Press release

JONATHAN MEESE
Mama Johnny
22 October 2006 – 7 January 2007
from Tuesday to Sunday, 2 -7 pm

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Download the interview of Jonathan Meese (pdf - 200 Ko) by the participants of Ecole du Magasin and Inge Linder Gaillard, coordinator of the exhibitions at Magasin

Mama Johnny is the title chosen by Jonathan Meese for this exhibition which immerses visitors in a world filled, among other things, by paintings, sculptures and photographs that, like Kokain, presented in the Auditorium, form a kind of total artwork.
Born in 1971, Meese belongs to the young German art scene whose roots go back to the “punk attitude” of the previous generation, as represented by people like Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner and Albert Oehlen for example, and which draws on a multitude of references running from German history to media and art.
Meese’s work talks about his times and his own sensibility. He made a name for himself in 1998 when he presented the first version of his provocative installation Ahoi — De Angst at the Berlin Biennial. As the magazine Stern wrote of this artist whom it portrayed as contemporary chronicler, “This 26 year-old Berliner has collected together with maniacal attention all the things that our culture of the everyday abhors: cult and kitsch, high culture and soft porn.”
The exhibition unfolds through a succession of citations and characters drawn from cinema and history. Among them, we meet the heroes from cult films (Ze from Zardoz, Darth Vader from Star Wars, Doctor No from the James Bond movie, Alex de Large from A Clockwork Orange) and historic figures such as Saint-Just, Caligula, Sade and Stalin. Most of these are sombre names, of dictators and men with blood on their hands. For Meese, “‘these characters exist by their own efforts and have been transformed into their own laws, which are summed up in their names. They cannot be reduced: whether good or bad, they are complete. These larger-than-life figures always showed their hand, risked everything in life’s game and threw themselves into existence. As to whether they are somber or luminous, well, for ART that doesn’t count.’ Meese does not do morality: good and evil are relative notions. All that matters is the obscure energy that runs through the centuries (George Lucas called it ‘the force’) and that is what helps make a tragic destiny, bestowing on certain human beings an imprescriptible immortality, the immortality of History.” These characters are “More than his heroes, [they] are the artist’s ‘ich’ (self) intensified to a vertiginous degree.” Jonathan Meese himself makes frequent appearances among his heroes. Portraits and self-portraits are constants in his work, as is the theme of the “Mother.”
At the same time, Meese also dialogues with his peers. Three rooms in this show present works by or dedicated to Albert Oehlen, Daniel Richter and Jörg Immendorff, whom Meese considers his mentor, and with whom he shares a “deep doubt ” with regard “to the role of the artist and of art today, which they see as alienated and introverted.” The role and responsibility of the artist are indeed issues that a number of German artists have reappraised in relation to their country’s history.