John Bock

In 2005, the German performance artist, sculptor and video artist John Bock spent two weeks in Iceland producing Skipholt, a film based on the lives of early explorers and the mythic fear of shipwreck. As he treks through the wintry landscape with a bizarre range of props to, "face up the facts of DEADWHITE," Bock performs the explorer's destitution in his wonderful language of slapstick absurdism, evoking the obsessions of Scott and Shackleton and Captain Ahab's mad pursuit of Moby Dick. This artist's book, which accompanies Skipholt, is published on the occasion of Bock's exhibition at Kunstraum Innsbruck. Designed in the manner of a mountaineer's journal or explorer's sketchbook, it reproduces video stills alongside drawings created for the book-a familiar Bockian weave of pseudo-scientific, aesthetic and social commentary.