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Serious Business
John Haberin New York City
Sue Coe and Thomas Bayrle
Political Art and Due Process
Politics is serious business, but then so is art. And Sue Coe and Thomas Bayrle demand that you take them seriously, with lives at stake.
For Coe, that means the terrors of cruelty and war, in the language of the graphic arts. For Bayrle it means the misbegotten pleasures of global capitalism, in the languages of Pop Art and new media. They are dead serious, even in reference to comic strips and Colgate, or even deadly. Where great art can also be playful and provocative, they do not so much ask questions as provide answers. That has kept them somewhat on the margins even after all these years, much as a show on the theme of "Due Process" occupies the margins of the Lower East Side, but you know what? They like it that way. 
This means you
Sue Coe wants her creations to hurt, and why not? So many, she insists, are already hurting—and that means you. If you care enough to attend a nonprofit arts space like MoMA PS1 for "Graphic Resistance," you know the rapacity of Wall Street that takes its gains before it inflicts the pain. You know what it means to lie flat and distended like her live dog and dead bird on paper. You will understand that those creatures stand for the victims, while the represented scraps of newsprint share in the dismemberment. You will recognize, too, the awful creature on the sheet between them as a shark.
So what if she rubs in the pain? Coe is not out solely to awaken old wounds and new outrage. She sure lingers over both, at least for the few on a free "first Sunday" old enough to remember the shark's occasion, the crash of 1987. More, though, her grim reckoning sees many a viewer as not just complicit in the pain, but embracing it. She wants to make the pain inescapable for anyone with the least responsibility for sexism, the AIDS crisis, America's misadventures overseas, its disdain of immigrants and refugees, and cruelty to animals. And that, too, means you.
Born in 1951, Coe runs to cold grays with accents of harsh yellow and blood red, especially for the headlines—as close to comic strips as to early Modernism, expressionism, and the art of World War I. Max Beckmann meets Batman. Too much has the shallow literalism of R. B. Kitaj and her native England, with (speaking of cruelty to animals) enough detail to choke a horse. Yet it can be brutally effective, like the Statue of Liberty shedding its torch. She leaves canvas unstretched, like flayed skin. In the largest works the darkness accumulates, and the rare patch of color cries out.
A painting from the 1980s represents a baboon in no way prepared to donate its heart to a child. This is not the numbness of a patient etherized upon a table. Another, facing it from across the room, represents a gang rape in a bar. Its skeletal victim rises from the pool table with the blood on her lips and the darkness in her eyes. Zombies they are, but zombie formalism or sophistication not. More often, though, Coe visits a slaughterhouse, where the humans have the glasses of a Nazi doctor or the wild enthusiasm of trained killers.
Plainly she is not having much fun, much like Nancy Spero and Gulf War art at the museum coming up, and neither, she hopes, are you. Leon Golub has his utter certainty of right and wrong, with scumbled paint to make looking a visceral experience. Still, his fans admire every gesture—and the very anonymity of his death squads. Coe takes everything personally, and agony never verges on ecstasy, like the African American experience for Arthur Jafa, or irony, as for Adrian Piper. She cannot help giving Ronald Reagan fangs and the slaughterhouse its fire. It is not enough that someone might do the deed without obvious pleasure.
The show includes real and doctored pages from The Times, and some are ahead of their time in Donald J. Trump's America. Still, even the political cartoons have no place for humor, and answers are all well and good, but the questions still matter. A tinkering of Operation Desert Storm into Operation Desert Shame is not designed to elicit a smile. Are so much certainty ridiculous and its division into cartoon heroes and villains worse? Does it help that she revels in a once crime-ridden city, even as she disdains release—and that she uses animals as a metaphor for savagery, even as she calls for animal rights? You may leave with equal certainty that, no, this does not mean you.
Pop goes the computer
Thomas Bayrle could be the ultimate Pop artist. Product packaging and Chairman Mao, in slapdash colors like a silkscreen by Andy Warhol? Check. Cars and airplanes hurtling toward freedom or destruction, on the scale of James Rosenquist, and political leaders as sinister as figures for Richard Lindner—with, just maybe, a nasty bit of sex? Mechanical constructions from repeated elements as coarse as Ben-Day dots for Roy Lichtenstein? Check, check, and check again.
Born in 1937, Bayrle came of age in the thick of things, even without a studio in New York. Like Warhol, too, he had commercial experience (on behalf of McCann Erickson, the ad agency), a studied detachment, forebodings of death, and an obvious pleasure in the corporate identity that he set out to mock. The American dream, for him, encompasses them all. He threw in Bonnie and Clyde and copulation as well, around 1970, because who could make it through those years without taking note of sex? He may not have hit on all that many icons of American consumer culture, but then he was German. His art could not end the day without Super Colgate, to be sure, but also a shot of (yuck) Jägermeister.
Could that explain why you may never have heard of him, before a New Museum retrospective? Bayrle's translation of what the Whitney has dubbed "Sinister Pop" is quintessentially German. It has a determined rigor, the kind that produced his early paintings not from silkscreens but from repeated daubs of color. Later elements range from cars to a Madonna, in a warped grid akin to digital modeling in three dimensions (although he often relied on stretched rubber to create it). It has a sense of humor so earnest that I dare you to call it funny. It has, too, no end of politics and critical theory, all too often at the expense of art.
The curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Helga Christoffersen, call it "Playtime," but it is never just playing around. A poster from 1968 announces (in German) that The Revolution Does Not Die of Lead Poisoning, because "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" could never be pointed enough. Besides, the song by Gil Scott-Heron came two years later, and anyway this revolution will be televised, early and often. Bayrle paints an old TV as Vor-Bildlich (a pun on figurative painting and model), and recent sculpture from used automobile engines recalls Nam June Paik and his stacked TVs. Bayrle is fascinated by mechanical reproduction, from the Jacquard loom and the assembly line to the creation of a modern city, and he continues to build on his early interest in computers and photocopies. He just cannot stop himself from executing the work by hand.
The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction has its High German side, too—from musings by Walter Benjamin on just that right down to another Frankfurt artist, Gerhard Richter. For Benjamin, though, mass reproduction frees art from the burden of uniqueness and the aura of authenticity. For Bayrle, even the mechanical runs wild. It does in anarchic digital videos from the 1990s and in a colorful room at the exhibition's center, with Laughing Cow wallpaper and repeated shoes for the floor. The first dot patterns have the awkwardness of an early video game. More recent grids have the sophistication of computer modeling, but also the Madonna and the cross (with or without Jesus). Older forms of repetition and ritual have their blessings, too.
The exhibition invites one to follow his career backward, descending from the fourth floor. Huge collage and offset prints with their clumsy elements and fine tracery sing the body electric, but also floating skyscrapers and cloverleafs, the iPhone, seemingly armored heads, and religion. A robot with windshield wipers for arms offers a comic but mournful greeting. You may not have heard of Bayrle for reasons other than his nation. As Pop Art goes, he came late to the game, and he could not discover iconic images in no small part because he could not create them. More than a hundred works pass by quickly, because so for him do the consolations of meditation, Marxism-Leninism, art, and life.
In the process of dying
I came home from "Due Process," at Ludlow 38, only to read about the frightening ascent of Germany's far right. In its size, violence, and anger, a mob far exceeded anything in America's alt-right. Where protesters against racism easily shamed a ragtag assortment of white supremacists in Washington just weeks before, the Nazi salutes in Chemnitz, in eastern Germany, outnumbered even the police. And where Donald J. Trump basks in the support, those Germans have turned on a conservative prime minister as she tries to control the anti-immigrant backlash. Still, it sounded all too familiar and all too close. Could that be why the MINI/Goethe-Institut can offer a telling account of injustice in the United States?
Maybe not, for the institute's contemporary arts space and residency program are quite content with the Lower East Side. Its small group show has a single artist from northern Europe, Per-Oskar Leu, but no obvious bridge to Germany's rich cultural history. The nine artists shy away from the overt drama and Romanticism of Wolfgang von Goethe's Sturm und Drang. They also have little doubt about where the police stand—and that is definitely not on the side of human dignity and due process. The show is little more than a late summer popup, opening before Labor Day and running for barely a week. It earns its keep more by the issues that it brings together and in its ways of bringing them home.
It nods to the plight of immigrants, as Jenny Polak works with the emergency exit signs in designs from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In her ICE Escape Sign, there is no way out. And it culminates with a take on police practices from Dread Scott, who creates wanted posters for men guilty of living while black. More often, though, the show focuses on the penal system and those it puts to death or leaves to die. Previous shows here have leaned to a documentary and often dogmatic side of political art. A stencil on the front window still bears the collective title Agency for Legal Imagination. Still, for once the gallery gets visceral.
Here visceral also means personal. Scott's translation of why police sought these men would be comic enough if they did not hit home. An accompanying video of the artist at work has none of the pain or exhilaration of Black Lives Matter for Arthur Jafa. It is also the show's biggest letdown, but at least due process can mean the process of making art, and the tedium is all his. Another view of false arrests skips right past the accused and accuser, in a photo by Taryn Simon, to the site of the incident at an American Legion Outpost. The man alone at the bar, framed by with wood paneling and low-hanging lights, could already be wasting his life away.
The front room approaches capital punishment without the tapestries of Maureen Kelleher, but still life hangs by a thread. Lucky Pierre and Gregory Sale take the point of view of the dying, in grainy video and frankly amateurish sketches. Pierre films desired last meals, while Sale asked prisoners to create obituaries for how they wish to be remembered. I hardly know how they all did it without crying. Jesse Krimes leaves images of the incarcerated in playing cards and small bars of prison soap, where they are already faint. Soon enough, they will be washed away.
Race appears throughout, although only Scott makes it explicit—and even then as just a label. That alone communicates what blackness means to many others. It has one last echo in prints, where it becomes a literal matter of color. Amy Elkins reduces skin tones to a warm range with little hint of black. Adrian Piper has done something similar, but the gradations have the assuring calm of sky studies by Byron Kim as well, in a show with little calm and few assurances. They may bring one closer to color studies by Goethe after all.
Sue Coe ran at MoMA PS1 through September 9, 2018, Thomas Bayrle at the New Museum through September 2, and "Due Process" at Ludlow 38 through September 9.