Jeppe Hein’s works address us individually; though, importantly, we might not have asked them to. Hein delights in apparently serendipitous events, suspending common sense laws of cause and effect and conjuring up scenarios in which, in direct response to our presence, seemingly sentient behaviour is coaxed from inanimate things.
In some of his pieces he articulates a dialogue between the work itself, the person encountering it and the gallery space in which it is sited – though this is a conversation for which one is wholly unprepared. Works of this kind imply a wry relationship both to the Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s and to those forms of institutional critique that sought to question the authority of the museum or gallery space. Yet Hein’s practice does not really fit either tradition – the mode of address and playful tone is at odds with, for example, phenomenological interpretations of Minimalist sculpture, in which the viewer participated in the work but as a relatively abstract presence. For Hein that viewer becomes a very literal participant who, consciously or otherwise, acts as a trigger for the work. On sitting upon Hein’s Smoking Bench (2003) the viewer is slowly engulfed in clouds of dry ice and water vapour. Hein’s works are charmingly simple. Inert or cloaked, they require us – sometimes unwittingly – to provoke them into action.
Courtesy: the artist and Johann König Gallery, Berlin
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