Josephine Meckseper
dal 19/2/2009 al 2/5/2009
Segnalato da
19/2/2009
Josephine Meckseper
Migros Museum, Zurich
In her photography, videos and installations Josephine Meckseper (born Lilienthal, 1964, lives and works in New York) engages with the interaction between politics and glamour. Thus, in her works, images of political activism - whether photographs of demonstrations or newspaper cuttings - set against sparkling consumer goods and advertising motifs evoke a paradoxical effect.
Situated somewhere between the trappings of political activism and mass consumerism, the work of Josephine Meckseper (born 1964 in Lilienthal, lives and works in New York) functions like sculptural collages that evoke the paradoxes of the current capitalist value system. In Meckseper’s first solo exhibition in Switzerland, the migros museum für gegenwartkunst is exhibiting a series of new works investigating the complex interaction between the auto and oil industries and the war in Iraq.
Since the early 1990s, Meckseper’s installations, photography, and films have reflected upon the reciprocity between a culture of consumption and politics. Shiny consumer products become artefacts of a political activism, which, in effect, yield a veritable constellation of confusion. Window display mannequins – exponents of a consumer-happy society – are draped with picket signs, while glamorous accessories and toilet brushes are absurdly confronted by Meckseper’s photographs of street protests. The incongruous arrangement of contrary worlds in a seamless display refers point-blank to the flattening out of political and aesthetic principles in the mass media. Meckseper works with symbols, which serve as metaphors for the critique of late capitalist society. Her arrangements of objects and artificial scenarios recall the aesthetics of department store displays, but at the same time, re-contextualize the objects presented: the protest slogans are given a new significance – they become “a provocation against the presumed state of paralysis of our world.” In this confrontation of normative societal attitudes Meckseper challenges viewers to evaluate their own code of values.
In her most recent works shown at the migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Meckseper questions the values and morals of American society in light of the USA’s invasion of Iraq. She employs emblems of the American oil and auto industries to represent both their economic success and, likewise, their downfall. The major work in the exhibition is the strikingly edited video work "0% Down" (2008) with its industrial soundtrack, "Total War." Elegant, fast, and powerful cars lifted from American advertising spots emerge swiftly as ironic references to the perverse and manipulative rhetoric of the auto industry’s advertisements, which use military visual language in aggressive sales strategies. The life-size works created for this exhibition, "Untitled (Bunker)" (2009), modeled after a military bunker, and "Untitled (Oil Pump)" (2009), which replicates an oil pump, become symbols of the war for oil. The work "Unable Bodies" (2008) – a medical walker adorned with typical American emblems including the Bible, the American flag, an oil canister and a foxtail – denounces the downside of the invasion via an undisguised reference to crippled veterans, while the installation "Negative Horizon" (2008) satirizes car-centric American society. The built-in vitrine "Fall of the Empire" (2007) and the platform sculpture "Ten High" (2007) allude to the death throes of an imploded economic model. Meckseper adroitly dissects and re-contextualizes such border transgressions without forcing ideological dogma on the spectator. Like a double agent, she plays both sides off against each other, deftly changing the role of the observer and, by using varying perspectives, offers up a reappraisal of contemporary politics and the strategies of advertising rhetoric.
“The basic foundation of my work is a critique of capitalism. The objects here are simply employed as a vocabulary and embody a form of commodity representation. I’m less interested in the discourse of aesthetics than in factually exploring the contradictions and absurdities of the objects exhibited. The idea behind the shelves and showcases, which I began producing in 2000, was to create an artificial focus of attack, which established a link to the showcases smashed by demonstrators. In my exhibitions I wanted to show not only the films and photos I had taken of demonstrations, but also to bring out the paradox inherent in manic consumption and its presentation platform. The shelves and showcases present a collection of manifestly grotesque elements or pseudo-consumer goods. Instead of aestheticizing political issues and problems, what I try to do is to challenge ingrained perspectives: for instance, habits of seeing brought about by leafing through a newspaper in which horror stories from Iraq appear side by side with underwear advertisements. These works exaggerate this mode of disseminating information and consumerism in order to expose it. The individual elements of the works symbolize or simulate commercial objects”.
Meckseper, who currently lives in New York, grew up in Germany in a politically-minded family. After her studies at the Universität der Künste (University of Fine Art) in Berlin, she attended the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, where she documented the Rodney King riots and witnessed growing patriotism after the outbreak of the Gulf War. This politically-charged mood shaped and continues to inform her work. During the following years she participated in significant group exhibitions at renowned institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2006), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2006), and the Tate Modern, London (2006), and staged solo exhibitions at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart (2007), Museum of Modern Art, New York, with Mikhael Subotzky (2008), and at the Bremer Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst (The Bremen Society for Contemporary Art) (2008).
For further information please contact the curator of the exhibition, Heike Munder.
CATALOGUE: On the occasion of the exhibition JRP|Ringier will publish a catalogue with texts by Heike Munder, Rachel Hooper, Sylvère Lotringer in conversation with Paul Virilio in June 2009. The catalogue is a collaboration between migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Ausstellungshalle zeitgenössische Kunst Münster and Blaffer Gallery, the Art Museum of the University of Houston.
Press contact: Raphael Gygax presse@migrosmuseum.ch
Press conference: 20th February 2009, 11.30 am
Opening: Friday, 20th February 2009, 6 pm
migros museum für gegenwartskunst
Limmatstrasse 270 - 8005 Zürich
Public guided tours: Sunday, 22nd February, 15th March, 5th & 19th April, 3rd May at 3 pm, as well as Thursday, 5th March and 30th April at 6.30 pm.
Hours: Tues / Wed / Fri Midday–6 pm, Thurs Midday–8 pm, Sat / Sun 11 am– 5 pm. Entrance to the museum on Thursday between 5 pm and 8 pm is free.
Holidays: On 1st May the museum is open from 11 am to 5 pm.