If you’ve suffered a dearth of Teutonic angst in your life since Anselm Kiefer’s show finished at the Royal Academy, then head over to Old Street where Jonathan Meese, Nazi saluting, pith helmet wearing provocateur of contemporary German art, has done a number on Modern Art’s swish new pad. Like Kiefer, Meese, a forty-something painter, performance and installation artist, makes immersive art about political, religious and ideological structures (and their failure), memory and the weight of history. But, unlike the daddy of feel-bad Kraut art, Meese does so with one eyebrow raised quizzically, his tongue planted firmly in his cheek and a skip full of tat at his disposal.
Good manners, good taste and a great deal of sense go by the wayside in a crazily scattershot installation featuring anthropomorphic self-ketchuping hot-dog sculptures, blow-up Sponge Bob Square Pants figures, shop mannequins with swastikas daubed on their breasts, novelty beach towels and cards from a ‘Top Trumps’-style game featuring all your favourite dictators from history (you’ll find Hitler attached to a crash helmet stuck on the back of a plastic snail). The show has a tinny soundtrack – featuring delights such as Divine’s swaggering Bobby O-produced classic ‘Shoot Your Shot’ – while a weedy projector throws shapes onto the wall. There are references to ‘Dr No’ and ‘Miss Marple’, as well as Richard Wagner’s opera ‘Parsifal’, which Meese was due to direct at the Bayreuth festival in Germany in 2016 before ‘financial problems’ with his ambitious plans led, last month, to his sudden removal from the role. It’s all so bizarrely fascinating that you barely give Meese’s cod-expressionist paintings, the most conventional (and presumably saleable) things on show, a second glance.
It comes across as a double satire – of the sort of ego that gives rise to both monsters and badboy artists. Were it just empty posturing, though, there would be nothing to keep you looking. In the end, Meese for all his self-mythologising and bonkers superabundance, is wrestling with very real questions about history, masculinity and creativity. It’s about wanting to shoot your shot but finding yourself in possession of a comedy weiner, perhaps.
Martin Coomer