Nice to Meet You

Gerz is working against the myth of the artist. Unreflective acceptance and mechanical, linear use of language and images result in their destruction as a form of communication, similar to what Vilém Flusser analysed and described as the fate of technical pictures. Here, two positions meet that are trying to reach related, perhaps even analogous goals. Their common ground is doubt and scepticism about things that are and yet are not, and the way things purport to be.

Andreas Vowinkel 1992. Translated by e_CR editors

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