The Bulletin Board: Josephine Meckseper

The second installation in White Columns’ project space “The Bulletin Board” – a 6’ x 4’ glazed aluminum bulletin board installed in our entrance lobby – is by the New York-based German artist Josephine Meckseper. Writing about Meckseper’s earlier work John Kelsey has observed that “fashion images share space with protest documentation, where an idea of relational space rubs shoulders with an idea of lifestyle or boutique design, where an idea of the social morphs into an idea of the commodity relation, many of the elements on display also double as mechanisms of display: shelves, rugs, windows, magazine covers, and wallpaper are the products here. Here, display displays itself. Covers and wrappings conceal nothing, they only reveal themselves. And, re-appropriating the very mechanisms of commodity transmission in this way, and in particular by conflating politicized symbols with such functions (Party logo and gold pendant, for example), by relocating non-art in art and vice versa, by this orgiastic displacement, the artist goes to work … in the production of her anti-world.”

Josephine Meckseper lives and works in New York. The former editor and publisher of FAT Magazine (1994 – 2000), Meckseper has exhibited internationally since 1992, including solo exhibitions at Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart (2004), and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York (2003). Recent group shows include: The Future Has a Silver Lining: Genealogies of Glamour, Migros Museum, Zurich; American Idyll, Greene Naftali, New York (both 2004); and Nation, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt (2003). In 2004 Lukas & Sternberg published the monograph The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue that includes essays by Andrew Ross and John Kelsey. She received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, in 1992.

The Bulletin Board series is generously supported by Corrie Sandelman