KEY POINTS:
To celebrate moving back to Berlin after four years in New York, Christian Jankowski lit a fire in his new apartment. Then he made a video of the flames crackling in the hearth, with a soundtrack of him singing to himself.
Welcome Home is one of the works on show at the Sue Crockford Gallery, illustrating the way Jankowski can see art in any performance or chance interaction.
"Sometimes [art] happens on the side. You do something and you realise it may be art," he says. "That's the story with a neon sculpture of the phrase, 'I want my money'. I was collecting up my papers and I came across some old to-do lists.
"I wrote that down before meeting my gallerist [art dealer] in New York, because she owes me so much money.
"I realised how absurd a lot of what I was writing was, when you think about the time you waste working on to-do lists instead of thinking of new works, but I can try to change bad energy to good if it is transformed into a neon."
Jankowski doesn't expect to see much of his new apartment. "I am always travelling. My working practice always means going to new spaces, starting again, working with different teams, project to project. My studio is wherever I am invited," he says.
Last week, he was in Auckland. This week, he is at the Basel art fair, reprising a work he did at the Cologne art fair, where he got the German home shopping channel to do a three-hour presentation on some of the art for sale. "We sold two pieces," he says.
It is the artist-as-ideas-merchant - inserting himself into the information age bitestream and spitting out his own take on existing genres and production conventions - that is ideal for an art industry keen to make critical hay out of chaff.
In Angels of Revenge, Jankowski has used horror movie genre conventions as his starting point, after hearing a lecture by Henry Jenkins, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that used images and quotes from horror directors such as David Cronenberg and George Romero.
"He's the director of MIT's comparative media studies programme, so he's into high art, low art and how these things are overlapping. When I saw this theory, and saw these crazy images, it was like a collage."
He invited Jenkins and several other horror theorists for casts of body parts, which made their way into a low budget horror movie.
He also took a film crew to a horror movie convention and buttonholed fans as they came off stage from a horror costume competition. He asked them to stay in costume and character and tell the camera who had harmed them most in life and how they would have their revenge.
That's the video.
Then there are the photographs of the costumed fans and the autobiographical scripts they penned. That was done to keep them from wandering off before it was their turn to perform, but it also creates another saleable object, important in the economy of conceptual art.
Jankowski says the photos are mainly to break up the exhibition space, so people are not just going from one dark room to another. "It is my videos I live off. People who buy my work buy the film work," he says.
His approach is not to immerse himself in research but to create space for activity to happen and then rely on gut feeling - "out of the stomach", as he puts it - to find the art in it.
While in America, he collaborated with a Texas televangelist, who Jankowski describes as having a Brechtian theatrical sense of audience involvement, as well as being a sophisticated user of video technology.
"I approached him to declare a whole show on television a piece of art which, at the same moment, is a holy artwork, so I was trying to define what would make art holy. He was totally into it and taking it over.
"He had a lot in common with the art system. You also have believing systems, some things are important in art, it's telling you things, it shapes your perspective on things, all these big ideas you have about art."
EXHIBITION
What: Angels of Revenge by Christian Jankowski
Where and when: Sue Crockford Gallery, 2 Queen St, to June 21
