Sculpture as theater: with her recent, quasi-architectural sculptures functioning as video screens, Rosemarie Trockel presented at the Dia Center for the Arts a cohesive yet characteristically multifaceted exhibition

A thousand spleens bear her a thousand ways.--William Shakespeare

Model: Book

Rosemarie Trockel once described a book she envisioned that would reprint all of the articles written about her and her works, all of her own publications and exhibition catalogues, together with all of her exhibition reviews, pro and con. (1) Such a book would evidence the different ways her concepts are embodied and transformed over time. It would serve to pinpoint when and where works were initially presented, and demonstrate how they were later reworked or re-presented in other places and contexts. Trockel follows different lines of thought in connecting her projects one to the next, often in response to the sites where they are exhibited.

Accordingly, the collection would show how different meanings pervaded each situation and how different publics responded in different instances; more importantly, it would establish which works were actually shown. The checklists of Trockers exhibitions, as published in the accompanying catalogues, have at times failed to include crucial works added to a show at the last moment in an improvisatory act of revision and redirection. So routine is this last defining gesture in an exhibition practice that is also characterized by close collaboration between artist and curator that it might be seen as evidence of Trockel's "spleen," a word she has defined (the German word is also "spleen") as slightly peculiar or bad habits. (2) Today, the sense of "spleen" is typically limited to a "feeling of resentment or anger," as in the expression "to vent one's spleen." However, going back to an unabridged Webster's, the word's emotional range is seen to be complex and contradictory (a state that Trockel always finds promising). She explores some of the ramifications of the word in a recent series of videos, to be discussed below.

Trockers encyclopedic publication would afford the reader a sweep through her themes, motifs, mediums and formats, such as the wool knit "pictures" and garments, some of them preposterously elongated, for which she first gained wide public notice; the works in several mediums focusing on stove and oven imagery; the houses for people and animals, made in collaboration with sculptor Carsten Holler; the egg/chicken coop projects; and those works related to the initials "BB" (referring to Brigitte Bardot and also Bertolt Brecht), to list but some of the more familiar bodies of work. Also included would be the more recent "Living Is ..." series of photo/assemblage floor pieces, as well as the "Manu's Spleen" videos and the architectural sculptures she generically calls "moving walls."

And there's more. Art historian Anne M. Wagner estimates that Trockel had by 1999 "generated something like a thousand drawings in the last twenty years" (3); an informal survey by this writer indicates she has made more than 50 videos. Her work also includes designs for books, magazines, clothing and household furnishings, but these are harder to quanta. "Since 1986 Trockel has sent unobtrusively into the stream of commerce carpets, vases, china and clothing, and in 1994, designed a striped carpet, ceiling decorations, and porcelain coffee service for the Ladies' Drawing Room for the German embassy in Washington, D.C.," writes Lisa Zeiger in Nest. (4)

With the exception of a retrospective survey exhibition that toured Europe in 1998-99, offering the fullest picture of her work to date, (5) Trockel in recent years has typically focused each exhibition on one or two types of works, such as the 1999 show "Maisons/Hauser" (Houses), comprising shelters for animals and people, done in collaboration with Holler at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, (6) or the exhibition of stove/kitchen pieces at the Lenbachhaus, Munich, in 2001, or the kitchen works together with the wool works at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, also in 2001. (7) An alternative model is to pick one or two new suites of works for the core of the show, and then add a variety of others in the same exhibition. For example, the drawing retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, offered a year's production of Trockers then newest body of drawings, the "Sleepers," in which the figures look ambiguously sleeping or dead. The exhibition also presented drawings since 1983, as well as a multimedia sculpture that is a drawing/slide show situated inside a camping tent; the video Manu's Spleen (2000) was also given its debut showing. (8) The extensive works on paper component of the Pompidou show was subsequently on view at the Drawing Center in New York. (9)

"Rosemarie Trockel: Spleen," currently at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York [through June 15], is a concise and theoretically focused show. "For this exhibition," reads Dia's fall 2000 exhibition calendar, "Trockel will install a new suite of video projections connected by cantilevered aluminum walls that are suffused with warm ambient light." The show affords much new material and many surprises. This is the first time the five "Spleen" videos and five "moving walls" have been shown together as an ensemble, and in a framework that pairs each video with a wall in ways as quietly dazzling as they are structurally economical. The show also offers some "extras" to the billed installation: another sculpture, another video and two vitrines filled with maquettes for unrealized books that the artist brought with her from Cologne when she arrived to install the show.