Rollenspiel, MDF- Regal, bedruckte Stoffhüte, 210x144,4x30,5 cm, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Schenkung Sammlung Schröder, Hamburg/ Berlin
Tour de Suisse, 1994, Video, 1994 (excerpt, no audio)
Tour de Suisse
4 September – 23 October 1994
Fri-Art Centre d‘Art Contemporain, Fribourg, Switzerland
Preliminary Room:
– “Hutregal,” 1994, 49 hats, labeled, in a shelf made of MDF; Private Collection, Berlin
Exhibition Space:
– Installation: MDF, painted; metal supports, current publications of Swiss cultural institutions, six coat hooks, six hats, wall text, 60 wooden boxes, 35 with completed questionnaires
– Cinema: video projection “Sketch for a Roadmovie,” 150 min., camera: Michel Ritter; table with monitor and video archive of talks with curators
Christian Philipp Müller traveled through Switzerland. In “Tour de Suisse,” the artist, who has worked primarily in the U.S. since 1992, cast a backward glance and investigated 65 Swiss art institutions, developing a working concept — more of a heuristic system than a finished work.
Each of the institutions received a questionnaire, developed in collaboration with Lüneburg sociologist Ulf Wuggenig, with 50 questions regarding their holdings as well as their institutional and financial structure. At the time of the exhibition opening, 35 of them had been filled out and sent back; these were installed by Müller in 60 wooden boxes arranged in a grid, unevaluated and in alphabetical order.Then in the summer of 1994, Müller traveled to each of these 65 institutions as an art tourist, together with Michel Ritter, director of Fri-Art in Fribourg. On this journey, he also appeared in the role of analyst, conducting 25 interviews with directors of the institutions. The result comprises the video “Sketch for a Road Movie” (an excerpt can be found at the bottom of this page).
In the first presentation, which took place in the Fri-Art exhibition space, the current Swiss art landscape was mapped out in terms of its lakes. These orientation points were painted blue; between them, each art institution was marked by a bookstand bearing its publications from the years 1992 to 1994. The height of the metal placeholders marked the altitude of each site above sea level (on a scale of 1000:1), ranging from easily accessible, central locations such as Zurich to remote art outposts in mountainous regions, such as Furkart at the height of the Furka pass. Even before entering the exhibition space, visitors were confronted with their own role within the art establishment. The coat stand was temporarily replaced by a hat rack bearing white caps with seven different inscriptions in German and French: “Artist,” “Critic,” “Spectator,” “Agent,” “Patron,” “Collector,” “Dealer.” In the exhibition, the caps hung on coat hooks on the wall, with four questions next to them: “What role would you like to play? What role do you play? Where do you come from? Where would you like to go?”
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Excerpt from Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller, and Ulf Wuggenig, eds., Games, fights, collaborations: das Spiel von Grenze und Überschreitung, Kunst und Cultural Studies in den 90er Jahren (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1996), 194-195.
A cultural landscape as a model.
“Touring Club” and “Tour de Suisse”
The Kunsthalle in Fribourg, Switzerland and the Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg, Germany invited me at the end of 1993 to participate in the development of site-specific exhibitions. In combining the projects, which spanned a period of four months, and letting them add to each other, I sought to expand the respective local references. I was interested in the status of the relatively new Kunsthalle in Fribourg within the Swiss museum landscape (not least because of my ten-year absence from this national cultural milieu). I both subjectively and objectively tried to create a picture of my own situation and that of the director of the Kunsthalle.
My first step was to conceive a questionnaire that was distributed to all institutions in Switzerland exhibiting contemporary art at least once per year. My methods were influenced by art-sociological studies on Hamburg and Vienna conducted by Ulf Wuggenig and his students in Lüneburg. The detailed questionnaire was prepared in collaboration with Ulf Wuggenig.
I planned to deal with my reservations about analyzing and interpreting this effort in two exhibitions. To supplement the questionnaire project, Michel Ritter, the Fribourg curator, and I visited all the institutions that the questionnaire had been sent to. I was interested in informing myself at each of the respective sites about conditions there. Equipped with an Hl-8 video camera, we went on our ten-day trip in August 1994. I tried to walk through each and every exhibition room for the film, in order to create an apparently unending succession of rooms. I focused on the architecture of the rooms. In the finished, edited film, individual indoor scenes were interrupted by outdoor shots showing the paths from one site to the next. I asked the director of each institution for an interview on camera about the Swiss art and museum landscape. I also compiled catalogs produced over the last two years for the exhibition in Fribourg.
After the trip, the gathered materials of various media were incorporated into a walk-through installation. The architecture of the Fribourg Kunsthalle provided the primary basis for the presentation. I amassed the collected data to examine the impossibility of showing the cultural present in an objective manner. It is only possible to present quantity (how many museums, how many exhibitions, how many visitors, how many catalogs sold, etc.).
At the beginning of the two-week seminar in Lüneburg, I posed the question of purpose and target audience for site-specific projects, and options for transferring them in terms of time and place. We had the packaged relics from the Fribourg version in the exhibition room. How could we transfer this subjective representation of the dense, multilingual Swiss cultural landscape into the context of the university? How could the students' participation in the preparation of the exhibition and the decision-making processes involved be made visible? The question as to the audience, based on the various identification models (artists, critics, viewers, agents, sponsors, collectors, and dealers), was posed at the beginning of the exhibition. The students did not want to add any categories I hats for Lüneburg. Projection of the more than two-hour video of the trip to Switzerland was chosen as the central work, which meant that a wall had to be built in front of existing windows. Two benches were put parallel to the side walls, which supported the perspectival sectioning effect of the wall-filling projection. The real and projected walls merged, opening up the Kunstraum in for countless exhibitions of Swiss institutions. The adjacent wall with sixty wooden crates for the completed questionnaires portrayed the response, that is, the reactions of the contacted institutions. A further analysis did not seem appropriate within the scope of the exhibition and was reserved for a future book project. Valuable groundwork, such as entering all the collected data, was done by the students and displayed as documents on a worktable. A screen and videos of the interviews with the exhibition directors were also available on a table for individuals to delve into the examined material in further detail (if they desired so). A wall chart with markings in different colors depicted year of founding and how the institutions are integrated into the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions of Switzerland. In Lüneburg, the projected exhibitions were contrasted with video prints of the responsible exhibitors in their milieu prepared by students. The postcard format of the prints emphasized the touristic aspect of the entire “Tour de Suisse Project.”
The diverse participation in the exhibition and seminar program of the Kunstraum der Universität Lüneburg allowed the students privileged access to dealing with art that extends far beyond the conventional university scope. Unfortunately, it was not possible to have any sufficiently satisfying discussion on the content of the work within the short period of time available within the scope of the seminar. The very hard-working though reserved students never really questioned either the project itself or the leading role played by the artists.
P.S.
The conception of “Tour de Suisse, Sketch for a Road Movie” was also influenced by Olivier Mosset, who was invited to participate in the opening of the Swiss Institute on Broadway, in New York in November 1994 (prior to the Lüneburg exhibition). For that version, together with architect Ken Saylor, I designed a video pavilion with a slanting roof as a type of shelter for my project.
The representation of Swiss institutions and landscape forms in the United States and Germany never allowed me to forget the touristic background to the perception of this project while filming. The more art historical previous knowledge the viewer had, the more complex and profound the reception of “Tour de Suisse” will be.
Excerpts from a conversation of Christian Philipp Müller with
Christian Bernard, Director of the Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Geneva, on 17 August 1994
Christian Philipp Müller (CPM): How would you define contemporary art?
Christian Bernard (CB): I must begin by telling you that I suggested that the museum in Geneva be called the Museum of Contemporary and Modern Art, and not the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. I stood by this appelation for two years, but it was rejected in the end by the municipal cultural authorities. Although it is not a municipal museum, it is administered in consultation with the city. I accepted the decision, but I am very disappointed. It seemed to me impossible in this day and age to found a museum of modern art in Geneva; that is finished, not the modernity as such, but the possibility of establishing a museum for something called modern art. From a theoretical perspective, too, that would mean dedicating a museum to a closed artistic epoch. Just as, for example, one can no longer establish a museum of the eighteenth century. Mentioning the contemporary before the modern seemed to me to lend more weight to the contemporary. And now I will tell you how I define contemporary art: one can begin with the sixties, providing one acknowledges that a greater change in artistic production took place than, for example, after 1945.
CPM: You have a collection as a basis for the museum. What is the relationship between the permanent collection and the changing exhibitions?
CB: We must speak first of the composition of our collection. Only a small part of it belongs to the museum. Another part is composed of objects from other public museums in Geneva. The greater part is a selection of works from private collections in Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany and the USA, which are on loan to the museum for a period of ten or more years. The sum of the selected works makes up the museum's current collection at any given time. In the initial phase, we shall focus primarily on exhibiting (introducing) the museum. That means showing the concept behind the collection and the stages from idea to realization. I don't think it makes sense to distinguish between the collection and changing exhibitions; only the sum of exhibited works makes the museum what it is.
CPM: How would you situate your institution in relation to Geneva's museums more generally and in the context of your geographical proximity to France?
CB: A museum's radius of activity is not circumscribed by its walls. What counts is where the museum makes an impact on the international scene.
Excerpts from a conversation of Christian Philipp Müller with Ulrich Loock, Director of the Kunsthalle Bern, on 22 August 1994
Christian Philipp Müller (CPM): What role does your location in Berne play for your museum's programming?
Ulrich Loock (UL): No particular role; I like to think that I would organize a similar program if I were running the ICA in Boston or the Kunstverein in Hamburg, or whatever. But I don't mount exhibitions that relate specifically to the Berne standpoint.
CPM: How would you describe the peculiarities of the Swiss art scene in comparison to that in other countries?
UL: This is only speculation, but I would say that a number of Swiss artists have a sort of cautiousness that one doesn't find to the same extent among, say, German artists. A tentativeness, a circumspection that actually prevents them from taking very strong, clear positions, and from making more radical or emphatic artistic statements. That can be negative, but it can also be positive. The positive side can be a sensitivity which also seeks out the niches or unoccupied nooks and crannies of our world, goes there and puts out feelers; Swiss art can also be very much given to testing. On the other hand, it is often a matter of one step forward, two steps back without -- which still fascinates us -- any strong statements being made that might cause controversy. To this extent, Switzerland has rarely produced anything that challenged other artists, and forced them to take notice. Even something like Fischli/Weiss or the like, they create their own field and fill it, but it more or less ends there. What happens in economic life? Switzerland is good, for example, at developing and manufacturing pharmaceuticals and I believe that Switzerland is still quite good in certain areas of precision engineering and the like. Mechanical engineering and clocks and looms and things like that, those are Swiss specialties. But I have the sense, and this is quite a prejudice, that the Swiss mentality isn't so well suited to production, but perhaps better to mediation. The banking business is about mediation. The training in diplomacy and in making compromises, and that at least corresponds to a prejudice, which may have some grain of truth. Art is difficult to reconcile with a mentality of compromise and diplomacy. Mediation is another matter. That is why this is such fertile ground for museums, exhibition halls and so on. People are incredibly open to these things here in Switzerland, there is a mediation machinery but it is not necessarily primarily a mentality conducive to production.