This page contains a Flash digital edition of a book.
Books:
is especially notable in this respect, though it’s a
tendency eagerly accommodated on all fronts.
Perhaps it’s Meese’s obvious interest in
and debt to Romanticism which inspires in the
authors such utopian visions as to attempt to
Jonathan Meese first came to serious artworld literally transcribe his practice into print, while
prominence following his participation in the 1998 simultaneously offering them an excuse to
Berlin Biennale, and since then his work, individually parade their own magpie-like approach to and
and collaboratively, spanning everything from understanding of the history of these ideas as
painting and photography to music, installation, performatively as possible. Only one such essay
writing and performance, has justifiably come to attempts to engage more closely with the historical
occupy a special place in the minds of many still impetus behind so much of Meese’s work, albeit in
open to the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Mama the form of pseudo-historical curatorial posturing.
Johnny is an impressively illustrated, extremely This, however, is itself further indicative of a
well designed and comprehensive document of general desire to cast Meese as an artist whose
Meese’s work over the last year or so, accompanied work does not just appropriate, deconstruct and
by a series of essays discussing his art from its reanimate history, but as one in whom the long
emergence up to the present. nineteenth-century fundamentally inheres and is
If you believe all the numerous contributors borne up into the twenty-first.
to this weighty, and undoubtedly handsome None of which is Meese’s fault, though it
retrospective of perennially Adidas-clad dark may entirely be his intention. In fact, as someone
knight Meese, a new name needs to be added acutely sensitive to both the pay-offs and the
to the pantheon of the Wonders of the World. pitfalls of playing games with sincerity, it’s a high-
Even as collections of catalogue essays go, risk strategy which might be said to have worked
Mama Johnny is at times a mind-numbingly out beautifully. To see this at work, check out the
hagiographic and portentious affair, achieving freewheeling but insistently revealing interview
such stratospheric heights of tendentiousness as with Aeneas Bastian at the end of the book, a
makes the mind boggle. Meese the latter-day discussion ranging from the Cheops Pyramid,
saint, we are invited to think, might actually be on a the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens
par with Saint-Just, Robespierre, Richard Wagner, of Babylon and Herodotus to contemporary art’s
Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Hitler, H.P. Lovecraft, (in)capacity to deal with the issues such a cultural
and perhaps even Satan himself. This, though, history throws up. This conversation, like the book
would be to say nothing of Beuys, Klaus Kinski, as a whole, embodies that same experimentalist
Christopher Lee, Sam Raimi, Che Guevara, spirit, implacably opposed to, yet nevertheless
Steve McQueen and Claudia Schiffer – all of at the mercy of failure, which animates Meese’s
whose names feature copiously in a succession entire oeuvre. Luke Heighton
of (quite possibly appropriately) hubristic streams
of hyperbole. Benjamin V. Stuckrad-Barre’s essay
‘Irritating Action Art’, as artful an exercise in self-
congratulatory vacuity as one could ever wish for,
JONATHAN MEESE:
MAMA JOHNNY
Walther König, Cologne
€49.80/$54 (hardcover)
p162-165 Reviews AR Jun07.indd 2 3/5/07 17:39:10
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Page 85 Page 86 Page 87 Page 88 Page 89 Page 90 Page 91 Page 92 Page 93 Page 94 Page 95 Page 96 Page 97 Page 98 Page 99 Page 100 Page 101 Page 102 Page 103 Page 104 Page 105 Page 106 Page 107 Page 108 Page 109 Page 110 Page 111 Page 112 Page 113 Page 114 Page 115 Page 116 Page 117 Page 118 Page 119 Page 120 Page 121 Page 122 Page 123 Page 124 Page 125 Page 126 Page 127 Page 128 Page 129 Page 130 Page 131 Page 132 Page 133 Page 134 Page 135 Page 136 Page 137 Page 138 Page 139 Page 140 Page 141 Page 142 Page 143 Page 144 Page 145 Page 146 Page 147 Page 148 Page 149 Page 150 Page 151 Page 152 Page 153 Page 154 Page 155 Page 156 Page 157 Page 158 Page 159 Page 160 Page 161 Page 162 Page 163 Page 164 Page 165 Page 166 Page 167 Page 168 Page 169 Page 170