Dawn – On the Safety Curtain by Thomas Bayrle – Daniel Birnbaum

Dawn – On the Safety Curtain by Thomas Bayrle

Daniel Birnbaum

The origins of Bayrle’s graphic and experimental printing work lie in a German variation of Pop Art. Beyond that, his interest in the relationship of art to society led to original research in which cybernetics and biology play a role. What comes out of all this are visually confusing and intriguing patterns that refer to aspects of the city and the world of mass-produced consumer objects. Some of his pictures resemble labyrinths in which the eye becomes lost. In the catalogue to an exhibition in Japan a few years ago he said, "I compare the relationship between the individual and the collective to that of the dot and the raster screen. Because the dot is a part of the raster screen – just like the cell is the fundamental building block of the body." This working principle, the combination of heterogeneous elements in visual patterns reminiscent of Piranesi, has been central in Bayrle’s work since his early political objects from the sixties. In Mao (1966)–a robot picture equipped with a motor on a painted wood construction–party members form a Mao star. Slowly, like in a circulating plant, the star transforms itself into the face of the "great Chairman" himself. Through accumulation, the individual cells produce a superform.

The Safety Curtain is made up of a complex collage with a mega-city in background and Christ in the foreground, who appears to have grown from the sea of buildings. In a similar way to the composer Steve Reich, Bayrle works with a few modules and puts the city together through a wide range of combinations. The body of Christ set against this city consists of several hundred containers, all of which contains a police photo of a motorway scene. Through the adaptation to the individual containers, the scene is distorted in a different way each time where the situations are always similar but never the same. Bayrle determined the proportions of this Christ figure in 1988 by creating models of the work from old masters such as Cimabue (around 1240-1302) and Diego Velàsquez (1599-1660). The city in the background was constructed in 1977. The whole picture consists of recycled parts stemming from a wide range of contexts. Bayrle stated: "I tried to select and work out a suggestive and no way interchangeable image. I go back to a depiction of Christ that I began 15 years ago but never completely condensed into an autonomous statement. It’s important to me that Christ is in the middle of this, our world, even grows out of it and is literally made up of it. I confront the body divided up into organic containers with an unoriented mega-city. It’s a narrative, city-tapestry made up of a few modules in many variations into which, eaten up by the streets, the Christ almost sinks down. The eye can lose itself in the mass of buildings or imagine driving along the streets and crossroads and so follow millions of destinies in a vast, endless landscape of apartments, windows and streets."

Safety Curtain is an exhibition series conceived by the museum in progress in collaboration with the Vienna State Opera House, which transforms the safety curtain into a temporary exhibition space for contemporary art. Five projects have been completed since 1998: Kara Walker (1998/99), Christine and Irene Hohenbüchler (1999/2000), Matthew Barney (2000/2001), Richard Hamilton (2001/2002) and Giulio Paolini (2003/2003). An international jury selects the artists, whose work is then exhibited at the State Opera House during the opera season. This series will be continued until the season 2007/08.