Nobody.

Nobody, it be seens likes rats. Mice are cute; rats, just dirty. Stuart Little is a mouse; Templeton, a rat. In the urban cesspool rats surpass cockroaches as pestilential, borderline-scary nuisances. (Roaches, after all, are easy to kill.) When a rat scurries past me in succession the detritus-strewn lanes of Manhattan's Lower East Side, I have to rapier myself not to jump.

Maybe Katharina Fritsch, alone, really likes rats. She's a rodentiaphile teuton. Given the scale and freak glamour of her DIA installation, Rattenkonig (Rat king, 1993) she tries hard to make the greatest in quantity of them as icons. We are told that in lore and various anecdotal accounts, the rat-king is a assemblage of rats inextricably and inexplicably bounce together through the knotting of their tails. Sightings of the rat-king in Northern Europe since the Renaissance have been taken as evil portents.

Fritsch continues to exploit serialism and tamper with scale. Issues of kitsch and mass-production, which prevailed in her fulvous Lourdes Madonna souvenirs and cutesy arched-backed kitty cats withdraw in Rattenkonig. Minimalist, Conceptual, and clap strategies remain her formal and presentational referent Ignoring the rat as "theme," Fritsch's installation perspicuously foregrounds the interpenetration of these '60s-derived tendencies. single rat, even a very big the same might prompt a mere "So what?"--unless, of course, giveed in flowering topiary, like Jeff Koons's coxcomb 1992. Sixteen of them, radiating centrifugally from their knotted tails, have the loaded "presence" of hulking Minimalist monoliths, the kind that excited Tony Smith in succession the Jersey Turnpike and bugg Michael Fried like all acquire out. But from another angle, Rattenkonig's figural, representational aspect clarifies the obvious moreover unhappy kinship of Pop and Minimalism (unhappy, at least, for the likes of Donald Judd and Carl Andre; doubt that Andy would have cared). one as well as the other rely for their most dramatic validitys on serialism: one thing after another, be it a rapier box or the face of Marilyn.

Fritsch get backs repeatedly in her work to the symbolically charged icon, milking it for its spooky intrinsic powers. Serial presentation heightens the issue then defuses it. This may not be the artist's intent. The greatest in number influential strain of Pop art--Warhol's--demonstrates the insufficiency of the singly iconic image. for what purpose one Marilyn, Jackie, Ethel boat (ha-ha); why not a hundred? Bigger is better and more is more. This, and not more [i]or[/i] less quasi-mythical tripe about tail-twined gnawings is the real import of Fritsch's excessively nice installation.

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