Josephine Meckseper
2X(I)ST
March 30–May 25, 2014
NAK
Neuer Aachener Kunstverein
Passstraße 29
52070 Aachen
Germany
T +49 241 503255
F +49 241 536848
info [at] neueraachenerkunstverein.de
www.neueraachenerkunstverein.de
Neuer Aachener Kunstverein presents Josephine Meckseper’s solo exhibition 2X(I)ST. The sculptural installations and wall works by the New York-based artist refer to the political dimension of early modernist display architecture and design between World War I and II in Weimar Germany while simultaneously creating a window into our contemporary consumer society.
“The co-presentation of the assembly line with the glass vitrine in Aachen, the birthplace of Mies van der Rohe, serves as a reminder of the industrial prehistory of the preeminent architect of display. The pairing thereby functions as a familiar insistence on “the hidden abode of production,” which consumerism has always worked to disavow. In our contemporary moment, meanwhile, this capitalist “short-circuit” might take on further significance amid discourses of late capitalism, which hold that prewar production has given way to postwar consumption, materiality has become virtual, and need has been replaced by choice. The assembly line and the vitrine thus insist on the materiality and phenomenology of an economic system novel only in its reliance on an imaginary of disembodied relations and global capital flows.
For Josephine Meckseper’s installation in Aachen, this preeminent sign of capitalist production meets its counterpart in the glass vitrine, a crystallization of the two primary forms of capitalist display: the shop window and the glass pavilion. Both find their precursor in the 19th century’s Crystal Palace, and prewar points of convergence in the glass designs of Mies van der Rohe, before reaching postwar consolidation in US curtain glass construction. The glass vitrine, like the assembly line, occupies a parallel status of reconfigured contemporaneous ubiquity: While glass facades have become the marker of the global megacity, shopping—by no means in decline—is less and less a transaction mediated by a pane of glass.”
–Sarah Lookofsky
Josephine Meckseper was born in Lilienthal, Germany, and studied at Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and CalArts, Los Angeles, where she received her MFA. Her work has been exhibited in numerous international biennials and museum exhibitions worldwide, and is in the permanent collections of various institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zürich, and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. The artist lives and works in New York.
*Josephine Meckseper, Sabotage on Auto Assembly Line to Slow it Down, 2009. Conveyor belt, rubber car tires, and TV monitors (showing 0% Down, 2008 and Shattered Screen, 2009) on mirror-tiled wooden platform, 300 x 670 x 300 cm. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart, and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London. © Josephine Meckseper.
