Are you still in Milan? Maybe becouse you live here or perhaps you are spending few days on holiday... in both cases take a moment to visit the beautiful spaces of Fondazione Prada with the new exhibition by John Bock, from the 18 July to 24 September 2018. If you want to Know closely all the latest news from art museums all over the world take a glance to our dedicated area.
The Next Quasi-Complex is an exhibition conceived by John Bock (Gribbohm, 1965; lives and works in Berlin) for the Podium exhibition space. The project reflects his own practice that freely employs performative elements with audience engagement, installation, environment among others. His performances, called “lectures” by the artist himself, parody academic presentations and didactic methods. They are enacted in environments crafted from everyday objects, found materials, detritus, furniture etc., arranged to create a deliberately absurdist, or illogical universe. During his live events, visitors are involved in an experiential and participatory relationship with the artist.
For this new project, Bock transforms the ground floor of the Podium into his own eccentric and surreal world, a theatre of the absurd intermingliming dark comedy with disciplines such as philosophy, economics, music, fashion as well as fragments of daily life, altogether overcoming the conventions of contemporary art.
Fondazione Prada Milano Courtesy Fondazione Prada
At the center of this new exhibition project are two large installations from the Collezione Prada: the mobile stage of When I’m looking into the Goat Cheese Baiser (2001) and the living room of Lütte mit Rucola (2006). Incorporating new experimental architectures, fragmentary walls, make-shift structures and a selection of existing artworks, the project takes the form of a circular path leaving a small plaza in its midst. The objects on display exist both as actual settings and tools from John Bock’s lectures or remains of his film sets. When transformed into an installation, Bock defines this kind of assemblage as a “summutation”, the mutation of what is left after a lecture or after a film shoot has taken place.
Lütte mit Rucola (2006) originates from the correspondent film, where the artist himself plays a crazy killer cutting up his victim alive. In the Podium, the film set is turned into an installation, essentially consisting of the living room where the torture took place. Housed in its own newly built room, the audience witnesses the relicts of the bloody scene from a balcony overlooking the space. When I’m looking into the Goat Cheese Baiser (2001) is a mobile set that Bock used in one of his live events, an assemblage of kaleidoscopic props waiting to be animated by the artist, encompassing a video documenting the lecture held by Bock in New York in 2001.
