Categories

The editions… focus like a magnifying glass on the conflicting aspects of change and continuity in his work as an artist.

Volker Rattemeyer, Renate Petzinger 1999

This literature with hardly any words, which is called visual poetry, sees the old aesthetic problem of original and copy within the communication process.

Georges Schlocker 1974. Translated by e_CR editors

Traces of words become a poetic expression of art as life. 

Helga Pakasaar 1999

Between 1968 and 1975, Gerz compiled a visual diary containing 88 works under the title of French Wall.

Volker Rattemeyer, Renate Petzinger 2011

Visual diary… Objets trouvés: Observations, experiences, thoughts, aphorism… radical rigor, analytic poignancy, polemics, irony, mystification, playful lightness and poetic sensibility…

Rainer Schoch 1996. Translated by e_CR editors

In The French Wall art is shown at the edge of its possibilities.

Stephan von Wiese 1996. Translated by e_CR editors

The practice of performance art is a metaphor in itself. More precisely: a metaphor referring to a historical and social state when artistic work was a natural part of collective life and the daily efforts to humanise life in conflict with nature.

Herbert Molderings 1984

The performance consists of just one thing: what the people make of the situation that the artist has prepared for them.

Friedemann Malsch 2002

The installations… are rather memorials in a poetic sense… they are an immediate invitation to become aware.

Peter Althaus 1969. Translated by e_CR editors

The installations are the demand for an art that needs to emerge between people.

Volker Rattemeyer 1997. Translated by e_CR editors

The Gerz’s monument is like the imagination itself, … unconstrained by time and space…

Marcia Tucker 1994

… Art with a …tendency toward immaterially and effective invisibility is settling in precisely where life itself is liable to occur.

Peter Friese 1995

Jochen Gerz, qui s'est longtemps exercé à déjouer les pièges de la commande publique, explique qu'entre la clandestinité et le respect de l'ordre se trouvent le jeu et la ruse: "Avec ceux qui vous passent la commande publique, vous rusez. La ruse fait partie intégrante du processus de création, ou du moins, de réalisation".

Joëlle Zask 2013

One could understand Gerz’ Photo/Texts as a dialectic exchange between word and image, artist and audience, museum and world: The texts phrase theses, the photos phrase antitheses.

Ulrich Keller 1979. Translated by e_CR editors

The photo/texts illustrate how the themes of memory, time, the past and history are not only the subject of “commemorative works” such as Gerz’s later memorial projects (counter-monuments), but are present on many levels in his work.

English Wikipedia 2016

Closely related to the mixed-media photographs, the late single works look ahead to the impending turn of the millennium, the question.. of what has changed the 20th century culture…

Volker Rattemeyer, Renate Petzinger 2011

Gerz Arbeiten kreisen um die Möglichkeiten, wie auch um die Grenzen der Sprache in ihren verschiedenen Mediatisierungen, im einmalig authentischen Verfahren, das auch mit Schmerz verbunden sein kann wie auch in der Versuchsanordnung, in der das Video seine Unbarmherzigkeit zeigt, um den Akteur im repetitiven elektronischen Medien zu vereinnahmen.

Eleonora Louis / Mechtild Widrich, 1996

Jochen Gerz is not a video artist. For him, video as a medium is the tool that best allows him to lay down the conditions of his artistic production in a (post) industrial society…. The use of video is a continuation of his practice of distanciation which began with visual poetry.

Marion Hohlfeldt 2002

The reproduction (the image) is no longer produced by the artist, it translates the audience’s behaviour.

Jean-Michel Bouhours 2002

In ... Fuji-Yama-Series (1979), neither the 'truths' nor the 'lies' of his subject are told. His pictures tell only of the 'un-truths': what appears to be mountain is a heap of slag. Only, once sighted by Gerz, it became an image called Fuji-Yama. The nature of the 'real' is that is has been, and still is, essentially, a choreographed reality…. At this point, it is not of major importance to define precisely what is meant by an unreal reality. Whether it is Lévi-Strauss' bricolage (a "structure without origin" relevant to discussing the ready-made), Barthes' pastiche, Baudrillard's simulacrum, or Derrida's reference without model, the 'real' is always that which has been previously made: culture. What is crucial is our ability to understand this previously fabricated world. Should we view it as a found world (un monde trouvé), or as a world to be made anew (un monde à faire)?

Bojana Pejic 1993

Writing is actually just a proof of time that has passed while writing… To understand writing as writing down one’s own time.

Günter Metken 1978. Translated by e_CR editors

…A collection of aphorisms that is, with its intricately ramified phrases, unrivalled in contemporary literature.

Petra Kipphoff 1987

Gerz’s mirror-writing signifies illegibility. In the instant of its fixation the text escapes.

Roland Recht 1994. Translated by e_CR editors

These fables which I shall call mythical ... express our wayward culture with the very words that made this waywardness possible.

Anne Dagbert 1989

Gerz does not show nature as itself, but as its "counter-image".

Andreas Vowinkel 1992

His basic idea is to turn receivers into givers. People who only take what is available and put up with what is happening to them loose the feeling of contributing something themselves, of being responsible and being able to have an impact.

Hermann Pfütze 2006. Translated by e_CR editors

What these works have in common is their performative force, the fact that through conventional gestures they effect changes in social reality.

Mechthild Widrich 2014