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The photo series “The Flood” was created in the summer of 2021 shortly before and during the flood of the century in the German Ahr Valley. Although the title of the series and the period of its creation suggest that the series primarily examines the ecological threat and its consequences, the focus is rather on the theme of the joy of life.

Water as an essential element is life-giving, but at the same time it can kill us. We can swim and play in it one moment and drown in it the next.

The idea of mixing threatening motifs and elements with joyful images and depicting them in vivid, contrasting colors aims to motivate joie de vivre and defy the threat we face.

In addition, the images thematize water as a visual element that seems to become a different material depending on the condition, light and perspective... in some images it is hard and solid, as if the body floating in it were cast in acrylic, then it appears fluid and soft, deforming and seemingly dissolving the body forms... or it shatters the forms into countless particles with restless, fragmenting structure.

With these different areas, the series spans a range from predominantly narrative motifs, such as “Business Trip,” “Just Married,” or “Body Floating,” to more formal versions such as “Ascension,” “The Groom,” or “Woman” in which the abstracting, visual peculiarities of water are in the foreground.

Chimera

Markus Rock’s 2019 photo series “Chimera” is primarily a sculptural work. Two dancers, Julia and Siri, who look amazingly similar, choreograph the fusion of their bodies and create the illusions of new, independent beings.

The performance goes from the mirroring of single body parts to the complete entanglement of two beings, tender, ecstatic, confrontational and threatening. Their representation becomes a projection surface on which we ourselves create the absurd, sometimes grotesque “chimeras” in a fusion of perception and imagination. Upon closer inspection, these creatures dissolve again and transform back into their familiar components of body parts.

Being Human

The philosopher Martin Buber said, that only by confronting the other, man finally becomes himself. In this confrontation, the I loses its narcissistic structure (by experiencing) friction and resistance. This principle of dialogue is a reoccuring characteristic of Markus Rock’s work.

Ralf Hanselle (in the catalogue for the exhibition ‹Leib›)

Photo: B. Reich

Claudia Stein

Introduction to Markus Rock’s Photographic Art

Markus Rock’s photographic work centres on the question of what it means to be human in contemporary society. His earlier series show de-contextualised naked female and male bodies floating on black surfaces. The ‹larger than life size› prints confront us with different states of individual being. But they also thematise the universal human longing for intimate and meaningful relationships. The physicality of the human body, the images suggest, is the landscape into which such searches for and struggles over human identity and selfhood – individual and collective – are inscribed.

The ultra-realistic aesthetics of Rock’s photography can be deeply unsettling because the boundary between the body’s reality and its representations is kept open, porous and undefined. The powerful drama of human life is there for us to see and we are inescapably drawn right into it, complicit in the construction of ‹the Other›. The struggles of fellow human beings for dignity and recognition, Rock’s powerful images remind us, are always part of our own.

In his most recent work Rock continues his visual exploration into what it means to be human in today’s world. He is particularly interested in what role material culture plays in who we think we are. Is there a meaning to the physical world that goes beyond its materiality, its mere use value?

Rock is inspired by the old genre of vanitas still-lives which first emerged during the Golden Age of Dutch and Flemish culture in the 16th and 17th century. Decorating the parlours of the burgeoning merchant and bourgeois classes such meticulously arranged and amazingly realistic paintings aimed to show off the wealth of the patrons. They also celebrated the then growing stress on worldly accomplishments and human abilities: colourful paintings carefully combined the precious, rare and exceptional produced by the arts and to be found in nature with the pleasures of the mundane: flowers, bread, cheese, fruits and vegetables, books, jewels, golden and silver wine-filled chalices, scientific objects, maps, mirrors, Venetian glass, Chinese porcelain, silver cutlery, Indian cloth and Turkish carpets.

Such opulent paintings were – and still are – a material feast for the eyes. Some of the objects there depicted, however, such as the hourglass and even more importantly the human skull, drove home another profound, if invisible, philosophical message: all is vanity, they reminded the viewer, and thus pointed to the transience and brevity of human life as well as to the shallowness of all human pleasures, of power, beauty and wealth. All material things and personal achievements amassed during your own life time, the painting warned, are insignificant. The essence of your being is your immaterial eternal soul granted to you by God.

Such profound Christian beliefs led the still-live paintings to ooze in symbolism and to depict allegorical compositions in which every element had a deeper, hidden meaning to be deciphered by the pious onlooker. It was only at first sight that a vanitas painting celebrated worldly goods, possessions and human abilities. Their exuberant materiality ultimately aimed to take the viewer beyond the shallow materiality of the physical world onto a spiritual journey to encounter and explore the mysteries of the human condition, and renew one’s faith in the love and power of the Almighty.

The peculiar double-meaning of such early modern paintings radiates a unique aesthetics which inspires Rock’s carefully staged 12 vanitas photographs, all of which are immersed in dark atmosphere. But he gives this old genre a fresh meaning. Each of the pictures juxtaposes a skull with a carefully composed scenery of familiar objects used in our contemporary consumerist culture and many of these compositions carry a significant dose of satire. Arrangements such as the ‹conversation› of the human skull with an empty and seemingly hastily thrown-away bag of crisps or the assembly of battered-looking plastic toys are humorous and even funny. But they don’t make you laugh full-heartedly. One cannot help wondering what it means to be human in our throw-away global consumerist culture.

What are we as humans if all we produce is trash? What is left of the faith in human dignity and unique abilities so cherished by our early modern ancestors if human knowledge today is reduced to quick visual searches on the web to be downloaded by everyone onto a cheap electronic device? Is the human skull still a meaningful reference to human mortality at the time when the cognitive life sciences are promising us to soon be able to unlock the mysterious of eternal life in our brain chemistry? What is left of the earthly pleasures such as delicious foodstuff if consumed in a haste from plastic containers? Does the material world really have no deeper meaning to us than its immediate use value?

Rock’s vanitas images celebrate the pleasures of sight but, simultaneously, they also leave us deeply unsettled: meanings are emptied, plastic consumerism seems to take their place and the shock of a global trash culture lingers in one’s mind. One is left with the old question: who am I in all of this?

Jan Großer

Markus Rock – The I and the Other

The human body is, depend­ing on one’s per­spec­tive, an ob­ject as well as the home of the human sub­ject. Its physical exist­ence poses the bound­aries, be­hind which the sub­ject is pro­tected and im­prisoned in a sort of existen­tial iso­la­tion. Never will I really be able to feel what another feels, never will I take his place or be fully united with him. He will always remain the Other to me, the un­fathom­able. Yet, the body is also the means, by which to come into con­tact with the Other and, at least, in part over­come this loneli­ness acquired at birth. Because the en­counter with the Other enve­lops me in a cloud of sensual im­pres­sions – his voice, his touch, his warmth and smell – which leave emo­tional traces in me, to be in­te­grated as memo­ries. In this manner, the Other may become part of me and I of the Other and we thus break through our iso­lation.

Being entered by the Other, how­ever, also pre­sents a danger to me. I cannot com­plete­ly know, alone control it. Will it hurt me, emo­tion­ally or phys­i­cally, or over­whelm me so that I can only feel and think the Other and no more myself? Caught be­tween my desire for union with the Other and my fear of it, I am facing a fun­da­men­tal dilemma.

In his current work, Markus Rock looks at this dilemma, the human body and its in­herent ambi­valence. Rock declines some of the in­numer­able con­stel­la­tions of this con­flict. In his pic­tures, the bodies appear in a vacuum with­out con­text – in their naked­ness before the black back­ground – reduced to their phys­i­cal pres­ence as objects, but in meeting the viewer also as sub­jects. The lying woman with her eyes closed remains dis­tant and passive, while the men who gaze di­rect­ly at the camera or de­cid­ed­ly away from it emerge as active sub­jects. Other figures stay occu­pied with their bodies as ob­jects or their inner ex­pe­ri­ence – the tattooed man who steps away from the viewer, the woman reaching be­tween her buttocks, and the man hold­ing his head in his hands. In their self-absorp­tion, these figures reveal them­selves also as sub­jects – as sentient, self-aware beings.

In the images of the couples, the en­counter with the Other is shown as a con­stant struggle, which poses the ques­tion of power – in the form of pene­tra­tion, the taking of as pos­ses­sion, the exer­cise of a force upon the Other – and the ques­tion of iden­tity – Who are you? How do you re­spond to me? How resilient are you; how resilient am I? This struggle is playing out in the conflict between the desire for and the fear of the Other, be­tween inti­macy and dis­tance, the fun­da­men­tal con­flict of human rela­tions.

When the figures gaze di­rect­ly into the camera, enter­ing into eye contact with the viewer, so to speak, we can feel clear­ly what is present in all the images. Every man ex­per­i­ences him­self in his dicho­to­mous exist­ence as self-aware spirit and phys­i­cal object, as an I and as an Other. Each en­counter with another person is the field, where this split is staged anew. As pain­ful as that may be, it remains our only hope.

Here you find a film portrait by Frank Bertram about the work complex “The I and the Other”, filmed during the ex­hib­i­tion in Berlin.

You can down­load the press release for the ex­hib­i­tion “The I and the Other” with the print­able text here in English and in German (PDF).