FEATUR

To the Dictatorship of Art: Jonathan Meese

Provocative, playful and deeply critical of history as a monolith-that suffices the German artist Jonathan Meese’s works. But there is more to this man in Adidas track suit. Amrita Gupta Singh features this artist of excess.

“I would describe myself as a playing baby animal, a human being playing humbly in the playground of art. Art itself is the dictatorship. Art is so strong, it is above everything. I think it will take over power, real power. The next revolution will not come from the street, but from art itself. I believe we are in a very important situation now. The only alternative is art. Art will be the power of the future, even in parliament. Not as decoration but as a principle.”- Jonathan Meese

Jonathan Meese, German painter, sculptor, performance and installation artist based in Berlin and Hamburg, views art as completely independent of human influence, with its own instinct, reality, politics and confusion. His works are filled with references to history, literature, pop culture and the art world, expressing the repressed, taboo, monstrous and absurd. Radical, controversial and excessive, his work represents an aesthetics of chaos, keying in on the pulse of our times. Meese engages with the horrors of history, subverting such horrors into images of sensationalism and spectacle, “doing everything in the service of the dictatorship of Art”. 

Meese’s first solo exhibition in India, General Sweetie (Polly, Revolution, SOUTH, Cookie) presented in Bombay by Galerie Mirchandani+Stienruecke, provided the art-world shocking imagery in the form of paintings, sculptures and a performance at the Mohile Parikh Center for the Visual Arts. Meese wears cowboy hats with Adolf written on them, uses the Hitler salute excessively and engages with the traumas of Nazi history with vengeance. His works and performances seem initially revolting, leaving the viewer in a state of perpetual daze; he subverts all rational forms of thinking, engaging in radical gestures, grotesque masks, and guttural sounds, assaulting the senses and pushing at all barriers of viewing and experiencing Art. Provocative, controversial and Europe’s celebrated artist, Meese views art to be a form of play, via which revolution is possible, art in itself is political, it is the ‘party’, it does not need a group/king/leader to bring it into existence. His paintings are full of expressionistic vigour, with drips, splatters, stains, squiggles and grotesque imagery, interlaced with historical and popular media references; one sees this immense energy and artistic extremism in his performances also, which are impromptu, spontaneous, with one gesture leading to the next and his body, toys, Hitler photos, masks, and rock music providing the context (the Bombay performance was titled Dr Baby-James-Bondaddy  Revolution+Revolution=Jameese’L).

The subversive intensity that is unleashed in his work describes a sensibility keenly aware of his tumultuous national history and the politically charged artistic movements that Europe witnessed since the 1960’s- the radical work of Joseph Beuys who worked across drawings, sculptures, posters, installations, happenings and public performances, the paintings of George Baselitz and Otto Muehl (who also founded the Vienniese Actionism), “the radical performances of Hermann Nitsch, Martin Kippenberger’s  rock n’ roll” and also the pop art of Andy Warhol. As Meese says “I like radical things like pornography, military items, religious stuff, manifestos, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, all these major figures, I need them around me”.

Meese, before entering art school, tried to be a banker, to fulfill his mother’s wishes. He joined art school at the age of 23 in 1995, but left before he got a degree in 1998 and he found art professors useless. He was already popular with the galleries while in school, and his provocative work shot him to fame in no time. The aesthetics of excess that is Meese exhorts, engaging in the evil signs of history is almost like a cathartic act for he feels that such malevolence should not happen in reality, they can be assimilated in the counterculture of Art.

Meese finds the process of art-making to be very simple. He works prolifically and abhors academic skill; As a public display of the productive use of mass culture, each of the works presents the viewer with a uniquely constructed world, positing the instinctual, emotive and raw experience in art. They are violent and playful, erotic and innocent, calculated and full of chance. They are also, historically specific works that are densely layered and informed by Meese’s war with violent world histories, and the world of spectacle. Like his performances, Meese approaches painting and sculpting also like ‘happenings’, filled with bold lines and colour, distorted forms-in-dissolution, two-dimensional, and without perspective, his sculptures are mangled, misshapen forms and the grotesqueness found in his work can be linked to his love for horror films. Paint, symbols, doodlings, scribbles and text form inter-relationships akin to child-art, Meese plays incessantly in his studio: “Yes, I’d like to just stay in here and play, and throw out whatever results, and at my gallery, people can come and take it away and throw me some food and alcohol in return.” The Adidas tracksuit is his uniform…while excess his signature!