JONATHAN MEESE SCREAMS AND SCREAMS AND SCREAMS: “RICHARD WAGNER IS THE GREATEST. HE IS HIS OWN LAW.”
By Sebastian Preuss

Whoever considers Richard Wagner an anathema would best avoid this production. Because to see Jonathan Meese’s performance, one would have to sit through the full length of Parsifal – six hours, plus intermissions. After the first act, the second theater of the Berliner Staatsoper was only half full. Those who remained were either dyed-in-the-wool Meese fans or knew Wagner’s work well enough to recognize through all the monstrosities, the endlessly drawn swords, the bronze penises and skeletons, the many hollow gestures, the well-known Meese arsenal of German myths, cult-of-genius bombast and expressive layers of paint just how intelligently the artist was dealing with the onstage consecration after all.

In Meese’s work, his full-to-bursting installations, the similarly scrawled sketches, the painted-over photographs, thickly encrusted paintings and menacingly giant sculptures, the late Romantic and composer of German destiny has always played a decisive role. So the artist didn’t hesitate long when the Staatsoper proposed he present three of his own performances of Parsifal parallel to the live music of the new production conducted by Daniel Barenboim and directed by film producer Bernd Eichinger (Downfall).

Ever since he drew a large public into the overflowing caves of his heroic figures at the Berlin Biennale in 1998, Meese has been one of the most popular figures of recent German art. His grotesquely overstuffed installations are now known around the world, infamous, admired, or hated. With mounds of material, quickly cobbled together, Meese reshuffles his universe in which characters from sagas such as Hagen of Tronje meet up with historical dictators like Hitler, Stalin, or Caligula, where furious film figures such as Dr. No, Mad Max, Conan, and Klaus Kinski dance wildly around the Golden Calf with Saint Just. For this artist, the fantasy and abundance of mythological and cultural history is inexhaustible, even when his stance as a drunken provocateur and infantile tinkerer and his burlesque humor often disguise the seriousness of his research, collection, and creativity.

The degree to which his pathos-laden artistic activity is existential to him could be seen in the exercise in endurance in Berlin to the endless sounds of Wagner. The stage is a wild convocation from Meese’s studio. At its center is a huge, moveable sculpture; Wagner’s face can be made out in its engraved furrows. A second sculpture is made of bronze: a hermaphrodite human-animal-creature with long phalli extending from its body. As the performance begins Meese happily fondles the beast’s main penis.

Following the foreplay, Meese cocoons himself in a long army overcoat and pulls it off again; he runs around, yelling wildly or contorting his face into grotesque expressions like a silent film star. On countless occasions, he grabs a long sword and raises it in the air as if he were the young Siegfried in Fritz Lang’s famous silent epic. He tosses spears, puts on knights’ helmets, crawls around on a throne, and caresses two skeletons before he tosses everything into a pit where, later, he dashes generic hieroglyphic symbols and outlines of godly entities on canvases.

Then he holds up placards again on which we read “Isis’s Ancestors” or “Tombs, Richard as Dead Man.” All in all, it is pretty boring at first, but at some point, one begins to notice the musicality of Meese’s movements. He drinks a lot of red wine and falls into a trance that sends him stumbling around but also more and more at one with the sounds of Wagner.

While Amfortas groans in pain from his bleeding wounds, Meese escalates into an ecstatic declaration: “Richard Wagner is the greatest,” he screams. “He is his own law. His music is in love with itself.” Like a machine gun, he shoots out these improvised phrases of an art-religious rapture. Wagner, Hitler, Stalin, Caligula – all the disturbing figures of late Romanticism, the cult of genius and totalitarian dictatorship hold a place in this private ideology.

After this emotional outbreak, Meese, exhausted, retreats back to his Wagner sculpture. The key scene is comprehensible even without his presence. When Kundry tells the foolhardy Parsifal of the death of his lonely mother, thereby waking him from his indifference, Meese’s mother suddenly appears on the giant screen over the stage, the screen on which up to now his own actions had been projected. The tender woman watches attentively as her son turns her into a wild Meese artwork. “She’s the most utopian person I know,” Meese once said of her.

The third act reveals that his symbol-laden St. Vitus’ dances are also always a theater of his own art. He stands around and plays lovingly with the first small sound structure he ever made, which he keeps at home as if it were a personal Grail. During the finale, he triumphantly holds up the relic while, over in the Staatsoper, on the “real” Wagner stage, Parsifal unveils the Grail, relieving Amfortas and the Knights of the Grail of their suffering. Then Parsifal and Mutter Parsifal have come to an end. Shortly afterwards, Meese gives his first interview.