Cory Arcangel Recovered a Late Artist's Digital Legacy

In 2002, the thirty-five-year-old, Luxembourg-born painter Michel Majerus was on a short flight from Berlin, where he lived, to his native country, when the plane crashed, killing him and nineteen other passengers. With his death, a burgeoning artistic career was cut short. Majerus had been the subject of a solo museum exhibition in Switzerland, in 1996, and he’d created a major installation for the Venice Biennale, in 1999. There would be no more of his innovative œuvre, which included individual painted canvases in addition to room-scale installations smashing together the vocabulary of early digital culture—lo-fi video games, internet-y typefaces—with aggressive brushstrokes and flat planes of color borrowed from Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Majerus’s souped-up Apple PowerBook G3 laptop, however, survived the wreck—at least, the hard drive did. The computer remained with his estate for many years, a relic left untouched. During that time, Majerus’s paintings continued to ... Read full article.