Here we go, boys and girls. I’ve been waiting for someone like this to enliven the art world for quite some time. Dressed in the grubby tracksuit uniform of the sink estate and looking like the flawed doppelganger of a late-80’s Gibby Haynes, Jonathan Meese is a German artist who casts his talents across a whole range of disciplines – from painting to sculpture, to installations and – you guessed it – “performance”. Meese went to art school in Hamburg, but left before completing his studies, and his work was soon picked up by the Berlin gallery Contemporary Fine Arts. Ten years on, and he’s still operating at the pace of far younger men who feel they have to prove themselves to the world, which begs the question: what’s driving him?
Clearly a product of his time and place, his body of work is a psychosexual stew of pop culture, heavy metal symbols, pornography, standard horror tropes and, of course, hurling it’s shadow across it all is the glowering eagle of the Third Reich. Unlike Gottfreid Helnwein, who approaches the dark and heavy legacy of Nazism with a certain degree of seriousness, Meese is quite clearly taking the piss. On his MySpace page he lists amongst his friends Wagner and Eva Braun, and in his performance pieces – and virtually every time a camera is pointed in his direction – he is cranking his arm in salute to the long-dead Fuhrer like a fevered onanist. Hitler remains the uberbogeyman of our times – endless documentaries about him clogging up the evening TV schedules, dozens of breezeblock biographies written by men obsessed beyond all rational argument by their subject, broadsheet column inches trailing off into infinity debating the morality of owning – or even wanting to look at – one of his piss-poor watercolours. He’s also been an easy reference for anyone – cinematic auteur, underground comix artist, rock musician – out to shock their audience into paying attention, so it should come as no surprise that high art wants in on the act. But ’shock’ only works once, and after you’ve got their attention you have to follow through with something of genuine substance.
What then are the roots of Meese’s work? German expressionism, Viennese Actionism, Josef Beuys, perhaps? Chuck in a bit of Clockwork Orange, Sven Hassel, Iron Maiden, Freddy Krueger, Sgt Kabukiman: NYPD, poor toilet training and not having met enough people in his life prepared to say “NO” to him and you have the perfect ingredients from which to create – Weird Science-style – an artist ideally suited to the early 21st century. Still suffering from the brutal hangover of the previous ten decades, and subdued into a kind of half-hearted nihilism by the collective lack of hope in the future, an art designed to effectively express this malaise is obviously going to involve… paintings of big scary faces, feral Honey Monsters, chocolate golems and lots of Maltese croses and toilet door cocks thrown in for good measure. When I first saw these paintings I cracked out laughing, and then recalled a row of garages that used to stand in my home town where teenage metalheads had established a porn & lager dungeon, decorated with crude facsimiles of their favourite album covers. Their ‘work’ was gaudy and comically-bad, but to witness them in the dark, with no-one else around, was quite an experience. It felt like you were stumbling through the ruins of the Abbey of Thelema, and it made me wonder what state of mind you would be in after hammering the Special Brew or huffing Superglue fumes in such an environment. Meese’s work on the other hand, hangs on plain white walls and suffers as a result. Gestalt is everything with this kind of imagery, and fed through the rinsed prism of the Saatchi Gallery Meese’s “pantheon of fiendish deities” lose their clout somewhat. It’s true, I’m absolutely fascinated by these images, but primarily because I can’t quite believe he’s got away with it, and the more high art piffle you use to celebrate his vision (“Meese downsizes his necromancy for intimate veneration… his unpredictable gestures contain a savant sophistication in their vulgar naiveté… a self-proclaimed cultural exorcist…he adopts a shamanistic role, schizophrenically channelling all manner of chaotic zeitgeist and psycho/media debris”) the more you begin to suspect that somebody, somewhere, is pissing up your back and telling you it’s raining.
Alongside the paintings, his performance pieces are particularly noteworthy, especially a recent debacle at the Tate Gallery in London featuring our hero made-up like a geisha stood within a wrestling ring dressed as an outward expression of his mind: skeletons, mannequins, street trash, and photographic blow-up’s of Jimi Hendrix and, of course, himself. Video projectors relayed the action live, cut-up with scenes from his favourite films, while Meese drank whiskey straight from the bottle and bellowed semi-coherently at the audience. Inevitably, the carnival atmosphere soon went awry and he began picking fights with some of his own props, bludgeoning them with sticks and snarling insults. This went on for over an hour, until the plug got pulled and he was forcibly removed from the arena. Some were thrilled, some left in tears, and I especially like the quote from one member of the audience who said: “I feel like I’ve been used like a nappy.”
Going back to the Gibby Haynes reference for a moment, all of this sounds like a typical Butthole Surfers gig circa 1988, with gruesome surgery footage displayed alongside scenes from the Dukes of Hazzard played in reverse, while in front of all this you had Gibson Haynes himself, covered in clothes pegs and flour, screaming and rolling about on the floor. The difference, again, is gestalt, as the Butthole Surfers were a rock band and were expected to go as far as they did (somebody had to), all completely off their heads on acid and goaded on by their demented audience. Whereas Meese conducts his “performances” in a gallery setting, where patrons sit politely and witness the spectacle or stand holding their catalogues and glasses of wine, unsure how to respond. I can see that with this character it’s an essential part of his public persona, but isn’t it all just a pose? Has he cleverly spotted a niche in the market and fashioned himself an alter-ego to suit? Is he – and therefore the work itself – ‘authentic’? Does it even matter?
I’m reminded here of the quote from Peep Show, where Mark Corrigan makes another Hancock-esque assessment of the world: “That’s just how it is these days – put a zip here, a swastika there, why not? Who knows what these things were once used for… and who the hell even cares?” I’m reminded of the Evening Standard advert that showed a picture of a policeman with a truncheon about to brain someone behind the banner slogan: ‘Evening Kick’Off’. I’m reminded of the photo I saw of some Hoxditch wanker twat’s “pad” where one wall had been decorated with a stylised rendition of the famous photograph of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon. Nobody gives a fuck anymore, and absolutely anything goes, so in terms of accurately representing that world then Jonathan Meese seems more than qualified for the task. And so, in closing, I’ll draw your attention to the words of George Diez, who recently wrote an article discussing the phenomenon of modern German artists who “want to warm themselves at the fire of dangerous ideas.” Meese isn’t the only artist he cites, but Meese is the one that he feels is the prime mover, and suggests that it’s the rise of radical Islam that has inadvertently triggered this reaction, this adolescent fascination with totalitarianism. Stating that “the idiocy of artists is sometimes visionary” he seems to be implying that in his own way Meese the slavering savant, the gallery hooligan, has got something to say. I’ll leave it to you to decide just what that might be.
