Jonathan Meese: Both awesome & blasphemous

During the course of a recent trip to Hamburg, I was fortunate enough to see the Falckenberg collection, which contains over 2000 works of art and is listed among important private collections of contemporary art in Germany.

Assembled over a short span by businessman Harald Falckenberg, this impressive collection, which is housed in the factory halls of the Phoenixwerke in Hamburg-Harburg, focuses mainly on German and American art of the last 30 years.

Walking me through the massive innards of a white washed structure on the outskirts of the city, resident curator, Nasim Weiler provided a context to the curatorial thrust of the collection. “From the mid-1970s, an art scene emerged in Hamburg and Berlin that grew in importance compared with Cologne and Düsseldorf, the strongholds of German postwar art.

Today, Berlin is a world leader in the field of contemporary art. The development also began in Hamburg, home to prominent artists like Sigmar Polke, and Dieter Roth and a focus of punk, the music of a disillusioned youth. This gave rise to a subversive art with neo-dadaist traits that attacked the prevailing social system with irony and satire. In our collection, this current is represented by artists including Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Andreas Slominski, and later John Bock, Christian Jankowski, Jonathan Meese, and Daniel Richter.   The Falckenberg Collection offers an overview of this development in contemporary art based on the model of the counter-culture.”

The most prominent example of this is an enormous, fairly blasphemous site specific installation by Jonathan Meese who is considered by some to be the enfant terrible of German art. 

Located in the basement of the spacious building, Meese’s installation occupies an entire room. The installation stands out as much for its sheer decadence as its shock value. Even for a seasoned art viewer, the experience of walking through the installation is chilling.  I felt like I was stepping into a ‘sick’ man’s ante chamber. Blood soaked body parts (prosthetics), explicit sexual imagery and frightening slogans evoked goose bumps, bringing to mind scenes from a film like The Slaughter of the Lambs.

The frenzy with which Meese has assembled scatological text, profane graffiti, pornographic images, sadistic pictures, and dismembered life-like body parts and fetish objects is oddly noteworthy.  As observed by critic Susanne Titz, his art “puts a finger on the pulse of his generation.”  

That Harald Falckenberg (he actually purchased one of the ware-house like buildings and entrusted its conversion to an architect, Roger Bundschuh from Berlin so as to be able to house his art in a building befitting it) actually commissioned Meese to install this strangely provocative work, speaks volumes of his passion and belief in the artist’s process. 

In India, Devi Foundation in New Delhi is perhaps the only collection that stands out for a similar breadth of vision. Collectors like Harald Falckenberg and Anupam Poddar are driven by inexplicable passion and an out-of-the-box approach. 

A rare vision often guides the creation of such collections: one that leads to the creation of unprecedented value for future generations. And also as a record of our times.    

The author is a published writer and an arts consultant. She is the director of A’bad International Arts Festival.