Super Mario Bros... for Super Michel Majerus
About the exhibition "Michel Majerus: Machine of Sense", on show at Mudam in Luxembourg from 1 March to 1 October.
He was born on 9 June 1967 in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg. Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Michel Majerus jumped at once into the artistic effervescence of Berlin, after studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, where he took classes with Joseph Kosuth, one of the leaders of conceptual art in the United States. Michel Majerus was one of the twenty victims of the plane crash on 6 November 2002. The comet passed through the world of contemporary art before dying at the age of 35. But his wake is not dying out.
Referring to artists such as de Kooning, Warhol and Stella, his profoundly Pop practice is reminiscent of graffiti, advertising, comic strips and video games. Often fluorescent and large-scale, his paintings are based on the aesthetic of assemblage. He even made the famous little Italian plumber Super Mario Bros one of the mascots of his paintings. The critic John Kelsey had this to say about the artist: "Ironically, his destiny was to sample and appropriate the entire history of art [...] before he himself became a legitimate historical reference. But when he was alive, he was probably more like Super Mario going through history like the levels of a video game, flattening content on the screen of his work, even 'collaborating' with dead artists".
In 2022, Super Mario Bros celebrated the 40th anniversary of his birth, and twenty years after his death, the Luxembourg artist was celebrated with a posthumous series of around twenty exhibitions, including the one at Mudam in Luxembourg, which is still on show today. The series of pan-German exhibitions entitled "Michel Majerus 2022" is devoted to the different phases and aspects of his extraordinary work, which continues to influence younger generations of artists to this day. In five solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (nbk), the Kunstverein Hamburg, the Michel Majerus Estate and the neugerriemschneider in Berlin, the work of Michel Majerus is being or has been honoured in all its complexity and on an unprecedented scale. Loans from the artist's estate, as well as from public and private collections, have shed new light on the early work of Michel Majerus, and on the media and thematic issues at stake.
Alongside these exhibitions in Berlin and Hamburg, thirteen museums across Germany presented works by Michel Majerus from their collections. Mudam (Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean) in Luxembourg also hosted a symposium in November 2022, followed by this retrospective entitled Michel Majerus: Machine of Sense, on view from 1 March 2023 until 1 October. ICA Miami is also presenting Michel Majerus: Progressive Aesthetics, the artist's first solo institutional exhibition in the land of Buzz Lightyear!
"While this constellation of exhibitions has made Majerus's brief but prolific oeuvre - comprising around two thousand works conceived in a decade - a household word in Germany, he remains relatively unknown in France, where only the Capc - musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux devoted a major exhibition to him in 2012, ten years after his death. In France, his name is at best associated with an excessively meteoric career," notes Camille Debrabant, a doctor of art history, member of AICA and lecturer at the Ecole nationale supérieure d'art et de design in Nancy, in her article for Artpress. Yet Majerus has developed pictorial forms as original as skateboard ramps, warm-up areas and dance floors, giving access to contemporary artworks to audiences who might not otherwise go to art galleries or invest in artworks for sale on the contemporary art market. Proof of this are the works If We Are Dead, So It Is, in Cologne in 2000, and Dancefloor, in Basel in 1996.
"Analysed as the flip side of Warholian pop, for whom "everything and therefore nothing is art", Majerus's artistic approach has been understood as a pictorial conversion of the "visual remains of capitalism", incorporating even the wreckage of packaging. This reading seems to be supported by the artist's statement: "Few things are thrown away because in reality there is no place to throw them". But this statement could just as easily be understood as a response by Joseph Kosuth's former student to the famous 1969 resolution by Douglas Huebler, another American pioneer of conceptual art: "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting, and I don't want to add any more. I prefer simply to note the existence of things in terms of time and/or space. The American photoconceptualist's exhaustive documentation of reality is echoed in Majerus's re-use of the entire visual culture of his time," writes Camille Debrabant. The Luxembourg artist was not content to simply recycle rubbish; he also assimilated, adds the art historian, "all analogue, digital and printed images in an insatiable aspiration, of which the Teletubbies and their ventral television screen painted in Gewinn (2000) provide a possible metaphor".
As Camille Debrabant points out, Majerus could also have been seen as "a vulgar user, opportunistic and consumerist". "As early as 1992, when he made his debut on the Berlin art scene, Majerus immediately placed his production under the sign of irreverence and the desacralisation of the masters. After invoking Dürer's Paumgartner altarpiece in a degraded way in one of his installations in Munich, he disrupted his former master Kosuth's installation at Documenta 9 in Kassel by walking around in a dog mask... And he widened the spectrum of his targets in 1992 with Fuck, gratifying fourteen of his contemporaries with his "rebellious affection": Stella, Erhard Walter, Wilde, Schnabel, Kosuth, Steinbach, Kippenberger, Penck, Haacke, Baselitz, Koons, Gilbert & George and Polke.
"Conceived as a multi-sensory, immersive environment, reconstructing the artist's most famous displays (scaffolding and dancefloor), the Mudam exhibition focuses on the dystopian dimension of his work, especially his last period, contemporary with his stay in Los Angeles in 2000-2001," explains Camille Debrabant. "Like Super Mario, Buzz Lightyear and all the other heroes in a hurry in his paintings, the supernova Majerus has flashed through his time, but continues to shed light on the present day...".
Illustration: View of the exhibition "Michel Maierus. SINNMASCHINE" Mudam Luxembourg 31.03 - 01.10.2023
Photo : Mareike Tocha | Mudam Luxembourg