Artist Josephine Meckseper Creates A Post-Capitalist World With Her Mannequin Vitrines

For the last edition of Art Basel in Zurich, artist Josephine Meckseper created a vitrine display filled with objects commonly sold to women through advertising and propaganda in a work titled Empire of Signs (2022). It was a riff on a series of works she first created in 2016 called Blow Up (2016), where she featured magazine adverts, old perfume bottles, underwear and chopped up mannequin parts to create a scene where the presence and image of a woman was felt, but a female body was distinctly lacking.

Meckseper’s displays and installations look at how dictatorships and political power are communicated to women through advertising, and her revival of the medium has excited her cult following. Over the last two decades, Meckseper has used appropriated female bodies to highlight a disconnect between advertising aimed at women during various economic climates, and the reality of the lives of the women living within them. Here, she speaks about the dolls, “unspecificness” and platonic objects as a medium.

What’s the idea behind Blow-Up (Michelli) 2006? What does ‘Blow Up’ mean, and what does it refer to within the context of the piece?

The pairing of oppositional voices, such as advertising language, consumer products, and protest signage is a crucial factor in the conceptualisation of all my vitrine works. In the aftermath of September 11, I began setting up these relationships by filming the ongoing antiwar and anti-capitalist protests in New York and the surroundingurban shop window displays in urban environments. What particularly interests me is the transformation of consumer zones (shopping malls) into politicised zones (street protests). Blow up (Michelli) includes images from antiwar demonstrations in New York and Washington D.C. from 2004 and 2005.

The work was inspired by Antonioni’s countercultural movie Blow-Up, set in 1966 London. Towards the middle of Antonioni’s film, as the protagonist drives his Rolls Royce convertible through London’s East End, he is held up by protestors waiving No War signs. Shop windows appear towards the end of Antonioni’s film, some featuring mannequins holding up placards just like the protestors in the earlier scene. All these elements from Antonioni’s film including a model photo shoot, are echoed and set into new relationships within my glass and steel vitrine.

The vitrine is filled with things that allude to the presence of a woman. There’s a mannequin torso and also a couple of fake legs. How and why did you decide on their placement?

The objects and elements in Blow Up (Michelli) are deliberately pedestrian and include references to the imminent financial crisis with signs such as Endless Deals and an image of a homeless girl I photographed in Soho, New York. I wanted to evoke a counter-fashion campaign, presenting staid underwear, beige support pantyhose. The photographs of the three women in the vitrine epitomize the standardized wear of the communist era when clothing was just a part of the planned economy and not a status symbol as it is in free market economy societies.

The stainless steel and glass vitrine structure itself, serves as a reminderof the industrial prehistory of the preeminent architecture of display and how early Modernism and the avant- garde developed into a form of political and aesthetic resistance to classism and capitalism.

How does the display relate to your photograph Blow-Up (Tamara, Michelli, Laura), and why have you used mannequin parts in all of these pieces?

The toilet brush, the mannequin, the photograph are signifiers of the tension between the objects themselves displayed in the vitrines, but also the relationship of the vitrine window and the objects to us and to an abstract world. Shop windows, art historical and political artifacts are faced together as they are in everyday life. They are a fragment and a window of our time, and take into consideration “the split second” that allows us to shift our perception and to create a counter universe. Philosophically, the conflict and specific “unspecificness” of the objects in my work points to the question whether there is a “world as a whole” or just an infinite chain of correlations between matter and objects. At the same it is also about perception and the dialectic between “being as a whole” and “specific beings” as suggested by Heidegger. The drama and tension between the objects creates the essence of what “time” or “the thing” is.

What are the main cultural reference points in your work?

I’m looking for cultural and sociological end points as a platform to subvert reality. In some ways the mirror display cube, the white mannequin and the fictitious campaign poster, sum up a sense of disappearance of humanism and political utopianism in the 20th century.

My hometown of Worpswede in West Germany is in fact a Utopian artist colony founded by my great grand uncle Heinrich Vogeler at the beginning of the 20th century, with a rare combination of Jugendstil, German Expressionist and Modernist architecture. During my adolescence Werner Fassbinder shot “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant” in my friend’s house and the political climate of the 70s, namely the Baader-Meinhof group revolting against corporate capitalism, had a large influence on how I started out as an artist.

Did growing up in communist Germany impact the series?

The shop windows and vitrines in my work reflect the role of the artist in our current consumer society and points to the instability of capitalism and Post-Fordian society. My works are investigating platonic objects, such as bathroom rugs, mannequin parts, liquor bottles, underwear. This raises questions: does what we produce culturally have an accumulative aspect, or is it just a process without ultimate consequences? Does the existence of an object also include its non-existence? The male and female representations in my work convey a body “without function” separated from nature and instrumentalised as a work force. Fragments of advertisements, including male and female underwear ads, speak to the explicitness of mass media spectacle and universal capitalism.

What interests you so much about mannequins – how does a fake female body help communicate the political bend of your work?

My steel and glass vitrines combine retail display forms and mannequin parts with artifacts of historical and political events, questioning traditional shop windows’ implicit status as a tenuous symbol of consumerism. The mirrored displays create a tension between the materiality of the objects and the illusion of an urban archaeological landscape of infinite demand and supply within a larger economy.