Biography

John Menick is an artist and writer who works with the moving image and digital media.

One of Menick’s earliest works, Giving Time, was exhibited in 2000 for the first Greater New York at MoMA PS1. For the exhibition, the artist constructed a wristwatch that runs on a 28-hour day. Members of the audience were invited to live on this extended time and speak with the artist about their experiences.

Menick’s first video essay, The Disappearance (2001-02), took the form of a fictional location scouting in Nuremberg, Germany. The resulting video narrated the postwar history of the city using images of public spaces such as disused factories, stadia, and housing complexes. After this video, the essay, both written and cinematic, became Menick’s primary artistic form.

For dOCUMENTA(13) in 2012, Menick was commissioned to make Starring Sigmund Freud, a video memento for Sigmund Freud’s life as a fictional character in the cinema. Menick also exhibited a sound installation containing subliminal messages, as well as published a book of collected prose, A Report on the City, with Buchhandlung Walther König. The latter was selected by frieze magazine as one of the highlights of the year.

Menick’s other works include a documentary on madness and travel, Paris Syndrome (2010), and an essay film in the form of a monologue about “last person on Earth” films (The Secret Life of Things, 2005) His most recent project, Haunting (2020), is an evocation of the long history of ghosts in cinematic horror.

Born in White Plains, New York, Menick studied fine art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. After graduation, he was an early member of several New York art collectives including Nomads + Residents and 16 Beaver Group.

In addition to MoMA PS1’s Greater New York and dOCUMENTA (13), his visual art and films have been exhibited and screened at the International Film Festival, Rotterdam; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; CCA Wattis, San Francisco; and Artists Space, New York. Menick’s essays and stories have appeared in frieze, The Believer, Mousse Magazine, BOMB, Spike Art Quarterly, Art in America, and Witte de With Review, among other publications.

Menick was awarded grants from the Jerome Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and has received several commissions, including from Les Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers in France. Menick currently lives in New York City where he is a visiting professor of film at the Cooper Union.