FRANKFURT, GERMANY.- John Bock is primarily known for his spectacular, comic-grotesque actions in which theater, lecture, video, installation, and sculpture merge in a unique way. In recent years video as a medium has moved to the foreground and become independent of the lecture-performances. From video shorts with rapid montage, Bock has recently moved to distinctly longer and more narrative films in which he works with actors and real sets, which he then infiltrates with his own universe. As in his live performances, here too he celebrates a colorful world that is as enigmatic as it is absurd and that eludes rational interpretation, interspersed with countless biographical, artistic, and scientific references. The exhibition concentrates on John Bock’s genuinely cinematic works for the first time and presents six films and videos from 2001 to 2006 as well as a film produced especially for the Schirn: Palms, a mixture of road movie and gangster film shot in Los Angeles.

Since the early 1990s John Bock has attracted attention with what he calls lectures,” in which he reflects on the connections between art and economic theory in a format reminiscent of academic lectures. Starting out from that basis he has developed over time increasingly complex, large-scale installations in which he employs simple everyday objects and materials like wood, fabric, wire, cotton wadding, toothpaste, shaving cream, cleaning products, and food, which he treats and combines in unusual ways. They serve as props for his actions and then he leaves them in the exhibition space. The medium of video has frequently played a role as well: the artist documented his actions with a camera and integrated the resulting video into his installations or parts of his live performances are presented cinematically.

In 2001 John Bock produced Porzellan-Isoschizo-Küchentat des neurodermitischen Brockenfalls im Kaffeestrudel (Porcelain Isoschizo Kitchen Act of the Neurodermatitic Scrap Falling in the Coffee Maelstrom) his first autonomous video, which is clearly different from his filmed performances. Barely two minutes long, this surreal action for the camera shows the artist in his kitchen struggling with animated food running amok. With reference to Vienna Actionism, Bock employs a radical editing technique in which the action emerges from the cinematic montage and whose rapid tempo deliberately overtaxes perception. In addition to this kitchen film he has produced a whole series of brief, crude, staccato-like videos that are distinguished by their grotesque wit and an extraordinary visual power. The film Boxer (2002) is one example that will be shown in the exhibition.

In Gast (Guest), which at first glance appears to be a simple home movie, John Bock made what is perhaps his most personal film in 2004. A hare hops through a bright room. It eats something here, discovers something there; suddenly stops here, raises his head there; and at the next moment is gone again. The world is seen entirely from the hare’s perspective: the apartment is a long-familiar space in which the animal clearly on top of the world—no wonder since the rabbit is not at all a “guest” as the title of the film suggests but at home. John Bock becomes an impartial researcher into life, into the traces of our civilization, whether of humans or animals, bringing them together in this experimental process in which way that everything is turned: up becomes down, near becomes far, the animal has human features, the familiar home becomes alien.

In the past three years he has produced distinctly longer and technically more complex videos and films that are increasingly like feature films. The artist began working with professional actors like Anne Tismer and Lars Rudolph in Meechfieber (Meech fever) and Anne Brochet in Salon de Beton (Salon of Concrete) and creating ever more complex scenarios. Using the camera he often takes his stage to remote places, like the farm in northern Germany on which he grew up, a bunker, a castle in southwest France, or the desert in California—starting with real backdrops by creating his own universe. Without following a concrete narrative, his recent works nonetheless increasingly employ narrative elements and frequently reflect on established film genres like the Heimatfilm (sentimental regional film) or, as in Dandy, the historical film.

Thus the title Dandy refers to the hero of the film shot in the Château du Bosc, the family estate of Toulouse-Lautrec, and so to the artist himself. The film begins with an epileptic fit suffered by an artist who is clearly aristocratic. Louise, the beautiful young servant, hurries over. After quite a bit of fiddling about with wires and forms he recovers in order to dedicate himself to his three most noble activities: the production of harmonies, for example, between black and gold or pedestal and sculpture, the production of great monologues—sometimes given to the verge of collapse—on art and the world in which words such as “being-essence problematic,” “genius of drives,” or “art welfare” occur, and finally the making of a machine for the production of the perfect fragrance for which all sorts of strange ingredients are required including the vaginal fluid of certain women from Montmartre. John Bock’s bizarre objects and machines are repeatedly employed: poetic forms from tea strainers, tinfoil, bottles, and paint. Dandy can be seen apart from the cinematic narrative as a kind of “object comedy”: beyond a certain degree of poetic liberation “things” are just irresistibly funny.

John Bock’s film Palms is Bock’s second work for the Schirn, following the performance-installation Marlit, in the context of the exhibition Grotesque! The first of John Bock’s films to be produced in America, it leads us through an empty, indefinite landscape. Two killers have arrived from Germany. They are wearing white shirts under black single-breasted suits, narrow ties, and jet black sunglasses, as we have come to expect from countless films. They have a job to do in America and are, apart from small sadistic outbursts, emphatically objective when underway. The stations of their business trip are framed by two icons of architectural history: homes by Richard Neutra and Rudolf Schindler represent the starting and ending point, respectively; between them the odyssey follows the trail of strange signs along the highways of Los Angeles, through the desert, a lot where a house has burned down, a strange, small open-air stage with a band, and the bar that provides the film’s title: the Palms. The killer’s paths are lined with various protagonists: a woman bartender explains the existence of different planes of time, of “now time” and “later time”, almost like present and future, if it weren’t for perplexing times that are shot through the planes of time and their logical connections like destructive elements. One of the killers sits down during the woman’s monologue, on a barstool with bizarrely proliferating, amorphous folding backrest and puts on a helmet of braided electrical cables with eggshells woven in. It remains uncertain whether the killers will find the mysterious unknown man. And if so, what is in store for him?