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E-mail Norbert H. Kox
Norbert H. Kox
at Apocalypse House
NORBERT KOX, VISIONARY ARTIST
By
Professor David Damkoehler
Norbert Kox has always been resourceful and inventive, first as a biker and now as a artist. From his earliest childhood Norbert Kox revealed a creative passion. As a young man this intensity found a release in outlaw biker culture. Very few avenues were available to working class youth in his hometown of Green Bay, especially which offered a wild and exciting lifestyle. While he was a biker his actions were legendary. People who encountered the early Norb recount vivid, vulger acts done with a flair and an originality that compares with the most outrageous performance art of the time. While he was painting and sculpting cars and motorcycles he was also painting on canvases and creating unusual objects. He would fill bottles with cigarette butts and other trash in layers sealed with resin which he would give to friends. Bottles that recall the work of Arman and the snare painting of Daniel Sporn.
By 1975 the ostensible freedom and excitment of motorcycle gangs was now seen by Kox as a terrible trap, he had reached a dead end. He found his way out through a spiritual awakening. This lead to his joining a conservative pentecostal group where he started reading the bible. As he read the scriptures his perception of christianity became more and more original. Kox could no longer belong to any organized religious group as he now understood them to be the deception of evil forces. He saw pagan religious practice at the heart of this false representation of Christianity. "Jesus", as the name of the son of God, was a manifestation of this falsehood. To counter this error one had to search the original language and text of the Bible and fmd the true answer in Yesu, the son of God, who has been expropriated as "Jesus" who carries a counterfeit message which will lead to world dominion by satanic entities.
In 1975 Kox went on a spiritual retreat. While living in privation in Suring, Wisconsin he turned his creative forces toward installations, painting and writing that carried his new understanding of the Bible. Blood Offering:Yesu Christ the Sacrificial Lamb, was his earliest major work, painted in 1976 and enhanced in 1988, Window of the Apocalypse: Revelation of Prophecy in the Night of the Beast, was painted in 1983 and revisited in 1992 with added glazing and enhancement. These paintings show his original revelation and mark the beginning of his development as a visionary artist.
Kox wrote Six Nights Till Morning: The Real Star Wars [sample] in 1980-84, a 900 page manuscript which set into words the ideas which form the basis for his paintings. Kox's message conflates ideas about Masonic conspiracies and apocalyptic warnings with his own understanding of grace and redemption. America, the images on American currency, organized religion and other manifestations of evil are all complicit in attempting to overtake the world. The paintings depict most organized religious practices and symbols as having a concealed basis in pagan, non-christian belief. Images of America are painted to reveal the diabolical purpose behind most of modern life. Biblical stories are given new imagery to reflect Kox's vision and to place the images in a modem context. Each painting and sculpture can be seen at first sight a spectacular work of art, but on closer examination one sees bible passages that give resonance and validation of the truth as understood by Kox. No matter how bleak things look in Kox's vision of the apocalypse redemption is always present and at hand, but not obvious. One has to study the picture, to know where to look. In his recent sculpture, The Final Fire, a key hangs on a nail as the symbol of redemption. This small image of redemtion, overshadowed by ominous forces in Kox's art is a metaphor for the need to study the scriptures to find the truth.
New Franken, WI 54229
