Teun Hocks

The elaborately staged self-portrait photographs of Dutch artist Hocks mine the same deep vein of poker-faced humor one finds in the films of Buster Keaton or the plays of Samuel Beckett, where the indifference of the universe and the insufficiency of human effort are made bearable by elaborately pointless jokes and pratfalls. The effect is not only deeply funny but strangely comforting, what essayist Koplos calls "the salve of humor." Somehow the adventures of Hocks's hapless everyman make our own lives slightly more bearable. In one image he walks with a little house strapped to his back, in another he cries while his tears pool into a waterfall. Demons fly around his desk at night; he stands on a chair and inserts his head into a picture frame. The pictures are as visually rich as they are tongue-in-cheek; working from drawings and constructing backgrounds, Hock makes the photograph and then paints over the result with oils. If fellow lowlander Magritte is a clear point of reference—not least in his puckish disrespect for Newtonian reality—the richness of the background landscapes reference several centuries of Dutch landscape art. This book, which also includes a number of the artist's drawings, is the first monograph on his work to be published in North America. (Apr.)