Jochen Gerz

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.

He began writing and translating in the early 1960s (Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington), while occasionally working as a foreign correspondent for a German news agency in London (1961–62).

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 (1977/1987).

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 (his own) life.

"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.

Gerz realised numerous mixed-media photographic works using montage and cross-fading, with image and text overlapping, interpenetrating and entering into complex pictorial relationships.

In 1972, on the construction site of the future Charles de Gaulle Airport, Gerz shouted towards the camera and microphone from a distance of 60 metres until his voice failed, with Rufen bis zur Erschöpfung.

The 1972/4 installation "EXIT – Materials for the Dachau Project" (Materialien zum Dachau-Projekt), consists of two rows of tables and chairs illuminated by weak light bulbs.

[15] The compendium of instruction panels, guideposts and warning signs traces the emotional and mental circuit the visitor to the memorial must traverse, exposing the unavoidable continuity in language between concentration camp and museum.

"If today for convenience’s sake the museum keyword ‘Exit’ hangs over doors that once led directly to a certain death," says Gottfried Knapp, "then the thoughtless analogy with reference systems, distorted through this discrepancy, takes on a macabre dimension.

[17] In 1974 Jochen Gerz wrote the word "leben" (to live) with chalk for seven hours, filling the floor of the exhibition space (Art Museum Bochum).

Anyone wanting to decipher the text installed on the front wall, had to cross the space and thereby tread on the writing on the floor, which was gradually blurred and deleted by the visitors’ steps.

[18] When the work was realised again at the New York Guggenheim Museum SoHo in 1998, Marc Bormand explained in the exhibition catalogue: "The medium of chalk means that the erasure of the writing is already inherent and everlastingness is entirely absent.

"[19] One of Jochen Gerz's most important installations, Die Schwierigkeit des Zentaurs beim vom Pferd steigen, was featured at the 37th Venice Biennale alongside Joseph Beuys and Reiner Ruthenbeck in the German Pavillon.

Since 1986 he has realised numerous public authorship pieces, including several unusual (disappearing and invisible) memorials in urban contexts, also referred to as "counter-monuments" or anti-monuments.

In a public square, the two artists erected column clad in lead beside which they provided a metal pencil and a panel with the following text translated in seven languages (English, French, German, Russian, Turk, Arabic and Hebrew): "We invite the citizens of Harburg, and visitors to the town, to add their names here to ours.

The commission was unusual: a German artist was chosen to "replace" the memorial for those who had been killed in the First and Second World Wars in the Dordogne village of Biron, where the 1944 massacre by the SS was still far from forgotten.

As early as the beginning of the 1970s, Jochen Gerz had begun to grapple with the cultural technique of the computer ("These Words are My Flesh & My Blood", 1971), and in the 1990s he increasingly made use of the possibilities offered by digital communication (e.g. "The Plural Sculpture", 1995; "The Anthology of Art", 2001).

"[29] "Les Mots de Paris", a piece dealing with the by turns romanticised and stigmatised existence of homeless people, was realised to mark the new millennium.

While they were in France once the subject of films, poems and songs, known as "clochards", nowadays the "SDF" (sans domicile fixe) are banned not only from popular culture, but also from the French capital's tourist hotspots.

Gerz hired 12 homeless people for a period of six months as part of the artwork and rehearsed the exhibition with them on the most visited square in Paris – the forecourt of Notre-Dame Cathedral.

The homeless people spoke openly about their lives "behind the mirror" to an audience that was often surprised and hesitantly entered into a dialogue with them on poverty, social exclusion and the role of art.

The city commemorated its destruction in the Coventry Blitz during the Second World War while at the same time discovering how many immigrants there are in its current population, and what it means to have been a colony (England itself is named third).

Sociologists, cultural scientists and town planners undertook scientific studies, and the media threw an additional light on what were otherwise marginal and often problematic districts with a high percentage of migrant unemployment.

Instead of the promises, the names of their authors from all over Europe fill the square in front of Christ Church, of which only the tower, featuring a surprising mosaic from 1931 of Germany's 28 "enemy states" (England, France, USA, Poland, Russia, China ...) survived the war.

"Epistemological doubt in the power of image and text alone to convey meaning can be observed in the works of Jochen Gerz more clearly than in any other contemporary artistic oeuvre.