Jonathan Meese is a self-proclaimed cultural exorcist. In his performances, sculptures and paintings he adopts a shamanistic role, channelling all manner of chaotic zeitgeist. His personal interests reverberate throughout his paintings: comic books, horror films, medieval crusades and outsider art merge into a compendium of morality and epic failure. In his paintings, clear-cut roles of good vs. evil are confused, ironic propaganda is served up with homebrew conviction and malevolent knaves become heroes of the disenfranchised..Appropriating historical and media references, Meese parodies his own symbolism. His paintings adopt the theatrical quality of opera, with pretend realms of decadence and absurdity, where form and idea become easily detached and reassembled according to the artist’s own logic. Meese’s grand claims become zombie-like effigies, redundant sequels to real historical epics. Finding catharsis in replicating ritual, Meese renders its powerful aura defunct in the process.In his self-portraits, Meese exaggerates his real-life ‘wild-man’ features, his image continuously mutating through a cast of characters – from demons to divas – to develop potential narratives exploring the nature of power and conspiracy underlying contemporary mythology. Through his many reinventions, Meese replicates celebrity image manufacturing to style himself as a cult figure: both symptom and cure of a corrupted belief system. His narrative works play out B-movie fantasies in feudal tableaux, hailing religion and politics as punk-style forgeries. Collectively Meese’s works operate as meta-narratives; feeding the fictional legacy of the artist as an almighty and immortal entity.

Jonathan Meese Is Mother Parsifal set the young artist alone against the well-over-five hours of Wagner's slow-moving epic in the vast scenery store-house of Berlin's Staatsoper Unter den Linden. There Meese performed three shows in March, with music piped in live from the new Eichinger and Barenboim production of Parsifal, which was playing simultaneously in the Staatsoper's main auditorium. It was a prestigious venue for the Berlin art scene's resident Wagnerian--although, aside from promising an endurance test, it was unclear until opening night what Meese would actually do. Sitting on bleachers, clutching wool blankets in the soaring, unheated Magazin, we confronted an extraordinary junk pile of a stage. Majestic in the center stood the enormous stone head from Zardoz, transformed into a Janus-faced portrait of Wagner--on one side Meese's rough version and on the other a souvenir-shop likeness, embellished with a great phallic chin. A blowup of a small sculpture, it bore oversize traces of the artist's thumbprints. On the back wall was a painted caption: DR. SAINT PROPAGANDADDY SPOKE. Homemade Meesiana littered the stage: weapons and helmets; large photos of Klaus Kinski with hand-painted captions like THANK YOU and FRIEND; and, down some stairs. The Propagandist, a bronze humanoid sporting five huge dicks. A rickety ladder led down to a pit, where four blank canvases stood ready. With rows of plastic skeletons flanking a throne at center stage, the set seemed as much goth bar as Valhalla.