MICHEL MAJERUS 31.05 / 23.09.2012 For its main summer show, the CAPC programs the first Michel Majerus retrospective in France. Only french museum detaining a monumental work of the Luxemburg born artist in its collection, the CAPC CAPC will present a consequent selection of installations musée d’artd'art contemporaincontemporain and paintings in its nave, of which the gigantic and de BordeauxBordeaux gliding skateboard ramp if you are dead, so it is. “I’m fascinated by the idea of doing something without being sure of what it will become, and without anyone else being sure what it will become. I will never know, and no one else will know: that is how I think of art”. Michel Majerus The brief span of Michel Majerus’ career This is the first solo exhibition of Michel coincides with two major revolutions, one Majerus’ work in France. Produced in technological, the other political. The artist’s collaboration with the Kunstmuseum in work reached its creative peak and made its Stuttgart, this retrospective will gather 35 mark on the international art scene in 1996, works produced by the artist between 1996 when the Internet was emerging as a new and 2002, as well as two major installations: phenomenon. His death in a tragic plane crash - The monumental work Reminder (1998), occurred one year after the political turmoil which was added to our collection in 2007 caused by the 9/11 attacks in 2001. (on deposit from the Centre national des arts In the space of six years, these two revolutions plastiques). It is the first time since its creation profoundly transformed the socio-cultural and in 1998 for Manifesta in Luxemburg that this economic parameters of our civilization, giving amazing work can be shown again, thanks to birth to a new era we commonly refer to as the huge size of the main hall of the CAPC. “globalization”. - With if you are dead, so it is (2000) It brought with it mobility, polycentrism, Majerus has covered the interior surface information streams, new networks, social of a skateboarders’ half-pipe. It will be diversity, and hybridization. Nothing is reconstructed running the length of the 164- “remote” or “peripheral” any more, power foot nave of the CAPC. Visitors will be able to hubs no longer have physical locations, glide through on foot or on roller blades… and social time patterns have been desynchronized. In the space of a few years, This show reflects the museum’s determination Michel Majerus sensed and embraced these to present the work of a generation of artists, new parameters and used them to develop curators and critics who have developed new new aesthetic paradigms: painting as a space idioms and display methods that echo the for navigation and circulation, the canvas’s changing cultural, social, and economic context surface used like a screen, the boundless of art. availability of images, the simultaneity and heterogeneity of signs and forms, the Curator importance of communication technology in Charlotte Laubard human interaction, and so on. Catalog Michel Majerus The openness and permeability of Texts by Nicolas Bourriaud, Heike-Karin Majerus’work reflects its genuine kinship Föll, Ulrike Groos, Joseph Kosuth, Charlotte with Pop Art. Its contemporary thrust owes Laubard, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen much to the artist’s relentless concern with Eds. DISTANZ, Berlin ; Kunstmuseum, the question of style, rooted in his awareness Stuttgart ; CAPC musée d’art contemporain, of living in an entirely ‘designed’ world Bordeaux, 2011 in which all entities, ideas, and physical French-English, 224 pages, color illustrations, manifestations are produced via standardized 23,5 x 28,5 cm communication tools whose visual identity is ISBN: 978-3-942405-56-0 tightly controlled. Majerus decided to refrain Price: 44 ¤ from making choices (of style), remaining faithful to this fundamental, difficult and often The exhibition Michel Michel is organized misunderstood relativism until the end, as in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum, shown in the darker, more anxious paintings Stuttgart he made in 2002, shortly before his death. Couverture Michel Majerus, Pathfinder, 2002. Impression numérique sur vinyl, 380 x 290 x 3,5 cm © michel majerus estate. Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin Michel Majerus : Screenshots Nicolas Bourriaud When discussing Frank Stella’s painting, and I was astounded by the large scale of his Robert Rosenblum writes that it covers nearly works and the aggressive, Pop-influenced all essential painterly problems of its time.1 colors. It all seemed far removed from the The same could also be said, however, of timid drawings created immediately after the compressed, synthetic work of Michel his studies at the Kunstakademie Stuttgart. Majerus—in spite of an extremely short career With astonishing audacity, he now made the that came to an abrupt end in a plane crash exhibition space entirely his own. From 1996 in fall 2002, when he was merely thirty-four to 1999, Michel Majerus designed his first years old. It was an ironic twist of fate that the major shows, starting with the Kunsthalle accident occurred in the country of his birth; Stuttgart up to the monumental Wall Drawing, no stranger to wanderlust, Majerus, a man who commissioned by Harald Szeemann for the would introduce himself as a “Berlin artist” facade of the international pavilion at the and had just returned from a several-month Biennale di Venezia. Shortly before this first stay in the USA, would have been amused by high point in his career, I had invited him this symbolic act of coming full circle. There to participate in my exhibition Le Capital: is a bitter irony in the fact that his birth and tableaux, diagrammes et bureaux d’études his death occurred in this tiny country, which at the Centre d’art contemporain in Sète.2 he always wanted to leave behind. One can This show was mainly concerned with the spend a lot of time speculating on how his question of how capital flows had become work would have shaped out if he had been a main topic in contemporary art, and how granted more time than just those few short artists were having recourse to a language of years. Like Yves Klein, Pino Pascali, Blinky abstraction, statistical tools, and diagrams to Palermo, and Jean-Michel Basquiat before outline what had since become an abstract him, Majerus’s work has gone down in art reality for them. Majerus turned a huge stretch history as one of those important oeuvres of wall in the first room into an assemblage, that was cruelly cut short. Which path would painted several elements in the gallery itself Majerus have embarked on? Perhaps his style and brought others with him from his studio, would have become more somber, become including parts from earlier installations. more “Kippenbergerian,” as the large lyrical Architectural in nature, this piece, containing paintings that were found in his studio colossal blow-ups (Yet sometimes what is immediately after his death would suggest. read successfully stops us with its meaning, Or perhaps—as is my personal belief—he unveiled at Manifesta), monochrome panels, would have evolved a new synthesis from the and signs that had been painted over, clearly diverse pictorial building sites of his mind. brought to light his method of composition: in Majerus was the kind of artist who did not all his work form and color were subjected to allow himself to be squeezed into a painterly a global image of contemporary life, informed formula. When I first met him in Paris in 1993, by a Pop—which is to say ambiguous—view he had nothing more to show than a thick of the two-fold dominance of the computer wad of small drawings, all inspired by the screen and commercial capitalism. This pop culture of the time, mostly by animation fundamental ambivalence in Majerus’s painting films. Their gentle irony was akin to that of was based on his ability to marvel at the such artists as Rita Ackermann and Jean-Luc signs of commercial rhetoric and the visual Blanc, who were also working at the time on a flotsam and jetsam of the packaging industry, sensitive reappropriation of the dream factory, counterbalanced by his belief in the power executed by hand. of art and its ability to open the public’s eyes to the toxic environment in which we find I only encountered Majerus’s works again in ourselves. Romanticism and irony feed off 1998, during Manifesta 2, which was then held each other and lead to a whole new synthesis: in Luxembourg. His progression was evident Majerus’s art flits between the causticity of a Kippenberger, the iconic potential of Pop Art, structured as commercial displays according and the existential undertaking of a Basquiat, to the rules of product placement. This never actually settling on one. He manages fascination for the shopping mall aesthetic to suspend all these heterogeneous elements and attachment to Pop’s visual matrix are in a kind of precarious balance to reveal to us typical for Majerus’s works of the nineties. As the various facets of the world of capitalism, a reaction to the American Simulationist art of from visual aggression to popular lyricism, via the preceding decade, young artists were now alienation and rage. more likely to be inspired by the formal model of the flea market. From Thomas Hirschhorn to Rirkrit Tiravanija and Jason Rhoades, the Collage and Postproduction exhibition in Sète formed a complex visual circuit and was founded on such themes Of all painters, Michel Majerus undoubtedly as the availability of formal elements that embodies most clearly the methods of displayed a taste for the short-lived. From production that I attempted to outline and a painterly perspective, it revolved around analyze in my essay Postproduction.3 The the demand, dominant in the late twentieth casual manner in which he manipulated the century, for a historicizing or sentimental form signs of postindustrial culture, the diversity of painting, from John Currin’s mischievous of his techniques, as well as his disdain for portraits up to Karen Kilimnik’s or Elizabeth any subject that had not yet featured online, Peyton’s assessment of visual junk.