De l'art

On Art

Von der Kunst

CR 278. Year 1983

De lart2 Jochen Gerz CR 278 web

- Can we be something other than porous sieves? Heroic as sleepers, secretive as shoppers? Who consumes more than an inventor? Can we be other than neurotic? Where did they go, the yellow hunters ...

Gerz' approach has led him to utilize indistinct photographs, downright fuzzy, and a hermetic language in order to establish a better quality of communication between people and things. The very contradiction apparent within this approach is the result of the insight that language and everyday images, thoroughly compromised by the media, have only a mediocre capacity for transmitting an authentic experience. … In order to achieve this, Gerz took up a poetic prose in his texts, which was fairly simple in the beginning, growing more enigmatic and complex until near pure poetry by 1979. There are sublime examples in the small poems in haiku form from the Fuji Yama Series (1979) or in his admirable De l'art (1982-1983), a masterpiece of symbolic condensation.

Anne Dagbert 1989

Mixed Media Photograph

11 framed b+w photographs, each 13 x 18 cm, 4 framed b+w photographs, 1 framed text (typed on paper, enlarged photograph), each 40,5 x 50,5 cm, total 96,1 x 256,5 cm

The text is typed in English, German and French.

Collection Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain Lorraine, Metz.

Exhibitions

Basel 1983. Fontevraud 1983. Chalons-sur-Saône 1983. Berlin 1985. Paris 1986. Roche-sur-Yon 1992. Nancy 1992. Bar-le-Duc 1995

Bibliography

I: Bielefeld 1985, p. 174. Berlin 1985a. Calais 1986, pp. 30-31. Tarazona 1992, pp. 93-95. Paris 1994a, pp. 33-34

II: Gravel 1983, p. 34. Red. 7, 1984, pp. 38-39. Stein 1984. Syring 1984, pp. 166-168. Bichler 1985. Wulffen 1, 1985. Wulffen 2, 1985, pp. 296-297. Drathen 1991, pp. 108-109

Access general bibliography

My name is Jochen Gerz