Sabine crouches naked on the cooker, surrounded by appliances. All her extremities make contact with the hobs as though she herself were somehow plugged in. The retrospective is the largest collection of work ever to be exhibited by Trockel in the same space, and is separated across three floors and numerous corners, nooks, and sub levels. Playing with contradictions and expectations, the works exchange a certain corporeal yet objectified substantiation. Objects are bodies, bodies are objects, and nothing really makes sense except the fact that someone’s having a laugh.
Just off the main gallery, visitors encounter an eighteen minute video piece; a kind of Trockel vs. Trockel showdown from bird’s eye view. The camera angle is ingloriously neutral; an unapologetic invigilator. Trockel sits desheviled and bedraggled in an interrogation chair. Circling her is Trockel herself, like a predatory hawk, berating her to disclose “who is the best artist?” She asks her(self) again and again.
As Trockel embarks to generate the correct answer, she continues to fail, being met with violent retaliation from herself. The visualisation and dramaturgical enactment of self-hate and comparison associated with the concept of “best” echo ongoing themes not only to the art world but with the monotonous male gaze and insinuations of authority.
At moments like this the works can be deeply chilling, but Trockel’s dry humour catches the viewer just at the precipice of succumbing to dreaded thoughts and associations. The contrivity of dialogue keeps the fourth wall wholly in tact, tempering any caustic speech. Trockel’s palpable German accent makes the fact that she carries on to have an English conversation with herself not only comical but utterly endearing.
Though the layout of the exhibition has been seemingly labeled as chronological, the curation follows a more materialistic statute, attempting to make clinical order of Trockel’s anarchic impulses. Nevertheless, the ordering of chaos does not censor her recurringly odd obsessions with certain cultural, and sometimes biological, products. These become an aesthetic language that Trockel uses to illuminate quotidien processes and unintentional making of rituals, including, but not limited to: eggs, wigs, and hobs.
The occupation of the kitchen becomes a carrier for modernist painting. Trockel composes large canvases of electric hobs. While they convey an astute minimalist aesthetic, the viewer is met with an eery and unsettling discovery. The hobs are plugged in and emit an active heat. There are warning signs interspersed by the museum that announce “Please don’t touch. The plates are hot.”
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While the plates have been repurposed, they have not lost their ubiquity.The dual purpose engagement of the plates as well as their implied threat speak to the expectations of female occupation and subsequent vulnerabilities.
A source close to the artist explains that the materialistic curation of the show evades the craziness inherent to her process. While the show is cleanly sorted into themes, sections, and materials, in reality Trockel would purportedly be working on many of these works concurrently. She picks things up and puts them down. She is chaotic, anarchistic, and disorganised.
Despite the recurrence of ideas and objects, Trockel’s identity is determinately and consistently to not ascribe to one. Traversing sculpture, knitting, photography and drawing, her work is predictably unpredictable.
Because Trockel’s pictures by no means subscribe to the image of lovingly and laboriously made manual work (many were machine-made) they also embrace a timely West German quality of value creation; a trademark of post-war West Germany, where she grew up.
This is particularly apparent in the well-known series of knit paintings, for which Trockel first became known. A way of painting-without-painting, these canvases again reflect the dry wit and courageous embrace of conventional female-associated practice, moreover analogous with hippies and repugnant handicraft.
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The MMK’s progressively perplexing layout serves the retrospective well. Unduly tidy the curation may be, visitors will get lost within corners and sub-levels of the space. Artworks are tucked into tiny nooks with obtuse angles, or plainly presented in airy, squared-off spaces. This dimensional banter lays a disorienting but fortuitous groundwork for Trockel’s lawless and unwanting play with contradiction and seems to make perfect sense.
The exhibition is supported by Crespo Foundation, Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain, and Kulturstiftung der Länder
Rosemarie Trockel is on view at MMK Frankfurt through 18 June
Domstraße 10
60311, Frankfurt am Main
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