Arts Publications

Mass appeals: Christine Mehring on the art of Thomas Bayrle

ArtForum, April, 2007 by Christine Mehring

On the night of April 11, 1968, Thomas Bayrle and two friends, Bernhard Jager and Uve Schmidt, were busy in a basement print shop in Frankfurt, producing a poster of German student leader Rudi Dutschke. Earlier that afternoon, Dutschke, the prime mover behind the West German Extraparliamentary Opposition, known by the acronym APO, had been shot by a presumed right-wing extremist. The poster responded directly to the three bullets that were fired: THE REVOLUTION DOES NOT DIE FROM LEAD POISONING! At that moment, however, it was not clear that Dutschke would live. (He did, although complications from the shooting would kill him eleven years later.) By the next morning, his face was not only everywhere in the German mass media but emblazoned across the city on the trio's myriad placards. That night of uncertainty about the political icon's survival had already begun to crystallize into one of the most polarizing moments in '60s Germany, separating once and for all Left and Right, revolution and establishment. Yet not so for Bayrle. "The next day," he recalls, "I was cheerfully at it again with Mon Cheri." Which is to say, Bayrle resumed his day job at the same basement shop with Bayrle & Kellermann (The Makers of Display), the company he ran with graphic designer Hans Jorg Kellermann from 1968 to 1972, producing advertisements for corporate clients ranging from chocolate maker Ferrero and carpet brand Enkalon to fashion designer Pierre Cardin and trade-union bank BfG. On the morning of April 12, Bayrle was producing a campaign and composing a sales slogan for a popular chocolate praline with a cherry and liqueur filling: "Mon Cheri, because one can't say it more nicely."

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Was the revolution a one-night stand for Bayrle? A perhaps aptly equivocal answer is suggested by the basement operation of The Makers of Display, which encapsulates the slippery ways in which the Frankfurt-based artist's practice has long straddled the divides between agitprop and advertising, commodity criticism and commodity culture, art and design. At least since 1964, Bayrle has been infatuated with the notion of the mass, and in his signature work, ranging in media from books and silk screens to cardboard reliefs and films, a discrete unit is repeated numerous times to create what the artist calls a "super-form"--that is, a figurative image itself made up of hundreds of tiny figurative images. Obsessive repetition functions here as a kind of visual equalizer, most interestingly across party lines, since the artist draws his iconography from the worlds of capitalism and Communism alike. "For me, the external forms of mass products in the West and mass demonstrations in the East were optically 'the same,'" Bayrle recalls in conversation today. "And beginning in 1965,1 mixed Communist and capitalist patterns together without qualms, simply under the aspect of accumulation: Mass movements like vacations, shopping, and driving over here were the same for me as marches, parades, and sporting events over there." Bayrle is a pathological squinter, equipped with a structural vision at once so near- and farsighted it can register only similitude.

What are the implications of that leveling vision? The Makers of Display was a place where, Bayrle says, "we killed ourselves working days and dove into the daily dirt at night." Today, the artist concedes that he effectively led a "double existence," with neither half of his clientele--corporate or political--aware of the other. Rather than dismiss this enterprise as simply two-faced, however, we would do well to consider why Bayrle has described these days as a "stimulating time" and his studio-cum-business as a kind of "reloading point and interesting turntable." Such terms suggest the comings and goings of those dozen or so friends who regularly gathered for ad hoc nocturnal activities, but more important for our consideration of Bayrle's art, they have a conceptual thrust that touches on the question of the politics of Pop, a matter that is increasingly relevant to our understanding of art today. To put it bluntly, do the likes of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Jeff Koons, and Takashi Murakami address popular and consumer culture critically or affirmatively--or do they want to have their cake and eat it, too? Given his superior bona fides as both a workaday shop owner trying to make ends meet (working within industry rather than offering any Warholian performance of it) and a committed political activist (taking his oppositional stance to the streets rather than simply hanging it on a wall), Bayrle presses Pop's seemingly inherent dichotomy more forcefully than the best of his peers. Consequently, his suggestion that there is no simple answer--and that taking sides (or, better, seeing the world through a single lens) has never been for him--is all the more resonant.