Josephine Meckseper's work is political, not a common occurrence in an art world which is overwhelmingly busy courting the stock market. She is even political with a vengeance, to the point of baffling those who are most ready to welcome her in their midst. Her explicit aim, though, often reiterated publicly, is sound enough. Her art, she said, is meant to offer a critique of "Consumer Society", the media and the aestheticization of politics. Yet she goes about it in a very unusual way. Instead of addressing the issue head on, as Leon Golub does, for instance, she skillfully uses "detournements" to comment ironically on her own displays ("Please Pardon our Appearance"), systematically turning the language and aesthetics of advertising against themselves.

Her main strategy, though, is both hilarious and delirious. She continually rubs opposites against each other as if they belonged together. (In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari assigned "non-exclusive connective" logic to schizophrenic delirium). Everything Meckseper exhibits on the wall, in shop windows and installations, obeys this principle of equivalence. Incongruous, absurd, or outrageously provocative, these juxtapositions are all the more unsettling for having been "naturalized" through the formal unity and artificiality of her displays. Mixing logos and symbols, propaganda and advertisements, protests and shopping constitutes, of course, a kind of provocation, even subversion. And yet hybridization of that sort is also being actively promoted by capital itself, whose delirious flows keep abolishing every barrier and extending every activity outside its own boundaries (art is the most recent example). Here, something is at work which goes beyond the usual critique of the system, although it could never have been allowed to surface without it.

What sets it in motion is Meckseper's liberal mixing of radical iconography (political icons and protests) with consumer products and advertisements. Introducing politics into fashion and fashion into politics is a far more daring, if not iconoclastic, project in as much as it seems to turn her professed radicality against itself. It comes as no surprise that cultural critics would be puzzled by her insistence on representing protests as "a fashionable identification with radicality." Was she criticizing political involvement, or equating counterculture and consumption? Was she commenting upon the leveling of differences in "Consumer Society"? The disarray among critics is painful to watch, especially since it is the first time that this kind of material (street fights and helmeted police, peaceful demonstrations, etc.) has been removed from a radical context and incongruously juxtaposed to women's underwear and bottles of perfume. Yet the artist's affective resonance with her material seems palpable. Critics keep scrambling to find a response that would accommodate this strange critical turnaround, while preserving the legacy of "a time when the terms of contestation and the political stakes seemingly appeared unambiguous." Actually, the reviews are hilarious to read as well - the more intelligent, the funnier - so embarrassed are the authors by their own convoluted disclaimers and their eagerness to reassert against all odds the unequivocal nature of the artist's intentions. If it were only for that, the gamble Meckseper takes bringing opposites together would have been worth her while. Because it is, I believe, deliberate. The ambiguity inscribed in Meckseper's work is not just the result of an historical process, it is part of the overall strategy that she has adopted in relation to "Consumer Society". [...]

Josephine Meckseper: New York City, 2007

acrylic Glass, Metal Stand, Acrylic Display Hand, Martini Glass, Jewelry, Magnet, 84 x 23 x 23 cm, 33.07 x 9.06 x 9.06 inch

Click on image to enlarge.

In "Symbolic Exchange and Death" (1976), Baudrillard remarked that theoretical production, like material production, was losing its determinacy, "slipping en abyme towards a reality that cannot be found. This is where we are today: indeterminacy, the era of floating theories, as much as floating as money." (SE, 44) Meckseper's work floats as well, but not because of any shortcoming. On the contrary, she takes the risk of confronting the radical indeterminacy produced by the system on its own terms. The principle of equivalence is the law of capital and Meckseper applies it literally in her work whatever the consequences. It is exchangeability itself that she is investigating and she can only do it by escalating its effects. Her own flotation, as a result, is only apparent. It is task oriented. There is something definitely experimental in Meckseper's work. And she has managed to pursue her project pragmatically with a rare consistency. Actually, she is one of the few contemporary artists to have seriously raised the issue of making radical art in a post-political, market-driven, media-saturated era.

Meckseper has made no secret of her reliance on Cioran's writings and even a cursory look at the Romanian writer's aphorisms suffices to realize the extent of his skepticism regarding politics and his apology for absolute lucidity: "One doesn't meddle with political struggles without paying the price; it is the cult devoted to them to which our epoch owes its bloody allure." "In itself every idea is neutral, or should be. That a man loses his power of indifference and becomes a virtual criminal." Cioran's cynicism grew out of his unfortunate involvement with Romanian fascism and the rash of RAF actions also proved bloody. But Meckseper applies this radical indifference to far less violent targets and the effect is unsettling. She uses absolute lucidity in lieu of critique.

In "Consumer Society" (1970), Jean Baudrillard asserted that critique no longer has the privilege of exteriority. Any counter-discourse remains immanent to its object. Actually, "Consumer Society" "balances consumption with its denunciation." His warning has remained largely ignored, but this analysis happened to be prescient and the gradual collapse of all distinctions and oppositions within contemporary society has certainly confirmed it. Escalating visually its boundless boundaries, Meckseper has also brought out the futility of critique in a "Consumer Society". It is now floating as well, irremediably. Only by upping the ante on the process of exchangeability could one ever hope to challenge the system, uncovering the madness that lies at its core.

Sylvère Lotringer

(Excerpt from the author's essay written for Josephine Meckseper's Edition Quelle International that was published on the occasion of the artist's solo exhibition at GAK, Bremen (15.2. – 4.5.2008)

Okwui Enwezor, "Forms of Arrangement/Engagements," Marion Ackermann (ed.), Josephine Meckseper, exh. cat., Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Ostfildern 2007, pp. 51, 48.
"Militant opposition has acquired the patina of a hip (but bygone) lifestyle." Christian Höller, "Department Store and Arson," in: Ackermann 2007, p.121.
Emile Cioran; History and Utopia, 1960 (Original French title: Histoire et utopie, 1960)
Emile Cioran, A Short History of Decay, 1949 (Original French title: Précis in Decomposition, 1949).