Jochen Gerz
Jochen Gerz is a German conceptual artist who lived in France from 1966 to 2007. His work involves the relationship between art and life, history and memory, and deals with concepts such as culture, society, public space, participation and public authorship. After beginning his career in the literary field, Gerz has in the meantime explored various artistic disciplines and diverse media. Whether he works with text, photography, video, artist books, installation, performance, or on public authorship pieces and processes, at the heart of Gerz's practice is the search for an art form that can contribute to the res publica and to democracy. Gerz lives in Sneem, County Kerry, Ireland, since 2007.Career
An autodidact, Jochen Gerz began his career in literature and later transitioned to art. He began writing and translating in the early 1960s, while occasionally working as a foreign correspondent for a German news agency in London. He studied German language and literature, English language and literature and Sinology in Cologne, and then later archaeology and prehistory in Basel. After moving to Paris, he became part of the Visual Poetry movement.
As an activist and witness to the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris, Gerz took full advantage of the newfound freedom from literary and artistic conventions. He thus began in the late 1960s to engage critically with the media, both commercial and artistic, and increasingly came to see the viewer, the public and society at large as all part of the creative process. His photo/texts, performances, installations and works in the public space call into question the social function of art and the Western cultural legacy after Auschwitz. Doubts about art continually resurface and still pervade his work today.
Jochen Gerz gained international recognition with his contribution to the 37th Venice Biennale in 1976, where his works were featured in the German Pavilion alongside those of Joseph Beuys and Reiner Ruthenbeck, as well as with his participation in documenta 6 and 8 in Kassel. There followed numerous retrospectives of his work in Europe and North America. In 1979, Gerz participated in the Biennale of Sydney, and in 1980 in the ROSC exhibition in Dublin. From the mid-1980s onward, he once again turned his attention more toward the public realm and in the 1990s increasingly withdrew from the world of the art market and museums.
Gerz has realised several monuments since 1986 which at once engage with and subvert the tradition of remembrance, the public becoming the creative vortex of his work. His public authorship projects and participatory processes in the public sphere since 2000 manage to radically transform the relationship between art and viewer.
From 1970 onwards, Jochen Gerz lectured at art schools and universities in Australia, Austria, Canada, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Israel, Ireland, Japan, The Netherlands, Portugal, Serbia, Switzerland and the United States.Writing
The practice of writing and the question: "What does it mean to write?" form a leitmotif that can be traced throughout Gerz's oeuvre. He casts doubt on the capabilities of language, experiments with its representative function, and breaks with conventional discursive linearity.
In 1968 Gerz and Jean-François Bory founded the alternative publishing house "Agentzia", which published early works by artists and by authors of "Visual Poetry". He described his own work at the time as "away-from-paper texts, toward-squares-streets-houses-people texts, and back-to-paper-again texts. They nest in the book like parasites. They take place anywhere, anytime." These words anticipate Gerz's path to text as part of visual art and to art as a critical, participatory contribution to the public space and to society.
Although Gerz's texts are conceived as part of his artworks, they are also highly acclaimed on their own merits. "The most extensive and richest of these books", writes Petra Kipphoff of "The Centaur’s Difficulty When Dismounting the Horse", created in parallel with the installation at the 1976 Venice Biennale, "is on the one hand a reflection and a reckoning and on the other a collection of aphorisms that with its intricately ramified phrases is unrivalled in contemporary literature."Early works in public space
Jochen Gerz began to discover the public space for his work around 1968, using artworks to confront the realities of daily life. In a 1972 interview he refers to himself not as a writer or an artist but as "one who publishes himself".Caution Art Corrupts (1968)
In 1968 Gerz pasted a small sticker with the words "Caution Art Corrupts" on Michelangelo's "David" in Florence. He thus "laid the cornerstone for creative activities which consciously attempt to stand apart from categories, and which dare to formulate interventions that respect no strict separation of genres. Caution Art Corrupts is a work that addresses art while also extending beyond it: a single sentence, a single gesture, which makes it clear that the conditions for art after 1968 can no longer be retrieved from art alone."Exhibition of 8 persons residing on Rue Mouffetard...
Many of Gerz's works in the late 1960s and during the 1970s deal with the nature of "public" versus "private" as the supposed locus of authenticity, such as 1972's ''Exhibition of 8 persons residing on Rue Mouffetard in Paris through their names written on the walls of their own street. In collaboration with students from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, Gerz hung posters with the names of eight randomly chosen residents of Rue Mouffetard in Paris on their street in 1972. The diverse reactions, ranging from appreciation to people removing the poster with their name on it, can likely be attributed to how exhibiting a personal name in this way was tantamount to putting on display the "temple of the non-public realm".Exhibition of Jochen Gerz next to his photographic reproduction (1972)
In 1972 Gerz stood on a street in the centre of Basel for two hours next to a photograph of himself. According to Andreas Vowinckel, this performance "was particularly effective in revealing the process of observation as demonstrated by chance passers-by in the street. They gave the photograph more of their attention and seemed to believe it more than they did Gerz’s physical presence. This behaviour suggests that we are always looking for the secret behind reality", while also showing how distraction is the essential function of the waves of media that inundate us every day. The reproduction crowds out the original.Image and text
In the mid-1960s, Jochen Gerz began to delve into the dialectic between image and text. While in visual poetry the two "unequal siblings" still enjoyed a "playful interaction", in Gerz's "photo/texts" since 1969 they are subjected to an almost systematic questioning. Gerz works in the intermediate space between media, creating a poetic no man's land between fiction and reality that the viewer or reader must himself fill with life. Gerz's "mixed-media photography" works of the 1980s and 90s reveal by contrast continually new appropriations and connections between text and image, anticipating later technological developments and the possibilities of digital media – for converging and even fusing image and text – that are second nature for us today.Photo/text
Gerz doesn't set out with his camera on a quest for exclusive or rare motifs; his photos seem instead to be rather random and commonplace. "From the way he makes use of the medium," says Herbert Molderings, "it is already clear that this work is not about adding new and aesthetically different, balanced and symbolically dense photos to the world’s existing reservoir of reproductions, but rather that we are being asked here to consider the activity of photography itself and its place in our everyday cultural behaviour." The ordinary-looking, seemingly randomly shot photographs are placed next to texts that "relate" to one another in an indeterminate manner that is oddly bereft of context, not even revealing the nature of this relation upon closer inspection. The texts do not function as captions describing, augmenting or explaining the pictures, and nor do the photos illustrate the text. The photo/texts illustrate how the themes of memory, time, the past and history are not only the subject of "commemorative works" such as Gerz's later memorial projects, but are present on many levels in his work.Mixed-media photography
Gerz realised numerous mixed-media photographic works using montage and cross-fading, with image and text overlapping, interpenetrating and entering into complex pictorial relationships. The media engage with each other here as image and information elements to such an extent that they seem to forfeit any signification of their own and can be identified only as part of the viewer's own memory. Like many of Gerz's other works, these too explore how experiences and memories are culturally conditioned. How extreme this alienation can be in some cases is demonstrated by "It Was Easy #3", one of ten wall-based works, which shows two bands of clouds, one mirrored as the negative of the other. Placed vertically, these cloud bands become ascending columns of smoke. Two text banners read: "It was easy to make laws for people" und "It was easy to make soap out of bones."Performance
Performative aspects can be found everywhere in Jochen Gerz's works – from his early writing and first participatory works in public space in the 1960s, to his photo/texts, mixed-media photography and installations, and onward to the public authorship pieces he has undertaken since the 1990s. This applies especially of course to his performances with or without an audience, whether in the exhibition space at galleries or museums, or outdoors in public space.