joaoflux / digital / analog / culture

Recently (actually: quite a while ago) I saw Jonathan Meese’s “Mama Johnny” exhibition at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. I must admit that I had not seen Meese’s work other than printed in Magazines. I had missed Meese exhibitions in Berlin as well as the theatre play “Kokain” at Voksbühne, for which Meese designed the stage.

Shortly before seeing the exhibition I had read an Interview with Meese. He claims to be “radical” in his art practice and he criticized art academies as useless and even counter productive institutions. I quite agree with the latter, my reasons are very different though.

Being radical is a boring pose in art (unlike in other fields, where being radical can be dangerous). Personally I think Meese is not even radical in his art production but actually rather conventional. At most his dedication seems to be somewhat radical. His dadaesque techniques are quite obvious and his “universe” as it is called on the web page I find neither surprising nor is it of infinite size. The corner of this little universe that kept me interested the longest was the black adidas sports jacket he seems to always wear.

I don’t think he has a contract with Adidas (which I wouldn’t mind at all), but he must have some way of getting the jackets in large quantities, since he uses real ones in some of the installations. It’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t trash one of those jackets a day, given the radical determination with which deposes large quantities of paint and other substances on canvases and whatecer is at hand. I also have difficulties imagining him putting on a white painters coat to protect the rare Adidas jacket when he is working. Creating the kind of mess he does is only half the fun when you have to put on a ridiculous coat first. I remember this from elementary school, where we had coats like that for painting.

My problem is not that I can’t tune into Johnny’s universe. It is actually quite accessible, but it leaves me indifferent. The worst are his collaborations, especially the one with Jörg Immendorf. All you see is variations of the painted name “Jörg” and the notorious “Erz”, corner stone of Meese’s vocabulary.

In 1998 Meese appeared in the german comedy “Sonnenalle” where he played a crazy artist. Very cliché. It seems like playing this role has taught him more than art school did: Being radically cliché usually is a save bet.

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