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World Receiver Brüsselerstrasse

Artist
Isa Genzken, German, born 1948
Date
1992
Material
Cast concrete and telescoping radio antenna
made in
Cologne, Nordrhein-Westfalen state, Germany, Europe
Classification
Sculpture
Collection
Modern and Contemporary Art
Current Location
Not on view
Dimensions
40 9/16 x 4 1/2 x 5 1/2 in. (103 x 11.5 x 14 cm)
Credit Line
Partial and promised gift of Betsy Millard, the Earl and Betsy Millard Collection
Rights
© 2020 Isa Genzken / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Object Number
42:2003
NOTES
The familiar sight of a raised antenna transforms this concrete block into a silent radio. Isa Genzken used concrete to reference the cold, raw material of postwar German reconstruction. "World Receiver Brüsselerstrasse" is subtitled with the name of a street ("Brüsselerstraße" in Cologne) and an international city ("Brüssel", or Brussels), evoking the global nature of radio transmission. Radio waves cannot be blocked by borders or walls, so radio programs became a site of propaganda transmission during the Cold War.
- 1992
Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Germany, acquired from the artist [1]

1992 -
Earl Millard (d.1996) and Betsy Millard, St. Louis, MO, USA, purchased from Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Germany [2]

2003 -
Saint Louis Art Museum, partial and promised gift of Betsy Millard [3]


Note:
The primary source of provenance is Betsy Millard [Information for appraisals form, SLAM document files].

[1] Invoice dated December 14, 1992 from Daniel Buchholz to Schmidt Contemporary Art suggests that James Schmidt had the sculpture in his possession for a short time in St. Louis and served as a broker between Earl Millard and Daniel Buchholz [SLAM document files].

[2] See Note [1].

[3] The terms of this partial and promised gift are detailed in the contract between Betsy Millard and the Saint Louis Art Museum [SLAM document files]. Minutes of the Collections Committee of the Board of Trustees, Saint Louis Art Museum, June 3, 2003.

We regularly update records, which may be incomplete. If you have additional information, please contact us at provenance@slam.org.

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Hear Expert Commentary

  • Speaker: Molly Moog
    Research Assistant
    Saint Louis Art Museum

    A telescoping antenna extends out of this sculpture as though ready to receive a transmission. However, you won’t hear a sound coming from its core, a block of solid concrete. Renowned artist Isa Genzken has produced a series of these paradoxically silent radios, called World Receivers, starting in 1987, two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Evoking the global nature of radio transmission, many of the works in the series are titled after international cities. The title World Receiver Brüsselerstrasse encompasses the name of a street in Berlin as well as the capital of Belgium—Brüssels or Brussels.

    Born in 1949 in northern Germany, Isa Genzken moved to Berlin with her family as a child. She studied at the famous Düsseldorf Art Academy in the 1970s and was exposed to works of American Minimalism on view in Düsseldorf art galleries.

    In the 1980s Genzken moved to Cologne, a city still rebuilding after Allied bombing raids of the 1940s. She began casting the World Receivers in concrete, a material closely associated with postwar architecture. Germans of Genzken’s generation grew up in and around Modernist housing made from prefabricated concrete slabs that replaced the crumbling ruins left in the aftermath of World War II. The cracks and holes that mark the surface of World Receiver Brüsselerstrasse are reminiscent of wartime ruins themselves as well as the effects of time and weather on the cheaply constructed facades of postwar slab buildings. The intentionally rough surface treatment in Genzken’s sculpture highlights the vulnerability of what appears to be a solid and impenetrable material. Concrete is also the material of the Berlin Wall, constructed by East Germany in 1961 to stem the flow of defectors to the West. A symbol of Germany’s ideological division, the wall nevertheless could not prevent all communication between East and West Berlin.

    Situated in a block of concrete, the antenna—a recurring symbol within Genzken’s body of work—brings to mind the radio stations that became sites of communication and propaganda transmission both within and across borders during the Cold War. However, it also suggests broader notions of connection, inspiration, and receptivity. A few years before she began her World Receiver series, Genzken made an oblong sculpture from plaster and the sweepings from her studio floor. Sticking a wire antenna in the top, she called the work Mein Gehirn (My brain)—a physical representation of artistic insight. Later she said of her World Receivers, “My antennas were also meant to be “feelers”—things you stretch out in order to feel something, like the sound of the world and its many tones.”

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