Apparatus 1
Richard Hoeck / John Miller
2015
Archival Inkjet prints, each 235,5 cm x 152,2cm
Edition 1+1AP
“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions, a statistic.“
Whether Josef Stalin ever spoke these words or whether this is one of history‘s famous misquotations, the
truth remains: The greater the scale of the disaster, the less we can cope with it.
Today the brutality of the Ukraine invasion has overwhelmed the public, leaving it numb. Paradoxically, ar-
tifice often has more impact than reality. As Walter Benjamin claimed, people left insensate by the constant
din of the news learn to cry again through films.
The emotional response to Richard Hoeck and John Miller‘s video Mannequin Death reflects this. The viewer
watches in horror as meticulously styled mannequins fall from a cliff‘s edge. The camera follows the figures‘
descent into a quarry, violently crashing and coming apart. In the end, only mangled parts and dislodged
limbs remain.
The artists photographed this debris afterward, creating the series Sex Appeal of the Inorganic. The inani-
mate materiality of the mannequins is never in doubt.
Yet the images of their mutilated remains – bodies that border the life-like and the artificial – create a deeply
unsettling effect.
