The Last Resort

There's a poster on the wall: a full colour reproduction of a photograph of a middle-aged woman perched cross-legged on a couch, smoking and looking at the photographer. Although staged, the image is neither intimate nor official. More importantly, it has charisma - the source can't be pin-pointed, but it is unmistakably there. It comes as no surprise to learn that the picture was taken by Wolfgang Tillmans and that the woman is his friend, the sculptor Isa Genzken.

She's sitting carefully, emitting a disquieting flurry of emotions and non-verbal communiqués. She's even wearing an unlikely costume - a rubber short-sleeved shirt that she has spray-painted and splashed with pink and silver. It ought to be impossibly ugly but it isn't. Although home-made, the garment is decidedly clubby. But maybe the real source of the magic is Genzken's mouth. It seems to be composed, or held in place, to ensure that it's a more than passable quotation of another pair of enigmatic lips: those of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. But unlike the painting, Genzken's face, despite the ambiguity that resides there, is not something into which one may project at will. If both women seem calm, with Genzken it's the calm before, during and after the storm.

The poster is an advertisement for Genzken's 2000 solo exhibition at the Frankfurter Kunstverein. The exhibition was simply entitled 'Urlaub' (Holiday). Even though in speech the manner of expression or intonation counts for almost everything, 'holiday' is a remarkably light word, one that the photograph, for all its wit, lends gravity to, as if to say: 'I really needed a holiday; I took one and now I'm back.' Genzken used the title as a way of grouping together otherwise heterogeneous works all inspired by time away - on sunny, densely-populated Long Island, NY, for instance, or in a snow-covered Bavarian forest. The irony is that for much of her holiday neither her brain, nor her cameras were at rest.

'Urlaub' seemed strangely slight - with its combination of home video and small-scale sculpture, it could have been seen as the first solo show of a promising young artist. Mounted high on one wall, and pulled out at various relaxed angles, were a row of orange awnings Markisen (Awnings, 2000). Below them were her other new sculptures: Strandhäuser zum Umziehen (Beach Houses for Undressing, 2000). They sat on a line of white pedestals and looked out of a window onto a brutal group of offices and shops. As their title suggests, they can be read as models for coastal shelters. Each of them is an assemblage of cheap materials, such as paper cut-outs, plaster, board, and metal scraps, and each one conjures up a different occupant: expressions of personality, or personal taste, in an architectural guise. Unlike most architectural models however, the detailing of the sculptures' surfaces is not about miniaturised approximation. Another work, Luxury Cottage, Montauk, NY (2000), made in collaboration with an architect, is a model of a high-rise complete with a multi-story flapping curtain which Genzken wryly thinks would make native New Yorkers feel more at home on the coast. Scattered around the beach houses are handfuls of white sand and tiny shells which look irritatingly like amateur craft (or beach art), or a ridiculous gesture that seems miles away from the tough formal presentation of earlier works. But they grow on you precisely because of this.

There is a sense of risk in Genzken's choice of materials and form, and the buildings are full of humour. Take, for instance, one in which a picture of a sun-tanned model, presumably hacked out of a magazine, is glued next to a twisted and crumpled structure which makes it appear that the model might be a tortured neo-Expressionist with the resources to realise her dreams and nightmares. Stranger still is one of its neighbours: what can only be interpreted as a sodomy play house. Pictures from gay teen porn adorn the walls of a transparent rainbow villa. The piece is odd not so much because of the nature of the sexual antics, but because these images crop up unapologetically in the artist's image bank.

Genzken chose to temper the light-drenched, seaside holiday theme with a video installation, Meine Grosseltern im Bayerischen Wald (My Grandparents in the Bavarian Forest, 1992). The work is a collection of framed stills from the life of her then nearly 100 year old and active grandparents. The merits and positioning of a new rug are discussed, and a picture examined, while the snow falls outside. The frail, miraculous body - the thing we try to make our own, until it bucks the burden in sickness, or evicts us in death - has always been a key reference point in Genzken's art. She emerged from the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts in the late 1970s: a tough, male dominated scene which she took on aggressively, and the tension resulting from playing off competing artistic, political and personal demands is implicit in all her work.

It has long been a strategy of the artist to re-present art works from previous series in new configurations. The 2000 Kunstverein Braunschweig exhibition 'Sie sind Mein Glück' (You Are My Happiness) presented some of her earliest sculptures - such as Rot-graues offenes Ellipsoid (Red-grey Open Ellipsoid, 1978) and Hyperbolo 'MBB' (1981), two of a series of computer-aided, craftsman-built, wooden floor works - while demonstrating Genzken's spatial refinement; you wouldn't have wanted to move anything, although the placement of the work also suggested an exaggerated need for harmony and completeness. The eleven metre long, needle-like ellipsoids are reminiscent of dissected and wingless Concorde fuselages, while the hyperbolas look like finely balanced futuristic dumb-bells. Elsewhere, sculptures from the late 1990s towered next to framed reproductions of stereo equipment advertisements: 'HIFI-Serie' (Hi-Fi Series, 1979). The tower sculptures from 1998-1999, all personalised with first names - Daniel, Christopher, Justus, Kai, and Andy - are a handyman's creations. They are compelling assemblages of plywood, veneers, perforated metal, mass-produced marble tiles, glass, mirrors, aluminium, postcards, and photographs. This sculptural conglomeration of identities and real persons was juxtaposed with views of another set of towers: New York, NY (1998-2000), 29 colour photographs, and New York, NY (1998-2000), 25 black and white photographs. They show Manhattan looking up from street level and seem to postulate a condition opposite to vertigo - the fear of being too low.

Some people equate distinctiveness with megalomania, yet it seems like those who demand individuality of their artists are privately appalled by it. Attempts to dislodge the idea of the artist as detached from real world concerns of commerce and politics - as a fragile creative, prophet, poet, or visionary - haven't been entirely successful. Perhaps that's because the imaginary appeal of some of the alternative models - the artist as activist, social theorist, moral minority, or professional supplier of a luxury commodity - haven't been able to compete. Genzken's work embodies this matrix of contradictions under the umbrella of a go-it-alone ethos. I once encountered her in a Berlin gay bar for thirty-somethings - her preferred social space. Against a background of loud, jaded-hedonist House beats, she was standing in the thick of things wearing a Walkman, intently listening to her own music, which I never got close enough to hear.