The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue
Book Launch: Saturday, January 29, 2005, 5-7 PM
Printed Matter, Inc.
535 West 22nd Street
New York, NY 10011
212 925 0325 tel
212 925 0464 fax
Printed Matter is pleased to announce a book launch for The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue, the most recent release from German-born, New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper. Please join us at a reception for the artist on Saturday, January 29, 2005 from 5 to 7 PM. Printed Matter is located at 535 West 22nd Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.
Published on the occasion of her 2004 exhibition IG-Metall und die kunstlichen Paradiese des Politischen (IG Metall and the Artificial Paradises of Politics) at Galerie Reinhard Hauff in Stuttgart, The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue presents images and artifacts from Meckseper’s critical art practice in the guise of a glossy fashion magazine. Her use of this format speaks directly to one of the central themes of her work: the convergence of fashion, politics and capitalism.
Meckseper’s work reveals the ways in which counterculture becomes codified through surface concerns such as style and packaging. Hippie accessories such as used Birkenstock shoes, orgy rugs, Palestinian head scarves, and psychedelic wallpaper rub shoulders with conservative political parties’ campaign posters, German union logos, and installations of retail windows. Her filmic, photographic, sculptural and performance-based investigations into the aesthetics of political protest are ironically at home in a (mock) publication dedicated to style.
In the catalogue, film stills and photographs of recent protests in the U.S. and in Germany (2001-2004) masquerade as advertisements, while images of her new sculpture, painting and installations dealing with Utopian dreams and capitalist retail strategies act as illustrations to “feature articles” that are actually catalogue essays. John Kelsey discusses the historical precedents and cultural context for the combination of politics, style, protest and nostalgia that characterizes Meckseper’s work, and Andrew Ross provides a bleak view into the contemporary consumer consciousness it both depicts and addresses. The catalogue and the work that it so brilliantly reinforces crackle with complexity, complicity and critique.
Josephine Meckseper’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions at museums and in galleries around the U.S. and Europe, including the Migros Museum for Contemporary Art, Zurich, Kunsthalle Nurnberg, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Haunch of Venison Gallery, London, and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City. Her work is currently on view at Faure & Light Gallery in Santa Monica.
The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue, ISBN 1-933128-00-3, is published by Lukas-Sternberg, New York. It is available along with 15,000 other artists’ publications from Printed Matter’s website: www.printedmatter.org.
For additional information, please contact Rachel Bers, Programming and Website Coordinator at
(212) 925-0325 or at rbers@printedmatter.org.
Printed Matter, Inc. is an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 1976 by artists and art workers with the mission to foster the appreciation, dissemination, and understanding of artists’ books and other artists’ publications.
Printed Matter has received support, in part, through grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Altria Group, Inc., Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, the Consulate and the Government of Canada, The Cowles Charitable Trust, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, Fifth Floor Foundation, Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Kettering Family Foundation, LEF Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and private foundations and individuals worldwide.
Printed Matter, Inc. is not affiliated with, nor a division of, any other non-profit organization.
