Untitled
Taking her cues from the likes of Bret Easton Ellis, Josephine
Meckseper’s installations mirror the nihilist horror of
middle class lifestyle. Turning an art exhibition into department
store display, Meckseper’s mannequin poses before a gallery
hang in hoodie and scarf, the ensemble of choice for both activists
and thugs. Ironically coordinated with a stylish abstract painting,
and the cover of a terrorist biography, Meckseper’s model
creates a totality of image: reflecting a social elite as both
cause and symptom of cultural turmoil.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/josephine_meckseper_brigade.htm
Labelling her sultry and seductive models with German political
party vanity chains identifying the joint Christian Democratic
and Christian Socialist Union, Jospehine Meckseper spin-doctors
a media savvy image parodying the right wing. Meckseper’s
enlarged faux magazine spread updates traditional allegorical
painting via woman’s fashion advert, drawing veiled reference
to Angela Merkel, the party’s leader and Germany’s
first female chancellor. Raising uneasy questions about class,
power, nationalism, and feminism, Meckseper portrays her homeland
as a twinned stealth-like beauty: Arian perfection garbed in democratic
coloured designer gowns, languishing in extravagance and oblivious
to the proletariat maid lingering in the distance.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/josephine_meckseper_cdu.htm
Pyromanic
2
Josphine Meckseper’s photographs subtly infuse lifestyle
ideals with an incitement to revolutionary violence. Using the
format of fashion magazines, Meckseper examines how cultural information
and its inherent values are packaged and merchandised: beauty,
capitalism, and glamour are laid bare and magnified as vacuous
imagery transparently revealing their social, political, and economic
realities. In Pyromaniac 2, Meckseper’s model is posed with
lit match perched between her lips, an emblem of commodified desire
transformed to an impending powder keg explosion.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/josephine_meckseper_pyromaniac.htm
Untitled
(Berlin Demonstration, Fire, Cops)
Having worked as a photojournalist for German media, Josephine
Meckseper’s demonstration photos capture the cool neutrality
of front-line reportage. Shot at a riot near the former GDR HQ,
Untitled’s dramatic subject matter neither advocates nor
denounces political concern. Photographing protesters, police,
and bystanders participating in their expected roles, her images
of violent unrest allude to a choreographed theatre, the readily
identifiable aesthetics of protest culture transfiguring as stereotyped
vogue. In Untitled, a shopping cart blazes against a crowd of
cops and demonstrators, framing the iconography of anti-capitalist
sentiment as implicitly commercialised fashion.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/josephine_meckseper_demo.htm
Occident
– Orient (RUG NO.3)
Pieced together from Palestinian fabric, Occident Orient patchworks
a conflicting system of ethics arising from globalism. Drawing
attention to the adaptation of meaning, Josephine Meckseper’s
scarves reference both traditional Muslim headdress and trustafarian
style, entwining capitalism and its consequences in a personalised
item of individual conscience. Swatches and bands of colour emerge
as both Minimalist and Constructivist associations; ideological
territories mapped out and merged as an opulent fashion accessory.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/josephine_meckseper_occident.htm
Untitled
(Berlin Demonstration, Police Brigade)
Photographing public demonstrations, Josephine Meckseper embraces
an alternative politic of the contradictory messages contained
within visual culture. Highlighting the trendy youth culture adaptation
of protest chic, Meckseper shoots a line of riot-geared police
officers flanked by the impressive columns of government buildings,
framing the overlapping connotations of authority, violence, oppression,
security, and heroism with the casual flair of a Gap advertisement.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/josephine_meckseper_police.htm
The
Complete History of Postcontemporary Art
Through her installations, Jospehine Meckseper frames consumerism
as a form of protest of choice; her products become activated
beyond their saleable function by their staged conjunctions to
both contemporary zeitgeist and art history. In The Complete History
of Postcontemporary Art, Meckseper utilises the stream of consciousness
process of 90s scatter art: as products stand in for themselves
humorous associations emerge, as stuffed rabbit, upside down pinups,
and patterned stockings wittily implicate Beuys, Baselitz, and
Vasarely as models of cultural consumption.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/josephine_meckseper_tout2.htm
RAF
Tray
Printed in black and white, Josphine Meckseper’s RAF Tray
is reminiscent of the ambient class of perfume adverts, the drama
of classic film, and the radical chic of 60s political photos.
Staged by Meckseper, her models exude this expectant glamour,
femmes fatales peddling image over content. Proffering box of
matches on a silver platter, they offer revolution as a bi-product
of their conflicting values, sparking a dissident solution to
the boredom of privilege.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/josephine_meckseper_tray.htm
Jospehine
Meckseper
© Jospehine Meckseper 2006
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