Interview

At her solo exhibition in New York City last spring, 44-year-old artist Josephine Meckseper showed a six-minute film titled O% Down, a hot and incendiary black-and-white remix of car commercials set to a merciless industrial-noise song called "Total War." The propulsive images of cars and SUVs speeding across deserts and morphing into fighter jets looked as if the Pentagon had recently opened an advertising agency. Meckseper, a native of Germany who has lived in the United States since 1990, has never shied away from the darker, violent truths of capitalist culture. Her videos, demonstration photographs, shop-window installations, collages, and even her own restaging of beauty ads, employ the frank emptiness of materialism as well as a political aggression that lies just beneath the surface. Meckseper is something of a political dissident, just when you thought there was no way an artist could be one anymore. This winter she is showing her shop vitrines and '50s lingerie ads at MoMA, bringing an anti-Iraq War film to the first-ever New Orleans biennial, and creating a series of damning prints made of found imagery dealing with the U.S. presidential election. She chatted via e-mail with fellow artist Liam Gillick, a person who also knows what a maze the surface of things can be.

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Liam Gillick: Your last solo exhibition in New York had a great film playing in the back room. It was cars and sound and power-surface and lies. It was one of the most elegant and cutting corruptions of contemporary culture I have seen. Yet it seemed extremely simple-one of those moments when someone identifies an aesthetic in the culture and nails it. Tell me more about that.

Josephine Meckseper: The concept for this film was fairly straightforward. If it had a script the only line would be: "Illustrate the obvious ties between the car industry and wars fought over oil." In essence, Dick Cheney could have easily come up with this idea in his retirement years.

LG: How did you put it together?

JM: I contacted a group of car companies and asked them to send me their current TV commercials. Saab, which is part of General Motors, had been running a campaign called "Born from Jets," where they used the connection between the way they make cars and their involvement in building military jets. Other carmakers show oil rigs or insert indirect references to 9/11 in their ads. It's devastatingly overt. Once I had enough commercials, I contacted the industrial-noise musician Boyd Rice in Colorado and talked to him about using his song "Total War" as the soundtrack. The edited film is called 0% Down and consists entirely of black-and-white edits of the car commercials I collected. The overlay of Boyd's menacing, base-heavy soundtrack leaves very little room for imagination.