Hommage à Domberger

The media covered by the works of Jochen Gerz – photo/texts, photography, performance and video – contain a new concept of time which, more than in any traditional artistic discipline, depends on the function and speed of the apparatus. Gerz is aware of this foreshortening through the apparatus, and he acts against it by not echoing it. His relation to the time-quality of the apparatus is that of the artist par excellence, for he also uses the apparatus contrary to their own inherent purpose and intent. He takes them into his own time when he changes their significance; photography is made to serve his own purpose, which is to avoid copying reality, and the video is taken out of the linear chronology of the narrative continuum. The timeless time of the performance and the elimination of time in the conjunction of text and image are used by Gerz against the inflation of the today-feelings, which call up comparable images in our society; against industrial repetition and the seeming precision of the pre-fabricated flood of images the simplest means in the individual experience of our own link with time.

Ulrich Krempel 1988