The Gaslight Gambit
Brit Barton
Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, 2011, Courtesy Manizeh and Danny Rimer Collection, © Trisha Donnelly, photo: Axel Schneider
“You’re so free—that’s what everybody’s telling me.”
– I’m A Marionette, ABBA
Trisha Donnelly’s exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt is a collection of twenty works ranging from 2007 to 2025. It is not quite a survey in scale but in timespan at the Tower location of MMK. There are a few looping video pieces, drawings, and a modest embroidered work, but it is predominantly a showcase of stone or marble sculptures. As ever with Donnelly, a visitor (without a press pass) receives next to no information wherein one might situate the enigmatic aspects of work. One is meant to embrace the inaccessible aura of the artist and exhibition, away from the pedestrian demands of a title, date, and list of materials. But this is Germany—the land of the didactic—and, moreover, an institution dedicated to accessibility,1 despite the artist’s best West Coast ethos of existing on vibes.
Two pamphlets are given out to the general public if they choose to take them: one available in both German and English which includes a brief text by philosopher-biologist Cord Riechelmann and several distorted scans of William Woodsworth’s Romantic poetry; the second pamphlet available is in Leichte Sprache (roughly translated to “easy” or “plain” language)—intended to aid those with limited German proficiency or cognitive abilities—outlining the exhibition with concise, clear explanations. The paradox, then, of the artist’s practice against institutional principles is immediately evident.
I have a press pass. I’m offered a folder upon entry with a press release, checklist, exhibition layout, and (curiously) the artist’s CV. I was also alive and awake before I visited Frankfurt—just enough to know from a group of upper-echelon institutional Donnelly allies that this was the exhibition, possibly of the year, possibly of a lifetime. It is a telling, well-known fact that the artist's practice is one thing, but its situational framework of rumor and societal spectacle is another. Without all that weighted necessity of wall text, or famously of the lack of explanation, Donnelly as an artist who is free-to-be is the most dominant, resounding register of her practice—right next to the cadre of controlled and institutionally apropos authors and curators who write or act on her behalf instead.
The eponymous exhibition at Tower MMK serves its function. The marble works range from manageable to life-size, polite in their pacing and curation throughout the vastly empty space of the revamped corporate skyscraper atmosphere. They are a viable commercial extension to her multivalent practice that has delved into performance (described more precisely as “demonstrations” and “actions”), audio works, photography, and the like. But it is Donnelly’s drawing works that have always been the most bewitching, their ability to conjure her most concluding metaphysical concept of everything and nothing. The sculptures are at their best not because of their conspicuously expensive materiality, but because of the way they gesture toward the ambiguity of her mark-making and use of negative space as blocks of mass. The strength resides in that tension. Yet instead of the ubiquity, history, and intimacy of graphite on paper, we are confronted with something else entirely: an industrial CNC machine cutting into grade-A Italian stone. The rock is quarried, carved, carted, shipped, exhibited, acquired, and installed to round out an institution’s collection that echoes a collector’s kitchen.
***
My introduction to Trisha Donnelly is much like everyone else’s—as an outsider reading the words of someone else’s lived reality, someone credible, someone we can trust. They serve as witness testimonies to give credit to the victimless crime of a contemporary artist’s ambivalence. Who am I to disagree? At this point, the often told story should be said in less of a whispered tone and more so in a series of declarative statements: The night of her solo debut at Casey Kaplan gallery in 2002, Trisha Donnelly dressed up and rode in on a white horse dressed like a Napoleonic messenger, a move to absolve any metaphorical critical shooting. She delivered the lines, “...If it need be termed surrender, then let it be so, for he has surrendered in word, not will…I am electric. I am electric.”
What was awe-striking then seems a bit sus now. Who from San Francisco even knows how to ride a horse, and how much did the permit cost to bring one into Chelsea? The devil is in the details, but back then—I’m guessing—the defiance of showing up to withhold was part of the unchecked privilege of the select few; those who could utilize institutional critique in a downtown gallery without all the pedanticism. I can understand why that was probably refreshing compared to a decade of sitting through Andrea Fraser lectures. Nevertheless, the myth of Donnelly’s own making was cemented when she, coincidentally, halted the horse to stop right in front of critic Jerry Saltz who went on to proclaim his undying love. Scores of trusted curators and writers followed and it is where we remain today.
Years later, I must have read and reread this one fourteen page Parkett2 essay at least a hundred times. Tiled across my studio wall, like some kind of slapdash wallpaper, this considered analysis of Donnelly’s practice faced me daily; what was I hoping to get out of it? As if I could ascertain information by proximity or osmosis for the gambit, even though the game had drastically changed, as if it was never rigged in favor for certain people to begin with.
I didn’t really know who Beatrix Ruf was, but I loved what she had to say:
Her works are always realized within the context of a system of varied references. She thus activates her works at their voids—asking questions as to the nature of art, in which reality we can trust, and how we are to construe belief and knowledge in the interstices of matter and spirit, abstraction and experience.
But the truth is, I didn’t really understand it then and I’m not sure I even understand it now.
If Donnelly is beckoning us to question validity and reality, why is it that her stratagem of deniability collapses under the controlled and selected attestations of those with cultural clout, leaving us little room to think independently?
Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, 2023, Courtesy Florac Works, Paris and Blondeau & Cie, Geneva, © Trisha Donnelly, photo: Marc Domage
Trisha Donnelly, Untitled, 2023, Courtesy Air de Paris, Romainville, © Trisha Donnelly, photo: Axel Schneider
In Frankfurt, it's understood immediately that nature as a phenomenological force is the intention of the exhibition. For instance, in Untitled (2016), a black, concave slate slab contains water that was by then half evaporated. Time and decay was a given. But the additional press information is, simply, essential for revelation and it is the task of the writer-in-waiting to enlighten the audience. Sculptures like Untitled (2023), Untitled (2013), Untitled (2011), or Untitled (2024) note their source or color—Pietra del Cardoso, Rose, Rosa Portogallo, Santa Brigida, respectively. The provenance of the marble is critical to the logistical underpinning of Donnelly’s referential abstraction; Santa Brigida is a marble known for its durability in renovating Tuscan monuments and/or religious iconography, for instance. Formally, the linework on each sculpture seems refined enough to point to the idea of being formed by the elements over centuries, as if it was an artifact. Untitled (2024)—the said marble work from Santa Brigida—is hardly commanding but quietly alluring, with mark-making and rhythm like a pillow draped with a linen laying atop.
Whereas The Secretary (2008) is a kidney-shaped wooden desk, finished in a high-polish with a symmetrical set of brass ringed drawers and black painted molding, and situated in the center of the exhibition. Counter to the marble or stone works—generally overwrought in their self-seriousness, materiality, and the anxious appeal for art historical innuendo—The Secretary is clever in its confident simplicity. This is Donnelly’s at her most Duchampian: a piece of antiquated office furniture out of place and time that speaks at once to a modernity, memory, and all the possible problematics of the era, including labor and power. It doesn’t self-censor itself under the tyranny of Untitled. It contains multitudes without having to over explain or conceal itself all together. And finally, it doesn’t cater to anyone.
***
I watched as a group of design students from Hochschule Darmstadt made their way through the exhibition. Prompted by the professor, they pointed at parts of the sculpture that were the most obvious: Diese sieht aus wie ein Knie. (This looks like a knee.) Sieht aus wie eine alte Spielcartridge. (Looks like an old game cartridge.) Oder ein komischer Tomb, genau. (Right, or a weird tomb.) Where the work exists without words, it inherently suggests the associative and I know there’s nothing wrong with that. It just feels lacking, errant, and pointless to the politics of the present, or even ten-to-fifteen years ago when majority of the sculptures were made. To move through the world with such detachment but proclaim silence as an action, a demonstration, then to be celebrated for it—I cannot fathom the entitlement but I admit, I’m jealous just the same.
I returned to the Leichte Sprache text,3 where I belong.
Man wird nie alles in eine ordentliche Reihenfolge bringen.
Mit einem Anfang, einer Mitte und einem Ende.
…
Die Gleichzeitigkeit von vielen Dingen ist
Vor allem dann schwer:
Wenn in einem Kopf zwei Ideen sind.
As I reread it now, I consider the notion of accessibility in the vernacular of institutional contexts and contemporary art—who gets it and who gets to dismiss it. It's an old argument, I know, but the nuance with this exhibition is in its parameter not simply of power and interpretation but of cultural presumption as production. Trisha Donnelly’s practice is predicated on a house of cards of belief and devotion, foregrounded by the anointed with authority and dismissiveness of the commoner class who have simply grown up or out of love of the aura.
A publicist calls me; he asks if I’m proceeding with the text and lets me know that the gallerist has asked to speak to any writers about the exhibition.
“Tell them I said no.”
2. Beatrix Ruf, “Trisha Donnelly: Schwa,” Parkett, no. 77 (2006).
3. Trisha Donnelly: Leichter Sprache text is credited to multiple people: Isabel Monroy Moreno, Hanna Franke, translated by Marlene Seifert and edited by Tina Wessel. It is available at:
https://cms.mmk.art/site/assets/files/1283960/25_09_22-mmk-lsb_160x210-trisha_donnelly-digital.pdf