Rosemarie Trockel
Until October 31; Tramway, Glasgow

There’s an image that’s been going round and round in my mind like a catchy tune, by German artist Rosemarie Trockel. An ordinary egg spins, apparently of its own volition, in the centre of a black hotplate. Finally, after four minutes, it slows to a stop. This silent black and white video has the formal simplicity of minimalist sculpture, but it’s far from simple.

It doesn’t take Einstein to work out that the egg and the hotplate are objects closely associated with women. They point to cookery, fertility, domestic production and reproduction. These are themes rarely associated with the stoic, mechanised world of minimalism, populated largely by men.

To work out the rest, we do need Einstein. He was a disciple of the Austrian physicist and philosopher, Ernst Mach, who showed that inertia can only exist in relation to other things. In other words, if the earth was spinning in a vast, empty space, how could you be sure it was rotating at all? It can only move, or stay still, in relation to other objects, like distant stars. This famed “thought experiment”, which existed for Mach only in his imagination, now exists for us as an egg on a hotplate.

Now, when we see that egg apparently spinning of its own volition, we know it’s impossible. There needs to be some outside force making it spin. Like a woman trapped in her domestic life, it has to be preserved in a state of inertia by some other, unseen, controlling force. It’s the existence of that other “force” that is discovered in this experiment.

This idea that our lives exist only in relation to others runs through the whole show, which comprises of work by Trockel from the last 25 years. Counted by some amongst the greats of 20th century German art, Trockel represented Germany in the 1999 Venice Biennale, but is notoriously reluctant to make public appearances.

That should not come as a surprise, judging by her work. One of Trockel’s main themes – and a favourite of feminists – is the way society shapes your identity for you, from the moment you’re born. You form your image of yourself from reflections, whether they’re in mirrors, in pictures, or in the eyes of others. And that brings us back to relativity; how can you define yourself in a vacuum, without others to relate to?

This theme is explicit in places. A photograph shows a woman’s naked legs, her sexual organs obscured by a mirror. In this mirror she will see her sexual identity, the rest of her self invisible. In one drawing a tiny portrait is visible inside a person’s eye, a literal representation of how we see ourselves as others see us. In other photographs and drawings Trockel repeatedly shows the backs of women’s heads, rejecting the idea that someone’s character can be understood from a representation of their face.

The men, meanwhile, all seem to be asleep. In a reversal of the art historical convention of the reclining female nude, the men in Trockel’s drawings are passive, their public façade lost in unconsciousness. As if to highlight this reduction to a natural state, they all have their masculine attributes to hand: one sleeping man is draped over his car, while the hand of another is wrapped around his air rifle. It’s as if their chosen identities have seeped outside their bodies while they doze.

Trockel turns her razor wit on the art world too, slicing through its veneration of the individual expressive genius. Her painting machine contains 56 brushes, each made with a lock of hair from a famous contemporary artist. It’s been used to make the abstract paintings which hang nearby. This makes a mockery of the widely held mantra that gestural brush marks, and the artist’s bodily presence, are proof of individual creative expression.

Trockel’s other large canvasses have been made by knitting machines and even moths. While her drawings come from her own hand, they consciously avoid a signature style. The roughly drawn outlines in one of her videos – often assumed to be drawn by Trockel – actually come straight from a computer filter, found in a pull-down menu marked “artistic”.

Trockel has succeeded in discarding her artistic persona, an outward mask which would obscure the true nature of her work. What’s left might at first seem impenetrable, but with a little perseverance, you can start to unfold the complex ideas wrapped up in them. And like the best art, you know there’s much much more than first meets the eye.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 17.10.04