The Great Beautiful Boredom of Repetition with Thomas Bayrle

Thomas Bayrle - Rosenkranz, 2009 Thomas Bayrle – Rosenkranz, 2009

Kunstbau München is currently showing an exhibition by Thomas Bayrle – one of the first German artists who worked with computers and technically generated imagery. He was also one of the German pioneers of pop art who influenced further generations of artists and whose works are shown in many established and famous collections all over the world. Sleek had a talk with the artist about the uniqueness of artworks and the embarrassment behind religion.

Your new exhibition at the Lenbachhaus shows a variety of different media: sculptures, videos, black and white projections. Do you have a preference for any material or medium?
I do not follow preferences, I follow ideas and their realization. I’m trying to construct rather hermetic circumstances in between materials, forms and contents. No matter if film or sculpture, I want to condence.
You were one of the first artists in Germany to work with computer-generated imagery. How did you come up with that?
When I started out working in 1960, I felt like I was swimming in a collective broth of mass production and mass communication. Like Andy Warhol put it back then – passively being pushed by the circumstances around me. Therefore I did not aim for elements such as style and artistic expression too much, but instead tried to become acquainted with mass production related to computers, watching out for procedures that helped to set out a collective access to newspaper connections and so on. But to be honest, at the same time I felt mistrust towards the unspecific digital mass food, always knowing that one single hand-drawn line will stay forever.

Thomas Bayrle - Conductor (Ford Galaxy Wiper), 2011 Thomas Bayrle – Conductor (Ford Galaxy Wiper), 2011

At that time computers were something completely new, something very interesting to explore and to work with. What would you advise young artists nowadays: to look for new media or to search for new ways of using the old ones? Of course young artists should look at both sides! At both the individual aspect and the mass aspect of being. But what is that now philosophically? I do not believe in any radical sameness! I – and this is naive, like artists and children – only believe in similarity. Artists of our times should step into the great beautiful boredom of repetition and at the same time know that everything is singular! Everything stays original – there is no radical sameness even in billions of repetitions.
What do you think are the strongest social changes that took place in the art scene over the last 20 years? It is embarrassing that god exists and we all know it and we all can’t express it without sounding reactionary. The great thing was total uncertainty – like quantum theory. Is there anything that is fixed? Hopefully not – us artists are not an insurance company. We hold a certain amount of fantasy and this will help us to survive.

Thomas Bayrle - Monstranz, 2010Thomas Bayrle – Monstranz, 2010
 
What media you have never used before would you like to try now? Again, even more embarrassing: I’ve never worked with the Bible. Johann Sebastian Bach and Dürer used it, and James Joyce had his.
Do you think it’s still important to look at art in person when everybody can check it online nowadays? Does personal experience yield something that the screens can’t? Oh yeah, both fields will continue, neither one will be better than the other. They’ll both be part of the same! Some things seem not allowed: to stay depressive, to stay in permanent vacation. Sorry: You have to work!

Thomas Bayrle - Rosario, 2012Thomas Bayrle – Rosario, 2012