13 October – 21 November 2009: The Big Sleep
John Bock’s new show with Sadie Coles HQ takes the form of an installation of seven new sculptures. The opening night of the show featured a six minute performance repeated between 6-8pm. The walls of the Balfour Mews gallery space have been saturated with colour to house Bock’s absurdist and theatrical assemblages. Concocted from familiar household objects – a suitcase, cushions, an empty bottle – the works have a peculiarly machine-like appearance, and form sculptural analogies to Freud’s mechanistic conception of the human psyche.
Strampellümmel – a cat’s cradle of pulleys and struts on top of a table – vaguely evokes the reels of a film projector or sewing machine, while ultimately evading easy, associative interpretation. The Dead Eyes of London, which takes its name from a German melodramatic crime film of 1965, consists of a simple wooden cabinet that has been turned into a perplexing mutant object, a hollow box with a smashed-through screen.
Excising objects from their normal contexts to form nonsensical aggregates, Bock’s sculptures are strongly resonant of Dada – notably Kurt Schwitters’s Merz paintings with their bolted together rubbish and driftwood – as well as Surrealism’s tendency for irrational juxtaposition, and the anti-aesthetic assemblage art of the mid twentieth century. Several of Bock’s titles are nonsense composites of real words – Fingernagelzwillingszeit (meaning ‘fingernail twin time’) – mirroring the hybridised form of the works themselves.
Bock’s sculptures frequently serve as props within his elaborate performances and video works, which have a pervasive ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ aspect. In their embodiment of the histrionic theatricality of Bock’s other work, these pieces constitute the elements of an unbounded gesamtkunstwerk. And yet there is also an entropic undercurrent to each of the sculptures – they seem broken, or impossibly fragile and teetering on the brink of collapse.
22 February – 24 March 2007: Dandy
For his second show at Sadie Coles HQ, German artist John Bock presents a new film and related sculptures. The film, Dandy, is a dazzling cross between Un Chien Andalou and Sherlock Holmes.
'Dandyism in certain respects comes close to spirituality and to stoicism…These beings have no other status, but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking .... Contrary to what many thoughtless people seem to believe, dandyism is not even an excessive delight in clothes and material elegance. For the perfect dandy, these things are no more than the symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind.'
Charles Baudelaire, 'The Painter of Modern Life', 1863.
Dandy, made in 2006, was filmed at Chateau du Bosc, the family home of the aristocratic dwarf Henri de Toulouse Lautrec. Toulouse Lautrec is clearly the inspiration for Bock’s character, the fictional 19th century aristocrat Monsieur Lautréamont, a hypochondriac dandy committed to the pursuit of true aesthetic perfection which he calls “urge-ingeniousness”. In the same way that adopting the persona of a dandy could allow artists of Lautrec’s period to transcend boundaries of artistic taste, by embracing the persona of Monsieur Lautréamont, Bock allows us step into his strange and uncanny world. The film focuses on the interplay between Lautréamont and Louise, his seductive servant, and switches back and forth between Bock as the master and his reliance on Louise who is all at once nurse, servant, inspiration and lover. The film crosses the boundaries of surreal fantasy and period drama, with Bock playing the tormented genius, an inventor attempting to achieve perfection in every creative aspect: poetry, perfume, and even nature. In the final scene between Louise and M. Lautréamont, Bock’s own bizarre items of clothing, with their phallic shaped appendages and inventions, take on the characteristics of fetishes in a surreal orgy in which the strange social boundaries which have established their relationship up until this point are abandoned and animal instincts take over.
John Bock is based in Berlin and has exhibited in numerous museums and galleries worldwide including the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and the Moore Loft Space in Miami in 2006.
20 September - 20 October 2001
Sadie Coles HQ is pleased to present the first one-person exhibition in the UK by German artist John Bock. Bock's surreal modus operandi is a combination of lecture, performance and installation. The Berlin-based artist expounds pseudo-scientific-social theories (often in gibberish) in clownish staged performances during which he encounters and builds sculpture made from found objects. At the Venice Biennale in 1999, in a piece called Approximation Rezipienten-bedurfniscomaUrUltraUse-MaterialMiniMax, Boch's elaborate shantytown structure involved cubicles where he burrowed and nested as well as places where the audience interacted with the artist. Putting their arms through a slot, their limbs were made into a temporary sculpture of shaving cream, cling-film and tin foil. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Bock staged a fashion show (Multiple Quasi-Maybe-Me-Be-Updown) featuring friends, guards and museum staff wearing outlandish clothes and moving up and down the escalators parodying the pretension of fashion, social etiquette in contemporary museums and Dada theatre.
Comparisons have been made with Joseph Beuys and the Viennese Actionists and there is a good-humoured parody of both of these artists and of contemporary artists such as Jason Rhoades and Matthew Barney. Intentionally confusing, Bock challenges the audience to comprehend and examine everyday obstacles, be they intellectual, physical or linguistic.
John Bock lives and works in Berlin. His work was exhibited at the Berlin Biennale in 1998 and Venice Biennale of 1999; the Museum of Modern Art, New York was the site of four lectures in 2000; and a catalogue documenting the most important lectures has just been published by Cantz for exhibitions in Bremen and Bonn.