Bazon Brock

Bazon Brock (born Jürgen Johannes Hermann Brock, 2 June 1936) is a German art theorist and critic, multi-media generalist, artist and philosopher. He is considered a member of Fluxus, and was a leading art theorist in the 1960s and 1970s. In a 1968 exhibition, he showed a metal plate in the style of a high-voltage warning: "death must be abolished, this damned mess must stop. He who speaks a word of consolation is a traitor" ("der Tod muß abgeschafft werden, diese verdammte Schweinerei muß aufhören. Wer ein Wort des Trostes spricht, ist ein Verräter") and signed Bazon Brock. The text is a truncated version of his eulogy for Siegfried Kracauer, which continued, "betrays the solidarity of all human beings against death... Death... is a scandal, a beastly mess!... Don't let yourselves submit to it, understand death... [is] a monstrous scandal, against which I protest.") ("ist ein Verräter an der Solidarität aller Menschen gegen den Tod... Der Tod ist ein Skandal, eine viehische Schweinerei!... Lasst euch nicht darauf ein, versteht: der Tod... [ist] ein ungeheuerlicher Skandal, gegen den ich protestiere.")

Also in 1968, Brock installed a "Besucherschule" (visitors' school) at documenta IV, introducing exhibition visitors to contemporary art in several hours of "action teaching". The program was repeated several times until 1992. This was done in the style of the late 1980s, when the "Lange Marsch durch die Institutionen" (Long march through the institutions) was started. In 2011, he introduced the exhibition "Trans-Skulptur" of his friends Anna and Bernhard Blume in Berlin. He created an instution called Denkerei (thinking workshop), for "theoretic art, universal poetry and prognostic", based at the Hoftheater in Kreuzberg.