Jonathan Meese - Creating and Work

Jonathan Meese is certainly one of the most interesting German artists of the current time. With equally great certainty, it is also one of the most controversial artists of the current time. What invites all the more to try an approximation:

What is Jonathan Meese actually doing?

Jonathan Meese paints and forms sculptures , designs performances and installations , turns video art , puts collages stage sets or productions for theater .

In German, it does a lot in all areas of art, a connecting element is more of the frequency with which he also makes dubious personalities in world history, unappealing heroic tags and threatening old myths about his work.

This choice of topics makes sense when you observe how often Meese tries in his work “German delusion” and German mythologies in a very aggressive way. In confessed successor to the history processor Anselm Kiefer, arch ÖLDNER Richard Wagner in his installations .

After Meese

is all toys. That was all. Whether communism , National Socialism , ancient Egypt or ancient Rome, nothing comes back. I can no longer hope for a revolution from the street, and people can't do it. We should let something different step down, the volcano of art may break out. "

Despite his termination of study in 1998, Meese quickly proved to be an exception, he was greeted by artistic greats of the time like Daniel Richter and Leander Haußmann, and above all he presented an incredible pace:

The exceptional area Meese

According to the first exhibitions in the study period, Meese still produces the backdrop and stage sets for the film "Sonnenallee" by Claus Boje, Leander Haußmann and Detlev Buck in the same year, which resulted in a staging that is growing into a comprehensive spectacle of the artist who is now also an author: "Mr. Good bye ”was shown in the new Aachen Kunstverein in 1999.

With the role of the crazy artist in “Sonnenalle”, Meese works for the first time as an actor, in 1999 the shop window exhibition and artist book presentation “Front library Meese” in the Walther König bookstore, the exhibitions “Cut Bring Sections” In the exhibition room Cut (both in Cologne), “Sonnentanz/ The Weidenmann/ Food/ Archisis” in the Kunsthalle St. Gallen: Erz religion Blood hospital/ ore Öldner Richard Wagner/ Private Army Harvest and Saat/ Weapon: Erzblut of ISIS/ Food: BlueSturt "in the Frankfurter Kunstverein," Information - Return - Return/ Richard Wagner's private army Lichterz "in the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and" Foundation '99 - The last light beam of the millennium ", With Erwin Kneihsl in the Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin.

During this time, Meese also became known abroad: at the first Berlin Biennale presented the installation "Ahoi der Angst", a colorful collage, dedicated to Marquis de Sade, in which politicians, musicians and actors were processed, who were able to listen to music and read poems, but also watch the video Caligula.

This installation garnished with numerous posters was the first work of Meeses, which was extensively treated by the media beyond the borders of Germany. Here you can read the first comments of a total confusion, which should later become typical for Meese: The artwork was referred to as “Labyrinth of Sentimentalities” (art magazine Art), but also as a “horror cabinet between porn, Charles Bronson and Slayer” (Peter Richter) or as a “glazed boys' room” (Berliner Zeitung).

In 1998 Meese can also be seen in Vienna, in the group exhibition "Young Scene '98", in Basle at the art fair "List 98", in London as a participation "Site Construction" of South London Gallery and in Marseille at the exhibition "Today Tomorrow" of the Galerie de L'Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Marseille.

From 1999 his appearances, in group exhibitions and as a solo presentation, nationally and internationally. There are interesting room installations and performances to be seen, it is certain in any case that Meese can also be seen in persona.

Regardless of whether in disguise or as part of a collage, in a picture or a drawing, or simply in action, the artist always provides his body when he equips his works with topics for coping with history and with allusions to German philosophy and literary history. Meese is not afraid to recall Adolf Hitler in his performances and actions, and several times he provocatively showed the forbidden Hitler salute.

In 2004 Meese turned to the theater again, for the staging “Kocaine” by Frank Castorf on the Berlin Volksbühne, he designed the stage design, and he also works for the Avignon Theater Festival and the Salzburg Festival. In 2005 he created the stage design for “Magic Afternoon” directed by Angela Richter, the play can be seen in Hamburg, Berlin and Düsseldorf.

In 2006 he staged the play "Zarathustra. The figures are on the road in the Neuhardenberg Schlosspark with Martin Wuttke." And produces the stage design for “The Master Singer” Frank Castorf's on the Berlin Volksbühne. This year, together with Daniel Richter, he also hosts the work cycle “The whip of memory”, which creates workpieces by both artists about their handling of history.

The impetus for the work idea was the medieval grave of the Stader Archbishop Gottfried von Arnsberg, so the exhibition is first shown in the Kunsthaus Stade, the work group supplemented by Meese moves further to Berlin and Hamburg, Rosenheim and Freiburg, Grenoble and Biel.

In 2007 he staged his first own play on the Volksbühne Berlin, which had to struggle with the heavy title "De Mrs. - Dr. Pounddaddylein - Dr. Ezodysseuszur" and was not very applauded in terms of content.

Among other things, it has been criticized that the colorful mix of penises and dolls, swastikas and skeletons and sayings are already known, "he may bring freshness for the Volksbühne, but in his own art he turns into a circle," was the comment of the magazine "Die Zeit".

In any case, with the stage design for Castorf's "Fuck Off America" ​​at the Berlin Volksbühne in 2008, the theater work will take over the stage design for the "Dionysos" at the Salzburg Festival in 2010.

Meese all over the world

In the meantime, however, Mees's first comprehensive overview of work “Mama Johnny” in the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg ensures a typical entertainment for a few months, with over 150 sculptures and paintings, photography work and installations, for example with an oversized “Black Box” as an exhibition space for one of his stage designs and with two equally huge, accessible sculptures.

With this show show, Meese had made it: Immediately after its end in September 2006, Meese was classified in the artist ranking of the magazine of the magazine Capital among the most important artists in Germany (a place that he can essentially claim to this day), since 2008 he has been able to shape the medal for the Roland Berger Prize for Human Trust.

In the meantime, many other exhibitions from Jonathan Meese were also available, also with new topics: "Ore State of Atlantis" (dictatorship of art) in the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen in 2009 in around 170 sculptures, over a dozen paintings and artist books, ten films, 4 sound sources and a large collage with Joseph Beuys works on the subject of Atlantis.

The self -presentation of Meeses was skillful there than ever, at the opening crossed Meese, uniformed and in a military jeep on a ferry, several times the Rhine, in order to take the ARP Museum Rolandseck with the exclusion of slogans to the “dictatorship of art” .

Also in 2009, Meese in Italy took the writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, which he says in an installation with the beautiful title "Ahab: Moby Dick is not a democracy, all democrats will soon no longer sit in a boat (slaughter ship of art never sinks)" and an equally beautifully titled radioper. (Pups) “) as one of the mentors Mussolinis and exposes as the leading figure of the Italian fascists.

There it is again, the history coping, and it also shows itself in the exhibition entitled "Meat is tougher as a steel - brazen fötusmann and Bausatan cheese on the ozbar (the horny -blushing things)", in which Meese and Herbert Volkmann show work in the Goslarer Mönchehaus Museum in autumn 2009, which Goslar's story as a residence and National Socialist Edit Reichsbauernstadt.

In the parallel Goslar Saalmanifest, Mease ISE predicted that the "dictatorship of art will soon include everything" and explains that "art is not a religion, but every religion art". However, one of these halls should also delight us with such important findings as the following: "All Japanese schoolgirls are total art, since they are notabases of the human animals".

At the same time, his “brats” were admitted to the Cologne sculpture park in 2009, who of course do not get by with such a short title, but rather call himself “We, ore children (sweet village of the damn) = brats”.

In any case, they are quite figurative and pretty pretty and thus works of art that can also like the cultural average man. The Humpty Dumpty machine of the total future, which was set up in 2010 in front of the old National Gallery in Berlin, may be less liked, but all technology-savvy inventors have a lot of fun.

Meeses artistic drive - controversial and controversial

If you are full of human and environmentally contemporary self-power, you could like the first appearance of the artist idea of ​​the “dictatorship of art”, which, according to Meese, “about the most loving rule of a thing, such as love, humility and respect, is summarized and summarized in the rule of art.” However, Meese's dictatorship of art shows a rather elite claim, he even distinguishes the art very quickly from all works with use value and pleasing beauty.

In 2012, this is how Meese formulates in an art conversation on the occasion of Documenta: "I suffer from the fact that I am sold as art, but are actually designed.

If you are full of unlimited self -power, you will probably not be able to make friends with such a dictatorial claim, according to which only “the thing rules, such as light, breathing, jelly (ore), love or total beauty, such as Scarlett Johansson.”

In this case, however, Meeses could always like the apparent tendency to grotesques, with which he not only judges and the "Harald Falckenberg, Head of the Phoenix Art in Hamburg," Harald Falckenberg, Head of the Phoenix Art in Hamburg, not only through the parody of Naziße or by using Nazi.

When Meese provocatively shows the Hitler salute in many actions, this is probably still appropriate as a warning memory and “a generation” does not seem “as free of this shadow”, as Georg Diez play in his contribution “Führer - why German artists should keep their fingers from Hitler” in July 2007, as can be seen in many corners in Germany.

In the subsequent short video you gain a little insight into the staging art of Meese (for the first time in the Arp Museum Rolandseck as his complete plastic work under the title "Ore State of Atlantis") Culture.

Lina cream

Passionate author with lively art interest

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