5 Billboards for Banff

CR 86. Year 1984

Wv 86 1984 Banff 2 Jochen Gerz Pscut Copy

Those who know will say least

Die davon wissen, werden schweigen

Qui en a connaissance se taira

те кто знает скажут меньше всего

אלה שיודעים לא יאמרו דבר

On the one hand, Gerz’ s performances, public pieces, and photo/texts critique the idea of an autonomous artwork by exploring relations to social practices in general. The discursive nature of his work suggests multi-tracked readings of the economy, the environment, social relationships, and politics. On the other hand, he is concerned with the socialization of seeing – all of the codes internalized by each of us to organize our perceptions and communication in the world.
Gary Dufour 1994

Keywords

Work in public space

5 b/w photographs on PVC, each 120 x 210 cm

Billboards show five different upside-down landscape motifs from the Russian taiga.
The text Those who know will say least appears in different languages (English, French, Hebrew, Russian, German) on each billboard. They are installed on buildings in the downtown of the tourist spot in the Rocky Mountains. There is an edition under the same name (802).

The Banff Art Center, Banff (Alberta).

Realisations

Mainroad, Banff (Alberta), 1984

Bibliography

I: Banff 1984. Mainz 1987, pp. 118-119. Düsseldorf 1988, pp. 80-83. Bolzano 1999, pp. 49-51

II: Red. 2, 1984. Red. 3, 1984

V: Erlhoff 1987, pp. 41-43

VI: The Event Horizon 1987, p. 276

Access general bibliography

Documentation

b/w photographs

Exhibitions of the documentation