Josephine Meckseper

Early Work: Meckseper’s first films time at CalArts coincided with the Gulf War and the Rodney King riots, 1992; During this politically-charged period her first installations and films reflected upon the actions of the Situationist International who advocated experimentation with the construction of situations, namely setting up environments as alternatives to capitalist order. Meckseper’s subsequent short films followed a similar principle and were mainly shot at Anti-capitalist and Anti-war protests in different parts of the world; as well as at the Mall of America in Minneapolis.

Meckseper’s film PELLEA[S], 2018 adapts the Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), in a Neo-Realist tradition, weaving together fictional scenarios and dramatic footage captured by the artist at the 2017 presidential inauguration and the landmark women’s march that followed. Conflating contemporary political realities to Arnold Schoenberg’s modernist sound poem of Pelléas et Mélisande, the city of Washington, D.C., and its architecture become a context and site of departure, giving voice to debates around notions of gender found in the original play. Meckseper expresses through cinema the dramatic narratives and relationships contained within the universe of her signature glass and mirror vitrines, and draws a direct correlation to the way early Modernism and the avant-garde developed into a form of political and aesthetic resistance to classism and capitalism.

While Meckseper’s earlier vitrine works commented on contemporary consumer culture using the shop window as an example and focus point for civic unrest and protest, documented in her film works, her recent steel and glass vitrines, allude to the political dimension of early modernist Bauhaus display architecture and design between World War I and II in Weimar Germany. Meckseper melds the aesthetic language of early modernism with her own objects and paintings and footage of historical and political undercurrents, taking on a similar function as Mies van der Rohe’s well-known designs and glass structures for art collections: art and art history are here on display. Often contained within Meckseper’s displays are paintings that nod to 20 century European modernist art, such as Russian constructivism.

In 2012, Meckseper’s public art project Manhattan Oil Project, commissioned by the Art Production Fund, was installed on the corner of 46 Street and 8 Avenue in New York City. Consisting of two monumental kinetic sculptures modeled after mid-20 century oil pumps, these 25 feet tall sculptures were inspired by oil pumps that the artist discovered in Electra, a boarded-up town once famous for being the pump jack capital of Texas. Placed in a vacant lot next to Times Square, the fully motorized pump jacks recalled the ruins of ghost towns, forgotten monuments of America's decaying industrial past.

In 1994, Meckseper founded FAT Magazine, a conceptual magazine project distributed at newsstands and in supermarkets, but also exhibited in galleries and museums in the form of wallpaper. It was inspired by political theorist and radical publisher Jean-Paul Marat’s newspaper, published during the French Revolution called L'Ami du peuple and the avant-garde tradition of breaking down barriers between art and life. Since 1994 Meckseper has published five issues: Good and Evil (1994); Surrender (1995/1996); on Fire (1997); Overflow (1999); Objectification (2018).

Josephine Meckseper studied at Berlin University of the Arts in Germany from 1986–1990, and completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1992, where she was influenced by artists Michael Asher and Charles Gaines, filmmaker Thom Andersen and literary critic and cultural theorist Sylvère Lotringer.

Josephine Meckseper grew up in Worpswede, Germany. This was a Utopian artist colony founded at the beginning of the 20th century. Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) and the writer and poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), both lived in Worpswede for parts of their life, as did Meckseper’s maternal great-grand-uncle, Heinrich Vogeler (1872- 1942). Vogeler was a diverse political artist and architect whose work is situated within the Jugendstil movement, a German offspring of Art Nouveau. Meckseper’s father is the widely known German artist Friedrich Meckseper (1936-2019).