Jonathan Meese

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.

Left and Right: Jonathan Meese.

It was quite an onslaught. 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”).

It’s true that the viewer seems to perform an absorptive role for Meese’s metaphorical feces. On the one hand, his mise-en-scène was visually compelling, belonging to a tradition of abject, chaotic performance-installations from Hermann Nitsch to Paul McCarthy to John Bock. On the other, the work does depend on a psychological performance of excruciating interiority: Meese’s adoption of an antiheroic persona is uncritically anchored in the Expressionist tradition. Against Kippenberger’s performative exploration of artistic personae (a performativity that leaves an empty center, à la Warhol), Meese’s cathartic performance keeps all notions of subjective coherence intact. While purporting to be about Germany’s repressed history, Jonathan Meese’s work seems more about Jonathan Meese. At a dinner for the artist a week previously, he had half-joked that the Tate performance “will be my grave.” I wouldn’t go this far, but I do now know that unravelling his references is no guarantee of conceptual gratification. This is not to deny the potency of Meese’s all-consuming subjective blitzkrieg, just to acknowledge it simply as that.