john bock

There's typically a specific focus for John Bock's installations and the unhinged 'lecture' videos he shoots in them prior to the show's opening: this time, aptly given the location, the theme is architecture and time. Punctuating the Curve's arc, wall-mounted via spidery articulated legs, are big pod-like ovoids made from painted steel grilles: they contain Chinese lanterns, clothes, bedding and, in the showstopping final piece whose multiple chambers balloon from the chassis of a London taxi, tides of old stuff - tennis rackets, guitars, clocks, pots, pans, a stove and a 1983 Eurythmics record. Who lives in a place like this?
Well, Bock's pseudoscience-babbling performers, naturally. On video, they man the pods while urgently conferring and experimenting. One of them blowtorches a tiny toy, crowns it with melted plastic goo, smashes a chocolate rabbit, and breathlessly dialogues with a female boffin about 'time bubble parasites'. A second man languidly croons the Beatles' 'Yesterday', recorded in 1965 when construction was beginning on the Barbican: are Bock's stooges trying to return to a romanticised, utopian-minded past?
As with most of his videos, this parodying of human hopefulness and the mad loops of the questing mind is sort of funny, but its knowing cavalcade of jargon-splicing verbiage is also moderately unwatchable. If the sculptures feel like supports for the video, the latter drives you back to the sculptures. Which is perfect, in a way, but it doesn't make the experience any less itchy.