The Josephine Meckseper catalogue

“Politics and aesthetics morph seamlessly in a world where politics confuses itself with representation, where all attention is swallowed in the communication of a message rather than in the intensity of an event.... In Meckseper's gallery installation, where fashion images share space with protest documentation, where an idea of relational space rubs shoulders with an idea of lifestyle or boutique design, where an idea of the social morphs into an idea of the commodity relation, many of the elements on display also double as mechanisms of shelves, rugs, windows, magazine covers, and wallpaper are the products here. Here, display displays itself. Covers and wrappings conceal nothing, they only reveal themselves. And, reappropriating the very mechanisms of commodity transmission in this way, and in particular by conflating politicized symbols with such functions..., by relocating non-art in art and vice versa, by this orgiastic displacement, this diabolical Feng Shui of signifying forms and materials, the artist also goes to work (like the peasant in her field, the posing model) in the production of her anti-world.” John Kelsey This book constitutes the first monograph on New York-based artist Josephine Meckseper, with essays by writer/filmmaker John Kelsey and Andrew Ross, Professor in the American Studies program at New York University.