Michaela Meise

By the time Nico’s best-known album, Chelsea Girl, was released in 1968, the legendary singer–songwriter was already in a completely different headspace, creatively speaking. She lamented: ‘I cried when I heard the album. I cried because of the flute. I hate it so much! It is a great mistake. The arrangements in general were not so good. Even so, I could bear the string sound. But I wish I could take the flute off. There should be a button on record players, a “No Flute” button. I wish I could un-orchestrate Chelsea Girl.’

Michaela Meise used this Nico quote for her text piece Ohne Titel (Nico Board) (Untitled, Nico Board, 2004), which consists of a sepia-toned panel leaning on a ledge like the lesson for the day in some latter-day classroom, with the quote painted on it in a wonky, protest-poster sort of way. Despite Nico’s dissatisfaction with the musical arrangements, there is still something haunting, refined and precise about the album. Like Meise’s own mixed-media work, uses limited means to create a heightened sensibility through its very nakedness. Both Meise and Nico communicate through understatement and a consciousness of what they don’t want to be. Although Meise also produces performances, videos and strange automatic watercolours, such as Amala und Kamala (2003), which depicts feral children, it is perhaps her sculpture – a form of post-Minimalism inflected by worldly content – that has brought her the most attention. Her wooden geometric forms sometimes sketch out an abstract space, as in the house (2004), or, like Lipsy (2004), generate ambiguous associations with their dismantled, oddly positioned furniture, but it is her deceptively simple idea of sticking photographs onto their surfaces or placing them together in tight spatial arrangements that gives them their resonance.
Meise collects images, drawn from all sorts of print media, that seem to amount to something more than the sum of their visual information – images with an inherent dissonance that encourages mental slippage and which have qualities that are hard to put your finger on. Personal affinity seems to play a role in her selection too, contributing to an essentially subjective world-view. One part of that view is a straightforward, matter-of-fact version of feminism that simply enjoys a bit of positive discrimination, re-representing women from public life, giving them space and taking them seriously even if they are not always perfect role models and even when some of them have tragic endings or tell of careers that turned out to be anti-climaxes. Romy Schneider, Chloë Sevigny, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Madonna, Missy Elliot and the Amazonian lesbian left-wing activist group Black Laundry demonstrating on the streets of Tel Aviv, Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich scribbling orders to her maid, and Mariel Hemingway, whose only memorable role was in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), have all made photographic cameo appearances in the form of atypically intimate head shots or been obliquely used as sources of inspiration in Meise’s work. Untitled (Sylvette David) (2003), for instance, is a white, chest-high wooden corner unit with a photograph stuck on it, showing the striking Pablo Picasso model Sylvette David eyeballing the painter with a sideways look and an expression that barely conceals an attitude of cautious self-preservation.

It was through experimenting with possible supports for images from her archive that Meise’s work first veered in the direction of sculpture. In her most recent exhibitions she has shown various combinations of reproductions combined with post-Minimalist panels, cubes, columns, planks, shelves and free-standing corner pieces. The idea seems to be that by mixing media you mix the message and perhaps open up a different mental space. Meise likes her objects to have traces of workwomanship – filled holes, sanding marks, painted and stained surfaces in off colours (denim, brown, aqua, lilac) – that don’t send out clear signals and are carefully but not fastidiously done. She’s not interested in aping the surface veneer of mass-produced goods or the fastidiously clean aesthetic that dominated in the 1990s. Nevertheless her pieces have a restrained formal elegance, particularly in terms of their balance and placement. She knows that sculpture is inherently a balancing act, whether we’re talking about monuments or maquettes. The writer Isabelle Graw recently praised Meise’s synthesis of sculptural concerns, ranging from Anthony Caro to Heimo Zobernig. Meise herself, however, doesn’t view her work as a matter of delineating an artistic position in terms of a formal lineage. For her, artistic licence means that the art-historical heritage of minimal, geometric, monochrome forms is just as likely to find its way into her cut-out and cut-up collection as any celebrity portrait in a glossy magazine.