FEATURE JOHN BOCK
above: Dandy, 2006 (installation view),
DVD, 59 min, edition 2 of 5. © the artist.
Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London
facing page: Dandy, 2006
(co-produced by Foundation EDF and Printemps de Septembre)
Photo: Jan Windszus. © the artist.
Courtesy Klosterfelde, Berlin, and Anton Kern, New York
“MAKING MOVIES IS LIKE… IS LIKE… AH… like when you put a nose Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (the film was shot at Lautrec’s Chateau du
hair on a cuticle. This balance is like making a movie.” If John Bock’s Bosc in France) and part literary reference to Joris-Karl Huysmans’s
description of his methodology had been any more sensible I would neurotic aesthete character Des Esseintes in Against Nature (1884):
have been sorely disappointed. And yet the prevailing narrative anarchy there is a scene featuring a bejewelled tortoise, albeit rather low-fi,
and hare-brained aesthetic in his work has been sustained for enough which in Against Nature dies because it cannot breathe through its
years now to suggest at least an internal logic, even if coinciding only gaudily encrusted and gilded shell. Bock adds his own dash of invention,
tangentially with logic at large. however, with Louise rolling up the blank, in-between areas of carpet
Bock is perhaps best known for his actions – live performances pattern as the tortoise pootles about, while the pair’s ceaseless and
in which he babbles patent bollocks and incorporates crude puppetry, earnest tinkering with contraptions cobbled from roughly cut wood,
rickety contraptions and messy squirty cheese, shaving foam, toothpaste foil, wire, paper clips and other quotidian consumables recalls more the
and the like – and video installations that stand as testament to the delusional Don Quixote or children playing doctors and nurses than
actions, propagating their mayhem in sculptural form. Now, though, the high-minded Des Esseintes.
Bock is concentrating more on filmmaking. The centrepiece of his Bock’s attitude to history is clearly not what you would call
recent exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ, London, for example, was the reverential, but more unreservedly curious. He talks of reality and
hour-long Dandy (2006), a more classical approach to filmmaking that, existence as if they were simply an episode of the journey towards
although containing all the elements of Bock’s signature absurdity, has abstract thought, which for him is ‘the best result that humans produce,
an evident structured sense of narrative. Dandy will be shown as part of as well as the worst’. His point is that the removal from empirical
an exhibition focusing on his more recent cinematic work at the Schirn experience that abstract thought heralds is both the point at which
Kunsthalle in Frankfurt this June, with a clutch of films that range from artists have made unprecedented leaps unrestrained by convention
Skipholt (2005), the epic set in the Icelandic tundra, to Gast (2004), – he gives the example of Malevich’s arrival at the black square – and
the hilarious sci-fi adventures of a rabbit in a living room, and a new film the remove that enables people to kill and wage war. Intellectual
shot in the Californian desert. distance from experience, he suggests, prompts the nihilistic as well as
Bock’s work can seem rather puerile at first, or perhaps a the ingenious.
straightforward practice rooted in ironic low-fi cobbling. But in fact This sort of ethical discussion may come as a surprise to those
the inveterate nonsense that almost chokes his films and videos, the familiar with the raucous aspects of Bock’s work, but once you think
tirades of gobbledygook and mayhem, comprise strata and strands about the implications of such irreverence and realise that a certain
of recognisable methodologies and motifs. He adopts the language understanding of the history of ideas and events is a necessary
of established disciplines and genres, committing malapropism and prerequisite to subverting them so absolutely, Bock’s acerbic smartness
solipsism as an everyday act. In Dandy Bock plays an eccentric in becomes evident. His obvious relish for absurdity, sculptural eccentricity
cravat and tailcoat who, with his girdled assistant, Louise, executes and nonsensical language is rooted in his admiration for, among many
ludicrous experiments: improving on nature with artificial appendages, other things, the Bauhaus, the Theatre of the Absurd and the phonetic
shamanically facilitating the perfect poetry and attempting to concoct poetry of Hugo Ball. The ideology of Cabaret Voltaire, and Ball’s
the most exquisite perfume from unmentionable ingredients. His scored pieces such as Caravan (1916), developed out of a political
character, Lautréamont (the pen name of the poet and surrealist icon desire to reproach the rising nationalism of post-First World War
Isidore Lucien Ducasse), is part homage to the diminutive aristocrat Europe. Ball’s goal of creating the total artwork, based on the ideas of >
ARTREVIEW five.linfour.lin
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