JOCHEN HÖLLER – “AN VIELMEHR NAHE MUSS WIRKLICH

The young artist Jochen Höller (*1977), coming from lower austria, is dealing with elemental topics concerning society, technics, religion and culture in his work. He traces it’s complexity and range, and puts it in a long-span context, thereby he isn’t only cloaking the root of matter, but delivers new food for thoughts with the humour of artistic practice.
After finishing his study of sculpture at the University of Arts in Linz he fully turned towards his work with paper.
The young Austrian artist Jochen HÖLLER deals in his works with profound issues of society, technic, religion and culture. He is tracing their complexity and range and includes them in a new context, which brings always new thought-provoking impulses in a humorously way to the surface. After his studies of sculpture at the art university Linz, HÖLLER concentrated to work entirely with paper . The method of self-arrangement is subject of HÖLLERs paperwork. The artist deals with common imaginations of order and information-transfer, he questions the easy habit to consume indications in a prefabricated way and uses cultural artifacts in a very active manner, which are according to Michel Foucault: “as archive not (defining) the totality of texts, which have been saved for the civilization, nor the allness of traces, which one was able to save after their destruction, but rather the game of rules, that defines in a culture the appearance and the extinction of statements, their short persistence and their erasement, their paradox existence as event and as things.”

In his exhibition “An viel mehr nahe muß wirklich” in Mario Mauroner Contemporary’s roomnumberOne Höller is fully focused on analysing systems, particularly language systems. The work “Issak Asimov – The Jokester” was Höllers first work dealing with language, where he disassembles the whole content of the book to reorganize it anew alphabetically. In his work “Maurice Halbwachs – Das Gedächtnis und seine sozialen Bindungen” goes one step further. He filters the available information, the content, the single words of the book and translates, to a greater degree transforms these into a sculptural setting, which is not only facing the actual content as interpretation, but as a redefinition. Maurice Halbwachs reflection starts with a conception of history, transferred from the social environment of each human. This conception is by Höller translated into a closed cycle, into an intrinsically intestine, that digests and spits out itself again. In his newest series of works “Eine Woche Kurier” the artist refers to society’s consumption of media. He disputes the question of how long information keeps its actuality and therefore its current truth. The fast pace of a daily newspaper, in which informations are being changed, revised, repeated, edited and added, is transformed by Höller into a temporal superimposition and juxtaposition.
Besides his presentation in the roomnumberOne Höller has created an artist book titled “An viel mehr nahe muß wirklich”. It is based on his “Wittgensteingenerator”, his most monumental work so far. After decomposing and rearranging Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Höller arranged the text blocks on a machine, which serves him as a playground for this vocabulary to create new works. By that way he created a book, that exhibits a new and autonomous text, based on the “Wittgensteingenerator”. The book is – according to Höller – a novel, a novel reflecting language and awarding it new meaning. The content could not have been thought of, as the fantastic absurd sentences derive purely from the diverse word pool of the Tractatus. Höller tries to create something new out of the found material, and questions if language can be meaningful without meaning itself. Or moreover how absurd seeming sentences – or a whole novel – are able to produce new meaning, new thoughts and new thinking patterns.