JOHN BOCK

Born 1965 in Gribbohm, Germany. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

John Bock, Fischgrätenmelkstand kippt ins Höhlengleichnis Refugium, 2008, video, 24 mins. Courtesy of Klosterfelde, Berlin and Anton Kern, New York Copyright © John Bock. All rights reserved. Photograph: Jan Windszus

John Bock makes, films and installations that combine and cross-pollinate practices of language, theatre and sculpture in an absurd and complex fashion. He is known for producing surreal, disturbing and sometimes violent universes in which he manipulates phantasmagorical machines constructed out of waste and found objects. Bock actively collapses the borders of performance, video and installation art.

Raised in a rural area of Germany (a background that he has drawn upon for his films involving tractors and rabbits), Bock came to prominence in the 6th Berlin Biennial (1998), the 48th Venice Biennale (1999) and Documenta 11 in Kassel (2002). He was initially known for his unpredictable, sprawling live performances in which he brings together uncanny costumes, jury-rigged sets made from tables, cupboards and simple machinery, and his own wildly discursive lecturing style. Clad in bright and excessive cloth appendages and covered in sickly materials, Bock interacts with handmade assemblages and inanimate objects that reference a range of social, scientific and philosophical structures. These objects are made into pseudo-scientific or cosmic diagrams and models upon which he subjects both analysis and manipulation. Following the less florid practice of Joseph Beuys, the settings and objects remain in the exhibition space as installations in the aftermath of his lectures.

Moving from early documentation videos of performances, Bock has recently begun to work on more complex videos and films that play with the structures and genres of cinema. He uses spectacular settings and costumes, rapid-fire editing, and a mix of sound and popular music to stage narratives that reference such broad fields as 1990s’ Hollywood cliché, 1970s’ glam rock and nineteenth-century dandyism. He has made films in such diverse locations as the Château du Bosc (the family home of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec), a nondescript paddock, his own apartment and a concrete bunker. In Palms (2007), he takes to the classic background of the desert highways surrounding Los Angeles. In twisted, unruly narratives, we see rock groups with absurd instruments; roaming besuited hitmen; cigarette-smoking machines; and a rapping waitress. Der Fischgratenmelkstand kippt ins Hohlengleichnis Refugium (2008) conjured up an entirely different mood and century; Bock plays the role of a decadent, powdered, ancien régime dandy who is trapped, questioning the meaning of life, with an opulently clad, similarly bewigged young woman in a clinical, tiled space. Under fluorescent lights a paranoid pantomime of the sexes plays out around a strange homemade apparatus.

Bock’s films, along with his lecture performances and installations, re-imagine the world as a type of absurdist theatre, illustrating its malleability above all else.

At the artist’s request, no exhibition details or bibliographic information is provided.