Christina Kruse: Balancing Act
An artist friend of mine once told me she hated Picasso. I asked her how that could possibly be, and she replied, “he used up all the good ideas before anyone else could get to them.” An overstatement, obviously. But one worth reflecting on, particularly if the point is generalized. To be a modernist was to be in constant breathless encounter with the new: abstraction, utopian politics, the path-breaking idioms of Cubism, Constructivism, Dada, and De Stijl. So much happened so quickly. Looking back at this heroic era, it can sometimes seem that we are late to the party—by a good century or so.
What we have instead is critical distance: the wisdom that comes with a retrospective view. We know, for example, that some of the greatest visionaries of the period were too little recognized at the time, simply because they were women: Hilma af Klint, Sonia Delaunay, Sophie Taeuber-Arp. And we know that the modernists’ most radical dreams were destined to remain just that, dreams. The aestheticization of society along avant- garde lines never came. Instead, today’s artists are faced with massive complexity and complicity, which can seem to overwhelm any sense of forward progress. So how does an artist do justice to the modernist legacy, while also remaining true to our own times ? The works of Christina Kruse provide one answer. They bear the full weight of the 20th century past, yet withstand the whiplash cross-currents of the 21st, maintaining their balance all the while.
The goal of keeping her moorings on unstable ground has long preoccupied Kruse. Between the years 1996 and 2007 she kept what she calls a Reisebuch, a “travel journal,” through her own internal experience. Comprising hundreds of pages, it has served as both foundation and quarry for her art ever since. It is filled with images of Kruse herself, variously cut up and costumed and absurdly extended through drawing and collage, floating in contingent space. On one page, she holds a metal cone to her mouth, speaking to nowhere; a caption asks, can you hear me now? On another, she sits atop a wall in a green clown wig, her legs quadrupled in length. The caption reads, If the distance between head and feet with shoes becomes too great, one is in danger of losing the very important serious perspective. These acts of ambiguous self-portraiture culminated in 2013 with Kugelmann, a 600-pound construction somewhat resembling a giant plumb bob. Loosely based on a German toy called a Stehaufmännchen (literally, “little man that stays upright”), Kruse could wear it like a dress and tip forward, backward, and side to side, all the while remaining vertical. It’s an apt metaphor for rolling with the punches of history.
Kruse’s newer works continue these themes, placing them at once into more orthodox formats (autonomous sculptures and drawings) and more intricate spatial arrays. She has said that the drawings could be interpreted as portraying the internal states, psychological or otherwise, of the three-dimensional constructions. As the other authors in this publication note, these sculptures owe a certain debt to the modern conceptions of the Bauhaus. But there is much of 2019 in them too, evident in Kruse’s determination to keep them poised in perfect balance despite their own endlessly ramifying complicatedness. In this respect, these latently figurative objects may be seen as characterizations of a kind. They are not necessarily portraits of Kruse, but of us all—and where we’re at now.
—Glenn Adamson
