Artist Ryan Bock wandered around a Etgar Keret exhibition written to Berlin Jewish Museum, tripping over crumpled pieces of paper. As indicated by the museum, he picked them up and read them one by one. “It was a son recounting his experiences as a young child to his mother talking about escaping the Nazis,” he said. Hyperallergic in an interview.
These crumpled pieces of paper echoed the reason Bock traveled to Germany in the first place: to attend the unveiling of the StolpersteinOr stumbling blocks, in Frankfurt. Since 1992, these brass-plated concrete cubes have been embedded on the sidewalks in front of the homes of Jewish victims of Nazi persecution.
Unlike in the past, Bock received a warm welcome from the mayor and residents of Lich, a small town near Frankfurt to which his family’s ancestry can be traced. “I will try to move to Lich for a few months,” he said. “I think there hasn’t been a Bock in this town for 400 years. So in many ways it’s like a comeback, a “fuck you; you can’t get rid of us. He said this with a quiet laugh, still expressing affection for the kindness the citizens of his ancestral home had shown him.
In Frankfurt, Bock met a high school student who had found the archives of one of his ancestors. Apparently, his ancestor constantly skipped school and yet managed to pass all of his classes. “He was in a choir that’s over 200 years old, which is still exists“, said the artist. “They performed many of the Jewish songs that the Nazis allowed them to sing at their last performance before the takeover of the regime.”
“It was unfamiliar but familiar at the same time,” he said. “I was not raised religious at all. So I didn’t really think something like this would affect me so deeply. But it really was. It was amazing.”
The origin of the term “Stolpersteine” is one of many examples of how Jews empowered themselves using aspects of oppressor culture. It comes from an anti-Semitic saying from the Nazi era, when people tripped over a stone sticking out of the ground and said, “A Jew should be buried here.”
This kind of irony and black humor runs through Bock’s art. His work’s cutting investigations into how the United States perpetuates authoritarianism come with a sad laugh, if you know where to look. The artist’s contrasting and sharp aesthetic is inspired by the crystalline forms of the under-celebration Czech cubist movement and the dark world of German expressionist horror filmmakers. Working almost exclusively in black and white, Bock’s over-the-top paintings, sculptures and puppets have viewers gasping and laughing simultaneously.
His latest installation is a life-size chess set, currently on view at artist project in Toronto, Canada. Bock said children quickly descend on the game board as soon as they see it, eager to play. Adults quickly joined in, dragging game pieces made from discarded piano legs. “It’s kind of like getting people to have fun,” Bock said. “But it’s like ritualized violence.” Noting its use in military training, Bock notes that chess is “about killing political opponents. It’s a war simulation.
Previously shown in an exhibition at the Ki Smith Gallery in New York, the Chess Game installation Ode to Duchamp: a liar (2022) refers to the artist who is considered by many to be the father of “readymades”: sculptures made from mass-produced objects, separated from their original use and “elevated” to art. But while Duchamp’s ready-made objects, like urinals and bicycle wheels, are left in their original form, Bock’s repurposed piano legs seamlessly blend together to create completely new forms. Without their massive bodies, all that remains of the pianos is their adornment: spiral legs, leafy tendrils, a few pedals, and even a full ram’s head.
Back at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, one story in particular caught Bock’s attention among the dozens he found on the floor. Safe in her new home after the war, a survivor described insisting on the explosive music of the anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner. A Jewish neighbor came and said, “What is this? You can’t listen to this! To which the woman replied, “Well, the Nazis ate apples. Am I going to stop eating apples? Am I going to stop making strudel? Laughing, Bock said, “The sense of humor this woman continued to have was amazing.”
Likewise, Bock noted, “I borrow a lot of visual cues from fascist movements and artworks,” including Neoclassical the architecture and the powerful diagonals of sustainagad posters. “I want to use the language that has been used by these regimes…to warn people so it doesn’t happen again.”
It’s a delicate dance: rather than simply repeating fascist aesthetics, the artist magnifies their grotesqueness, so it’s impossible to see the pieces as anything other than an ironic dismantling of authoritarianism. Her Paris installation 2018, I’m afraid of Americans, drew viewers into a dizzying carnival house of warped American flags, crumbling neoclassical columns, and a looming Statue of Liberty fashioned from a wardrobe. Likewise, his smiling and grimacing cardboard masks in his 2022 exposure Bockhaus haunted house in a brownstone in Brooklyn, recall the clownish costumes of Purim Spiels. Here they mock Uncle Sam, the justice system and the devil himself.
Bock, also known as Bockhaus, knows the power of good performance. A former street artist, he often dons his own disguise as a “semi-anonymous” character who is not photography in a ski mask. When preparing for the chess game, he wrote: “I found it difficult to justify my continued participation in the art market in the face of so much growing pain and struggle in the world… What power of real truth and change could art influence its spectators if it were presented as a mere commodity? His performance as a mysterious artist, shrouding his true face, highlights the ridiculousness of the art world he exists in.
Especially in the pessimism of the past few years, I’ve lost count of the number of times “pissed off” comedian fans have told me why transphobic ridicule, stories of aggression, and thinly veiled anti-Semitism don’t are nothing but so-called jokes. “You just don’t understand dark humor,” they say. They fall into the trap of nihilism disguised as satire: these jokes express the desire to embody the power of the oppressors. A good Jewish joke, on the other hand, laughs at the scowling face of white supremacy. It magnifies the surreal nature of a truly terrible situation, allowing us to smile through the pain. It is both a folk craft and a survival mechanism that rendered from generation to generation.
Bockhaus has inherited this ability and takes it to a place of his own: plunging into the darkness of these jokes, he blurs the line between humor and horror. But as his pieces travel through these depths, he does not indulge in darkness. In his dark and cackling universe, there is always a way out.
