Christian Jankowski

Combination filmmaker, multi-media artist, photographer and Duchamp-esque trickster, German artist Christian Jankowski has built his career on collaborations, often with unwitting participants. He first attracted significant attention at the 1999 Venice Biennale with his "Telemistica" installation, a short film based on Jankowski's telephone conversations with Italian psychics inquiring as to whether or not his Biennale exhibition would be successful. With Jankowski, the process of creating the work becomes almost more important than the final piece itself, forcing the viewer to reconsider his or her definition of "art" - it's a creative process, yes, but is it sociological study or prank phone calls? Is "art" beside the point? An accomplished memeticist, he creates circular, meta statements with works such as Lycan Theorized, in which he hijacked a low-budget horror film with the promise of delivering prosthetics cast from the limbs of academics examining the horror genre. Jankowski's art is the collision between high- and lowbrow, an exuberant and often humorous elevation of the absurd (i.e., The Frankenstein Set) to gallery status. Ultimately, the subject of the joke - and there's always a punch line with a Jankowski piece - could be the art world itself.