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From: Clem
Category: Art
Date: 11 April 2008
Time: 02:28 PM
Review:
To a minimalist formalist like Genzkhen, the realisation that the most perfectly executed piece of high
sculpture cannot compete with the lowest, mass produced bit of throwaway crap, either in its
perfection, its total form, its multiplicity ,its discursiveness,its compelling ugliness. A kind of profound
disillusionment with art follows ,and a body of work that reproduces all the known tropes of art through
this new base medium;classicism, narrative,psychological revelation, the confessional ,the
humanistic, the tableau, the decorative, the baroque, the sublime;its all there, its rhetoric exposed by
an utterly contingent ephemeral collage of the lowest commodities,plastic, empty, poundbuster trash.
Whats surprising is that it works so brilliantly as art and is moving,not a grotesque ironic parody.
We sympathise with Goofy ,imploring the porcelain figurine who will never turn around to greet him,the
differences between the two down to the level of their own materiality,one- rubber, one clay.Genzkhen
becomes a great artist by giving up on the idea of sculptures perfectibility,and this loss gives her
work a deep sense of the tragic - as though the goal of her art is so tied up with her goal for her own
life,so she only becomes fully human by starting from a position of failure-see Beckett, Philip Guston.
Its a kind of exhilirating ecstasy of failure,contingency and the half-baked;joyful, bitter, waspish.