John Bock was born in northern Germany in 1965 and studied at HFBK Hamburg. He works and lives in Berlin. He works as a sculptor, action artist, filmmaker and author and experiments in material and language that challenge the traditional boundaries within the art world. Bock composes spectacular and absurd structures wherein he stages his lectures and films.
Photo: Carmen Alber
SP: Could you share how your journey as an artist began and what influenced your unique style?
JB: Born out of a dark mud pit. My body visage clapped in the wet mud. Every breath followed the previous breath. It stayed that way until now. Beams of light cut my eyeballs and I blinked into my approximation-substitution-world-concept. Silently, work resolution artists such as Stanley Brouwn, Robert Barry and Ian Wilson plopped into my MEECH mind. I placed the brilliant sum mutation on this pointed zero point. The zero lurked in the KOP OP KOPPEL, the material hung in the fingertips.
Photo credit: Carmen Alber
SP: How do physics and discrepancies influence your creative process and themes? How do you bring your ideas to life?
JB: I am a full-bodied quasi-me of meta-physics. My meta-physics swirls in the plastic bucket of UN-reason. Scene in red. I cut the crystal of ideas from my MEECH-mind and transform them into plastic concepts. I hang this in the eyelids of the audience.
Photo credit: Carmen Alber
SP: What inspires you to work with non-professional actors in your performances? How do you choose your collaborators, and what do they bring to your work? How do you assess the effectiveness in engaging with the audience?
JB: A smooth sing-song trembles in my body-being when actors transform into quasi-actors. NO-artificially, speaking and moving as usual in the nonchalant term. Lisa Müller-Trede (actress) slips into the drama of action and urge and hurls the object-enveloped language calculations at the audience in Glam + Glory. TOP-IDEAL-Lisa shines.
Photo credit: Carmen Alber
SP: Can you walk us through your ongoing exhibit in collaboration with the Galerie Krinzinger? How has this curation of incorporating the works of the artist Rudolf Schwarzkogler, helped you gain artistic feedback from the art world?
JB: Rudolf Schwarzkogler is the ultimate must in detail measure. A set of rays in black and white with a Schißlaveng pain. Galerie Krinzinger is home to a pool of artists who have been buzzing back and forth like neurons around the atomic nucleus Ursula for over 50 years. The grande dame of the Viennese art scene shines brightly into my mind.
Photo credit: Carmen Alber
Photo credit: Carmen Alber
SP: Could you elaborate on the relationship between ideas and objects in your art? Do you have any core philosophy that channelises the artist in you?
JB: My objects are jammed instruments and diagrams. They are unfinished, sick and damaged. They are attempts to capture and banish the conceptual world. The diagrams serve to destroy conceptual structural blocks, instruments shine scratched in the space of concepts and dissect these conceptual masses into infinitesimal pieces.
Terms that I buzz around are, for example, Kunstwohlfahrt, IsoSchizo, presence of being, Nonchalance, genius of instinct, MEECH-mind, zig . X, hit-shit-bits, interdependencies, love elasticity, NO-sculpture, ActionUrgeDrama etc.
Photo courtesy: Anton Kern Gallery, New York
SP: How important is audience perception in your work, and what role do they play?
JB: No art without an audience. The work of art is created in the mind of the viewer. The work of art is not plastic, it is an intuitive idea. Instruments and diagrams serve the intuition idea.
Photo courtesy: Timo Ohler
Photo credit: Timo Ohler
SP: How do you incorporate unpredictability and playfulness into your art?
JB: Allow a warmth of imagination to rest in your head. Don’t drown in the mud of expectations. Use the zig-zag run of the rabbit. Don’t trust the swarm of terms and construction techniques with a beautiful surface. Recognise Kleinodtotsods* and celebrate them in the spotlight of UN-beings.
* e.g. a Q-tip
Image Courtesy: John Bock, Carmen Alber, Anton Kern Gallery, Sprüth Magers, Timo Ohler
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