20 Years Later, Artist Michel Majerus's Predictions Have Come True
An exhibition at the ICA Miami was held in honor of the late artist Michel Majerus's 20th anniversary. The artist had an eye on the convergence of art, media, and advertising long before AI became the central point of conversation.
When does an Instagram photo become a work of art? Is a TikTok a short film? Is the metaverse something ‘real’ or worth taking seriously? What’s truly original? Today, our culture is wrestling with these definitions in a way not seen since Andy Warhol’s time.
This year we’ll get some help in understanding these frontiers via the work of the late artist Michel Majerus, in various exhibitions around the globe marking the 20th anniversary of his untimely death in a plane crash at the age of 35.
“He really expanded on painting as a medium early on,” says Stephanie Seidel, co-curator of the show Progressive Aesthetics at ICA Miami, which opens November 29 and will be the first museum survey of Majerus’ work in the United States. “Painting is so much more than just oil on canvas...it really connects to how we read and perceive and redistribute images.” To Seidel, the work of Majerus is still relevant in that it gives “a broader understanding of what images are, how they travel, and how they can be interpreted.”
One of Majerus’s 30 or so works in the ICA show speaks volumes about his oeuvre: a wall piece from 1998, titled “yet sometimes what is read successfully, stops us with its meaning no. I,” that includes a large cut-out of a Nike sneaker superimposed over a rainbow-like canvas, with a hint of typography possibly referencing a billboard ad. Mixing styles, materials, and techniques, the piece shows the artist’s skill at creating captivating assemblages from concepts high and low, with little regard to how it might be received. The piece combines lacquer paint and a digitally printed foil in a way that brings to life what we’re used to seeing in the two-dimensional realm of Photoshop.
Majerus was born in Luxembourg but spent most of his time living and working in Germany. He studied painting and had a rather conceptual education—he studied under the American-born Joseph Kosuth for a time—but married that with a Germanic sense of craftsmanship and professionalism, with a sprinkling of American can-do attitude from his time spent in California for a residency in Pasadena. “What’s exciting for me,” says Seidel, a German native, “is to see this translation process. He really didn’t see himself as a European painter, but [he was] really aspiring to [embody] this international context, and was really fascinated with American culture.”
"The work of Michel Majerus is still relevant in that it gives a broader understanding of what images are, how they travel, and how they can be interpreted."
As Krist Gruijthuijsen, curator of a show at the KW Majerus in Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin on Majerus’s early work that opened in October, as well as the museum’s director, explains, “He was extremely clear in what he wanted.” To Gruijthuijsen, the artist’s industriousness was tied to his ambition: During his career, Majerus made over 750 drawings and at least 600 paintings, and documented everything from parties to street life on video camcorder, not dissimilar to Warhol. “His notebooks are filled with humor, but also eagerness and doubtfulness, even desperation.” Gruijthuijsen believes that the artist’s almost “capitalistic hunger” for success—one we’re probably accustomed to today in the form of influencer culture—wasn’t considered cool at the time; it earned him some enemies who probably doubted his work’s value.
“Yet sometimes” was featured in a cover story on Majerus for Flash Art in 1998; the article described his work in a way that sums up how frustratingly—and intentionally—shallow his work can sometimes appear: “The efficiency and spectacle of Majerus’s work are too close to the media machinery for the clearly opposing positions to be immediately recognizable.”
From supergraphics and commercial illustrations to 8-bit video game promotional art, Majerus tossed references and styles together, seemingly for impact and for little other reason. And if his media-loving, remixing mind seems a bit reminiscent of Warhol, you’ll enjoy works of his that simply copied Warhol/Basquiat silkscreen collaborations—with a few slight alterations to leave his own mark.
If there’s a common thread to the portfolio of Majerus, it might be a heralding of a world yet to come, where art, design, media, and advertising blend together in ways in which the only transgressive new voices in art are AI programs. This lack of seriousness in his work, and how it related to his output and his materials and references, is probably best seen in his masterwork, “if we are dead, so it is.” A half-pipe that Majerus originally constructed for the Kölnischer Kunstverein in 2000, the piece has punchy slogans emblazoned on it, like “conserve energy, make love slowly” and “burned out.” “I think he understood very correctly what you need to do in order to become successful,” says Gruijthuijsen, “and that talent is just the beginning.”
When queried about what he might ask Majerus today Gruijthuijsen is fascinated by how the artist would approach something like Instagram. “He wasn’t so interested in the self, per se. He was doubtful when it came to the mythology that surrounds most artists—the aura of the artist and notions about what makes art, and what you’re supposed to look at,” he says. “There are self portraits in his work, but never of his face. So I would ask him how he would appropriate and relate himself and his work to the digital sphere.”
Something tells me Majerus would have a lot of followers.
