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24/7/2009

Josephine Meckseper

Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham

Nottingham Contemporary, the city’s new international art gallery, is opening on the 14 November. While we finish our building, we will show two exhibitions in our main window, overlooking Weekday Cross in the Lace Market.

Both examine all-pervasive capitalism in Britain and the US, a system that has made us perpetual consumers – in areas where other shared values used to predominate, as well as in the shops. Yet both exhibitions anticipate a shift in the world order, following the catastrophic ‘credit crunch” that undermined the banks, the standard bearers for unquestioning capitalism, now underpinned by public money.

Near Nottingham’s main retail district, and visible from the street, the exhibitions are windows on another world, where everything is imagined differently. In the first exhibition american apparel (2009), Josephine Meckseper examines the hidden violence behind our most seductive consumerist fantasies – those sown and cultivated by the car companies. Speed, power and the thrill of sole control sells the cars featured in her exhilarating montage of US adverts. Yet this male dream world is based on aggression- imagined and actual. The car industry depends on oil, and on the wars fought to ensure its supply, while jeeps and jets symbolise links with the defence industry.

Does a smashed television screen signal the end of this luxurious illusion? Do the tyres on the conveyor belt represent the “Big Three” US car companies – or even capitalism itself - now reduced to trundling manufacture, stripped of an invincible veneer?

Meckseper's critique of how politics play out in the public sphere has evolved from a documentary approach into an increasingly direct examination of the destructive commercial interests in the war in Iraq. american apparel is an entirely mirrored space featuring a sculpture of three tyres (metonyms for the 'Big Three'?) on a chrome conveyor belt – this element is titled Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow it Down - alongside two videos shown on stacked television monitors. One of the videos is simply a continuous image of a shattered screen (Shattered Screen). The other, the conceptual core of the installation, is a montage of various car advertisements that flooded the US airwaves in early 2008. 0% Down reveals the violence latent in the otherwise appealing commercials, turning the fetishization of the car in on itself. "The very design of a product is a mirror reflecting its meanings and desires but concealing the power structure implicit in its fabrication" (Meckseper). A sense of instability haunts the clean surfaces of these seemingly benign objects, as if the "reason for their existence is the anticipation of their own destruction".

The artist Josephine Meckseper was born in Germany but lives in the US. Her work has exposed the empty glamour of consumer images and objects, as well as the power of the media to absorb and commidify our most powerful political images. “I want to bring out the paradoxes inherent in manic consumption,” she has said. ”Art for me has always been less a mode of autobiographical expression than a way of engaging with the world.”

Nottingham Contemporary
c/o Galleries of Justice Shire Hall High Pavement - Nottingham
american apparel can be seen in our window at Weekday Cross from 8am to 8pm. We look forward to welcoming you in our building from the 14 November. Entrance to our exhibitions will be free.

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