Perhaps it’s mere coincidence, but last summer America’s Warholian art starlet Jeff Koons switched off his X-rated machine (his explicit photo-paintings of himself and his Italian porn-star wife, La Cicciolina) and returned to family values in Germany. In a G-rated end run around the huge “Documenta IX” exhibition in Kassel (to which he was not invited), Koons installed a 40-foot-high sculpture of a puppy, covered with live, flowering plants, in the middle of the nearby town of Arolsen. He said at the time that he wanted to “communicate happiness.” Hey, how could anyone scowl at a mega-Benji in bloom?
Although it’s unlikely that the country of dachshunds and Weimaraners is so giddy with gratitude that they’ve sent us Fritsch’s piece in thanks, “Rat-King” is here. Fritsch, 37, is a considerably more morbid artist than Koons. In the past she’s concocted sleek, cold sculptures of 32 identical prisonerlike men at a long dining table; a shrouded figure beside a Plexiglas pool of blood, and an oversize gold replica of a dashboard Madonna. Her pieces all seem to be about that Euro-ennui regarding life at the end of the century. Like Koons, however, Fritsch is right out there on the cutting-make that gnawing-edge of postmodernist art. She studied at the Kunstakademie in Dusseldorf, where Josef Beuys was once the resident pied piper, and has been included in the better recent group shows of avant-garde sculpture, such as the 1988 Carnegie International in Pittsburgh and “OBJECTives: The New Sculpture” at California’s Newport Harbor Art Museum in 1990. Now she’s being sponsored by the Mercedes-Benz of culture foundations, Dia. Famous for its the-cat’s-away indulgence of hip artists, Dia invites them into its beautifully renovated packing-district warehouse in Manhattan and lets them play around the walls for nine months at a time.
Of course, bringing huge rats to New York is a little like, well, shipping Miller Lite to Munich. New York could have better used a nice soft puppy in a platz. As Conan Doyle said of the famous “giant rat of Sumatra,” it’s “a story for which the world is not yet prepared.”
