ART CITIES:Paris-Josephine Meckseper
Josephine Meckseper’s work conflates the aesthetic language of Modernism with the formal languages of commercial display and advertising. In her shop window installations, large-scale display sculptures, and films, Meckseper exposes the paradoxes of consumer culture through the combination of mass-produced objects with images and artefacts of historical and political events.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive
For her first solo exhibition in Paris, Josephine Meckseper has devised an installation for the Gagosian gallery’s street-level vitrine, informed in part by Walter Benjamin’s unfinished “The Arcades Project”. In her window installation, Meckseper continues in this spirit, conflating items of art history and consumer history, and underscoring the enduring mechanics of what Benjamin termed “Exhibition value”. The artist utilizes banal materials, from denim jeans to car parts, confronting the “readymade” with the refinement of “high art” though unlike her postwar predecessors, they maintain a pristine quality. Parisian arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the 19th Century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire. Benjamin linked them to the city’s distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the Flâneur. Benjamin first mentioned the Arcades project in a 1927 letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, describing it as his attempt to use collage techniques in literature. Initially, Benjamin saw the Arcades as a small article he would finish within a few weeks. However, Benjamin’s vision of the Arcades project grew increasingly ambitious in scope until he perceived it as representing his most important creative accomplishment. On several occasions Benjamin altered his overall scheme of the Arcades Project, due in part to the influence of Theodor Adorno, who gave Benjamin a stipend and who expected Benjamin to make the Arcades project more explicitly political and Marxist in its analysis. His Project was never completed due to his death on the French-Spanish border in 1940.
Info: Gagosian Paris Project Space, 4 rue de Ponthieu, 2nd Floor, Paris, Duration: 19/10-21/12/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, www.gagosian.com