Back to the Future – Michel Majerus’ “TRON“ series

The exhibition “TRON“ curated by Daniel Birnbaum & Jacqui Davies at the Michel Majerus Estate in Berlin does exactly that. It takes us back to the year 1999, in which the artist created his eponymous series of which 10 works are shown now. They all feature the same screen-printed canvas in the upper right or left corner: a cut-off portrait of the Berlin hacker Boris Floricic—pseudonym „Tron“—collaged together with promotional imagery from the Disney Movie “TRON“ (1982). 

Floricic was a big name in Berlin’s hacker scene back then. Closely associated with the Chaos Computer Club, he belonged to those who were at the forefront of the new  world, pushing its limits and negotiating the societal and political questions the new technology brought with it. The movie “Tron“, a pop flick of video game enthusiasm mixed with an undertone of tech scepticism, in which the real world protagonists suddenly find themselves digitised, fighting against personified computer programs, back then represented a milestone in terms of its digital effects. The rest of the 3×3 meter works consists of different monochromatic Pantone color swatches directly painted onto the wall, referencing colours of the video game Tron. Two video interventions by Davies provide necessary context for everybody under the age of thirty—a clip taken from “The Simpsons“, where Homer enters the digital sphere, comparing his experience to the movie Tron and a compilation of excerpts from both the film and the video game.

In a 2006 ArtForum essay, Birnbaum characterised Majerus’s work as ‘painting in the expanded field—or not even painting at all“, referring to his habit of deviating from the classical medium of the rectangular canvas, by for example creating a skate ramp for his exhibition at Kölnischer Kunstverein (2002) or installing a metallic grid as a second floor at Kunsthalle Basel in 1996.

While in his “TRON” series, the works themselves stay in the two-dimensional confines of the space’s walls, in combination with each other they extend into the space, creating a holistic installation. By engulfing the viewer in the larger than life colour fields, Majerus’ series shifts the proportions of the space. Being confronted with this code-like system of colour, I couldn’t help feeling shrunk to nanometer size, suddenly thrown into the workings of one of the countless digital devices mankind has come to rely on.

This shift in proportions, this visualisation of what “the digital“ is actually made out of—the zeros and ones that are needed in sheer unbelievable quantity to create the applications we use—is like a slap in the face, making us aware how far we are detached from the actual workings of the digital world while being so heavily influenced by it. How seriously Majerus must have taken the new technology becomes evident through his references to Tron. While in the movie an AI-like program develops a consciousness and tries overtaking the world, something that remains fiction until this day, in the case of the hacker Tron, the digital already influenced the real world—although the circumstances of his death remain unclear to this day, many suspect a link to his hacking activities.

At the same time, one must not forget the optimism and playfulness of the series and Majerus’ art in general. Yet for all its critical undertone, he never turned away from the newest developments. As if he was trying to say: Progress is unstoppable so we must not miss the opportunity of shaping it. In the movie Tron, when Alan says to a fellow scientist that programs would start thinking soon, the scientist replies “Won’t that be grand, computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop“. This surely wouldn’t have happened to Majerus and his art helps to make sure that it does not happen to us either.