The Bauhaus Disco: 18 Thoughts on the Grace Building, Ghost Estates and Isa Genzken

In May for the opening of the Isa Genzken show at the Kunsthalle Wien, I gave the opening lecture, one that pulls together everything from the Lenape tribe in New York City to the Bauhaus, Mies, a ghost office park in Paris and ghosts of the city and what the city should be, not to mention skating on Wall Street at 3 am and the buildings I have crushes on. They all became a way to talk about Isa Genzken’s work.

The video is here:

Here’s how my talk starts:

1)   A skyscraper too far.

This part is a story, a fable about an empty skyscraper which if you bear with me seems an apt introduction to Genzken. Or perhaps to my take on her work. And the fable is set in Paris not NY or Berlin as you might expect, though the title, A Skyscraper Too Far was a headline in the Economist magazine a month or so ago.

 I read it and immediately thought of Isa Genzken. The article was largely about the state of commercial real estate in Europe in the recovery or whatever economic moment we’re in now, but it started off with this ghost business park in Paris. La Defense. “Europe’s biggest purpose-built office complex,” the Economist called it.

 It’s the Majunga Tower. It glitters at silver angles raking up with jaunty zigs and zags towards the sky. It is big and empty. A ghost building. It will probably stay empty for years. This, the empty building, driven by speculation, the idea of a ghost skyscraper all of it seemed ready for Genzken to ponder, to transform and question. So I stared at the picture in the magazine and wondered: What Would Isa Do? In the US it’s a phrase that the religious right has coined as in What Would Jesus Do? And, where it comes to thinking of architecture, the built world and the social sphere, in my mind, she is a deity.

This has been the subject of her work for three decades. In my opinion this makes her one of the most important artists of her generation. So, this tower and what she might see and comment on in it, seemed a perfect metaphor and way into her work. Because her subject matter is all around us, and is more relevant than ever. I mean this was just a passing headline in the Economist but for decades she’s been thinking about these subjects, about cities and urbanism and the built world, and her work undoes our world around us and lays it bare for us. She can show us the skyscraper too far.