Explore the vast range of titles available.

The controversial performances of Jonathan Meese and the duo Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller uncouple the presumed alliance between fascist politics and aesthetics. Provocatively repurposing fascist iconography and thought, Meese and Vinge/Müller defend art’s autonomy against the contamination of reality and reimagine how contemporary artists grapple with Germany’s past.

Only eight years have passed since Jonathan Meese startled, imitated, impressed and enraged an international audience at the first Berlin Biennale. Since then, he has emerged as a shooting star of the German scene whose omnivorous, seemingly chaotic idiom thumbs its nose at the disciplined craft celebrated by the new German painting now in vogue on both sides of the Atlantic. Collaged, taped, stapled and overpainted, most of Meese's works seem a far cry from \"highly collectible,\" yet his first museum sale was to the Centre Pompidou, and he occupies a seminal position at Hamburg's Phoenix Stiftung, which houses Harald Falkenberg's cutting-edge collection. From Tokyo to Copenhagen, Seoul to Salzburg, and recently in the Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern, Meese has become an obligatory protagonist of the avant-garde spirit. Since designing the anarchic stage set and costumes for Frank Castorf's Berlin production of \"Kokain\" in 2005, the artist is also in demand for theatrical projects. \"Kokain\" was seen last year at both the Salzburg and Avignon festivals. The multilayered installation that marked Meese's spectacular Berlin debut in 1998 reminded some viewers of an anarchic teenager's bedroom, plastered with posters of music and film idols, chock-a- block with memorabilia and paraphernalia, banners and hand-scrawled political slogans. Indeed, there is something childlike even infantile in the approach that both Boch and Meese take to their profession. Yet for all the untidiness of Meese's Berlin ensemble, there were clear echoes of Kurt Schwitters's iconic \"Merzbau,\" a Dadaistic-Constructivist environment from the 1920s, and more than casual reminders of the expressionist film classic, \"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.\" The heroes and anti-heroes celebrated in Meese's idiosyncratic universe include Caligula, Stalin and Captain Ahab, while the lives of real-life artist protagonists like van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec were tinged with tragedy. Most of the writers who play a role here, such as Mishima, Beckett, Sade and Poe, also bear witness to a darker vision of life. Yet the Beatles, Noel Coward, Clint Eastwood and a bevy of porn stars join them in playing leading roles in this ongoing spectacle, for which Meese is an indefatigable ringmaster.

[Klaus Ottmann] introduced himself to a visitor simply: \"Klaus,\" as he extended his hand. Early '50s, Nuremberg-born, black golf shirt, black slacks, '60s rock 'n' roll-length dark hair, steel-rimmed glasses, Ottmann is slim, about 6 feet tall, and has a light, airy presence. No heavy vibes at all. Apt, perhaps, for a doctor of philosophy, independent curator, writer and editor-inchief of Spring Publications, Inc., which publishes books on archetypal psychology, symbolic imagination, art and the philosophy of art, phenomenology, the philosophy of psychology, religion, mysticism and gnosis, and whose theme for this biennial, repeated like a mantra over and over, is, \"This biennial is about the artists and not the curator.\" So, ready or else, here it comes, SITE Biennial VI featuring artists Miroslaw Balka, Jennifer Bartlett, Patty Chang, Stephen Dean, [Peter Doig], Robert Grosvenor, Cristina Iglesias, [Wolfgang Laib], [Jonathan Meese], Wangechi Mutu, Carsten Nicolai, Catherine Opie, and Thorns Ltd. (Snorre Ruch, Finn Olav Holthe, Jon Wesseltoft) opening to the public at noon Sunday. Before the public opening, however, is a soiree at Swig, tonight beginning at 9. Additional weekend events include a Jonathan Meese performance work at Paolo Soleri Ampitheater, at 5 p.m. Saturday; a public conversation with curator Ottmann and participating artists at noon Sunday at the Lensic Performing Arts Center; and a Thorns Ltd. concert at 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Paolo Soleri Ampitheater.

  Goose-stepping across the stage, gripping an iron cross attached to a human skull, swearing profusely against a backdrop of his neo- German Expressionist paintings, artist Jonathan Meese offers more than just a glimpse into one of the paradoxes of mankind: our lust for power and pleasure despite our urge to rebel against them. Born in 1970 in Tokyo, Meese later studied art in Germany at the Hamburg Art Academy. A precursory glance at Meese's performance art, paintings, and sculpture suggests what 20th- In defiance of the revolutionary threads that tie most artistic movements together, Meese makes a grand spectacle of moving art back -- conceptually at least -- to a place of celebrated mythology. A self-proclaimed \"cultural exorcist,\" Meese relishes the good, the bad, and the ugly as a visual artist. His large-scale paintings are replete with comic-strip imagery, B-movie kitsch, self-portraiture, and unmistakable, violent nods to German Expressionism, providing a front-row seat to his bloody, sexual, and cultural train wreck. Meese's bronze sculptures are Medusa-like constructions, ghoulish renditions of himself or historical figures. Most seem to melt into the base like untended candles. The two bronze self-portraits that Meese offers at SITE, arranged in front of his own mammoth canvases, blur the lines of gender and beauty and seem to almost parody the artist as celebrity. with his love of music and dramatic flair. As a child, Meese developed his own language consisting of 13 words and \"two to four grimaces.\" He uses this and other languages -- as well as historical and pop-cultural iconography (Adolf Hitler, Superman) -- in chaotic stage rituals rich with messianic overtones. An unmistakable message comes through in his performances: art, like life, should have its moments of ultimate discord. Meese presents Total Revolution = Dr. Eldorado at the Paolo Soleri Amphitheater on Saturday, July 8, and the performance, while primarily

Most of it was of museum quality, a fact that underlined the superiority of the Saatchi holdings in American post-war art to those of the Tate (as it was still known, quaintly, in those distant days). It was also solid blue-chip stock, and was subsequently disposed of to bankroll the development of a very different collection. This was to be a speculative, venture capitalist's project, with a much greater concentration on new and unfamiliar artists. In market terms, Saatchi turned his attention from the FTSE 100 to AIM-listed stocks, unlisted stocks and start-ups. Like many another venture capitalist, he had some notable successes - he bought Hirst, he bought Emin, he bought Lucas, all at the bottom of the market - and corrected his mistakes by selling. This, broadly speaking, is the policy he has stuck with. About 100 of these recent acquisitions have been shoe-horned into a display which still contains most of the emblematic works associated with second-phase Saatchi collecting: Hirst's shark pickled in increasingly murky formaldehyde, Emin's unmade bed, Jake and Dinos Chapmans' bleeding Goya mannequins, etcetera. Those tried- and-trusted examples of winning Brit Art formulae still occupy the heart of the gallery, its rotunda. This room, which looks more and more like a contemporary art version of the London Dungeon, now also looks as though it is meant to be seen as a kind of gold standard against which to measure the plethora of new arrivals. Are they sufficiently shocking, sufficiently disgusting, sufficiently impactful, to measure up to expectations? Quite what Saatchi's new acquisitions say about The State of Art Now is moot. Cumulatively they suggest that many younger artists have realised that going all out for shock impact is a tactic cruelly subject to the law of diminishing returns - and that the effects of Saatchi's own sponsorship of what might be termed the neo- Dadaist wing of contemporary art practice, exemplified by Hirst, Lucas, and others, may finally have run its course.

A picture of a bent-over backside. Two of David Falconer's heaps of patently plastic vermin. Four oil paintings, in black and white, and with a really rebarbative glint, of beer cans, old tabloids and socks drying on a radiator. Five of those ballpoint doodles by the young Danish artist TAL R, which I somewhere saw praised for their 'energy' (sure sign of cultural fatigue). Six self-portraits by Japan's (male) understudy to Cindy Sherman. A dozen works by the German painter Jonathan Meese, better left aside for the moment. How it mounts up. Works that come with a handy anecdote - made by a security guard, or a Mexican tattooist called Dr Lakra (surely a spoof, but life's too short to guess the true identity of this Mexican who doctors magazine covers). Works that are weird, trashy, nasty and kitsch. One-gag works. Works that fill a whole room, like the massive cardboard edifice that unites all the locations in The Trial in one superbly crafted, and supremely dull, architectural model. Which is Jonathan Meese in one: raucous, swaggering, attacking the thick paint with his frenzied fin gers, all huff and puff and ridiculous bluster. The young Berliner mocks himself up as mad old Ludwig, or a teutonic knight, or Antonin Artaud with faint hints of SS insignia. You're supposed to find it a little comic, all this egotistical bombast, but it doesn't seem genuinely absurd.

AT THE END of John Boorman's 1974 cult film Zardoz, Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling sit in a cave and age quickly through the rest of their lives while Beethoven's Seventh Symphony booms. The cuts move with the music, so each new phrase of orchestral high Kultur seems to bury them deeper under campy pancake and latex. As pretentious tableau, it pits lifetime against geological time, and as eccentric comedy, it transforms the two sex symbols into Pirate's Cove theme-park skeletons.

\"Medea\" by the composer Pascal Dusapin and the choreographer Sasha Waltz, which was based on Mr. Dusapin's opera \"Medeamaterial\" and premiered at the Grand Theatre de la Ville de Luxembourg in 2007, will be given in November. The following month Christophe Rousset will conduct Cherubini's 1797 \"Medee\" in a production by Krzysztof Warlikowski from the Theatre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels. In any case, [Marc-Antoine Charpentier] holds his own with \"Medee.\" Like most dramatic versions of the story, it opens after Medee has made considerable personal sacrifice to enable her beloved Jason to win the Golden Fleece. Now disowned by her family and exiled, she correctly fears that Jason's affections have shifted to Creuse, the daughter of King Creon of Corinth, who has given Jason and Medee refuge. Charpentier's librettist, Thomas Corneille, included still another character, Oronte, the prince of Argos, whom Creon has counted on, together with Jason, to help him withstand an attack by the enemies of Medee and Jason. In a plot-complicating wrinkle, Oronte also loves Creuse, yet ultimately the focus is on Medee, whom Charpentier portrays as convulsed by conflicting emotions while leaving no doubt that losing Jason means losing everything. Charpentier effectively enlists the obligatory choruses and dances of French Baroque opera to play a part in Medee's grim retribution, as, for instance, in a ceremony in which Medee, invoking magical powers, summons demons and prepares a poison to implant in a robe destined for Creuse (choreography by Kim Brandstrup).