Is Jonathan Meese a fascist?
Jul. 29th, 2007 02:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusPoison in the air: Why German artists should keep their hands off Hitler is an interesting article by Georg Diez which ran in English last week on cultureblog Sign and Sight after appearing, the week before, in German newspaper Die Zeit. It basically looks at a trend amongst "bad boy" German artists (and they are all boys) for invoking Hitler.
Painter and performance artist Jonathan Meese (born in Tokyo in 1970, but German) is the main culprit -- his MySpace page lists his friends as The Residents, Wagner, Pope Pius XII, Eva Braun and Divine, and his performances feature him throwing Hitler salutes and making wanking gestures. He likes to throw Hitler salutes at every opportunity, in fact -- check the Vernissage TV coverage of his opening at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin last October; each time the camera approaches, Meese heils.
The man is clearly an enormous wanker, but that's sort of the point. This is what Claire Bishop, writing in the ArtForum Diary, calls "Teutonic abjection". Or as Meese himself puts it: "Everything has to come back up again stinking!"
"Images cannot be dispelled," Meese says, talking about Hitler. "If you want to be rid of certain images, you must give them the chance to fight themselves." In a way, this is a sort of culture-troll's take on the wishy-washy humanist sentiment that "we can never forget the holocaust". To put it another way, when the History Channel is allowed to invoke Hitler every two hours, why shouldn't contemporary art too?
Here's Bishop's description of a Meese performance at Tate Modern:
"The artist (made up like a geisha, but sporting his usual uniform of layered Adidas tops) was standing in a vast wrestling ring adorned with skeletons, photographs of himself, bells, plastic mannequins, and random piles of detritus. Massive painted screens flanked the wrestling ring, which stood before a video projection that relayed the live action, intercut with clips of Visconti’s The Damned, Meese in his studio, Noel Coward singing, and dozens of other films. Meese swigged a bottle of whiskey and stumbled around, apparently drunk and jetlagged from a trip to Tokyo. Wearing an impressive variety of headgear—from a safari-style helmet to crusader chainmail—he wailed and crooned a stock of phrases repetitively into the microphone around his neck: “Ree-chard Vag-ner” and “A-dolf Heet-ler” (accompanied by salutes and wanking gestures); “If you want to be huuu-man . . . you must watch 120 Days of Sodom by Pa-so-li-ni . . .” He threw around the furniture and skeletons like a spoiled child and clung to the ropes of the wrestling ring, apparently in psychotic meltdown."
Opinions at Tate Modern, says Bishop, were starkly divided:
"The girl next to me left in tears; my friends bolted to the bar. I stuck it out for an hour, submitting to the hypnotic effect of Meese’s psychotherapeutic self-humiliation and recurring musical loops (ominous chords, Irish jigs, Coward’s campy English ditties) and trying to make sense of the mélange. When the video and sound track stopped, Meese soldiered on unplugged until forcibly removed from atop his bronze cactus sculpture. The event polarized the audience: Some found it fabulously energizing (“London hasn’t seen anything like this before”), but, frankly, they were in the minority; most were bored and insulted (“I feel like I’ve been used like a nappy”)."
Michelle Dovey emailed the Stuckists: "The Jonathan Meese performance at the Tate Modern on Saturday had members of the audience unbelievably furious. Whilst the performance was rousing, such extreme hostility in the viewers seemed a little implausible at times and the convenient way in which it complemented the artwork leads my friends and I to question its authenticity."
Bishop locates Meese in a transgressive expressionist tradition which explores the repressed, the taboo and the abject, mentioning Hermann Nitsch, Paul McCarthy and Berliner John Bock. But how repressed is this stuff when everyone starts doing it, when certain taboos become tattoos, when everyone has the same one done? Isn't the repressed then, precisely, expressed?
As Diez says in Die Zeit, there's a lot of this stuff about just now. There's a fascination with totalitarianism, and a refusal to condemn it reflexively. Some of it is coming from Germany's most interesting cultural figures, people I would consider allies. American composer David Woodard, for instance, approached me earlier this year to incarnate one of four characters (Beethoven, Spengler, Nietzsche and Hitler) in a musical event called 56 Minutes. The original idea was for these four historical characters to be sucked to climax, live, while they improvised music. In the final performance, though -- somewhat disappointingly -- all that happened was that the music got performed politely in a gallery. (I'd opted out by this point.) All the abjection stuff was censored, the taboos swept back under the carpet. What remained was music played by men in suits.
One of those men was designer Rafael Horzon, whose design work I've endorsed in ID magazine. Horzon is fascinated by authoritarian-utopian standardization schemes, from the way months got renamed during the French Revolution to the DIN system of industrial quality measures. He's a friend of Woodard and writer Christian Kracht, also cited in Diez' Zeit article for his book celebrating North Korea -- a book whose launch I attended and whose purpose (celebrating the hidden beauty of a nation la pensee unique vilifies reflexively) I can appreciate.
At Horzon's satirical Wissenschaftsakademie Berlin last year you could hear (as well as a lecture by me about Miyazaki's architecture) an address by David Woodard, Christian Kracht and Christian von Borries on the subject of eugenics in Nueva Germania, a small town in Paraguay. Here, a century ago, a fanatical band of Wagner-inspired German exiles attempted to purify the teutonic race and found a vegan community. They were defeated eventually by malaria and other tropical diseases. Woodard visited Nueva Germania in 2003 and wrote a beautiful anthem for the town, as well as prevailing on the authorities (including, apparently, US Vice President Dick Cheney) to twin the town with his Californian hometown of Juniper Hills.
And there we have it, at last, the point of all this provocation. Fascism is not tidily consigned to some kind of sealed time capsule, to the History Channel or to a few "rogue states" in an "axis of evil". Fascism is alive and well. We can measure it in medical procedures. It is necessitating 3000 prosthetic limbs per year in Iraq. This weekend it had its pacemaker batteries replaced, last weekend five polpys were removed from its colon.
Everyone who reads the newspapers (right-thinking people, that is) knows that these polyps were not cancerous. The same right-thinking people know that when Jonathan Meese throws a Hitler salute he is a bad man, whereas when Bill Viola shows some videos made with Hollywood special effects, and says that he's expressing something about the human condition as it affects all people in all cultures, he is a good one.
I'm not so sure. I don't think Meese is a good artist, but I think that every amoralist is a secret moralist, and for that I'm grateful. I think that fascism is unlikely to be found in the most obvious places -- under a fascist salute, for instance, or a hat marked "Adolf", or a lecture on eugenics. That would be much too easy, too tidy, wouldn't it? If evil were as easily-identifiable as that we'd be living in a world which had reached a sort of moral End of History, in which all was for the best and all dangerous dragons had long ago been slayed.
I suspect a Hitler salute or an Adolf hat is something else -- cultural provocation, a desire for fame, a wish to talk about ethics, a satire on the media's kneejerk reflexes -- and that today's most dangerous fascism is rather to be found in harmless-sounding things: the things we all do, the things we all think, the things we all believe in, the wars and environmental damage we cause as a result of all doing, thinking, feeling, wearing, watching and consuming the same (mostly idiotic and superbland) things. Fascism is hiding between the lines of newspaper articles, built into the way right-thinking people think. In such a situation, to think "wrong" is almost a duty. It doesn't necessarily produce good art, though.
Painter and performance artist Jonathan Meese (born in Tokyo in 1970, but German) is the main culprit -- his MySpace page lists his friends as The Residents, Wagner, Pope Pius XII, Eva Braun and Divine, and his performances feature him throwing Hitler salutes and making wanking gestures. He likes to throw Hitler salutes at every opportunity, in fact -- check the Vernissage TV coverage of his opening at Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin last October; each time the camera approaches, Meese heils.
The man is clearly an enormous wanker, but that's sort of the point. This is what Claire Bishop, writing in the ArtForum Diary, calls "Teutonic abjection". Or as Meese himself puts it: "Everything has to come back up again stinking!"
"Images cannot be dispelled," Meese says, talking about Hitler. "If you want to be rid of certain images, you must give them the chance to fight themselves." In a way, this is a sort of culture-troll's take on the wishy-washy humanist sentiment that "we can never forget the holocaust". To put it another way, when the History Channel is allowed to invoke Hitler every two hours, why shouldn't contemporary art too?Here's Bishop's description of a Meese performance at Tate Modern:
"The artist (made up like a geisha, but sporting his usual uniform of layered Adidas tops) was standing in a vast wrestling ring adorned with skeletons, photographs of himself, bells, plastic mannequins, and random piles of detritus. Massive painted screens flanked the wrestling ring, which stood before a video projection that relayed the live action, intercut with clips of Visconti’s The Damned, Meese in his studio, Noel Coward singing, and dozens of other films. Meese swigged a bottle of whiskey and stumbled around, apparently drunk and jetlagged from a trip to Tokyo. Wearing an impressive variety of headgear—from a safari-style helmet to crusader chainmail—he wailed and crooned a stock of phrases repetitively into the microphone around his neck: “Ree-chard Vag-ner” and “A-dolf Heet-ler” (accompanied by salutes and wanking gestures); “If you want to be huuu-man . . . you must watch 120 Days of Sodom by Pa-so-li-ni . . .” He threw around the furniture and skeletons like a spoiled child and clung to the ropes of the wrestling ring, apparently in psychotic meltdown."
Opinions at Tate Modern, says Bishop, were starkly divided:
"The girl next to me left in tears; my friends bolted to the bar. I stuck it out for an hour, submitting to the hypnotic effect of Meese’s psychotherapeutic self-humiliation and recurring musical loops (ominous chords, Irish jigs, Coward’s campy English ditties) and trying to make sense of the mélange. When the video and sound track stopped, Meese soldiered on unplugged until forcibly removed from atop his bronze cactus sculpture. The event polarized the audience: Some found it fabulously energizing (“London hasn’t seen anything like this before”), but, frankly, they were in the minority; most were bored and insulted (“I feel like I’ve been used like a nappy”)."
Michelle Dovey emailed the Stuckists: "The Jonathan Meese performance at the Tate Modern on Saturday had members of the audience unbelievably furious. Whilst the performance was rousing, such extreme hostility in the viewers seemed a little implausible at times and the convenient way in which it complemented the artwork leads my friends and I to question its authenticity."
Bishop locates Meese in a transgressive expressionist tradition which explores the repressed, the taboo and the abject, mentioning Hermann Nitsch, Paul McCarthy and Berliner John Bock. But how repressed is this stuff when everyone starts doing it, when certain taboos become tattoos, when everyone has the same one done? Isn't the repressed then, precisely, expressed?
As Diez says in Die Zeit, there's a lot of this stuff about just now. There's a fascination with totalitarianism, and a refusal to condemn it reflexively. Some of it is coming from Germany's most interesting cultural figures, people I would consider allies. American composer David Woodard, for instance, approached me earlier this year to incarnate one of four characters (Beethoven, Spengler, Nietzsche and Hitler) in a musical event called 56 Minutes. The original idea was for these four historical characters to be sucked to climax, live, while they improvised music. In the final performance, though -- somewhat disappointingly -- all that happened was that the music got performed politely in a gallery. (I'd opted out by this point.) All the abjection stuff was censored, the taboos swept back under the carpet. What remained was music played by men in suits.
One of those men was designer Rafael Horzon, whose design work I've endorsed in ID magazine. Horzon is fascinated by authoritarian-utopian standardization schemes, from the way months got renamed during the French Revolution to the DIN system of industrial quality measures. He's a friend of Woodard and writer Christian Kracht, also cited in Diez' Zeit article for his book celebrating North Korea -- a book whose launch I attended and whose purpose (celebrating the hidden beauty of a nation la pensee unique vilifies reflexively) I can appreciate.
At Horzon's satirical Wissenschaftsakademie Berlin last year you could hear (as well as a lecture by me about Miyazaki's architecture) an address by David Woodard, Christian Kracht and Christian von Borries on the subject of eugenics in Nueva Germania, a small town in Paraguay. Here, a century ago, a fanatical band of Wagner-inspired German exiles attempted to purify the teutonic race and found a vegan community. They were defeated eventually by malaria and other tropical diseases. Woodard visited Nueva Germania in 2003 and wrote a beautiful anthem for the town, as well as prevailing on the authorities (including, apparently, US Vice President Dick Cheney) to twin the town with his Californian hometown of Juniper Hills.
And there we have it, at last, the point of all this provocation. Fascism is not tidily consigned to some kind of sealed time capsule, to the History Channel or to a few "rogue states" in an "axis of evil". Fascism is alive and well. We can measure it in medical procedures. It is necessitating 3000 prosthetic limbs per year in Iraq. This weekend it had its pacemaker batteries replaced, last weekend five polpys were removed from its colon.
Everyone who reads the newspapers (right-thinking people, that is) knows that these polyps were not cancerous. The same right-thinking people know that when Jonathan Meese throws a Hitler salute he is a bad man, whereas when Bill Viola shows some videos made with Hollywood special effects, and says that he's expressing something about the human condition as it affects all people in all cultures, he is a good one.
I'm not so sure. I don't think Meese is a good artist, but I think that every amoralist is a secret moralist, and for that I'm grateful. I think that fascism is unlikely to be found in the most obvious places -- under a fascist salute, for instance, or a hat marked "Adolf", or a lecture on eugenics. That would be much too easy, too tidy, wouldn't it? If evil were as easily-identifiable as that we'd be living in a world which had reached a sort of moral End of History, in which all was for the best and all dangerous dragons had long ago been slayed.
I suspect a Hitler salute or an Adolf hat is something else -- cultural provocation, a desire for fame, a wish to talk about ethics, a satire on the media's kneejerk reflexes -- and that today's most dangerous fascism is rather to be found in harmless-sounding things: the things we all do, the things we all think, the things we all believe in, the wars and environmental damage we cause as a result of all doing, thinking, feeling, wearing, watching and consuming the same (mostly idiotic and superbland) things. Fascism is hiding between the lines of newspaper articles, built into the way right-thinking people think. In such a situation, to think "wrong" is almost a duty. It doesn't necessarily produce good art, though.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 01:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 01:27 pm (UTC)The whole "Hey look! Nazi stuff!" schtick is as tired as hell.
But a really perceptive artist could use these centre-right tropes as a mirror, reminding us of our own inner yuppie, the greedy kid that wants more and doesn't care who gets less.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 01:31 pm (UTC)I don't think Hitler has much to do with that, nor this Meese character going all retro 70s "Hitler as daring art". Most visual artists these days aren't exactly educated all that well... they are the rock stars of the early 21st century, after all, so they just need to look good, generate hype and sales, etc. It's hard to expect artists to really know what exactly they're doing.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 01:37 pm (UTC)FFS EVEN MY NAZIBOWIE ICONS MAKE MORE INTERESTING STATEMENTS.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 01:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 02:20 pm (UTC)卐卐卐 DONT FEED THE TROLLS 卐卐卐
Date: 2007-07-29 03:19 pm (UTC)I was in a pub with my friend Michael on friday, we couldn't hear each other talk, so we wrote notes to each other on a piece of scrap paper whilst we were drinking. We were both a bit tipsy, and we started to pretend to bicker on this piece of paper. During this playful bickering I wrote "Your handwriting sucks nigger cock" and passed it back to him. He saw the word nigger, gave me a semi-serious "OH NO YOU DIDNT" look and proceeded to scribble out the word nigger and reply back, occasionally looking up at the black guy standing a few feet away from us to make sure he couldn't see what had been written. I tested the boundaries a few more times, I wrote "FUCK CENSORSHIP" and drew a swastika under it. Michael censored me again.
I'm not racist, I just hate the way people want to censor you indiscriminately without even asking the most important question -- "What is this person's motives?". You can joke about murder, drugs, sex, religion, gender etc. and if it offends someone, we say "Free speech, it's just a joke" and seem to accept that it's gonna offend someone somewhere. but that rule doesnt seem to apply to racist jokes. It isnt allowed the same freedoms.
There's also a more serious aspect to this backlash. For example, when I was studying graphic design a few years ago, there were posters all over the college saying "43% of this college's students are black. only 4% of the student council are black: Is this fair?"
I dont see what race has to do with it, surely it's about picking cadidates that are suitable for the position regardless of race. But more importantly, It bothered me greatly that racial bias had been implied. I regret not raising the issue with the head of the college because I feel posters like that stoke racial tensions unnecessarily, not to mention you could never get away with that poster the other way around.
I don't think Meese is a asshole -- that's unfairly making assumptions about his motives, or possibly oversimplifying the meaning behind his art as just being about offending people. Surely the fact we're here discussing this issue because of his art gives it some worth beyond just being funny for being offensive.
I also think this neatly ties in with the recent Fox 11 report on 4chan (http://www.4chan.org) and it's more troublesome members making swastikas and posting Hitler images on the web, amongst other things. I think if you ever needed an example of people breaking taboos for kicks, compounded by the medias kneejerk sensationalist coverage of it all fanning the flames, you're not gonna find a better example than this:
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 03:34 pm (UTC)It's also worth saying that what's transgressive for the mainstream becomes mainstream once you enter the topsy-turvy world of transgression. By the same token, the most shocking thing you can do in indie rock is copy mainstream sounds, a trick I've tried myself (it defines pretty much my whole strategy when I was on Creation).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 03:38 pm (UTC)anyway, i don't believe a campy hitler fanclub can provide any alternative thoughts of value to oppose "bush" fascism.
(btw i don't get what is "provocative" in a performance that shows beethoven, spengler, nietzsche and hiltler - hihihi! - getting a blow job - hahaha! - "fo' rill", as in, like, "authentic". as in, maybe, "authentically moronic macho performance")
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 03:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 03:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 03:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 04:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 04:03 pm (UTC)Here in the U.S. we are much kinder to our genocidal heroes. Andrew Jackson is on the twenty dollar bill. If the fairness doctrine was to return and be applied to the US Mint then maybe there would be a depiction of The Trail of Tears on Jackson's backside.
no, YOU don´t feed the trolls
Date: 2007-07-29 04:03 pm (UTC)Also, you might like number 6:
http://wiki.fandomwank.com/index.php/Congratulations%2C_You%27ve_Just_Been_Wanked%21
You make up for it by posting that FoxNews thing, though <3 <3 I love it more every time I watch it. Poor clueless bastards.
HAVE MY ICON TOO
Date: 2007-07-29 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 04:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 04:10 pm (UTC)Isn't it a virtue in and of itself to be outside la pensee unique? I'd give Meese the same value as someone like Zizek, when he advocates letting the Iranians acquire nuclear weapons. In a world where la pensee unique thinks it's reasonable to solve the problems of the Middle East by selling $20 billion worth of arms to the Saudis (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2137051,00.html), we need precisely such "crazy talk".
Mikey vs The Simpsons
Date: 2007-07-29 04:18 pm (UTC)However, on the same theme, my memory is still good enough to have recalled (if vaguely) that you expressed similar sentiments on The Simpsons to those expressed here (http://interbreeding.blogspot.com/2007/07/simpsons-movie.html), on Interbreeding.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 04:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 05:32 pm (UTC)Re: no, YOU don´t feed the trolls
Date: 2007-07-29 05:40 pm (UTC)And Im sure you can guess what it means when you tell people the'yre racist because they said "Im not racist but..."
It means you're a shitty Guardian reading vegan.
"You make up for it by posting that FoxNews thing, though <3 <3 I love it more every time I watch it."
Truely epic LULZ.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-29 05:53 pm (UTC)i saw meese in person only once, at a panel discussion at akademie der künste, together with christoph schlingensief (the other boyish german arts loudmouth), catherine david and hans-jürgen syberberg. i had the impression that meese had to work rather hard to get his "provo" act toghether, struggling to utter his statements in his trademark uber-serious "heavy" tone, and not to smile about himself. he ran out of steem quickly, and, while the discussion lasted, only repeated his statements with less and less convincing grandeur. would i be his stage coach, i'd advise him to develop a routine of leaving the discussion in "anger" after his first statement, so nobody could witness his thinning out. at the same time, schlingensief never los his energy, getting more and more in the "provo" mood, accusing david and all french of being soft bourgeois, lacking the bloodlust germans like to display on the theatrical stage, which we, according to him" don't have to be ashamed of". well, i must admit, i was quite a bit ashamed of schlingensief at that moment ... meese seems basically a nice guy playing naughty art punk. hard to imagine people taking him as seriously as to break into tears at his performances. well, they obviously haven't been around at the time of the viennese actionists.
*offended*
Date: 2007-07-29 05:56 pm (UTC)For some reason you only seem to remember the names of people who have wikipedia pages for you to link to, you shameless name-dropper.