Christian Jankowski Flock, 2002 |
Video installation | DVD | posters |
12’15” and 68 x 87.5 cm (x5) |
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Christian Jankowski’s work is an action that often involves unsuspecting collaborators who run into or meet the artist innocently or by chance, becoming co-authors of the final result, something that is often a complete surprise even to the artist himself. This cooperative aspect of Jankowski’s work is enormously important, as each participant contributes by leaving his/her own imprint on it, and this culminates in a layered psychological diary which raises the suspicion that it is as strange and surprising to the artist as it is to the spectator. Much of what we have described here is true of this piece, Flock, 2002, which forms part of the thematic body of works in which Jankowski explores the symptomatic relation between the artist, the gallery as “institution” and the visitor or audience, which he calls the “magic circle”. Although other works, such as Rosa, for example, form part of this same body of work, this video, along with two others, forms a veritable trilogy on the theme. Each of these three pieces (My Life As A Dove, 1996; Director Poodle, 1998; and Flock, 2002) is imbued with the magic of transforming several people who participate in the projects – artist, curator and audience – into beings that are not human, but animal – a dove, a poodle and a flock of sheep, respectively. In the first video it is the artist himself who is literally transformed, turned into a dove by the great magician Win Brando for the three weeks the exhibition in Antwerp lasts, living in a cage just like a real white dove, completely supplanted by this feathered alter ego. In the second video, it is the then-director of the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Stephan Schmidt-Wullfen, who falls into Jankowski’s hands to undergo this strange and magical transformation, though on this occasion the artist permits him to turn into the animal that he would like to be; in this case a white poodle. Finally, we come to the video that concerns us now, Flock, 2002, in which the artist invites the great magician Paul Kiev, consultant to David Copperfield, to turn twelve visitors to the gallery into sheep, creating the flock alluded to in the title. In pairs, the volunteers are converted into sheep at the moment they begin their private visit to a collective exhibition whose theme is the way in which magic is related to art. Having seen the exhibition, the members of this “flock of visitors” are returned once more to their natural state as human beings. We can see then that this video, besides subversively questioning the roles played by the “magic circle”, shows that the artist has no doubt about what animal the audience should be turned into, and the resulting flock of sheep represents a caustic commentary on how the buyer, collector, critic and spectator at an exhibition are, in many cases, degraded, and the way in which they are aware of and accept their role in this whole racket. All this is reflected in the ironically magical approach that makes Jankowski’s work at once human and ingenious, whilst also subversive and sharply observed. Agustín Pérez Rubio |