How to know

The poetic undertaking has faced the problem of energy, as has the adventure of modern art. The pitfall was at times in believing that this energy would allow itself to be represented or stylised. Gerz knows that it can only be "shown" or indicated in a poetic constellation.

Christian Besson 1985

Jochen Gerz is an artist who has mastered the methods and tactics of the visual arts and yet, at the same time, foils them; he is an artist whose position on the open border between the visual, the literary and performance is rightly defined as a no man's land "between the chairs", for he pursues a strategy which assimilates daily experiences with the "media world" and severely questions them with regard to the way they work. The skepticism with which this is done manifests itself in the many parts, as well as, the ambiguity of the images and literary fragments which are intended to engender associations.

Peter Friese 1992

The breadth of Gerz's work and the wide variety of media he employs reveal with paradoxical clarity how fragmented narratives and/or disrupted images construct a place from which to consider relations between history (of earlier times and places) perceived at a distance and the immediacy of our personal experience of the present. Memory is invoked to concentrate the past within the continuity of our space in the present.

Gary Dufour 1994