John Bock
14 Feb - 21 Mar 2014
JOHN BOCK
Sweet Sub-NOTHING-Spores
14 February - 21 March 2014
Giò Marconi is very pleased to announce sweet Sub-NOTHING-Spores a new exhibition by German artist John Bock.
For his fourth solo show at Giò Marconi the artist will transform the gallery into his own eccentric and surreal world, a theatre of the absurd where no traditional rules or logic seem to apply.
Born in 1965 in Gribbohm, Germany, Bock found fame in the mid 1990s for his performances, the so-call “Lectures” and for his installations, extravagant assemblages of everyday objects.
His early “Lectures”, a cross between a performance and an academic lesson, focused on economic themes (the artist had in fact studied economics and art at the University in Hamburg) and were subsequently combined with topics that were closer to the world of art - a sort of parody of the intellectual world that culminated in absurd dialogues with audiences that were always directly involved. Many of these texts have been published, but to read them outside of the context of the performances makes little sense, just as those titles of his works that often derive from the juxtaposition or the repetition of real words apparently make no sense, in this way reflecting the hybrid and many-sided form of his work.
During his performances the artist utilizes a mixture of elements from cabaret, vaudeville, slapstick comedies and from theatre. He assumes grotesque poses, makes exaggerated movements, wears colourful costumes and extravagant protuberances and he combines the most disparate objects with every type of liquid in an imaginative and irreverent way. These absurdist and theatrical assemblages then become part of the exhibition, transforming the space into a kaleidoscope of colours, sounds and images.
His work is impossible to classify and any category used to describe it would be restrictive: performance, theatre, video, installation, sculpture intermingle with disciplines and languages such as philosophy, economics, music, fashion and fragments of daily life in an original fusion that never appears complete. It is through this very personal collage that Bock goes beyond and reinvents the boundaries of traditional art.
For his solo exhibition at Giò Marconi the artist presents a film, various installations and a sculpture.
The exhibition features the film “Above the point of the glowing silence”, first presented at the Venice Biennial in 2013. The film shows a dancing Muse telling short-stories on love, death, madness and para-worlds to a maggot in a “segment-house”. Then the muse gets lost in the maze of Venice and models soft masses on the house walls.
In the last ten years indeed Bock has devoted his time increasingly to video, the visual language of which is very close to that of his performances. His films are a sort of magnifying glass on reality, exploring its most hidden details. Bock starts off with everyday life and dwells on the most absurd aspects, allowing the spectator to enter a coloured microcosm made up of overturned spaces, substances and objects with unseen shapes that become animated characters, animals with human features and vice versa. A world where everything is dissociated yet combined at the same time, where every certainty is abandoned, so much so in fact that the artist defines his films as "absurdly dark comedies".
On display a peasant sculpture inspired by the sculptural style of Ernst Barlach. The relief-like, three-dimensional style of Barlach is taken up in the peasant sculpture. The sculptural terms of Barlach are re-thought and scribbled by Bock.
Then there is an installation made up of four display cases. Shoes are visible from below a three-meters high display case. A piece of chewing gum, pressed flat, can be seen on the sole of the shoe. Another display case contains a curtain, from behind which a light source emits unmotivated rhythms of light. In the third case a ball chain hangs vertically along with rabbit droppings. Finally, the fourth display case features a mechanism, which can be operated by hand from the outside showing how a tuft of hair strokes the nut and how a finger nail taps on a tablet. This display case is docked to a rack. Two pictures of the Muse, acting in the film “Above the point of the glowing silence”, hang above the rack.
At first sight his installations and his performances may appear nonsensical, chaotic and without logic, but in reality his work is always very lucid and meticulous, commenting on the current state of the western society and driven often by autobiographical allusions.
The installation “Ait-il se terme" constitutes the centerpiece of the exhibition. It results from a performance formerly done. The action, which took place as part of the installation is shown here as a video.
Furthermore, text panels are shown. In the text panels, words and phrases on actions and films are cut, collaged, mutated, unwritten and repeated annoyingly. They are fragmented, rearranged and written again.
Bock does not seek narrative logic or clarity, but confusion; he wants to disorientate the spectator, challenging him or her with irony to understand and overcome life's obstacles. The artist indeed describes life as a game of adventure that human beings can only begin to understand.
John Bock is born in Gribbohm, Germany in 1965. He studied at the Hochschüle für bildende Künste, Hamburg, Germany. He currently lives and works in Berlin.
Sweet Sub-NOTHING-Spores
14 February - 21 March 2014
Giò Marconi is very pleased to announce sweet Sub-NOTHING-Spores a new exhibition by German artist John Bock.
For his fourth solo show at Giò Marconi the artist will transform the gallery into his own eccentric and surreal world, a theatre of the absurd where no traditional rules or logic seem to apply.
Born in 1965 in Gribbohm, Germany, Bock found fame in the mid 1990s for his performances, the so-call “Lectures” and for his installations, extravagant assemblages of everyday objects.
His early “Lectures”, a cross between a performance and an academic lesson, focused on economic themes (the artist had in fact studied economics and art at the University in Hamburg) and were subsequently combined with topics that were closer to the world of art - a sort of parody of the intellectual world that culminated in absurd dialogues with audiences that were always directly involved. Many of these texts have been published, but to read them outside of the context of the performances makes little sense, just as those titles of his works that often derive from the juxtaposition or the repetition of real words apparently make no sense, in this way reflecting the hybrid and many-sided form of his work.
During his performances the artist utilizes a mixture of elements from cabaret, vaudeville, slapstick comedies and from theatre. He assumes grotesque poses, makes exaggerated movements, wears colourful costumes and extravagant protuberances and he combines the most disparate objects with every type of liquid in an imaginative and irreverent way. These absurdist and theatrical assemblages then become part of the exhibition, transforming the space into a kaleidoscope of colours, sounds and images.
His work is impossible to classify and any category used to describe it would be restrictive: performance, theatre, video, installation, sculpture intermingle with disciplines and languages such as philosophy, economics, music, fashion and fragments of daily life in an original fusion that never appears complete. It is through this very personal collage that Bock goes beyond and reinvents the boundaries of traditional art.
For his solo exhibition at Giò Marconi the artist presents a film, various installations and a sculpture.
The exhibition features the film “Above the point of the glowing silence”, first presented at the Venice Biennial in 2013. The film shows a dancing Muse telling short-stories on love, death, madness and para-worlds to a maggot in a “segment-house”. Then the muse gets lost in the maze of Venice and models soft masses on the house walls.
In the last ten years indeed Bock has devoted his time increasingly to video, the visual language of which is very close to that of his performances. His films are a sort of magnifying glass on reality, exploring its most hidden details. Bock starts off with everyday life and dwells on the most absurd aspects, allowing the spectator to enter a coloured microcosm made up of overturned spaces, substances and objects with unseen shapes that become animated characters, animals with human features and vice versa. A world where everything is dissociated yet combined at the same time, where every certainty is abandoned, so much so in fact that the artist defines his films as "absurdly dark comedies".
On display a peasant sculpture inspired by the sculptural style of Ernst Barlach. The relief-like, three-dimensional style of Barlach is taken up in the peasant sculpture. The sculptural terms of Barlach are re-thought and scribbled by Bock.
Then there is an installation made up of four display cases. Shoes are visible from below a three-meters high display case. A piece of chewing gum, pressed flat, can be seen on the sole of the shoe. Another display case contains a curtain, from behind which a light source emits unmotivated rhythms of light. In the third case a ball chain hangs vertically along with rabbit droppings. Finally, the fourth display case features a mechanism, which can be operated by hand from the outside showing how a tuft of hair strokes the nut and how a finger nail taps on a tablet. This display case is docked to a rack. Two pictures of the Muse, acting in the film “Above the point of the glowing silence”, hang above the rack.
At first sight his installations and his performances may appear nonsensical, chaotic and without logic, but in reality his work is always very lucid and meticulous, commenting on the current state of the western society and driven often by autobiographical allusions.
The installation “Ait-il se terme" constitutes the centerpiece of the exhibition. It results from a performance formerly done. The action, which took place as part of the installation is shown here as a video.
Furthermore, text panels are shown. In the text panels, words and phrases on actions and films are cut, collaged, mutated, unwritten and repeated annoyingly. They are fragmented, rearranged and written again.
Bock does not seek narrative logic or clarity, but confusion; he wants to disorientate the spectator, challenging him or her with irony to understand and overcome life's obstacles. The artist indeed describes life as a game of adventure that human beings can only begin to understand.
John Bock is born in Gribbohm, Germany in 1965. He studied at the Hochschüle für bildende Künste, Hamburg, Germany. He currently lives and works in Berlin.