| Josephine Meckseper |
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-> Works in the Exhibition  Andreas Beitin Josephine Meckseper and the Dilemma of Human ExistenceAt the start of the 19th century, French social theorist and critic of early capitalism Charles Fourier developed a harmonious utopian world order based, not on the repression of needs and drives, but on the free gratification of natural drives.[1] The emancipation of labor was to go hand in hand with the emancipation of sexuality; the equality of women was a key component of his utopia. The idea was for people to be able to satisfy the fundamental human need for sexuality without restrictions and according to personal preference, and bodily love as “merchandise” to be freely available to all and hence of no economic value. Fourier’s revolutionary anarchic utopia of libertarian socialism has never been realized. Despite all the permissiveness (or paradoxically enough precisely because of it), sex sells better than ever before: physical attractiveness and sexuality have never been as omnipresent in the media and society as they are today. The erotic factor in advertising contributes enormously to the value, or to the (symbolic) increase in value, of merchandise. Nakedness is used to solicit purchases even of goods that have nothing at all to do with the body simply increase their appeal,. In Josephine Meckseper’s oeuvre, be it her photographs, sculptures or installations, consumption, eroticism and advertising are recontextualized, their illusive and illusory mechanisms laid bare and the customary viewer standpoint opened up to scrutiny. Born in 1964, Meckseper grew up in the artist village of Worpswede in Lower Saxony, Germany. As a child she grew up in circles where opposing nuclear energy, the Red Army Faction terrorists and the West German Communist Party were all readily discussed, and that was the backdrop to the reality with which she was confronted: “We didn’t watch Sesame Street at grade school but were shown … Holocaust documentaries.” [2] When in 1992 she moved to New York, the “incarnation of the consumption cult at its most extreme,” [3] the reality of US politics had a particularly formative influence. Nonetheless Meckseper makes clear that art for her is “less a mode of autobiographical expression and more one of engaging and communicating with the world.” [4] The central theme of her work is a spirited critique of consumption and capitalism which she levels at the Western “société de consommation” [5] that Jean Baudrillard had exposed in 1970 in a work one can view as “a critique of neoliberalism avant la lettre.” [6] The percentage sign so familiar from trade discounts of all kinds forms a leitmotif in Meckseper’s installations and stands in for this critique. “Save yourself poor” is the paradoxical sounding, tacit injunction of our world of advertising where “the terror of consumption” sometimes transforms the ubiquitous stimulus to save into its opposite — excessive borrowing and pauperization. Meckseper repeatedly draws on symbols and mechanisms of advertising, making them visible in her work by means of simulacra. In the art context, the consumer article readymades that she employs become traps of the familiar, for they seem to be no more than what they simulate. In fact, in the museum context, they become charged with entirely different and in part quite the opposite meanings. [...] [1] Charles Fourier, Aus der Neuen Liebeswelt. Über die Freiheit der Liebe [French Le nouveaux monde amoureux, c. 1820], (Wagenbach, Berlin, 1977). [2] “Josephine Meckseper in conversation with Simone Schimpf,” trans. Christopher Jenkin-Jones, in Marion Ackermann (ed.), Josephine Meckseper, exhib. cat., Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2007), p. 26. [3] Loc. cit. [4] Loc. cit. [5] Jean Baudrillard, La société de consommation, ses mythes, ses structures, (Gallimard, Paris, 1970). [6] Peter Weibel, “Votum für eine transästhetische Vision,” in Peter Gente, Barbara Könches & Peter Weibel (eds.), Philosophie und Kunst – Jean Baudrillard. Eine Hommage zu seinem 75. Geburtstag, (Merve, Berlin, 2005), p. 29. Catalog excerpt "Extended. Sammlung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg" Editors: Lutz Casper, Gregor Jansen, published by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg, 2009 ^
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