Caleidoscope, #2 summer 2009, p. 24-29
The Mass Ornament – on the work of the german pop artist Thomas Bayrle
Recent exhibitions shed light on the prescient „super-forms“ of an artist too long under the radar.
Since the beginning of the 1960s, Thomas Bayrle has labored in relative obscurity, creating a vast body of hallucinatory works that blur the boundaries between art and design, Pop Art and Agitpop, aesthetics and allegory. A consummate artists’ artist and a foundational member of the German Pop movement, he has gained the respect and admiration of both his peers and the legions of students that he has taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt over the course of more than thirty years, but the widespread visibilty of superstar counterparts like Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke has largely eluded him. A flurry of recent exhibitions, however, including a major retrospective at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the participation in the Venice Biennale and a solo show at Cardi Black Box in Milan, have made it increasingly clear that Bayrle was not merely passed by in the mad rush of history. Rather, it seems that history has had to catch up with im – many of his works, though they were made nearly forty years ago, look like they could have been made yesterday.
Part of the reason that Bayrle’s work seems fresh, or even prescient, is a matter of aesthetics. His early works from his ongoing series of „super-forms“ for instance, appear to be threedimensional digital renderings that have been texture mapped with grids of endlessly iterated objects – except that Bayrle began making them in the late 1960s, entirely by hand. Yet intermingeled with his works forward-looking aesthetic is a similarly anticipatory set of thematics that often seems to speak directly to our globalized present. Rather than simply attempting to reflect or reproduce the times that he inhabited, as did Pop Art peers like Warhol, Hamilton, or Lichtenstein, Bayrle imaginatively traced the conditions of the postwar world along their logical future trajectories. As such, his works betray an implicit understanding that mass culture would evolve to be all the more massive and encompassing, consumerism would become more pervasive, the cult of the image more prominent, and the world more interconnected.
Bayrle’s prognostic tendency was undoubtedly a product of his experiences living and working in Frankfurt in the 1960s, when he began to produce his artwork in earnest. At the time, West Germany was awash in the splendors wrought by Ludwig Erhart’s economic miracle. An influx of American-style consumerism, along with many of ist attendant attitudes and mores, had transformed the social landscape at a breakneck pace, providing many who had suffered through the atrocities and privations of the Second World War and its aftermath with the hope that these horrors might soon be the stuff of distant memory. But at the same time, the end of the 1960s in West Germany, just as elsewere in the Western world, was also marked with a tremendous sense of unsease and dissatisfaction with the postwar consumerist ethos and the multi-faceted transgression (racism, sexism, imperialism, income inequality, alienated labor practices, etc.) perpetrated by industrialized capitalist nations. It was an environment marked by deep ambivalence: on the one hand, the newly opened spigot of abundance was a welcome, almost inconceivable joy for those rising up from the rubble after the collapse of the National Socialist regime; on the other, there was a significant amount of trepidation, and even fear, that the rapidly evolving space of capitalism was taking West Germany (and, perhaps, the whole of the Western world) in a direction that seemed to be both monstrous and nearly unstoppable.
For Bayrle, this ambivalence was embodied in the manifold demonstrations of the masses, which seemed to be paradigmatic form of a still inchoate world order. It was an aesthetic that was equally present on both sides of the ideological divide – present in the masses that congregate in protest just as much as it was present in the masses that congregated in shopping malls. Throughout the 1960s, Bayrle investigated the increasingly pervasive presence of the mass aesthetic through a series of ingenious “kinetic portraits”, which were fashioned out of collections of individually cut and painted wooden parts, and designed to come creaking to life at the touch of a button. On the whole, these works appear to be by turns acerbic and propagandistic, representing both the mechanized rituals of consumerism and the fluid, purposeful integration of the Chinese masses under Mao, who showed up as a sympathetic figure in Bayrle’s work well before more well known artists, like Warhol, ensconced him in the Pop lexicon. Despite the seemingly partisan nature of these early works, Bayrle insists that they were primarily concerned with aesthetic equivalence, stating simply that “For me, the external forms of mass production in the West and mass demonstrations in the East were optically “the same”. And beginning in 1965, I mixed communist and capitalist patterns together without qualms, simply under the aspect of accumulation.”
Christ Wiley