Scene VI

What you are looking at

The viewer looks into a room made almost entirely of mirrors. Walls, floor and partitions reflect each other endlessly, so every object appears doubled or tripled. At the center stands a stainless-steel bed with a white mattress, a naked female mannequin seated on its edge. Others sit or stand further back. Crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling; metal-framed partitions with Venetian blinds divide the space. A clothes-drying rack hung with white garments stands at the left, a bright yellow-green bath mat lies on the mirrored floor, and dozens of bottles cluster at the foot of the bed. Across the glass, scrawled in red, are graffiti-like words.

This is Scene VI by the German-born, New York–based artist Josephine Meckseper, installed at Timothy Taylor gallery in New York in early 2019. It is one of the sets from her feature-length film PELLEA[S], presented in the gallery as a complete installation with elements and props from the movie.

The film behind the set

PELLEA[S] adapts Maurice Maeterlinck's Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande (1892), the dreamlike story of a mysterious young woman, her older husband and his half-brother, a love triangle that ends in jealousy and death. The play inspired Debussy's opera and became a touchstone of Symbolist art.

Meckseper moved the story to Washington, D.C., and wove it together with documentary footage she shot at the 2017 presidential inauguration and the Women's March that followed. The gallery describes the film as bringing the play's gender debates into the political present, with the architecture of the capital as its backdrop and scenes shot in interiors the artist designed. It was screened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2018.

Looking closely

Meckseper is best known for her glass and mirrored vitrines, which display consumer goods, political images and protest material like merchandise in a shop window. Scene VI enlarges that idea into a walk-in room. The mirrors multiply the mannequins and bottles, turning a bedroom into a showroom where intimacy and display cannot be separated.

The gallery cited Fassbinder's set for The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad and Claes Oldenburg's Bedroom Ensemble (1963) as reference points. All three treat a room as a stage for desire, memory and power, and Meckseper's chrome-and-mirror version adds the cold glamour of luxury retail.

Meaning

The work asks how political spectacle and private life reflect each other. Maeterlinck's heroine is a passive figure trapped by the men around her; Meckseper's mannequins, naked and posed, are objects on display in a room that reflects everyone who looks at them, including the viewer. Shown in early 2019, at a moment of intense debate about gender and power in American public life, the piece reads as a mirror held up to its time.

For older art drawn from Symbolist literature, see our Symbolism collection. Other works by Meckseper on this site include Filmtract Nº1 and Masculine Feminine.

Where to see it

Scene VI was exhibited at Timothy Taylor, New York, from 24 January 2019. As a temporary installation it is not on permanent public view; information on its current status is best sought from the artist's galleries.