Painting at a Rate of 150 Beats per Minute:
Michel
Majerus
Nike sneakers are combined
with Baselitz quotes, slogans and logos are superimposed over computer
game characters – Michel Majerus transferred the method of sampling from
the techno scene to large-scale paintings in which visual codes of mass
culture collide. Over the span of only a few years, the Luxembourg-born
artist created a remarkably vital work that is situated between painting
and installation; it is currently being presented in major retrospectives
around Europe. Harald Fricke on Majerus’ dynamic mix of art,
consumerism, and entertainment.
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Performance with dog-mask, 11.6.1992
in the installation by Joseph Kosuth, documenta 9, Kassel, (c)Estate Michel
Majerus, Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin
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His appearance lasted one hour and remained for the most
part unnoticed by most of the visitors to
documenta IX . In the room where the works of his former teacher
Joseph Kosuth were installed,
Michel Majerus donned a dog mask for the opening on June 11 1992 and
wandered silently between the works, offering identical masks to the
hesitant preview public. Again and again, Majerus sauntered past the black
and white text panels containing quotes from
Walter Benjamin, in which the American conceptual artist reflects on his
relationship to the German philosopher. The room was primarily dedicated
to Benjamin’s Arcades Projekt (Passagenwerk), a
collection of notes he made in Paris exile that document the arts,
politics, and everyday life in the "capital of the 19th century."
Untitled, 2000, Deutsche Bank Collection,
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©Estate Michel Majerus, Courtesy
neugerriemenschneider
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For Benjamin, Paris was the place where capitalism turned
into culture. This did not, however, occur without ramifications: to
Benjamin’s mind, technological progress and the hunger for the luxury
goods of the ultramodern department stores were a hell of eternal return
"in which the face of the world never changes, especially in what is
newest." It was precisely this criticism of modernism that Kosuth sought
to carry on in his work in Kassel. Majerus’ performance, however, aimed at
another point entirely: hadn’t he taken on the role of a masked
flaneur strolling amidst the decoratively installed sentences? And
hadn’t he also – in keeping with Benjamin – drawn a connection between the
commodity cult and the culture that so frowns upon consumerism, in which a
stroll past a shop window begins to look a whole lot like a walk around
the art arena?
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Controlling the Moonlight Maze, 2002,
Installation view: neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 2002, Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
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©Estate Michel Majerus, Courtesy
neugerriemenschneider
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The ironic postmodern method of addressing the insignia of
high and low left its mark on Michel Majerus’ work. His documenta
appearance, however, was to remain an exception. The room-sized
installations of paintings and stage-like settings soon became the
trademark of the young Luxembourg-born artist, who died in a plane crash
in November 2002 at the early age of 33. At the core, however, Majerus
always retained some distance to art’s image-finding processes: he did not
believe in painting’s immediacy, but rather in a system of codes and
references that can be deliberately combined and transferred into the
medium of painting.
Controlling the Moonlight Maze, 2002, Installation view: neugerriemschneider,
Berlin, 2002, Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
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©Estate Michel Majerus, Courtesy
neugerriemenschneider
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The fact that a precise order formed the core of this
minimal agenda becomes apparent in the various exhibitions in Graz,
Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Hanover that are now honoring Majerus posthumously
as an “exceptional personality in the art of the past several years,” as
the preface to the collective catalogue puts it. For the Austrian curator
Peter Pakesch, Majerus’ works were "the leap of a new generation out of a
total image media universe that made it possible to blend the worlds of
comics and computer games with both the triviality of logos and the
irritation of art historical quotes and to fill pictorial spaces
previously conceived as abstract and make lively spaces out of them
existing somewhere between pop and virtual reality." Veit Loers, until
recently responsible for acquisitions by the art collection of the Federal
Republic of Germany, sees an "artificial randomness" at work in Majerus’
painting that continues to fascinate him to this day; and for the
Berlin-based critic Raimar Stange, Majerus is simply an "image-generating
machine." It goes beyond question: statements such as these fabricate a
legend that would have seemed deeply alien to Majerus. On the other hand,
the exhibitions have been distilled from ten years’ work during which
Majerus embarked on an unparalleled career that catapulted him from a
squat in Berlin-Mitte to the Venice
Biennial. The speed of his production and his choice of motifs seemed
to match the metropolis’ techno euphoria perfectly: painting at a rate of
150 beats per minute.
Exhibition at Kunsthaus Graz, 2005, Installationsan view, Photo: Niki Lackner,
Graz
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©Estate Michel Majerus, Courtesy
neugerriemenschneider
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