Within a few minutes of looking at Meckseper’s sculptures, videos, and photographic works, you’ll notice her ongoing exploration of American consumerism and politics focuses this time on car culture and it’s connection to the oil industry and related domestic and foreign policy decisions. Manipulating found and appropriated objects and images, the artist offers a range of works in a direct and multi-reflective mode.
Dark from the outside, the gallery space immediately envelops you as you step through the door. Shiny reflective surfaces surround you including a sensational gridded mirror ceiling and gleaming slat wall. The dominant chrome look suggests car dealerships and discount stores. The dark fluorescent lighting along the floor’s edge adds an odd and disquieting tone to the environment.
Highlighting the display and retail function of the gallery (this is New York-based German artist Josephine Meckseper’s fourth solo show at Elizabeth Dee Gallery), she transforms the interior into a showroom complete with stands, vitrines, and shelving. She uses retail’s merchandising language to display her artwork, for example hanging it from a hook and sitting it on a shelf or pedestal. In an inventive conceptual and formal strategy, the display item itself, the rack, stand, or wall are part of the sculpture not simply a presentation structure.
Meckseper suggests the pervasive presence of US power by presenting large-scale photocopies of the original “muscle” car in Mustang (Black) and Mustang (White). Michael Wilson proposes in his TimeOutNY review that the diagrams “resemble X-rays of traumatized bodies”. What do you think? In Americanmuscle, a glistening chrome wheel sits on a mirrored pedestal and Roberta Smith in her New York Times review points out that this work “updates Duchamp’s bicycle wheel”. The comparison of the two ready-mades immediately underscores the macho presence of the car wheel.
Of course, power and luxury go together in American culture and it’s impressive how engine parts in Meckseper’s hands can evoke an elegant designer handbag in Untitled (Honda) and the mesh carryall in Mobile 5000 looks decidedly upscale, too! Other car parts such as headlights and hood ornaments are also featured along with chains, men’s underwear, women’s nylon stocking, fur tails, and rabbits’ feet. In Brillo, steel wool is presented in a tiered display stand, for some reason suggesting to me confectionary treats.
Meckseper links luxury with the military and war in ads for Cartier Tank, a line of watches first created in 1917 by Louis Cartier, the famous French watchmaker. New Renault tanks that Cartier saw in use during WWI inspired the watch’s lines and proportions. The New Yorker review explains that this was “when France laid claim to oil fields in what is now Iraq”! The US connection arises in the fact that the Tank prototype was first presented to General John Pershing of the American Expeditionary Force. Look for references to our present-day crises related to our dependence on oil in newspaper images of Iraqi Shiites in chains and protesting the US occupation that appear along with the burning fire of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion.
As she has done in previous exhibitions, Meckseper provides a soundtrack for the show: the acid house classic “Where’s Your Child”(1988) by Bam Bam. The hypnotic driving beat along with the sound of cars racing, glass shattering, and baby squealing echo throughout the gallery installation but it’s actually the audio component of Meckseper’s video DDAYLNLAASSTY. The video features clips from the 80s TV shows Dallas and Dynasty interspersed with scenes of oil drilling and protests.
In addition to the complex and thought-provoking ideas present in Meckseper’s exhibition, the glam-aesthetic beauty of the objects struck me. In a recent interview in Flash Art that can be read on the gallery website Meckseper says, “I have no reason to be invested in the aesthetics because my work is based on things readily available. Formal issues are only the means to capture a sense of the present, they are never the goal. The reading of the work is circumstantial though, as it reflects the respective degree of criticality that the viewer brings to the environment. It succeeds when it brings out rejection and aggression.” When I read her statement, I immediately thought of another work in the exhibition, the video Shattered Screen. Meckseper explains further in the Flash Art interview, that the clean surfaces of the display forms are provocation for vandalism and destruction.
Meckseper is clear as she concludes her interview with this view of her art, “I think of these works as relics of the last throes of U.S. hegemony. In a way, my work serves a garbage can for the history of the present.”
For more information about Josephine Meckseper and to learn about Mall of America, her outstanding contribution to the 2010 Whitney Biennial, visit: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial/JosephineMeckseper
Josephine Meckseper
Elizabeth Dee Gallery – 454 West 20th Street
until July 16, 2010