Bremen. A yellow glass door promises a yellow world. But behind it there is no yellow world. No, things are hanging on the walls there instead, many things. A series of constructivist works on canvas of low complexity come into view. Sometimes they’re pink, sometimes they’re black on a white ground. Geometric rows come together to form a flag, and in another picture, a page of ads from the »New York Times« has been pasted onto the monochrome areas. At another point, a love of industrially made lace is evident. The impression emerges of promises whose fulfillment is delayed. Things looking like techniques of seduction form recurring markers in the dense juxtaposition of images.
On one wall, snapshots of forms of behavior from the repertoire of democratic order pile up: demonstrators march with or without masks, a sprayed slogan menaces the high-security prison in Stammheim, the face of a female politician gazes out from a campaign poster. The illustrations of political gestures in public space seem less seductive.
Between the geometric applications of paint and the allusions to the political hang large photos of young women posing in foundation garments. These are scenes that at first glance seem banal, but soon evoke a more enigmatic impression. The undergarments for forming the body presented here stem from a bygone era more than thirty years past. Worn by self-assured women of today who obviously feel at home in their bodies, the images unite two different zeitgeists. And yet strange and subtle manipulations have insinuated themselves into these pictures – so discreetly that they are difficult to pin down. Perhaps it’s the way the moles have been removed from some pictures and have found their way into others?
At the center of the exhibition stands a large black display. Without the frame of a shop window, on which it was presumably modeled, it has the effect of a stage. The four headless white mannequins are wearing jeans that have slipped down around their knees. Stubby necks serve as hooks for signs that Meckseper gathered up after a demonstration against the Iraq War. The presentation of apparel gets tangled up with democratic freedom of speech. The information provided for visitors asks: »Do the slogans and motifs lose their potential in the randomness of the fashion world?«. I find myself thinking of a clever Communist who liked to recount in his lectures how the members of the resistance evidently looked so good out on the street that the beautiful people felt compelled to join in, because more and more people followed. The beautiful people naturally do not come out due to any »randomness of the fashion world,« which can hardly be meant to be seriously represented here by the sagging standard jeans, but, if at all, because somewhere the surfaces of it all are joined up so fiendishly and irresistibly well. That’s not what it seems to be about here. Meckseper is apparently throwing herself into the topic of chic and resistance, where in her opinion semiotic maps no longer cover her terrain. This insight, to some extent a new one, betrays the influence of Jean Baudrillard, whose books – especially the »Agony of the Real« – often show up as real-life set pieces in Meckseper’s installations. The once so popular sociologist seemed to have gone out of fashion a decade ago, only still appreciated by cultural pessimists and autonomists, but is now enjoying a comeback in circles with less conservative values as well. The reason is obvious: Baudrillard persistently dealt with the terrorism that has taken on an imposing presence in recent years. But renewed interest is also being paid to Baudrillard’s description of a »geometric« separation in the production of signs into producers and consumers, or senders and recipients – a separation that he deems indispensable for the preservation of power within society and which he thus pinpoints as a central target of revolutionary attacks. Nowadays, many people say that little is left of this separation – at least that’s what the makers of digital tools and technosemiotic interfaces would have us believe. Upon closer observation, though, the much-touted mass creativity of more and more people, or »prosumers,« continues to take place within the »semiocracy,« as Baudrillard calls this division. The technical geometries for the maintenance of the laws of value have simply grown more complex, but not much more than that.
Meckseper’s scenarios are interesting in connection with Baudrillard’s questions to the extent that they illuminate the existence of these laws of value within the »soft fascism of consumerism.« She seems by contrast less concerned with what Baudrillard, at least in his early writings, described as the sole defensible possibility, namely to attack the semiocracy. It is however this very assault on the divisions that seems even more urgent today than it did thirty years ago, when Baudrillard framed much of his argument. Meckseper instead brings on board the tired idea of an exchangeability of signs, having Sylvère Lotringer say about her work in the catalog: »Since revolution is no longer possible, revolt is no longer an option.« Here at the latest the question arises of whether Meckseper’s relish in the reproduction of ambiguity doesn’t serve primarily to encourage a laid-back depoliticization that thinks it knows that everything will simply turn into spectacle in the end, and that any resistance is useless because it will only end up sinking into this mire. Josephine Meckseper’s many-layered work can certainly not be reduced to this aspect alone, but at the same time, she doesn’t seem to be working very hard to elude an interpretation of this kind.