ART CITIES:Berlin-John Bock
John Bock uses the form of performance as artistic medium, combining theater, video, installation and sculpture. Most of his early actions or performances were termed “lectures” and originated in the idea of an academic lesson on economic concerns. Starting out from that basis he has developed over time increasingly complex, large-scale installations in which he employs simple everyday objects and materials, which he treats and combines in unusual ways in order to create simple structures of life as well as art’s evolution into abstract forms and paranoid models.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
John Bock presents his new film “Unheil (Mischief)” for the first time as part of his exhibition at Sprüth Magers. Set in a medieval village, the artist returns to the Dark Ages and evokes an opaque and sinister film world. A mother is to sacrifice her sick child to the forest, she refuses, but the child disappears without a trace. A short time later, a stranger with shamanic abilities emerges from the forest and offers to help her in the search for her child. He performs mystical rituals and tricks of illusion with the help of fantastic sculptural apparatuses, drawing the woman into hallucinatory states. In her quest for knowledge, the protagonist loses herself in a web of ambiguous images that reveal partial, suspicious circumstances to her again and again. While the film initially follows a linear narrative storyline, it gradually dissolves into condensed, overlapping visual layers. John Bock deliberately uses filmic montage techniques such as dissolves, repetitions and disturbances to blur clearly definable narrative units and dissolve them into a complex network of associations. The film extends into the large exhibition hall with a presentation of mise-en-scène sculptures. John Bock perceives the ability to concentrate on details and individual facets of narration to be a special freedom of film as a medium. This function assumes control of the dramatic lighting as part of the “Summenmutation” (sum-mutation). While most of the sculptures remain hidden in the darkness of the room, spot lighting sets counterpoints and facilitates a semantic linking of different object components. Visitors move in a labyrinth where the meaning of the sculptures is perpetually in flux. A T-beam pervades the space in the middle of the hall, though its upper end appears lost in the darkness. This object will be incorporated into a performance by the artist at the exhibition opening. With his exhibition, John Bock creates an impenetrable, gloomy world of images and words were viewers’ feel for space, time and sensory perceptions continually changes in their search for meaning hidden in the darkness.
Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, Oranienburger Straße 18, Berlin, Duration: 24/11/18-9/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, http://spruethmagers.com
