In a 1992 interview with Dutch critic Renée Steenbergen, Teun Hocks said, ”Sometimes I get the feeling that maybe my whole life is taking place unconsciously, as if I were not present myself.” The irony is that this singular artist is not only very present in his photo/paintings; he is almost always its sole subject.
There are many artists who have painted and photographed themselves relentlessly. Rembrandt and Egon Schiele are painters who come to mind. John Coplans and Francesca Woodman are photographers who are not only the subject of most of their work but also obsessive documenters of their frailty and physical or psychic disintegration.
Teun Hocks never views himself with such intimate scrutiny. His artistic persona is so much a part of the quotidian, lived world that it is impossible to picture him as a navel gazer. In this respect alone he is very much embedded in the mainstream of Dutch art history: a history rich in social and mercantile landscape, a tapestry of a people woven of broad tolerance, where the middle of the road consensus, as well as its outer extremes, is one of its signatures. Little in the history of Dutch art reaches for the existential and metaphysical angoisse that one associates with German, Scandinavian or German art, or even of the religious and political fervor of Italian art. Dutch art is dominated by the everyday, the ordinary, and the life of an Everyman. And Hocks’ persona is, above all else, that near anonymous Everyman.
Born in 1947 in Leiden, Hocks expressed an interest in photography as well as painting in his early teens. He pursued studies in both, and by his mid-twenties he had begun to merge the two media by adding paint to his black and white photos. Like South African artist William Kentridge, Hocks also turned to performance art, a medium where he himself became the living canvas. By 1979 these multiple interests began to merge in the kind of work that has become his defining mark—the self-modeled photo/ painting, theatrical tableau. There is a disquieting but deadpan humor, a very Dutch sense of self-satire that hovers around this work—as if the painter Magritte, the comedian Buster Keaton and the existential playwright Samuel Beckett had all been loosed in a multi-media brainstorming session. This at first may seem like heavy artistic freight to bear, but it is all rendered with a casual, even light, Dutch hand. At first look, these tableaux appear to be not much more than a one line “gotcha” visual pun. But when you stick to them for a bit their rich sense of life’s innate absurdity assumes a deeper dimension. Dutch composer Martin Kuipers has set six of Hocks’ works to music. They are slow pan/zoom reveals of each work that convey a frozen cinematic moment.
Hocks also has made Super-8 films and videos that capture a moment in time, many of them live action versions of his photo/paintings. His home page features a video of him swinging from a chandelier. Another is of him sitting next to a copse of cut trees, playing a saw with a violin bow.
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