.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Instantly recognisable, Josephine Meckseper's Pyromaniac 2 presents the viewer with an arresting photograph of a model, almost life-size, posed defiantly with a lit match held between her lips. Beautiful with her aubern hair curling at her shoulder, the woman's gaze is defiant; an expression of her rebellious intent. Throughout Meckseper's diverse oeuvre, which spans from stylish installations of consumer products in display cases to protest documentation, fashion photography and wallpaper, Meckseper's work considers and examines how cultural property is disseminated and its internal values merchandised. A seminal series of anarchic photographs for the artist, the Pyromaniacs photographs have been widely exhibited including in the artist's first significant retrospective at Kunstmuseum, Stuttgart in 2007, in the ground-breaking exhibition Gestamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany at The Saatchi Gallery, London and importantly at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in USA Today: New American Art from The Saatchi Gallery, which later travelled to the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, where the present work assumed the position of a figurehead appearing as it did on the catalogue's front cover.
Addressing the objectification of women in society, Josephine Meckseper's work can be seen in relation to the grand legacy of feminism, inviting comparison with influential progenitors such as Hannah Wilke, whose ground breaking self-portraits in the 1960s and 70s satirised pin ups and American notions of feminine beauty. Meckseper pushes these explorations in an interesting and new direction specifically analysing how the female form is fragmented and displayed in a commercial context with an anarchistic bent. Using the format of fashion magazines, Meckseper's photography magnifies beauty and glamour, exposing its vacuity and the matrix of social, political and economic realities embedded within it. In Pyromaniac 2, the dangling lit match can be seen to transform the female body from a site of commodity desires to an impending explosion. As Paolo Virno elucidates, these images 'are no longer instruments of production so much as transmission belts. They are, at best, lubrication - pure Vaseline' (P. Virno, quoted in J. Kelsey 'Our Bodies, Our Selves' in The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue, exh. cat., Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart, 2004, p. 12).
Addressing the objectification of women in society, Josephine Meckseper's work can be seen in relation to the grand legacy of feminism, inviting comparison with influential progenitors such as Hannah Wilke, whose ground breaking self-portraits in the 1960s and 70s satirised pin ups and American notions of feminine beauty. Meckseper pushes these explorations in an interesting and new direction specifically analysing how the female form is fragmented and displayed in a commercial context with an anarchistic bent. Using the format of fashion magazines, Meckseper's photography magnifies beauty and glamour, exposing its vacuity and the matrix of social, political and economic realities embedded within it. In Pyromaniac 2, the dangling lit match can be seen to transform the female body from a site of commodity desires to an impending explosion. As Paolo Virno elucidates, these images 'are no longer instruments of production so much as transmission belts. They are, at best, lubrication - pure Vaseline' (P. Virno, quoted in J. Kelsey 'Our Bodies, Our Selves' in The Josephine Meckseper Catalogue, exh. cat., Galerie Reinhard Hauff, Stuttgart, 2004, p. 12).