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Lisa Lee, "Isa Genzken's Plastic Allegories"

The UCI Department of Art History presents
Isa Genzken's Plastic Allegories
Lisa Lee
Princeton University

Isa Genzken’s sculptural materials since 2003 feature commodities unmarked by
use and without the patina that time imparts. With their lurid colors and designer
curves, her works embody what Walter Benjamin memorably called “the sex
appeal of the inorganic.” Seizing mass-produced objects in their myriad forms,
Genzken subjects them to an assemblage process that generates
phantasmagorical effects through the staging of aggressive and arbitrary relations
between things. Genzken thereby exacerbates the alienations brought about by
late capitalism. At the same time, however, she maintains the possibilities,
however tenuous, of our meaningful presence to ourselves and to one another—
the possibilities, in other words, of privacy and publicness. In this talk, I engage in
a close reading of Genzken’s materials and her assemblage process, which I
understand to be allegorical in nature. I ground my reading of Genzken’s
assemblages in an elaboration of the history of their primary constitutive element,
plastic, as well as in a consideration of the thematics of desire, erotic pleasure,
and sociality that her works put into play.

Free and open to the public.
For more information, please contact arthis@uci.edu.