‘Vietkong, King Kong, Vita / Eckberg, la dolce Vita / Dolce & Gabbana / kick in the eye / Bela Lugosi, undead, undead, undead / I’m dead, dead/ I feel like MegaMeMind, / I am united aggressiveactiveactionamorph, / I live out my RandyDandy / 100 percent. / The self lies out of the triangle bush … ’
— John Bock, from the Lombardi Bängli performance, written for Kunsthalle Basel in 1999


Tereza Papamichali: We recently had the opportunity to attend a John Bock performance and watch some of his films in an Athens cinema, a significant initiative from the XYZ that brought us in touch with one of the most controversial figures in art today, a controversy that made a strong topic of discussion concerning the reception of this artist and his work. What makes the work of John Bock so unique and so important? Evaluating him first of all as a performer what qualities make him a major performer of our times? His work features and is characterised by a rant of pseudo-scientific lectures, using objects made from plastic and other ordinary and rough materials, which are left as residue of the performance but are effectively applicable as sculptural objects. He presents to his audience different archetypal personas, echoes and references from classic literature and pop culture.

Mary Zygouri: As an artist-becoming-performer, John Bock’s practice is undoubtedly a point of reference and inspiration. It is difficult to perceive the whole range of the multi-layered ‘mikrokosmos-makrokosmos’ of John Bock and that’s why it’s so difficult to categorise him simply as a performer. His references from the region of performance are obvious (The Viennese Actionists, Joseph Beuys, Fluxus) but in reality he overcomes the ’70s performance practices in such a way that he encapsulates and finally absorbs all these practices by transforming them, without hierarchy as many other references; an essentially heterogeneous ‘reality/un-reality’ with multiples roots, different fragments. Above all, we should recognise that his work as a whole has a strong principal unity. As Bock composes a new, irresolute form, a new type of unity triumphs in his work; his own Aesthetics, the Universe of Bock. Because of this unity, I believe, Bock is one of the most important art figures of our days. This importance is present in all of his artistic mediums: performances, actions or ‘live cinema’ films. From his first performances up to his recent professional films. Certainly it is quite difficult to define his practices, but we could say that it is between an art lecture, a performance, the making of sculptures in a space or the making of a system of animated sculptures, a play (studio theatre with two or three roles), a theatre of regression, a game that once begun and keeps expanding, object comedy or a content drama, a free play. A first impact with Bock’s work could be easily characterised as witnessing a well-made farce. This could happen because of his almost adolescent way. The field of artistic innocence. Without this possibility of innocence, it is almost impossible for any creative renewal to occur. But maybe that is precisely the point of academic criticism!

TP: In that way we could say that he does create a new performative language, a language constituting action in itself using, among others, codes of the ‘live cinema’ without investigating further the limits of this hybrid form but using it only for his each given idea. Surely the audience’s gaze of a performance today is so much more different from the one in the past, since it’s now saturated by the excess of time-based media, and also by different notions and purposes, and therefore deserving a different approach. Perhaps because of the common origin you consider his main references to be the Viennese Actionists and Joseph Beuys, but his intention regarding his public is different, with not so much direct and acute political and social thematic/subject, which nevertheless is touched upon. My impression, which is also evident in his work, is that on a first reading it is a game, a jest, a farce of some sort either with his pataphysical — of an Alfred Jarry tradition — lectures, or with his film parodies of the noir/gangster genre. Considering this, can’t we also say that he draws more on the tradition — the codes and the practice and tactics — of the flux? We can say that he is radical but not assessing social issues, in the way the Viennese Actionists did, but radical creating a different form, radical in assessing the human condition.

MZ: Not directly political but about the artist’s autonomy and his universe. Beuys was part of a tradition in social idealism and sought a sublime fusion of Culture and nature, in which animals always played a crucial role. It’s Existential. For him the artist is no longer identical with the work of art but rather is presenting a psychological role. Art and the everyday are linked in concentration on symptoms instead of focusing on what our age actually demands. The absurdities of life are zoomed in on in all their details, Artaud’s constant statement that ‘the real revolution lies deeper than the merely political’. His Fluxus actions are absorbed, becoming part of the Bock-universe. Like in his video Beginning, Middle, End, in the part where he is trying to eat his soup with a spoon attached to heavy armchair. His agonising difficulty in manoeuvring this bulky armchair is at the same time a separate performance. Αs a game of adventure inside a liquid diagram. Perhaps this is valid in his first work [i], where his personal language is not yet formed and his critique is still naive. Or less multilayered, as in his first videos. Apart from Fluxus I would also say Dada, Joyce, Beckett, Carroll. I POSE AS a QUESTION-SUBJECT, Bock’s TIME.

TP: His work includes in every way the ‘time’ dimension, either in performances/acts or in his films. His work resides in a timeless time and flow. The conventional sense of time is a primary factor of one’s being and destiny, and as a factor of normalisation, he tries to escape from it.

MZ: The existence of different planes of time — ‘now time’ and ‘later time’, ‘variable times’, ‘perplexing times’, ‘para-time’, ‘lack of sequence’ fusion, ‘collapse of now time with later time’, ‘time-language loss in the balance”, time definition, different speeds, no synchronic development of time — are an integral element of Bock’s artistic language. The confinement relation between time and space becomes the object of process and not a fixed presupposition. The process of alienation results in a temporal and spatial disorientation, a coexistence of past, present and future, as happens [ii] to the historical character, the decadent dandy, who is trapped inside a recognizable modern space. He is trapped inside time and space and his own absurd roles. It's about getting stuck, running in sideways or in circles, he is stuck in the moment, he is lost in his own mind and his own body or using his own words: ‘ … I am blank and I don’t remember what I was saying … ’ He is the sole demiurge, the president of his own-mini–tiny-whoopee, his own private world.

TP: Except for being the president of his own private world, with his own notion of space and time, he’s also producing other supplementary personas. One recurring figure is a persona that could be a jester. The function of the medieval or Renaissance jester was to comment, criticise and even poke fun at the king when no one else was allowed, someone that could speak openly and uncensored on controversial issues. Bock adopts the persona of jester even with the make-up (that of course reminds us of the pop-cult icon of the Joker in Batman). In a way he talks about controversial issues, political and social, through jests.

MZ: Like a strange creature-alien that has landed on earth, Bocks plays multiple metamorphosing roles: hero and victim, dancer and disc jockey, acrobat and ringmaster, an insane person, a mad man, a minstrel, an adventurer, a conqueror, an over excited child, a glamorous dandy. His essence is problematic. He says: ‘ … my films are about people who do their thing in a way that does not conform to society. They always end tragically because society or the milieu — the outwards — are simply not ready for their ideas. That kills this small individual revolution … ’. These personas are like the ‘familiar strangers’, which we all know. These anti-characters exist in situations where urgency and emergency merge, like living in a feverish dream. Such situations are the history of a migration, between his original being and a cycle of avatars that transport him far from his identity. Such rebuilding of each identity, by way of drastic confrontation with the existential void, simultaneously terrifies and magnetises them in a grotesque deformation. It seems to me that he is constructing these acting personas more like objects that emerge from a mental vision rather than real beings. As in Artaud’s work, total theatre does not deal with representation, but in real objects. [iii] These excessive situations are an example of what Bataille called the ‘formless’: a slippage internal to the normative and regulatory political economies. The term ‘formless’ itself performs this action: formless defines a state of the loss of all definition.

TP: It’s through these objects of mental vision, the avatars, that he projects onto his body the ‘formless’, creating a phantasmagoria of excess and surplus elements.

MZ: Unlike the Viennese Actionists the symbolism in Bock’s work is transcendental: the piss, the blood, the sweat are liquids borrowed from various everyday environments and transformed into ‘sangue’ (blood). The disgusting situations of the ‘orgy of fluids’ are here a grotesque body action or a carnivalesque performance made stronger by its fakeness, which fulfils the cathartic function of overcoming a ‘cosmic fear’. I could suggest as an example, the video-documentation Maltratierte Fregatte. [iv] A suspended bus from the ceiling of an industrial space. The characters are acting under the special physical condition of the disequilibrium. A reversal of inside and outside the space, the body. They experience an alarming situation: the body here is massacred, expropriated, dismembered and poisoned. She is trying to do intensive movements ‘interrupted’ by the objects-machines: ‘I cannot digest me’, ‘A finger lost in my body’. A paradox eruption inside the materiality of the body. Strives to abolish the boundary of her own body. She is part of the liquid machines. Her speech is the lamentation for the loss of body and self. All of them reach the panic and the paroxysm. Fusion in an ‘other’ world. Sovereignty depends on the loss of self and, as soon as I say: ‘I am sovereign’, I am not. As soon as I realise that my self has fallen away, it has returned. Sovereignty is not something I can have; it is not something I can be. It is not something at all. Bataille. I don’t remember / I remember.

TP: We can say — also from that last example the Maltratierte Fregatte performance — that the concept of the abject is very central in his work. When he makes his audience face a corpse, vomit, blood, people are ultimately repulsed because they are facing an object that is excluded, evicted, rejected from their life, they are facing an object that was once a subject. If we describe the abject with its degradation connotations (where the abject is situated outside the symbolic order) Bock creates situations where one is forced to face and essentially experience, his own mortality. Recognising the possibility of this violent transition of becoming object, which is a borderline situation, it constitutes an originally traumatic experience. His subject matter in one way is this repulsion from death, excrement and decay. What seems to interest him is this repulsion, which is the instinct reaction to the loss of the distinction between subject and object and effectively between the self and the other, and the reaction to the threatening possibility of failure of meaning, purpose and sense. In his practice, the production of his sculpture-object-residues, which are essentially non-objects, are close to the idea of the abject.

MZ: This sort of poetic creation is a system of animated sculptures arising from tea strainers, tin foils, bottles and paint cans, which have long moved beyond their Dadaistic precociousness. It is a picturesque madness, a trashy pastiche of domestic objects and household materials, which in Bock’s hands become undomesticated and uncanny. The environments he creates stuffing ‘queer foreign objects in every corner’, are imprisoning and obsessively constructed living spaces. Entirely rhizomatic borrows in pack form where the objects function as actors; they take on a life of their own. Bock says: ‘Don’t forget the little things, like cigarette butts!’ ‘The whole world is there’ in a Microcosmos. The fight between chaos and order. The objects he makes have no recognisable function, they are surreal adversaries, machines that don’t produce; self-contradicting systems, liquid diagrams, death diagrams which are in an eternally undecided struggle between the abstraction of calculable and serial programs, and the non-sense of organic forms of bodily practice.

TP: Apart from the objects that are becoming uncanny or signify the abject, it’s also that he produces uncanny characters that exist in a space of abjection. He plays upon concepts of the double and the inanimate when he presents zombie-like personas, stuffed animals, humanoids and puppets. And it is our reaction to those elements that re-charges what is essentially a pre-lingual response. When Bock explores the place of the abject, he is exploring an archaic preliminary space and time, before the construction of linguistic binaries of self/other and subject/object and effectively he is exploring a space outside language. And this exploration is manifested in his lectures that draw from the Pataphysics, a parody of physics and its concepts. There Bock evolves this parody by using and appropriating also art, philosophy and economy concepts and jargon, creating a nonsensical language transcending the bounds of meaning and sense.

MZ: He is an uninhibited researcher of life, of the traces of our civilisation, whether human or animal, bringing them together in his experimental process in such a way that everything inverts: up and down change places. The familiar turns strange. Bock’s world is a frantic investigation into the possibilities for how we experience and make sense of the world. He re-enacts the social dramas and traumas. He is a pure example of postmodernism that is promoting the infinite accumulation that never aims at reaching any form of conclusion but rather resembles the often confusing realities of contemporary society. He creates doubts concerning the standards and sensibilities that had long excluded them from respectable intellectual endeavours: Fragments of languages from the lived universe that is full of intentional inconsistencies; a zapping through popular culture and through art history; a collage of newspaper titles, from economics to music and fashion; a synthesis of the arts. Almost at once like a collection of anti-informations. A concentration on symptoms instead of focusing on what our age actually demands. In a way, the discussion of influences of John Bock’s universe is beside the point. His references include: Antonin Artaud, Matthew Barney, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Beuys, Charlie Chaplin, Alice Cooper, Marcel Duchamp, Michel Foucault, Eugène Ionesco, Allan Kaprow, Buster Keaton, Mike Kelley, John Maynard Keynes, Martin Kippenberger, Jean-François Lyotard, Deleuze-Guattari, Otto Mühl, Dieter Roth, and Kurt Schwitters, Werner Herzog, Sigmar Polke, Fischli & Weiss.

TP: The fact that language is not capable of serving him and his subject matter is perhaps why his performance texts and film scenarios are impenetrable, with performances in which he is either ranting or remaining silent, making his acts borderline cases mostly inexplicable and baffling for the public. And maybe because of this failure to understand Bock, it’s easier to make references to other performers, actors, directors, economists, etc. and avoid an attempt of direct confrontation with his work. And that is because he really is utterly self-referential and appropriative in the art context and the pop-cult context, and that his performances and his sculptures and performance-residues also strongly refer to cultural artefacts.

MZ: The invented language of Bock is usually regarded as nonsense or in other cases as concrete poetry, as parody, as secret, as poetic coding, as rhythmic pre-Babel language, a prophesy. Like symbols in a code. Like ‘reading/unreading’ machines. It reminds us of the image of Da Vinci, the experimental notes, Einstein’s mathematical notes, or moreover Joseph Beuys’ Blackboards. He constructs a type of babble speech characteristic of certain discourses of infants, schizophrenics, charismatics, mediums. He creates almost an abstract voice-character, who is fighting against his own impotence. Glossolalia: ‘ … It is a manifestation of language at the level of its pure materiality, the realm of pure sound, where there obtains a total disjunction of signifier and signified’ (Weiss 281). As David Appelbaum points out in his phenomenological writings, ‘speech tries to control the speaking voice. Glossolalia seems to disrupt the possibility for one’s own voice of a hiding place in speech … ’ Bock changes the role of speech. He invents a re-function of speech as a sculptural object. Bock says: ‘ … what I really do is to paint the objects with language, then cut them up. Language can be used like a jigsaw’. He manipulates it like a solid object. He makes use of it, in a concrete and spatial sense, accumulating (absorbing) it with everything that is spatial and significant.

TP: In a way his performances and films are sculptured and they are structured like a supertext. And like the concept of the ‘supertext’ we can say that through his work he is throwing keywords, in the form of both quotes and imagery from the classics and the contemporary, which serve as links to established and familiar knowledge. Or even the concept of ‘rhizome’ where Bock connects points — artefacts and references — of different nature and qualities, signs and non-signs, composing a volatile dimension rather than a fixed unity that exists continuously and grows, creating his textual space. And what makes an interesting point in his performances, is how he places his audience in this space and what is the function of his audience. In the Athens bus performance he was calling the participating people ‘receivers’, which is an ambiguous word to use. He often uses the terms ‘recipient human’ for the audience, and ‘quasi-me’ when referring to himself.

MZ: ‘Quasi-me‘ is a mask, ‘quasi-me’ flees into the cosmos. He abandons the individual psychology, is masking his individuality, in short ‘changes the subject’, depersonalising the individual body of the performer, Becoming other. Metamorhosis. According to the tendency of a certain imagination which distorts yet does not discard it: An impermanent world of continuous change of metamorphosis and gesture.

TP: The personas Bock is introducing to his public have traits of detachment and alienation. When he says ‘the human receivers’ he is separating himself from the human, becoming the transmitter. When he is performing with disorganised speech following a delusional pattern of thinking he is performing essentially a schizophrenic character. But also some of his personas and in some of his performances and acts are contradicting by being aloof, detached, unemotional and uncommunicative, inconsiderate to pain and danger, enclosed and trapped in themselves. This postmodern concept of him being the schizoid fractured subject is positively his political stance.

MZ: Disorientated physical event. The conflict between the ear and the eye, amorphous! Βetween verbality and visuality. His face represents the disorientation. Remote the head and connect it to the face, to the significance. The corporal and the vocal apparatus as alien to the self … The tried and true camera, David Schult as cameraman. ‘He is the camera and I’m the wobby tripod’. He becomes a piece in the camera’s reproductive apparatus. The camera is the subject, he is the object. The audience can follow the actions on a video projection. He is there live, sometimes he disappears and his presence is seen on the screen. His is trapped inside the close circuit. Camera-projection-audience. The gaze of the spectator is disorientated, detached and re-situated. The audience becomes part of the experiment. An experiment of strangeness in general. They become part of the Wunderkammer, like the cabinets that were filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals. He recreates the sense of wonder that the old cabinets of curiosity once aroused. He, as another human-becoming-animal-object, is the transmitter who communicates with the receivers. The human receivers. The audience has a role. Everybody is a participant, is a fact. The audience gets involved and has to decide for itself what’s going on and what’s to be learned from this kind of experience. They are standing in front of an intellectual hit … It is as if we are locked up in a room with the madman. The aim of activity is to attack the audience, specifically its ‘sensibility’. The dichotomy from a privilege of viewing, immobilize them in impotence. He has the absolute control. At the same moment, he raises waves of suspicion, a combination of inquisitiveness, disbelief and curiosity. He exerts on the viewer an irresistible impulse to interpret.

TP: So in a way the audience becomes part of that Wunderkammer, in a way it’s also the audience that becomes a ‘curiosité”’ in the world that he creates. And that means that people in his audience are entering a state between subject and object. In the Athens bus performance he was giving a lecture presenting a jester-professor persona using a lot the term ‘receivers’ and he involved people to some extent in what he was performing, by instructing them what to do. The experience was in all quite passive, sitting and observing, watching what Bock was performing. The only thing that was acted upon the audience from the part of Bock was that he physically engaged the audience in taking the bus-ride, the fact that he initiated the audience to be moving with him, trapped with him in his performing space, the Wunderkammer. Having also the chance to see more of his work, his video-performances and films, we discover that his work has evolved considerably throughout the years maybe not by changing in the content but by changing considerably in its form. From the very economical, compact and leaving-no-traces suitcase performances, he then moves to building an environment for the performance with objects-sculptures that he leaves behind. And finally, he moves to the production of films where the performance, made as an object that can be obtained, but without the audience’s live participation or presence. Why is that? The performance, like theatre, is of a fleeting and ephemeral nature, when it’s done, nothing is left behind. Does he change the form of his art works because he wants to leave something lasting and permanent? His objects and his films then serve in a way as memory devices.

MZ: There is no contradiction between the idea of actions and film and video in terms of meaning. In actions time is always a basic element, whereas in film one could shape a narrative structure that plays with the ideological patriarchal construction through which he has the complete control of the filmic process. On one hand, the technical means are professional and enter the realm of real movies. In their turn they follow the language of film that comes from this continuity — space and time — but on the other hand, the abstraction becomes even more and more strong. The films are increasingly complex and elaborately produced. They are cinematic journeys of exploration. Life appears like a complex wonderland, like a game of adventure. With the help of the camera he manages to leave the established framework of art institutions and move his stage to remote places, like a kitchen, a farm and Toulouse-Lautrec’s chateau in France or the California desert. Working with professional actors that are following the script or frequently improvising inside his art-language, Bock always has an original experience. He is both actor and director. The effect of editing upon Bock’s films is profound. The editing takes up a rhythm of the language, resulting in a temporal and spatial disorientation, rapid montage and the imperceptibility of its rhythms controls the viewers’ gaze, the attention that forces them to enter inside his microcosmos. It is the source of a kind of perpetual contagion which overcomes the viewer.

‘My films never end the way I planned.’ The same is true of Art.

John Bock said he is Capricorn


Tereza Papamichali and Mary Zygouri are artists who live and work in Athens.


[i] John Bock, Porzellan Isoschizo Kitchen Act of the Neurodermatitic Scrab Falling into the Coffee Maelstrom), 2001, 1 min. 45 sec.
[ii] John Bock & Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen, Der Fischgratenmelkstand kippt ins Hohlengleichnis Refugium, 2008, 24 min.
[iii] John Bock & Geraldine Ry, Antonin Artaud und Die pest, 2005, 14 min. 29 sec.
[iv] John Bock, Thomas Loibl, Uta Priew, Anne Tismer and Blackmail, Maltratierte Fregatte, 2007, 66 min. 41 sec.