Tim Laun

Wisconsinites bleed Green Bay Packers green and gold, so an exhibition extolling the football team’s legendary quarterback Brett Favre is a foregone curatorial decision for Madison’s contemporary-art venue. The oldest name in the NFL and the only franchise that is publicly owned, the Packers inspirit a fan base that is loyal and devout. Artist Tim Laun is an indisputable Packer devotee, yet his exhibition, comprising five framed lithographs, a thirty-three-foot-long graphic mural, and a large-scale model of a cyclorama accompanied by a digital photograph, deploys a rarified visual vocabulary that is considerably less populist than his home-state subject.

Mimicking the graphic impact of an arena scoreboard, Don Majkowski: Sunday, September 20th, 1992, 2007, depicts a momentous occurrence in the history of the club. A grid of thirty laminated panels documents the lone number 7—quarterback Majkowski—collapsed on the field with a career-ending injury. This athlete’s tragedy is bittersweet, as it ushered in the rookie named Brett Favre and thus launched the Packers’ recent dynasty. This is the exhibition’s most compelling component, as it incorporates many of the spectacular visual tropes that define sports entertainment. The work is also elastic enough to trigger empathy, history, lore, and legend. Stacked on a low, elaborate wooden base, Model for Cyclorama, 2007, assembles hundreds of small plaster televisions into a stadiumlike ring. Each television represents a game that Favre has played. (The show began with 257 sets, but more have been added as the season has progressed.) Although intriguing as minimal sculpture, the model is too abstract and too static to evoke the breadth of Laun’s muse. Fandom is powerful and so are its aesthetic manifestations. Laun’s own home-team pride, never embodied as mere fan gear, is in constant negotiation with the contemporary avant-garde.