Celebrating an unstable oeuvre: Rosemarie Trockel’s Retrospective

“Who is the best artist? ” Rosemarie Trockel (b. 1952 Schwerte, Germany) screams at herself in her 1994 video work Continental Divide. She cannot give herself an adequate answer and is slapped and beaten until unconscious for her ineptitude. Although the secret of artistic success is not given away in this work, it is a question that seems to follow Trockel’s artmaking, especially when she is faced with one of the biggest demarcations of artistic success: the retrospective. If they are lucky or famous enough, artist’s will search through their oeuvre, evaluating layer upon layer of work in order to build a new present/future image of themselves fit for public consumption. 

This perceptibility (to be seen and acknowledged) is the primary goal of most retrospectives. But what if an artist refuses to be edited down into a public comestible or has no discernable layers? What if their evolution and identity is more rhizomatic,¹ 1 - As used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Trockel’s work, like the rhizome, is about creating connections that never end, that can connect to any other thing, and if they are broken, they will begin again at some other point. Her work circles and spirals, returning to old themes and subject matter while constantly changing and connecting to new styles and subjects. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7. more imperceptible than perceptible?