Review: Angels of Revenge at Sue Crockford Gallery
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5:00AM
Thursday June 05, 2008
By Adam Gifford
Christian Jankowski and his work, Angels of Revenge. Photo / Kenny Rodger
To celebrate moving back to Berlin after four years in New York, Christian Jankowski lit a fire in his new apartment. Then he made a video of the flames crackling in the hearth, with a soundtrack of him singing to himself.
Welcome Home is one of the works on show at the Sue Crockford Gallery, illustrating the way Jankowski can see art in any performance or chance interaction.
"Sometimes [art] happens on the side. You do something and you realise it may be art," he says. "That's the story with a neon sculpture of the phrase, 'I want my money'. I was collecting up my papers and I came across some old to-do lists.
"I wrote that down before meeting my gallerist [art dealer] in New York, because she owes me so much money.
"I realised how absurd a lot of what I was writing was, when you think about the time you waste working on to-do lists instead of thinking of new works, but I can try to change bad energy to good if it is transformed into a neon."
Jankowski doesn't expect to see much of his new apartment. "I am always travelling. My working practice always means going to new spaces, starting again, working with different teams, project to project. My studio is wherever I am invited," he says.
Last week, he was in Auckland. This week, he is at the Basel art fair, reprising a work he did at the Cologne art fair, where he got the German home shopping channel to do a three-hour presentation on some of the art for sale. "We sold two pieces," he says.
It is the artist-as-ideas-merchant - inserting himself into the information age bitestream and spitting out his own take on existing genres and production conventions - that is ideal for an art industry keen to make critical hay out of chaff.
In Angels of Revenge, Jankowski has used horror movie genre conventions as his starting point, after hearing a lecture by Henry Jenkins, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that used images and quotes from horror directors such as David Cronenberg and George Romero.
"He's the director of MIT's comparative media studies programme, so he's into high art, low art and how these things are overlapping. When I saw this theory, and saw these crazy images, it was like a collage."
He invited Jenkins and several other horror theorists for casts of body parts, which made their way into a low budget horror movie.
He also took a film crew to a horror movie convention and buttonholed fans as they came off stage from a horror costume competition. He asked them to stay in costume and character and tell the camera who had harmed them most in life and how they would have their revenge.
That's the video.
Then there are the photographs of the costumed fans and the autobiographical scripts they penned. That was done to keep them from wandering off before it was their turn to perform, but it also creates another saleable object, important in the economy of conceptual art.
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