Jonathan Meese

About Jonathan Meese and his art
Text written by Patricia Ellis

Jonathan Meese is a self-proclaimed cultural exorcist. In his performances, sculptures and paintings he adopts a shamanistic role, channelling all manner of chaotic zeitgeist. His personal interests reverberate throughout his paintings: comic books, horror films, medieval crusades and outsider art merge into a compendium of morality and epic failure. In his paintings, clear-cut roles of good vs. evil are confused, ironic propaganda is served up with homebrew conviction and malevolent knaves become heroes of the disenfranchised..

Appropriating historical and media references, Meese parodies his own symbolism. His paintings adopt the theatrical quality of opera, with pretend realms of decadence and absurdity, where form and idea become easily detached and reassembled according to the artists own logic. Meeses grand claims become zombie-like effigies, redundant sequels to real historical epics. Finding catharsis in replicating ritual, Meese renders its powerful aura defunct in the process.

In his self-portraits, Meese exaggerates his real-life wild-man features, his image continuously mutating through a cast of characters from demons to divas to develop potential narratives exploring the nature of power and conspiracy underlying contemporary mythology. Through his many reinventions, Meese replicates celebrity image manufacturing to style himself as a cult figure: both symptom and cure of a corrupted belief system. His narrative works play out B-movie fantasies in feudal tableaux, hailing religion and politics as punk-style forgeries. Collectively Meeses works operate as meta-narratives; feeding the fictional legacy of the artist as an almighty and immortal entity.

Meese furnishes his work with an amateur aesthetic; his expressionism is staged as adolescent malice, embracing the values of individualism and anarchical force. Grotesque, sublime and comically dumb, his paintings follow the principles of science fiction prophecy. They envision the future as a post-Armageddon landscape, where primitivism is embraced as the rational and finite social solution.
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/jonathan_meese_about.htm

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[MrJimmyYeah]

von wem ist die musik?

[MrJimmyYeah]

vo wem ist die musik?

[NicolaRedwooddforest]

I love Jonathan Meese and I love Einstuerzende Neubauten. Excellent music choice for Jonathan Meese's art. The voice even sounds like Jonathan Meese's voice, I thought it was him singing. My favorite song of Einstuerzende Neubauten is Halber Mensch.

[airamanno]

It is the german Kultband "Einstürzende Neubauten". The song is named "Die Ebenen werden nicht vermischt."

[ArcaneWaif]

I love the art, but I also especially love the music. What is it that's playing?

[airamanno]

Yes. Now all is okay. Thank you very much for this really good Video especially the brilliant choice of the music!