P.Leisure Industries – a “Tableau Vivant” by Mike Meiré

Performance art, design exhibition, fashion show: the production, to which Mike Meiré extends an invitation on 16 January 2018 in his factory in Cologne-Ehrenfeld, is all of the above – and at the same time none of them. The designer and art director is taking the occasion of the international furniture exhibition imm Cologne to present an unusual and radical homage to the modern world. As part of a one-hour happening, he will be presenting a “tableau vivant” in which the heroes and icons of the Bauhaus movement are stylised into a fashion statement.

Modernity is dead – long live modernity. Almost a century after it was founded in Weimar, the Bauhaus is more present than ever, even more so in light of its upcoming anniversary next year. The reflection on the ideas of the avantgarde has since become an ongoing process, which the sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman has accurately described with the term “liquid modernity”.

But while the founding fathers of the Bauhaus made a rigorous break from traditions, nowadays the desire for radicalism and awakening has developed rather into a permanent state. The ideas and formal vocabulary of the Bauhaus seem like a bottomless well from which can be perpetually drawn on. Mike Meiré, too, refers to the codes of modernity. He turns the artefacts of the avant-garde into props in his “tableau vivant”, whereby he transforms, deforms and distorts them in an act of deconstruction. In doing so, the heroes of modernity are stylised into objects of fetishism. The names of their protagonists and accomplishments – from Dessau and Mies van der Rohe to Wassily – appear as a fashion statement on a t-shirt edition which Mike Meiré is launching under the name “P.Leisure Industries”. As an ironic reference to the entertainment industry, the name hints at the laws of the game of capitalism, which is characterised by the dictate of consumption and of the economy.

Today, the avant-garde’s aspiration to shape everyday life has become one of the most important challenges of our time. This form of aestheticitization and subjectivisation of domination through design provides the negative backdrop for Mike Meiré’s “tableau vivant”. He places in a context of commerce and cultural internationality the ideas of the modern age, which are almost exclusively attributed to the male protagonists and the European culture group. The characters of his “tableau vivant” seem to be living statues amidst a ruinous setting, which Mike Meiré conceives as an allegory of modernity, along the lines of Walter Benjamin.