Carmageddon

KOREAN ROSARY

In the course of his long career, Bayrle has repeatedly played with serial surface patterns and dealt with the inner lives of machines. Deeply influenced by early travels to China and Korea, he is one of the few Western artists blessed with a genuine understanding of Asian modular production. His work testifies to an unshakeable belief in the miracle of seriality.Though generally associated with industrial production today, seriality has in fact no particularly modern appeal and can easily be traced back to traditional handicrafts such as embroidery or printing techniques.The repetitive motion that drives seriality can also be seen in rituals and religious ceremonies (praying the rosaries in Catholicism or Buddhist mandala painting, for example).According to Bayrle’s work, those two aspects of seriality – endlessly repeated ornament and spiritualization through repetition – are indistinguishable from one another.Anyone who has ever sat in a car while it was raining is familiar with the monotonous sound and equally monotonous movement of the windshield wipers. Sound and movement work in tandem to isolate the world inside from what lies outside. For his piece in “Garden of Learning”, Bayrle has relieved the windscreen wiper linkage “Ssangyong Actyon” of its functional task in order to emphasize its meditative role.While still a machine, it performs as a conductor of sorts, setting the pace for the audience.