Born in 1940 in Berlin (DE)
Lives and works in Ivry-sur-Seine (FR)
1982-1983
Black and white photographs, gelatin-silver prints, typing texts
125 x 260 cm
Year of Purchase: 1985
While he was studying English literature, followed by German, sinology and archaeology in Cologne, Jochen Gerz suddenly decided to be either a poet or an artist, preferably in France. In 1968 he embarked upon a line of work that was strongly influenced by language. In no time, his videos, performances and installations would challenge and question what there might be between an image, words, and their reciprocal meanings. The gap that each of his works opens up is complemented by the subjectivity of an onlooker lost in front of these blocks of meaning whose editing remains open-ended. ‘Looking at my works, the desire to understand and recognize has no follow-up’, he declared, back then. We find this same principle in De l’art (1982-1983). This piece is made up of a sequence of photographs of very contrasting photographs surrounding a simple text. As is often the case with Gerz, the work is offered like a montage, a montage of disparate elements distributed in sequences, the random reading of which involves several simultaneous meanings. The text presents a dialogue, where the protagonists are not identified. Their neutral utterances, devoid of the slightest sentimental content, do not respond to each other. They put forward one or two declarations about the nature of art, about human beings, and the way they are constructed. These sentences are therefore not illustrations of images, but counterpoints which at once deny and reinforce what is suggested by the imagery – namely, that art is above all at the beck and call of the mystery of a world which doggedly refuses to open itself to our understanding.
Damien Sausset