Arts Publications

Mass appeals: Christine Mehring on the art of Thomas Bayrle

ArtForum, April, 2007 by Christine Mehring

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Bayrle's turntable art created room for reflection, however, as Pop motifs from the economic miracle joined other icons drawn from Communism, which first appeared, in the form of Mao, in Bayrle's 1964 painting Mao und die Gymnasiasten (Mao and the Secondary School Boys)--a work made before Polke, Richter, or Warhol ever touched the subject. At the time, the chairman's writings were steadily growing in popularity in the student movement, as Bayrle confirms: "We found Russian Communism utterly boring, whereas Mao's Communism had more power and color, letting 'one hundred flowers bloom.'" It might come as no surprise, then, that his kinetic portrait of Mao from 1966 would become one of his best-known works. As in the other soup-catapults, the work moves when the viewer pushes a button: The visage of a stern Mao--built up from hundreds of small pieces, each depicting a person--turns into the Communist red star and back again. "The masses" here suggests not excess but solidarity; the mechanical transformation appears less senseless than the result of rationally coordinated effort, in keeping with Mao's belief in mass mobilization as a catalyst for revolution (something that made even his Soviet neighbors wary). This radical spirit would subsequently inflect prints such as Paper Tiger, 1969, in which an army battalion, colored to form the shape of a tiger on a green ground, is keyed to Mao's famous belittling of the US military (Bayrle notably used the English wording in his title), and Revolutionare Krafte ernten Raps (Revolutionary Forces Harvest Rapeseed), 1968, in which hordes of peasants armed with straw hats and axes underline the agricultural basis of the revolution, in Central America as in China. Given such work, Bayrle might be considered the Communist court artist in Western exile par excellence, for it is hard to think of any postwar peer on this side of the iron curtain--aside, perhaps, from the young Jorg Immendorff--who has engaged in such a sustained way with radical political theory.

Bayrle's engagement with Communist motifs was so pervasive in the '60s and early '70s, in fact, that a rumor persists that he designed the RAF's legendary logo--a red star featuring a Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun. It must be noted that one of the nightly regulars at The Makers of Display was Helmut Pohl, cofounder of Draier Verlag and effectively Bayrle's first art dealer, but better known as a member of Baader-Meinhof. Bayrle's estimation of this iconography is informative in its irony: He merely quips with provocatively market-oriented language that the logo was "branding at its best," a "collective product" that is "much too intelligent to have been invented by one person." Such challenging ambiguity suggests that we should look twice at works like the artist's 1966 portrayal of Mao, where, in fact, the masses wear suits and ties. Members of a Marxist-Leninist splinter group, which Bayrle had wanted to join at the time, certainly did: "I thought naively that with my Mao machines I'd be in," the artist remembers. "I cooked a particularly good meal for a rather large examination board. They cleaned their plates, but as they were leaving, they said, 'If you paint Chinese neckties, you are a reactionary element, which we have no use for.' That was that." Little did they know that Bayrle would soon display the work on a wallpaper background featuring decorative patterns of Chinese farmers counting potatoes (a new rural crop) or that subversive elements drawn from a decorative vocabulary would creep into his art and other projects. For example, when the same group commissioned Bayrle (with fellow artist Volker Bussmann) to make an educational poster featuring an excerpt from Mao's 1937 letter "Combat Liberalism," the two executed the project--much to the group's dismay--on gold leaf.