German artist Rosemarie Trockel’s practice famously resists being categorised within a specific style or identifiable look — and in her on-going show at the Lalit Kala Akademi, you will encounter mediums and materials as varied as hotplates, knitting, a contraption with brushes, video and drawings.
Trockel (born 1952), is an important contemporary visual artist, and among the foremost living and working in Germany today. While Trockel doesn’t do interviews, an e-chat with her and her team about the processes and framework of the show reveals that the selection of works was made by herself along with the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations (IFA Institut) and curator Gudrun Inboden.
Rather than a retrospective, the idea was more a ‘snap-shot’ to offer an insight into her practice.
Trockel is interested in forms of artistic production and its hierarchies of fine art and craft. One of her most famous works on view is Untitled (Painting Machine), a contraption with a variety of brushes. When switched on, the machine “mechanically” draws a series of strokes on sheets of paper which are exhibited as artworks.
Conceptually driven, it’s not necessarily an easy show to “get into”, and perhaps the quickest entry points are two evocatively rendered drawings, Young Man Dozing and Kevin at Noon (both from 2000). The shadows are demarcated in rhythmic linear strokes; though primarily black, we see traces of other colours.
Unlike many of the works on show, not only are these titled, but the pleasure principle of creating drawings — and Trockel’s fluidity with the medium — are also allowed to peep through. As the e-chat discloses, drawing is still an important part of her daily practice.
The interest in drawing as a means of mark-making and enquiry into image-making is visible in her video Buffalo Milly + Billy (2000) where “drawn” elements both obscure and change the film.
Turning our attention back to our pair of drawings, we note that both Kevin and the Young Man Dozing have their eyes closed, and that the subjects of many works do not confront the viewer, but are napping, looking away or have their back to us. Some works ask us to speculate on the various registers between celebrity-hood and anonymity; others on notions of identity and gender.
The artist returns to feminist and gender concepts time and again, sometimes invoking the domestic. A personal favourite are her knitted works, which she has made since 1985. Though disappointingly, there’s only one on display — it suggests how the artist takes a domestic/female activity smack into the middle of the art/political debate.
The knitted work is abstract, and the overall look mechanistic, proposing a tension between the male industrial domain and the female domestic domain — an idea echoed in another work combining hotplates on a metallic ground.
The continuing role of gender in her work is part of the e-conversation, for Trockel believes it’s still necessary to deal with gender roles and inequalities between men and women; i.e. while there’s a surface semblance of equality in the (western) world where she conducts her practice, a closer look reveals significant differences in areas ranging from politics to the workplace and role models.
A small footnote: the show is part of a series organised by the IFA Institut and has included such male icons of German contemporary art as Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter.
It’s an interesting backdrop against which to view Trockel’s show as one that resists the spectacular, and deals with queries of gender and image-making in subtle, ironic ways.
Rosemarie Trockel is presented by the Goethe Institut at Lalit Kala Akademi, 4, Greams Road from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. till the end of the month.
(Chennai-based Parvathi Nayar is a contemporary artist known for her drawing and video practice, and was part of the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2014/15)
