Situated at the foot of the legendary Martinswand rockface near Innsbruck, Tyrol, is the quarry of Zirl. From its escarpment, it is an almost vertical brutal drop of umpteen meters of bare rock. The two artists Richard Hoeck and John Miller made this spectacular site the location of an equally mesmeric and haunting video: mannequins dressed up in stylish outfits plunge into the void, down the rockface, to be smashed to pieces on the valley floor. A bodiless mannequin arm shoves itself into the picture and pushes them to their ruin, one after the other, relentlessly. In falling, they turn flips and twists, spinning, losing clothes, limbs, heads. Accompanied by the sound of bursting bodies – the video soundtrack consists of fighting noises from a kung-fu movie – a macabre heap of body parts and torn pieces of clothing is piling up as they hit the ground. The fascinating sight of artificial bodies falling and being wrecked against the picture-postcard backdrop of the natural Karwendel North Range evokes a set of very different emotions: sheer horror, fright, and empathy, but also amusement and fun; after all, it is impossible not to notice the slapstick bathos of the scene. Mannequin Death also relates to the categories of the beautiful and the sublime as we know them from Caspar David Friedrich. They both invoke a sense of the immeasurable, but also of horror. And if reality suddenly breaks into the well-made shrill theatricality of the enactment, like an Alpine swift that has its breeding place in the quarry crossing the downward trajectory of a mannequin, it makes the irony perfect.

Brigitte Huck, 2019