog notes) in special issues on sexuality from almost every Leftist journal in the late 1970s and early 1980s, attests to the prominence of this discourse on the wider cultural sphere. ‘For what is going on in these memory-texts is an attempt to reconstruct the fifties’ interpretations of the thirties and forties within the context of the seventies and eighties’ struggle with the meaning of the sixties’, Herzog explains, a time when ‘faith in their own ability to sustain both a political and sexual revolution broke down’ (p. 398).

Problems of gender – of the meanings of bodies sexually, culturally, and politically – circulate around these discussions, but it is not just women’s bodies that were at issue. Most prevalent in this regard is Klaus Theweleit’s monumental, two-volume study, Male Fantasies, published in 1977. As a theory of fascism, Theweleit’s opus is both idiosyncratic and highly provocative. Focusing upon the German Freikorps movement – a volunteer militia organization made up of veterans of the Great War – Theweleit wades deep into the psyche and motivations of these proto-fascists. The self-anointed charge of the Freikorps was to defend ‘traditional’ German culture and to seek revenge upon those who were responsible (leftists, socialists, as they identified them) for the humiliating losses of the First World War. As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in the forward of volume I of Theweleit’s study, the Freikorspsmen ‘managed to survive the relatively warless years between 1923 and 1933’, and beyond that, would go on to become ‘key functionaries in the Third Reich’ and members of Hitler’s SA, preserving throughout a taste for violence and war (p. x).

For Theweleit, the Freikorps (as revealed through letters, personal testimonials, and novels) provide insight into the disturbing attitudes towards women and sexuality – resting upon fear and loathing – that come to characterize fascism, fueling some of its murderous desires. Following the canonical binarism, where women are separated according to virgins and whores (Marys and Magdalenes), the Freikorpsmen considered all women to belong to two, antithetical groups: the good (through the symbol of the white nurse) and the bad or evil (the red nurse). The former, as Theweleit describes it, represents ‘a different kind of woman, a heroic mother figure’, who is a caretaker, a wife, a healer. ‘She is a genuine countess, clearly above any suspicion of whoring’ (p. 91). In contrast, is the threatening, castrating ‘Red nurse’: a communist and a prostitute, the two inextricably linked in their perverse imaginative fantasies.

Providing evidence for his interpretation, Theweleit cites numerous first-hand accounts, including an anonymous war reporter, who, in the following, describes the outposts of the Red Army in the Ruhr Valley:

In any camp … wild scenes could be witnessed of Red bandits strutting back and forth, very much the revolutionary … surrounded by those most repulsive of characters, the Red ‘nurses’. These women indulged even unwounded warriors with prophylactic attentions; and as for the men, the spring season was in their blood. They did it right in the field and forests. (p. 82)

As Theweleit explains, in this and many more accounts, ‘prostitution is equated here with a voluntary erotic relationship between a man and a woman’, thus warranting the latter’s violent destruction: a feat achieved by one Freikorps commander, Major Schulz, who proudly recounts how one such unfortunate couple met their fate with a grenade, which ‘had caught [the woman] off guard in the practice of her true profession’ (p. 82).

The unabashed conflation of eroticism, violence, and misogyny that underscores these episodes –which, for Theweleit, directly informs the fascist mindset – offers further insight into the amalgamation of components found in Trockel’s photo-collage, RAF (Recycled Arnulf Rainer) described above. On the one hand, the idiosyncratic form of Theweleit’s book, which is characterized by the culling and assembling of eclectic and diverse references, including photographs, illustrations, and borrowed texts, uncannily anticipates Trockel’s own aesthetic of appropriation and juxtaposition that often ‘meanders’, to borrow Theweleit’s self-described writerly style in a similarly circuitous route (as recounted by Robinson, 1987). In RAF (Recycled Arnulf Rainer), Trockel weaves together references to the staged erotic transgressions of the Viennese Aktionismus artist to the terrorism of Nazism, a thematic coupling that seems far from arbitrary in light of Theweleit’s pointed analysis, where bodies and politics, sexuality and fear, are brought into dialogue in a troubling conflation.

Mining the ‘margins’ (pace Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault) of history, Theweleit (1977) considers such unexpected topics for a historical study as the fascist preoccupations with dirt and liquidity. Both substances took on notable import, seen to be a threat to the very identity of the ‘good’ (and soon to be) fascist soldier. Through metaphoric associations and inferences, these substances were linked to sex, bodily functions and pleasures. But it did not stop there, as they were also brought into service to conjure the specter of the ever-looming threat of ‘amphibious’ revolutionaries, whose furtive movements into the dirt and slime might undermine the solid (and erect) foundations of the revered state. Burrowing into the earth were a volatile mix of communists and prostitutes, each representing the dark belly underside of societal forces that needed to be quelled, and often through violent means. As another soldier (a wounded Rudolf Berthold, whose writings are cited by Theweleit, 1977), writes in his journal:

The country is full of loafers and cheats, of men whom the turmoil of revolution has whirled to the top, into ministers’ seats, how muddle and ‘lead’ us ever downward, farther down the slippery slop, immediately into the morass …while Bolshevism stands and sneers. (p. 390, ellipses in original)

Theweleit cites such evocative passages in asserting his own, equally suggestive, chain of associations, ones that produce a vivid picture of the Nazi mindset and its almost manic phobias in defense of the motherland, the seeds of which were planted during the pre-Hitler years. ‘The officer senses the drive of contemporary events toward liberation, and part of him would like to go along’, Theweleit explains, ‘but because liberation is inextricably tied to the image of the erotic woman – who exists in his mind only as a castrating whore – the birth of the republic remains synonymous for him with the transformation of ‘Mother Germany’ into a gigantic prostitute’ (p. 390).

In a similar vein, through appropriations from the history of painting, sculpture, fashion, textiles, pottery and design, Trockel thwarts the divide between fine and applied arts, unearthing fears and desires from the historical past with sometimes direct and sometimes meandering associations. Women, animals, sex, and gender are all recurring motifs, which the artist embraces in transgressive fashion, challenging implicit value judgments on the level of both art (or art history) and ideology. ‘If something is fundamentally taboo, that isn’t only a question of taste’, Trockel has remarked, ‘materials, procedures and motives are meaningful aspects of the female and are, accordingly, looked upon as inferior and taboo’ (Koether, 1987: 41). Her many borrowings thus are not simply strategies of artistic appropriation, but unveil hidden meanings of seemingly neutral terms, which, in the process, she reveals as culturally marked. Gender, for Trockel, largely functions on this level: operating not as a category with definitive meaning, nor as one specific phase of feminist struggle, but as a bearer of symbolic and historical import that acts as a potentially disruptive societal element.

Animals and Dirt

In this way, gender, to follow Mary Douglas’s seminal anthropological study, Purity and Danger (1991), functions as a taboo. As she explains, taboos concern the extra-institutional. From initiation rites in traditional societies to childbirth and mental illness in modern contexts, those who have been in ‘marginal’ positions – i.e. outside the norms of social order – are viewed as ‘hot’ with danger and ‘charged with power’ that threatens the social order (p. 97). Douglas emphasizes the symbolic value of these rites and their association as social contaminants. Not unlike Theweleit’s identification of the powerful hold substances of dirt and liquidity maintained on the proto- and fascist mentality, ‘dirt’ invokes disorder, and rituals of purification (even violent ones, as Theweleit explores) are less about cleanliness than about social regulation. ‘Dirt offends against order’, Douglas adds, ‘eliminating it is not a negative movement, nor a positive effort to organize the environment’ (p. 2). Dirt is allegorized as ‘virtues and vices’, and anthropomorphized in order to identify potential threats. In this way, dietary laws – based on restrictions and the opposition of ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’ animals, as in Jewish and Muslim doctrine – designate the boundaries of the impure, restricting behavior in order to protect the organization of the socius. Referring to such laws in the context of religious traditions, Douglas notes:

Christian teaching has readily followed the allegorizing tradition. The first century epistle of Barnabus, written to convince the Jews that their law had found fulfillment, took the clean and unclean animals to refer to various types of men, leprosy to mean sin, etc. (p. 48)

Following Douglas (and Theweleit), who emphasize associations made between animals, substances, and people, it is not surprising that a central recurring motif in Trockel’s artistic production is animals: and more specifically, their symbolic value in relation to social prohibitions and/or management. From her early Super-8 films released in 2000 as Tierfilme (Animal films); cast-bronze sculptures of dead animals entitled Creatures of Habit; and the monkey portraits from Pennsylvania Station 1986–1988 (Figure 10) to the chicken coop work, Hühnerstall (1993) and the 1993 video, A la Motte (in which a moth is depicted chewing and then regurgitating a piece of wool fabric), references to animals, their habitats and habits, cycles of birth, decay, and evolution, are continually invoked. In some cases, gender associations inevitably surface (i.e. the female equals animal equals dirty and inferior), as in the artist’s book, Jedes Tier ist eine Künstlerin (‘Every Animal Is a Female Artist’), which pointedly unmasks the often unacknowledged gender bias in Joseph Beuys’ famous, triumphalist dictum ‘Every man is an artist’. In others, such as Trockel’s 2001 exhibition of drawings at the Drawing Center, titled Metamporphoses and Mutations, the artistic metamorphosis of form through the process of drawing is linked to biological states: as well as the slippery and uncomfortable possibility of animal/human mutation as visualized on the catalogue cover.

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Figure 10

Untitled (drawings from Pennsylvania Station), Pencil on paper, 1986-88 Trockel: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

In these works, transgression functions not in terms of avant-garde shock, but on the visceral level of the abject: of feelings of disgust – or a bodily reaction based on cultural mores, which have been transmitted, learned, and internalized. In this way, Trockel links fears of dirt and animals to anxieties over ‘others’, over women’s bodies and sexuality. Her widely acclaimed installation, A House for Pigs and People (Figure 11) made in collaboration with artist Carsten Höller for the exhibition Documenta X in 1997, is one of a series of animal dwelling pieces in which these complex emotions of repulsion and attraction arise, and her ongoing themes are brought into dialogue with current artistic preoccupations. Comprising a concrete house, the work included a self-contained shelter for a boar, three sows, and a group of piglets; and a different space for humans, who were provided with mats to sit upon and observe the pigs in their somewhat plusher surrounds by means of a two-way mirror.

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Figure 11

House for Pigs and People, installation (concrete house, live pigs, two-way mirror), Documenta X, Kassel, 1997 Carsten Höller and Trockel: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

While offering tired viewers shelter and a place to ‘relax’, the installation also brought together living pigs and humans into the context of what might be considered a participatory artwork (perhaps with a not too sly commentary of the oft-benign terms within which audience participation was being reintroduced into artistic practices at the time). Yet, at the same time, the thickly-paned glass separating the two parties forged an impenetrable barrier, and touch, smell, and sound were negated: the result being that pigs became objects of purely visual observation. Their smells and textures were eliminated. While the work’s architectural and olfactory separation enforced the cultural distinction between the animal and human worlds, the singular ‘house’ for pigs and people, outlined in the work’s title, suggests at the same time their interdependence. Or as Richard Shusterman (1997: 651) observes in the Documenta catalogue, ‘Höller and Trockel’s Haus reminds us that our pork products are made from living creatures with whom we share a world, as we share this house.’

Aside from those ‘few lucky “art” pigs’, to borrow Shusterman’s words, culturally speaking, pigs are otherwise thrown to the mud, literally and figuratively. The swine is a potent symbol of cultural taboo, with Jewish and Muslim dietary laws prohibiting its consumption due to the animal’s perceived uncleanliness. As Douglas emphasizes, this prohibition derives less from actual health issues than the pig’s ambiguous status: at once cloven, but not chewing its own cud, it fails to adhere to the division of acceptable and unacceptable animals, sharing characteristics of both. As Douglas (1991) writes, ‘taboo is a spontaneous device for protecting the distinctive categories of the universe … taboo confronts the ambiguous and shunts it into the category of the sacred’ (p. xi, emphasis added).

Similarly, A House for Pigs and People fails to ‘protect’ such divisions on many levels, and presents the pig as a symbolic object, one that finds logic in Trockel’s larger production. Trockel’s work, rather than providing the comforts of a classificatory system that parses and makes sense of disorder, offers an illogically conceived system – a commingling of weaving and sculpting, fashion and painting, design and art, biology and society. Animals and gender, and the taboos they represent, function accordingly. Why is it, we might ask, that we can’t fully grasp or make sense of Trockel’s strange drawings of monkey/human faces? They challenge our sense of propriety due to their contraventions, disrupting the integrity of ourselves as human subjects, whereby clear distinctions need to be drawn separating us from the mud and dirt – or from the world of animals.

As Julia Kristeva (1982) might describe them, Trockel’s drawings (and her strange installations, chaotic sculptural tableau, and many other objects) are abject. Extending Georges Bataille’s theory of abjection (which defines the latter as a breakdown of meaning), Kristeva considers the effect upon subject–object relations, and the responses of fear, disgust, and horror in the subjects that arise when categorical distinctions (such as animals from humans) are breached. For Kristeva, the corpse is paradigmatic: ‘It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part’, she writes (p. 4). ¹¹

Relevant to our discussion here, Kristeva goes further, relating this dynamic to the traumas of history and its representation. In this context, she considers the crimes of the Holocaust as well as the literary crimes of Paul Céline, observing, ‘In the dark halls of the museum that is now what remains of Auschwitz’:

I see a heap of children’s shoes, or something like that, something I have already seen elsewhere, under a Christmas tree, for instance, dolls I believe. The abjection of Nazi crime reaches its apex when death, which, in any case, kills me, interferes with what, in my living universe, is supposed to save me from death: childhood, science, among other things. (p. 4)

Kristeva describes one’s response to a situation where the comforts of distance are no longer operative: where separation is stymied, or its conventional hold fails. In this case, the subject is no longer protected from those objects (the shoes, cast off like forlorn objects) that now threaten its existence; that refuse to ward off ‘death’ in so many guises. The crimes of the Holocaust live on, as they do in Trockel’s gendered universe, confronting us, as contemporary subjects in the here and now, with that which we no longer want to behold.

The History of Institutions

Gender and its operations of differing upset the provisional resolutions of post-Auschwitz reality, providing insight into the terms in which German feminism sought to introduce (or rather reintroduce) the subject of difference into society. On many levels, as our numerous authors and Trockel’s disturbing objects attest, gender threatened the integrity of a system that had been erected over an edifice of destruction (analogous to the ways that the RAF, albeit through criminalized violence, forced a confrontation with a past that was being masked in the new postwar economy).

To these ends, Trockel’s institutional history as an artist is notable, and specifically, her early affiliations with a number of artist groups and galleries. From the beginning of her career in Cologne in the early eighties, Trockel was not only intent upon fashioning an individual artistic practice, but also of creating a context in which her art could be judged: most notably through her extensive involvement with Monika Sprüth’s gallery, which became an epicenter of a burgeoning feminist artistic practice in Cologne during the eighties. Through the gallery, Sprüth and her artists introduced a distinctly feminist consciousness into the art world.

While not described by the participants in such explicit terms, their efforts uncannily align with the broader consideration of gender differences in contemporary German society, as well of the status of women in a range of postwar German cultural, academic and social institutions. As Ann Taylor Allen (1996) argues, women’s studies programs flourished in American (and other European) universities prior to their surfacing in Germany. During the 1980s, however, there was an important shift, when German feminism moved from carving a separate ‘female’ space into an interest in internally reworking dominant institutions. Taylor Allen describes this as a move from autonomy to integration:

The assumption that institutions could be changed from within was part of a more general trend in feminist movements of the 1980s … Such institutional strategies … were symptomatic of a ‘postfeminist’ era in which the explicitly political forms of activism developed in the 1960s and 1970s gave way to more local and varied activities designed to pursue feminist goals within communities, workplaces, and organizations. (p. 153)

The tension between autonomy and integration nonetheless persisted, she notes, as feminists sought to maintain the integrity of their ideals without compromise. These ideals often came up against the particularly entrenched and hierarchically organized structures of German institutions of higher learning. As a result, West German feminists were more resistant than their American counterparts to inhabit women’s studies programs in existing universities, preferring to develop their own programs in ‘outsider’ venues, such as community based groups and other adult educational organizations. ¹²

A similar questioning regarding the extent of their participation in existing artistic institutions animates the decisions of Sprüth and her artists as they were seeking a distinct place within the art world. It was a formidable context: Cologne during the eighties was a recognized epicenter of avant-garde activity, second perhaps only to New York in its international profile and influence. It was, however, a city of factions, first gaining fame for the neo-expressionist pomp of a set of male practitioners who were apparently very much on the mind of Sprüth from the outset: when asked why Eau de Cologne (Figure 12), the gallery’s on-again, off-again, serial publication modeled after Warhol’s famed Interview, featured women exclusively, Sprüth curtly explained, ‘Oops, no men, we hadn’t noticed’ (see Heiser, 2005: 110).

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Figure 12

Eau de Cologne cover, issue no. 3.

Sprüth’s gallery was highly self-conscious about its potential role within this situation. ¹³ The factionalism – even schoolyard cliquiness that fueled, among others, the cult of artist Martin Kippenberger (who would die an untimely death in 1997 at the age of 44) – was recast in Sprüth’s gallery through a commitment to collaborative work. As the history of the avant-garde reveals, collective (and often anonymous or pseudonymous) forms of artistic practice frequently represent a sign of political, aesthetic engagement, and Sprüth’s gallery was no exception to this rule. Eau de Cologne formed one node of its venture into collaboration: a magazine cum catalogue cum manifesto (accompanied by a related series of exhibitions) that contained interviews, articles, features, and reproductions, it forged a ‘community’ of women artists across national boundaries and existing art world subcultures through its pages and programs. During its run, the publication and series featured, among others, the work of Cindy Sherman, Jenny Holzer, and Barbara Kruger, three key American artists involved in postmodern media critiques. As Trockel recalls years later, such associations with artists across the Atlantic were significant: ‘I felt drawn more to what was happening in New York. In Cologne a lot of energy was wasted in power struggles, while in New York the equal status of women artists seemed much less contested’ (quoted in Graw, 2003: 225).

Efforts of the gallery to create a collective identity defined by gender nonetheless were not necessarily ‘pure’, as it offset the idea of limited, exclusive community through the inclusion of select male artists in the gallery’s program. Also at issue was its artists’ collective and individual participation in the larger community of the eighties Cologne art world, before and after Sprüth’s gallery opened. Notable is Trockel’s early association with the collective, Mülheimer Freiheit; the gallery’s friendship with the dealer Paul Maenz; and Trockel’s own, if uneasy, associations with Martin Kippenberger, whom she met in 1982. ¹⁴ As she notes to Isabelle Graw: ‘I only put up with Kippenberger’s system because I knew that something would come out of it for me. I was like a sponge slowly soaking it all up’ (p. 225).

Sprüth and Trockel (1985: 207) were equally shrewd about their place within the market as well as their ability to influence it: ‘In 1982 when I discussed the idea of a gallery with you for the first time’, Sprüth remarks to Trockel in a conversation published in the first issue of Eau de Cologne, ‘we talked about what role women play in these contexts. It was clear to us from the beginning that the focus had to be on attempting to exert influence, especially on the conditions of the art market.’ Later on in the same interview, Trockel situates her own practice from a similar perspective:

There is the contradiction of wanting to work in peace on the one hand, and on the other hand to take part in the art market, also in order to alter structures of power – and nonetheless not be absorbed by it. This problem is almost impossible to survive. (p. 208)

The Knit Paintings

To return to where this study began: Trockel’s, approach – one of simultaneous confrontation and withdrawal – is in evidence in her canonical knit paintings. While idiosyncratic, they nonetheless squarely inserted themselves into the then very current and charged debates regarding the ‘return of painting’, a discourse dominated by the reception of German neo-expressionism and its American counterparts. Utilizing mechanized techniques of knitting, Trockel adorns her paintings with the semiotics of pornography (Playboy bunny), industrial production (Woolmark) and political ideology (i.e. hammer and sickle), suggesting that everything – from seemingly ‘neutral’ issues of quality and mastery, to popular culture and political system are, pace Baudrillard, freely traded signs of the commodity. Any inherent meaning is depleted, and is now located only in relation to other commodity signs within the system (see Baudrillard, 1996[1968], 1981[1972]).

Made during a period in which poststructuralist critiques of representation were increasingly informing artistic practices, Trockel’s knit paintings logically lend themselves to such readings (such as the instability of meaning and authorship). But as the artist herself has remarked, her careful recontextualizations also serve to deplete the ‘original’ signs of their intended force. ‘These knitted pictures … differ from conventional iconography’, she notes, ‘If I knit in a garment or sweater the hammer and sickle, for instance, there is a depreciation of the ideology bound up in identifying the logos for product propaganda and ideological propaganda’ (Koether, 1987: 41).

In these respects, each knit work operates within a larger ‘system of signs’, to cite Baudrillard again, that, taken together, reflect upon on the coexistence of memory, history and difference. While their gendered critiques are evident – in referencing and then undermining of the ‘feminine’ terms of craft-based labor, which is here recast as a mode of industrial production; as well as in the signs (i.e.) playboy bunny that are included – these elements coexist with overtly charged signs of political ideology: one being the swastika (Figure 13), whose symbolism in relation to recent history and the nation’s contemporary remaking needs no further explanation. In case the specificity of this chain of references is not clear, Trockel seems to insist on its import. In one of the knit paintings, she repeats the ‘manufacturer’s’ tag, ‘Made in Western Germany’ (Figure 14) over and over again in tightly woven rows. Conflating a standard clothing label with a Duchampian pseudonym (where The Fountain’s signatory ‘R. Mutt’ is further dislocated into the anonymity of the nation-state), in this work Trockel pointedly rejects the Cold War definition of the latter – West Germany – presenting the politicized moniker ‘Made in western Germany’ in insistent reiterative play.

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Figure 13

Untitled (Swastika), knitted wool and acrylic yarn, 1986 Trockel: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Figure 14

Untitled (Made in Western Germany), knitted wool, 1985 Trockel: © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

In the End, a Hole

In the years following her period as the ‘knit person’, Trockel’s multifaceted objects continue to mine the territories of gender and history, consistently marking current political concerns by the shadows of the past. Her 2000 multi-part exhibition at Dia Art Center in Chelsea is exemplary. Entitled Spleen, the installation comprised a series of moving walls, a five-part video work (Manu’s Spleen), as well as a few select objects. The term ‘spleen’ of course names a bodily organ, but its figurative meanings are layered with historical import, as the spleen ‘since ancient times’, as Joan Simon (2003: 95) writes, ‘has been considered the seat of emotions’. In contemporary usage, according to the New Oxford definition, the spleen represents ‘Violent ill temper, spite; irritability, peevishness … in a fit of spleen, vent one’s spleen. An instance of this, a grudge, a spite.’

Trockel’s appropriation of the term reveals the literary dimensions of her objects. They are, one could say, deeply rhetorical, in the sense of self-aware of the uses of figural language and literary devices and modes – from allegories to symbols to narrative – that have themselves gone in and out of favor in the history of literary criticism (as well as, significantly, in art history, where they have often been cast outside the domain of avant-garde critique and thus rendered ‘taboo’). ¹⁵ The other dimension of rhetoric concerns its power of persuasion, a consideration that takes into account the more politicized aspects of speech. To quote literary theorist Terry Eagleton (1983: 206):

[Rhetoric] saw speaking and writing not merely as textual objects, to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly deconstructed, but as forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers, orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded.

This ‘embeddedness’ of the rhetorical within the social that Eagleton describes characterizes the many references of Spleen, and specifically one of the videos, entitled Manu’s Spleen 2 (2002). The subject of the work concerns the decision by the city of Cologne to tear down the Josef-Haubach-Forum, a building designed by Franz Lemmersen that housed the city’s kunsthalle and kunstverein, in order to make room for a new arts complex. Since the sixties, the building had been an important site of contemporary exhibitions and actions, and Trockel’s video refers to this crisis and the ensuing protests with which she became passionately involved: futile, belated exercises, as the decision was already made and just waiting to be carried out. ¹⁶ The ‘Manu’ of Manu’s Spleen is German artist and illustrator Manu Burghart, who is featured in all five videos of the series and whose appearance, as Joan Simon (2003: 95) observes, bears an uncanny resemblance to the artist herself: a döppelganger who serves as surrogate for Trockel’s own presence in the complex narrative explored in the videos.

The seemingly idiosyncratic pairings of a bodily organ, the emotional range of its use (here embodying anger towards a specific governmental decision), the will of political protest, coupled with references to her home city of Cologne are exemplary of the way that form, structure and allusion are consistently embedded with socio-political import. In the case of Manu’s Spleen 2, the afterlife of the work provided an unexpected reinforcement. Once the Josef-Haubach-Forum was demolished, the city of Cologne discovered it did not have the funds to build the new arts complex, which had been the entire impetus for its destruction. While multiple city entities went about searching for a plan, a giant cavity remaining in the landscape (Figure 15) became a pointed symbol of civic shortsightedness, historical amnesia, and profound embarrassment. Trockel, along with Marcel Odenbach, forged an alliance with fellow artists to create the organization, Das Loch e.V. (The Hole association).

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Figure 15

View of Das Loch (the hole), Cologne, Germany, 2002.

While the title of their organization, with its flash of sarcasm, levels pointed critique at the powers that be, it also had a serious or rather more productive side, leading to the organization of the European Kunsthalle, an institution that to this day exists as a museum with no actual physical building to occupy. ¹⁷ Taking what was then a novel but now a more common curatorial approach, in which the institution, in its very organization, reflects upon the eclectic, networked, and sometimes temporary formats of contemporary art, the Kunsthalle presents ‘a broad spectrum of art forms, not as yet known and as yet established approaches to contemporary art and includes interdisciplinary and experimental happenings’, ¹⁸ as its website describes. Through the European Kunsthalle, the artists involved are collectively reimagining the possibilities of a contemporary arts institution for a post-medium, global age.

In the case of both the Kunsthalle and Trockel’s video, what we see is the possibility of an actual and figurative place being erected over the site of destruction: or, literally a hole, extending and broadening the themes that Trockel first visited in her Balaclava masks. To recall, they are coverings, but ones that simultaneously mark emptiness. As the artist once noted, ‘I’m interested not only in the history of the victor, but also that of the weaker party. The masks, for example, consist not only of what they say or intend to say, but also of what they exclude. They have absence as their subject’ (see Koether, 1987: 40). This last comment perhaps best summarizes the artist’s aesthetics and (or as) her politics: for whatever can be thought, there is always an outside. To let the unthought consistently creep back in without resolution is in and of itself a political act: one in which difference is reinscribed into the place where it had long been excluded and remains a troubling presence. Holes abound.