Prologue

Their origins may seem alienating — at least from today’s point-of-view. For what finally galvanized this loose grouping of artists into action, or so they claim, was, of all things, the inglorious collapse of the art market some fifteen years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the first Gulf War. Almost all those present at their hour of birth agreed that it was because of the recession — then especially palpable in New York — that these hitherto marginalized, critical-theoretical artists were suddenly being accorded public space.[1] In an article she wrote for the first issue of Texte zur Kunst, Isabelle Graw even went so far as to quote the following lines from the Frankfurter All­gemeine Zeitung: “By 1500, the once great Republic of Venice was al­­ready in decline… After the defeat of Angadello in 1509, enemy fire was seen even in the city itself. Not only had several banking houses been long since closed, but now, even treasury bonds were tumbling to new lows. That a time of such extreme peril should have coincided with the Golden Age of Venetian painting as manifested in the works of Bellini, Titian, and Giorgione […] is something that comes as no surprise to Renaissance scholars.”[2] This implied a bold equation of Venetian masters with Christian Philipp Müller, Fareed Armaly, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Clegg & Guttmann, Tom Burr and others, young newcomers to the international art scene.

No less programmatic was the periodical Texte zur Kunst itself, which the author launched in collaboration with Stefan Germer with the intention of having a publication devoted exclusively to conceptualist, contextualist, and political art criticism. Just a few years later, in 1993, there were so many exhibitions of contextual art taking place that there was talk of a paradigm shift.[3] In his "Project Unité," at that time a highly regarded project inside Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Firminy, curator Yves Aupetitallot allocated each artist a separate unit with the expectation that this would induce them to engage with their site.[4] Also in 1993, exhibition commissioner Peter Weibel invited the Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub to team up with two other artists of his choosing, namely Andrea Fraser and Christian Philipp Müller, to design a transnational pavilion as the Austrian contribution to the Venice Biennale. The year 1993 also saw Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and Barbara Steiner curating the "Backstage" exhibition at the Ham­­­burger Kunstverein, while Thomas Wulffen’s “Betriebsystem Kunst” edition of Kunstforum International came out one year later. It was again Weibel who was behind an exhibition in Graz called "Kontext Kunst" (Context Art) — the name that would henceforth be used to describe all the aforementioned artists. When the more than 600-page-long catalogue finally appeared, it was intended as a compendium of universal validity, as the group’s manifesto, as it were. Yet, the tome was also symptomatic of Weibel’s tendency to claim this new art as ‘his’ discovery, if not ‘his’ invention — something of which Germer was publicly very critical.[5]

What Weibel had really done was to subsume the most diverse practices under a single label and then, by popularizing the discourse, propagate context art as a, by and large, coherent movement. Context art, in contrast to the deeply regressive image of art of the nineteen-eighties, was understood to be a paradigmatic response, because it returned to the critical tendencies of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, except unlike Hans Haacke’s “Investigations of the Apparatus,” its focus was not on art as an institution.[6] Instead, its institutional criticism was reworked and expanded to embrace an analysis not only of art, but also of society in general. All that these artists had in common, in Weibel’s opinion, was their practice of using research to make the context in which their interventions took place the sole object of their analysis. If Weibel ambitiously undertook to place context art in a cultural historical context, then he did so not just to ensure it was accorded its rightful place in art history, but also to delegate it to art history. The question of how history should judge this ideological co-opting of what was then a new artistic phenomenon and whether the periodical, Texte zur Kunst, or Weibel ultimately had the stronger title seems scarcely relevant to the present discussion. What is relevant, however, is that both promoters clearly had a keen interest in proclaiming the much yearned-for new avant-garde,[7] whose genealogical origins were emphasized by James Meyer much later.[8]

If, as purported at the outset, the alleged link between art and market forces seems alienating to us today, then certainly, it is not because there is any doubt concerning the existence of such a link. The problem is rather that as it has grown from strength to strength. The new avant-garde has, itself, tied its own founding myth to the demise of the art market, and by so doing, made itself a slave of economic determinism. Not only does this determinism from without contradict the autonomic claims made by all avant-garde movements, but it could even be said that it repeats itself in the sufferance of the label “context art.” The so-called recession theory, moreover, implies that such an avant-garde can scarcely hope to be accorded legitimacy in times of economic prosperity — which, in turn, begs the question,[9] “Is criticality, in the final analysis, no more than a temporary concession to the economic system?”

Critical Practice

In view of the fact that Christian Philipp Müller’s artistic practice is also part of this avant-gardistic undertaking, any attempt to present his work in a monographic-retrospective show is liable to appear problematic. Yet if, in the previous paragraph, the talk was of the new avant-garde of the nineteen-nineties, then what this term actually defines is not so much the collaborative context as the discursive framework within which these works should be considered. It might surprise some people to discover how little collaboration there has been among these artists — at least when compared to the projects of the post-conceptualists of the early nineteen-eighties, such as Louise Lawler, Allan McCollum, and Sherrie Levine. Only on rare occasions did Müller team up with fellow artist Fareed Armaly.

What is noticeable, however, is the way some of Müller’s works are echoed in the works of other artists and vice versa, indicating that the premises and self-imposed restrictions of the newly established avant-garde certainly led to some fruitful cross-pollination. It is im­­portant here to define more precisely the exact meaning of the terms ‘collaboration’ and ‘work’ when used in this context. As Müller understands it, artistic work is critical practice that does not, in the first place, generate works that could be read as collaborative. Critical practice does not distinguish between artistic and non-artistic practice any more than it acknowledges any specific roles, limits or hierarchies. It is rather an all-embracing strategy of contemporary act­ivism.[10] For the most part, true to the tradition of ‘feministically’ orien­­ted— post-conceptual art, Müller works on various different levels of cultural production: during the past two years, for example, he has been a member of the Orchard Gallery[11] in New York, an independent gallery founded together with other artists, critics, and curators as a venue not just for exhibitions, but also for discussions and other events. In 1986, and hence early on in his career, Müller also worked as an assistant to Kaspar König at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, and has just recently designed the corporate identity of the U.S. Mica Foundation. He has also made a name for himself as a curator, including of exhibitions such as "Platzwechsel" at the Kunsthalle Zürich and a project devoted to the works of the expressionistic architect Hans Poelzig. Also worthy of mention are his numerous lectures and publications and the meals he has conceived in order to place questions of taste in a systemic art context. Yet, even without listing all his many activities, it is clear that Müller has devoted a lot of time and thought to the exhibition as medium, whether in the capacity of exhibition designer and curator or in the capacity of the artist whose own extremely divaricate and polemical installations are to be exhibited. In both cases, the role Müller assumes is that of the commentator or factographic narrator.[12]

The Exhibition as Medium

Let us briefly recall "A Balancing Act," the work which Christian Philipp Müller produced for documenta X in 1997 and which has been described in great detail both by himself and by George Baker.[13] What Catherine David, as director of documenta X — which incidentally bore the subtitle, "retroperspectiv" — expected of Müller was that he engage with the "7000 Oaks" that Joseph Beuys had created for documenta 7 in 1982, the first tree and basalt column of which can still be seen today on Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz. After Beuys died, his widow and son placed the last pairing alongside "7000 Oaks" at documenta 8 in 1987. Walter De Maria’s "Vertical Earth Kilometer" of 1977 is found in the middle of the same square — which admittedly has shifted slightly owing to the installation of an underground parking lot. For Müller, these two visible relics in the cityscape of Kassel by De Maria and Beuys represent the two poles of twentieth-century art: at the one extreme there is purely autonomic, aestheticizing art and at the other, the art of social conscience. To reconnect these two poles, Müller staged a public performance six weeks prior to the opening, in the course of which he spanned a rope between Beuys’s oak tree and basalt column at one end and De Maria’s "Vertical Earth Kilometer" at the other. Under the guidance of a professional tightrope walker, he then walked up and down this rope, retaining his balance with the aid of a pole, half of which was made of oak and the other half — like De Maria’s "Vertical Earth Kilometer" — of brass. Müller’s archive contains a reworked postcard of the World Trade Center, which is, in fact, a multiple by Beuys. Whereas Beuys appears to transfigure the towers by naming them Cosmos and Damian, Müller’s twin towers represent the two monoliths, Beuys and De Maria. The figure that links the two complexes, of course, is Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who on August 7, 1974, to the amazement of the crowds on the streets below, really did walk a tightrope he had spanned between the twin towers, retaining his balance with the aid of a six-meter-long pole — at least until he was arrested and taken into custody.[14]

Finally, at documenta X, there was an installation by Müller, the central axis of which took the form of a six-meter-long pole with historical documents of relevance to Beuys’s "7000 Oaks" on one side and documents and photographs of relevance to De Maria on the other — all of them meticulously labeled. Positioned on the same axis as the pole was a video screen showing Müller’s performance and opposite it a window the artist himself had knocked in the wall to afford a view of Friedrichsplatz. This window was flanked on either side by photographs of the dramatic changes the square had undergone during the two World Wars. Of interest to us here, however, is not the specific geographical site of this work, but rather the question of how Müller’s work presents itself as an interweaving of various points. By presenting contradictory positions as equally legitimate, he visualizes their dialectical interdependence, it being the difference between them that makes first, one and then the other, come alive. The view through the reopened window is literally framed by its historical context, while the central positioning of the pole on a plinth of the kind used by De Maria resembles a display. What the ephemerality of Müller’s exhibition within an exhibition exposes, above all else, are the relational structures on the theme of the work that are latent within it.

The U.S. artists’ collective Group Material (1979–97) spent almost twenty years theorizing the exhibition as medium and vehicle for the communication of information and, in so doing, described it as an empirical system whose specific narration bears the stamp of symbolic and ideological organization. The artist Julie Ault, a member of Group Material for many years, compared the exhibition per se with the display of merchandise. She highlighted those relational interpretations of the same, not only shape content, but also, actually constitute content.[15] The reflections of Group Material were formative for artists like Müller. At first glance, this seems to apply primarily to Müller’s complex installations, such as his "Forgotten Future" of 1993, in which he associates diverse discursive complexes with historical strands of information — although the same could also be said of his contribution to documenta, which, after all, was model-like staged. In A Balancing Act, Müller ironically takes up one of classical modernism’s typical allegories to expose himself — on a tightrope spanned on the ground, and hence, far removed from all risk of injury or failure — through his teacher to a process of professionalization. Müller’s interest in this act has less to do with its potential as an allegorical description of his own role as an artist than with the way in which the figure of the tightrope walker is able to bring together the very different complexes of Beuys and De Maria, which despite their geographical proximity do not in fact have anything in common. The figure of the tightrope walker literally straddles the discourse, delivering a performance that contributes to the constitution of meaning. It follows that Müller’s staged argumentational installations can never be read as entities, for what the addition of active performance makes clear is that meaning is conceivable only as something temporary and provisional. Furthermore, it is, above all, the explicitly model quality or divaricate nature of the installation that exhibits the exhibition, rendering it, at last, visible. Instead of analyzing the institutional parameters, what Müller does is to analyze that very process that opens up spaces for action within which the uses and ends of the means of exhibiting can be renegotiated.[16]

A Dialectical Process

As is clear from "A Balancing Act," the figure of the tightrope walker plays a crucial role in the constitution of meaning. It follows that the performing subject does not, of itself, generate meaning, but rather occupies the gray area between two different discourses in a predefined dispositive. One consequence of this is that context cannot be the sole object of analysis: Such an assumption, being an attempt to pre-empt the postmodernist paranoia of subjectivity with its reduction of research to something purely objectifiable, would constitute a radical and excessively reductive misreading of artists such as Christian Philipp Müller.

If Müller was described above as a factographic narrator, it is only because his works can be perceived as palimpsest-like accretions of layer upon layer of incontrovertible facts from the past, present, and future. In his early guided tours of Düsseldorf’s Hellerhof in 1986, for example, he compared a rococo garden with a new housing estate, while in the screen prints made at the University of Lüneburg, as part of his "Branding the Campus" project of 1998, he superimposed dissimilar campuses one on top of the other. In "Eine Welt für sich," a project about the Freihaus district of Vienna completed in 1999, Müller even went so far as to incorporate rumors into his work, so that his reconstruction of local history — with a wealth of detail that puts it on a par with the nouveau roman — was, in fact, riddled with fictionality. In my view, of central importance is that all these works are, ultimately less focused on the normative context that shapes the end result than on the comparing subject. This explains why the intervening artist-subject must not, under any circumstances, be disavowed, even if subjectivity is not so much a known quantity as a dialectical process for the conditions of context. The artist-subject resonates like feedback and, as a result, leaves its mark in what is essentially this dialectical process, on the site of his work. The basic plot is a given, which means that Müller acts not as an author, but as an ordering narrator. The point here is not to claim authorship for Müller’s interventions, but to make it clear that the crux of his works is first and foremost his own biography with its own distinct historical, cultural, sexual, and racial marks.

In the "Forgotten Future" exhibition of 1993, Müller forged a link between Le Corbusier, Edgard Varèse, and Nicolas Schöffer, three very different representatives of late modernist utopianism, who for Müller, born in 1957, might well have been influential. Also worth noting is that, it was of all things, Veit Harlan’s homophobic movies that enabled him to address his own sexual biography. For this reason, one is almost inclined to describe Müller’s work as critical self-presentation — especially in view of his frequent use of the strategy of travesty (as when he crosses the border into Austria disguised as a tourist, wanders aimlessly through the underpasses of Hamburg in the guise of Monsieur Muller or, in the role of an overly zealous tour guide, airs his views on Hans Poelzig’s buildings in Berlin). At times very amusing, this dimension of his work is apparent in his latest project for Basel, which is a site-specific dialogue involving three separate institutions, namely the Swiss Paper Mill, the plug.in Forum for New Media and the nearby Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel. As an overture to this retrospective show, Müller erected in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel an installation that alludes to the paper factory, the old part of the building once housed. At the same time, he outlines a developmental history of the media that reads very much like a critique of the idea of progress that is so central to modernism. Hanging amid the documents and objects that make up this installation is Müller’s own Gautschbrief, a medieval printer’s and typesetter’s diploma reminiscent of the professional qualifications one might see displayed in the foyer of a hairdressing salon or law firm. What this does, on the one hand, is to raise the question of context-specific rules, and on the other, to provide a signature in the form of a certificate of authenticity. This work, in other words, is certainly not merely the product of the conditions of context, but rather pits against these a historically determined artist-subject that is constantly reconstituting, yet is still able to shed light on the institutional, historical, and social site in all its complexity.

Notes

1. Martin Beck, “Theorie der Praxis und Praxis der Theorie,” in Texte zur Kunst 9 (1993), pp. 128–34, here p. 128.

2. Dirk Schümer, writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (August 29, 1990), quoted by Isabelle Graw, “Jugend forscht (Armaly, Dion, Fraser, Müller),” in Texte zur Kunst 1 (1990), pp. 163–175, here p. 163. It should be stressed that Christian Philipp Müller was involved in the conception and design of the new magazine.

3. Holger Kube Ventura, Politische Kunst Begriffe in den 1990er Jahren im deutsch-sprachigen Raum (Vienna, 2002), p. 69. For another, no less informative publication on the reassessment of contextual art, see Zusammenhänge herstellen / Contextualize, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Cologne, 2003).

4. See Hal Foster’s critique of the "Project Unité": “The Artist as Ethnographer,” in The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 171–203.

5. Stefan Germer, “Unter Geiern. Kontext-Kunst im Kontext,” in Texte zur Kunst 19 (1995), pp. 83–95.

6. Peter Weibel, “Kontextkunst. Zur sozialen Konstruktion von Kunst,” in Kontext Kunst, ed. Peter Weibel (Cologne, 1994), pp. 1–68, here p. 19 ff.

7. Ibid., p. 84.

8. James Meyer, “Das Schicksal der Avantgarde,” in Agenda. Perspektiven politi­scher Kunst, ed. Christian Kravagna (Vienna, 2000), pp. 70–92, here p. 82. As early as the mid-nineteen-nineties, however, Stefan Germer pointed out that merging the various contextual practices had exposed the differences between them rather than what they had in common, and that artistic production had, in any case, been fragmented right from the start. Germer, 1995 (see note 5), p. 83 f.

9. See also Jan Verwoert, “Die Neunziger: Wie es wirklich war (?),” in Dziewior, 2003 (see note 3), pp. 113–119, here p. 114.

10. James Meyer, “Was geschah mit der institutionellen Kritik?” in Weibel, 1994 (see note 6), here pp. 243 ff.

11. www.orchard47.org.

12. George Baker describes Christian Philipp Müller’s work as being in a “factographic tradition.” See his “Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics. The Art of Christian Philipp Müller,” in Artforum (February 1997), pp. 74–77, 109, here p. 76.

13. George Baker and Christian Philipp Müller, “A Balancing Act,” in October 82 (Fall 1997), pp. 95–118.

14. Philippe Petit, To Reach the Clouds, My High Wire Walk between the Twin Towers (London, 2003).

15. Julie Ault, “Ausstellung: Unterhaltung, Praxis, Plattform,” in Agenda. Perspektiven kritischer Kunst, ed. Christian Kravagna (Vienna, 2000), pp. 160–185.

16. Beatrice von Bismarck, “Gestures of Exhibiting,” in Afterall 10 (2004), pp. 3–8, here p. 8.