By using such elements as testosterone-laden car logos, lingerie-clad mannequins, and burnt American flags, German-born artist Josephine Meckseper sets herself up to be many things—a commentator on gender, a political activist, a critical outsider, a soothsayer, even an archaeologist. The latter designation is the one she prefers. “My motive is to capture our present in some form that people can relate to as if they’re looking at an archaeological display of what life was like in 2013,” she says.
A woman of slender frame with piercing green eyes, Meckseper is laconic when asked to explain her work. Her reticence perhaps explains why so many critics incorrectly read bold political statements into that work. German curator Heike Munder compared her practice to the writing of radical liberal intellectual Noam Chomsky. In a catalogue essay for Meckseper’s solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart in 2007, Okwui Enwezor wrote, “Meckseper’s artist’s projects have stringently focused on addressing the politics of power and violence that undergird the current global imperium.”
When asked if her work is actively political, Meckseper replies, “My work is not really political because there’s no message. There’s political content in it, and I reference politics but the work itself is not political.” Dissecting what she means takes some effort. To begin, it’s important to understand that Meckseper derives much of her thinking from Michael Asher, who was her professor when she was a graduate student at the California Institute of the Arts in the early 1990s. She describes his oeuvre as archaeological; he clinically examined institutional behavior to understand how galleries and museums fail both artists and viewers. “He was one of the founders of the notion that the exhibition space is not actually a neutral ground, that you have a political responsibility when you show there,” Meckseper says.
As cool as her approach to her practice is—the role of the archaeologist is, after all, ultimately neutral, disclosing facts but not offering prescriptive solutions—the art Meckseper makes is heavily steeped in a Marxist critique of consumer culture.
In installations for her 2007 Kunstmuseum Stuttgart show, Meckseper filled glass cabinets that resembled shop windows with images of women in lingerie beside toilet plungers, photographs of riots, and pretty mannequins wearing kaffiyehs, the Arab scarf commonly associated with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Other display cases held bath mats, perfume bottles, treatises by Jean Baudrillard, jeweled pendants, and packed dress shirts. One room featured abstract paintings resembling works by Russian Constructivists like Kazimir Malevich—hung across from photographs of street bombings. In Meckseper’s supposedly neutral works, one message becomes clear—all commodities are equal enough in social value to be placed in the same exhibition space, and conversely are all equally worthless.
Her later work seems to be more directed at critiquing the American government and what Meckseper suggests is its insatiable hunger for oil and war. For 0% Down, 2008, which has been widely shown, Meckseper mashed up clips of American car commercials with “Total War,” a soundtrack by experimental sound artist Boyd Rice, to create a short black-and-white film that reads like a propaganda piece for the air force of the government in The Minority Report. For a 2011 exhibition at the Flag Art Foundation, in New York, she assembled an array of objects that summed up the typical American man—or at least the one idealized by hip-hop culture. Gleaming chrome tire rims rested on tables with reflective surfaces. A slat wall—ordinarily used to display merchandise in industrial retail stores—was composed of red, white, and blue mirrors. On it hung, among other objects, a screen print of twin Ford Mustang Shelby GT500s and a rack of silver necklaces with pendants depicting a bald eagle and the Mercedes logo. The look of the exhibition was both sleek and sort of tacky; in another venue, it could have been a shrine to a pizza delivery boy.
The 2012 Manhattan Oil Project, for which Meckseper installed two 25-foot-high oil pumps at the corner of 46th Street and Eighth Avenue in New York City, is perhaps her most overtly political work to date. The pumps bobbed up and down as if drawing oil from under the sidewalk; in actuality, they were just sculptures. Her intention was to make a statement about how oil fuels America’s appetites, though perhaps the most powerful statement made was that passersby largely ignored them. Someone digging up such artifacts 100 years from now would not necessarily get an unbiased view of society—for instance, where is the Internet in all this?—but she would certainly surmise that people today were patriarchal, patriotic, self-destructive, and marked by a fairly disturbing predilection for ugly objects.
Not all of Meckseper’s work, however, ignores the aesthetic. In her studio, we sit in a corner wedged between a desk with an Apple computer and an elegant glass case that Meckseper says references Mies van der Rohe; the great father of modernist architecture plays a central role in both her exhibition that opened in June at the Parrish Art Museum, in Water Mill, Long Island, and her solo show this fall at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York. The vitrine pairs the ass of a plaster mannequin with a totem resembling Constantin Brancusi’s vertical sculptures. “Van der Rohe built a lot of structures for art collections,” she says. “So I see these as display sculptures for small art collections.” A characteristically opaque response.
It isn’t until the very end of my visit that Meckseper loosens up. “Your studio is so neat,” I comment, as I wander around the meticulously clean space, lined with large canvases (based on photographs of Bernhard Hoetger’s Expressionist outdoor sculptures) that will appear in the Andrea Rosen exhibition. “It’s the German in me,” Meckseper says, smiling slightly. Although Meckseper has called New York her home for the past 18 years—“I always miss it when I’m gone, whether it’s dirty and rainy or sunny and hot,” she says—she was born in Lilienthal, Germany, in 1964. Her parents considered themselves anarchists but were well connected nonetheless; Meckseper’s father was a friend of former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. They hailed from the German intellectual avant-garde—her great-granduncle was Heinrich Vogeler, who founded Worpswede, a Weimar-era utopian artists’ colony, with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, among others. And Worpswede is where Meckseper spent much of her childhood. Rather than watching Sesame Street, she watched movies like Alain Resnais’s Holocaust film Night and Fog.
At the Parrish, as part of the institution’s new Platform Series, Meckseper’s pieces have the opportunity to interact with the permanent collection; she has created installations that directly engage in conversation with the institution’s new Herzog & de Meuron-designed building, unveiled last fall. The structure, which resembles two barns stretched horizontally, evokes both the clean, light-filled buildings of Van der Rohe and the pavilion-like car dealerships across from the museum along Route 27, the clogged single-lane highway that equalizes all who visit the Hamptons, even the wealthiest. Given Meckseper’s fixation on automobile culture and the great modernists of the Weimar Republic, the marriage between her and the Parrish seems predestined. On the exterior of the main entrance lobby, visitors are greeted by a glass vitrine that Meckseper modeled after Van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion at the 1929 World’s Fair. Just beyond, in the interior space, lies Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow It Down, 2009, a chrome conveyor belt with three tires placed on a mirrored panel on the floor, in front of a mirrored panel on the wall behind. Next to the conveyor belt sit two television sets, one playing 0% Down and the other running Shattered Screen, 2009, a continuous video of shattered glass. “In the mirror, you see the cars driving by reflected in it, and it looks as if they are driving into the mirror,” Meckseper says. “It’s not necessarily about seeing the reflected wealth or glamour of the Hamptons, but more about Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend and being stuck in traffic.” In Weekend, 1967, a vacuous French bourgeois couple abandon their car in traffic en route to a holiday and find themselves immersed in a surreal kind of civil war. As they traverse the bucolic landscape, they encounter burned cars, dead bodies, and a gang of cannibals who eat British tourists. Despite the carnage, the duo’s main concerns include making sure that their Hermès bags are not destroyed. Meckseper’s installation replicates the traffic in the film right before the violence erupts. When viewers turn away from it, they may find themselves in the museum—or immersed, as Godard’s couple discovered themselves, in a class struggle they can no longer ignore. (One hopes for the latter, especially if they’ve spent a Friday afternoon on Route 27.)
Four other works by Meckseper at the Parrish also employ mirrors, as well as images of cars, American flags, and ties. They reflect the art installed alongside them—pieces by John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Keith Sonnier, and Dan Flavin. Like Meckseper’s shop window installations, all the objects captured within the piece are effectively equalized: The exorbitantly expensive works of the great Minimalists are humbled alongside overblown Jeep logos. One can read it as a familiar critique of the art world—the auratic object has become just a commodity like any other. Or it can be taken as Meckseper herself might describe it—an archaeological display of what life is like in 2013, albeit for a privileged group of people, of which the artist herself is a member.
This article is published in the July 2013 issue of Modern Painters.
Installation view of "Manhattan Oil Project," 2012 / James Ewing, Josephine Meckseper,
Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart, and Andrea Rose Gallery, New York