THE DIVINE LEFT
Suddenly they were everywhere. Hanging from the windows or carried in all shapes and sizes through the streets, from full-size posters to shapely fashion accessories. In Spring 2004, armed with rainbow-coloured banners and the pacifist imperative PACE, hordes of anti-war protesters took to the streets to protest against the �alliance of the willing� that had declared war on Iraq. The pacifist message of the banner spread like wildfire. And when fashion empire Dolce & Gabbana sent its top model Naomi Campbell down the catwalk in a rainbow-coloured PACE top at the Milan fashion shows, the message seemed to have finally got where real trends are set: vanity fair. But soon, rumours were spreading that the rainbow-coloured banner itself had been invented and produced by none other than Dolce & Gabbana, who had started it all by launching them onto the market as part of a broad-based campaign. A conclusion that must have seemed like a slap in the face for pacifists and leftwing ideologists!
Since the early 90s, the artist Josephine Meckseper has been a keen observer of such transgressions, irrespective of whether they are politically motivated or merely following the unwritten laws of the awareness industry. Her works confidently oppose and play with images of capitalism as friend and foe, images that have mutually sustained each other over the past forty years: Puritans versus sex sells, preachers of progress versus the drop-outs, Jesus sandals versus the rest of the world.
The fact that the artist takes care not to play the ideological card herself is perhaps due to her own history. Josephine Meckseper, who now lives in New York, grew up in Worpswede, Germany. In 1986, Meckseper went to Berlin to study at the University of the Arts, in 1990 she moved to the renowned California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Since 1994, she has been editor-in-chief and chairwoman
of FAT Magazine, a cult spoof on the art and gutter press distinguished by clever essays and subversive satire. In 1998 Meckseper launched a poster campaign to get herself voted into the US Senate in the capacity of an artist. She didn�t win the seat, but that�s beside the point.
What really matters to Josephine Meckseper becomes clearest at those points in her work where the logic of politics becomes visible and the power of the aesthetic gains a political foothold. In a Super- 8 film from 2002 she presents the Divine Left as a collective that has chosen to rebel in a more or less similar way in New York�s Central Park and on the streets of Berlin. The artist deliberately leaves the actual message of the demonstrators in the background. Instead, according to the New York art critic John Kelsey, the film prefers to portray an �armed but peaceful fashion show: there�s the Trotskyist style, the pink-bloc and black-bloc styles, the green style along with the Tute Bianche and Attac styles. Image elements like rainbow flags and Che Guevara T-shirts, painted faces and jugglers with dreads are admitted into the same space, as long as they conform to the image�.�.
Meckseper also casts a new light on traditional coalitions and unions. In 2001 she produced a glossy photograph of two noble-looking blonde beauties, posing for the camera on a Modernist-style couch in cocktail dresses and high-heeled shoes. The ladies also sport a rather peculiar kind of jewellery that dangles suggestively over their low-cut d�collet�s: little gold vanity chains with the initials of the (German conservative) CDU and CSU parties.
The nation of voters as customers, their representatives as brands � the premature birth of the political from the image seems to determine the appearance of the political masses and classes nowadays. The fact that in this process the erstwhile antagonisms of conviction and seduction, of being and seeming, no longer correspond to what Marx once tried to resolve dialectically, becomes very apparent in the work of Meckseper. �The artificial paradise of politics� is what the artist terms those illusory worlds whose utterly materialistic promises of salvation always work best at the point when the message is on the brink of merging with the image: the pacifists with their flags, the message of the sister parties with their poses, or the political confessions of Angela Merkel with her haircut. It is never just about outward appearances, but about products suitable for media and marketing purposes, a fact as amply illustrated by the gold vanity chains of the Christian Democrat and Christian Social parties as by the Chancellor�s cigar and the fake turkey which George W. Bush presented to the Iraqi troops for Thanksgiving. In political terms such paradises are nothing less than a disaster, artificially kept alive by appropriating the convincing arguments of an illusory world.
Selling Out (2004) is a mirrored shop window and the sale it announces again skips freely between criticism and affirmation. Meckseper presents us with a starched men�s shirt complete with gold tiepins on one side and two Tiffany flacons on the other. Leaning between them are the empty book covers of two political works: a Merve edition of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard and a pseudo portfolio on the Angry Brigade, a British group of situational activists who advocated organized violence against the system from 1967 to 1984. �Donot give way to temptation!� exclaims the title of the Baudrillard book, while a Brigade communiqu� summons the people to take arms against shop windows: �The only good thing about the modern slave barracks popularly known as boutiques is that you can lob a brick through the window. Capitalism and inhumanity cannot be reformed. They can only be attacked until they collapse.�
The offensive confrontation of social opinions is an integral part of Meckseper�s work, as is her subtle feel for nuance, which becomes apparent at a second glance. �The Brigade is everywhere� claims the Angry Brigade in a further declaration, an assertion which in retrospect is clearly, at best, a half truth. It was far more the case of a relatively small group which managed to create the illusion of being a collective and �simulate omnipresence� to an almost revolutionary extent, as the political scientist and media expert Oliver Marchart put it. This not only gave the Brigade a limited though dubious success, but they also unintentionally proved Jean Baudrillard�s theory that although this illusory world has nothing to do with reality, it is just as convincing and as tempting.
If you stand in front of the shop window long enough you realize that the seemingly opposite images of culture and counter-culture, of system and revolt, of social conditioning and refusal to conform are in fact pursuing one and the same aim. They both intend to use every means at their disposal to create an identity and gain the broadest possible collective base. And if it is true that access to a collective is primarily a question of image, then Josephine Meckseper�s pieces hit this very sensitive nail bang on the head. Politically and aesthetically. In her magazine, as in her pictures, films and installations.
Ralf Christofori (Excerpt from: Monopol � Magazin f�r
Kunst und Leben, No. 04/2005)
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Josephine Meckseper
New York, NY
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Web Links
Elizabeth Dee, New York
Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart
Arndt & Partner, Zurich, Berlin
migros museum f�r gegenwartskunst, Z�rich
Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart
New Photography, 2008, MOMA, New York
Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston
Josephine Meckseper on wikipedia
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