Vas-Y!

source: youtube

Bock crea una ‘vivienda’ en una especie de barril, cuyo aspecto es una mezcla entre nave espacial y rueda para roedores. Como tal, la rueda gira impulsada por una persona, lo que hace imposible permanecer en el interior. Bock alude, como de costumbre, a una existencia hilarante: una disyuntiva irreconciliable entre el entorno, su función y la aptitud humana.
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source: theguardian

John Bock is often labelled a mad inventor. His films and performances are full of crazed contraptions, hand-built from bits of old furniture and domestic junk. Sometimes Bock and his collaborators also don these creations, while performing outrageous vignettes. Their dialogue is a gobbledegook of science, philosophy, art, sex and the scatological, variously delivered in the cadence of serious drama, childish singsong or hysterical jabbering. Owing as much to anarchic circus clowning and slapstick as to avant-garde theatre, Dada and Fluxus , these antics have featured flying food, Punch and Judy-style puppetry, live animals – even exploding vegetables.

Born in 1965, Bock studied art in Hamburg, one of Germany’s most theatrical cities. His early work took the form of surreal lectures, the artist drawing demented diagrams while delivering a babble of cod science and social theory. Whether crawling up home-made sculptural towers, crashing through audiences with a puppet-theatre over his head or staging absurdist skits from the gallery ceiling – as with the towering installation he has created inside London’s Barbican Centre – his performances are renowned for their extreme physicality. The sculptures that serve as props or sets are conceived in the same spirit of creative irrationality: Bock collages everyday household objects into dysfunctional machines or assemblages of whatchamacallits. They force us to consider the adult world anew.

While documentary footage forms part of the show when the live exploits are over, in recent years Bock has increasingly focussed on making films in their own right. His elaborately conceived productions have veered from the surreal high-jinks of 2005’s Salon de Béton – which includes a memorable sequence of a woman being pursued by a giant rolling pill – to the costume drama Dandy (2006), which was set in Toulouse-Lautrec’s château, and culminated in an orgy of sculptural appendages sported by Bock himself, talking the role of a hypochondriacal aristocrat.

By turns absurd, transgressive and flagrantly silly, Bock’s work variously recalls Hugo Ball’s nonsense poetry, Kurt Schwitters’ Merz pictures, Viennese Actionism, Paul McCarthy-style gross-out and the Shamanic rituals of Joseph Beuys, among many other influences. The irreverent spoofing, wild energy and relentless sculptural invention, however, are all his own.

Why we like him: For the brilliant black comedy of his 2007 road movie Palms. While Bock stayed behind the camera for this murderous gangster escapade through the Californian desert, professional actors brought an unusual gravitas to his chaotic dialogue, making their posturing both hilarious and unnerving.
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source: artspace

The internationally-acclaimed, Berlin-based artist John Bock is renowned for his surreal installations combining performance, sculpture and film. Drawing on an idiosyncratic range of interests, Bock creates an absurd amalgamation of references from the disciplines of economics, fashion, film, politics, philosophy and music, among others.

Of all the things John Bock uses in his art, reason is not one of them. Bock’s oddball sculptures and performances assemble household objects and combine them as dysfunctional props, reviving techniques from the Theater of the Absurd to jolt its viewer out of the mundanity of the everyday. Part scientist, part philosopher, and part child at heart, Bock mixes high art with scatological imagery to create shocking content. As in the case of Meechfieber, a film in which farmers deal with the sudden arrival of an alien spaceship, surreal imagery becomes a lens through which Bock satires sex, science, and art.

Bock’s work has appeared as part of documenta 11 and the 1998 Venice Biennial, and Bock has also done live performances at the MoMA and the New Museum. In 2006, Bock was selected as a finalist for the Hugo Boss Prize.