All is Light – Jan Henderikse

Starting in New York City ALL IS LIGHT- JAN HENDERIKSE narrates the birth of Nite Lite, a gigantic work of art by Jan Henderikse in the St. Georgen Church in the German town of Wismar. The film, in a very humorous way, lays bare the way the artistic attitude interferes with our lives and our thinking.

International artist Jan Henderikse in a sense takes the strategies of Warhol and Duchamp further and applies them to our banal little reality. Using everyday utensils he makes gigantic installations: beer-crates, used supermarket posters or plastic night lights of Jesus Christ: ‘Too much is not enough’.

Art is what he regards it to be. He took pictures of all corners of Broadway, New York City’s longest street. In Berlin he casted a bronze statue of a WWII shell-hole in a bridge. A Berlin newspaper called him ‘der Grossvater des Trash’, the grandfather of trash, in connection with a large exhibition in Berlin where he is celebrated as a great visual artist. Jan Henderikse himself hardly mentions it. Maybe because he is just being modest. Or maybe because he rejects the idea of the artist as a super hero.