Surveillance booth, 1994

Salomon Gessner Memorial, 1793, copper engraving by K.W. Kolbe, 1802

Zelle des Mystagogen

2 June – 30 July 1995
“Platzwechsel” (with Ursula Biemann, Tom Burr, Mark Dion)
Kunsthalle Zurich and Schweizerisches Landesmuseum, Zurich

Kunsthalle Zurich
– “Zelle des Mystagogen,” 1995, concrete, scrap wood, silk, plastic; 98 x 154 x 166 inches; courtesy of Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne / Berlin

Schweizerisches Landesmuseum
(Loggia / Alcove Tower)
– “Betretbare Form,” 1995, granite from the Maggia Valley
– “Panorama” (with Ursula Biemann, Tom Burr, and Mark Dion), 1995, adhesive letters, dimensions variable

In 1995, Bernhard Mendes Bürgi, director of the Kunsthalle Zurich, invited Christian Philipp Müller to exhibit there. Müller integrated three other artists into the exhibition — the Swiss artist Ursula Biemann as well as Americans Tom Burr and Mark Dion — and suggested a site-specific project focusing on Zurich’s “Platzspitz.” The Platzspitz is a central park in Zurich at the confluence of the Limmat and Sihl rivers.

Completely cut off from the city by the railway station and the Landesmuseum, the peninsula attained international notoriety in the nineteen-eighties as the site of the Zurich heroin scene, which subsisted there in a kind of hopeless but undisturbed half-legality.

From its almost utopian role in the tolerant drug policies of the nineteen-eighties, the Platzspitz was increasingly transformed into an island of misery adjoining the city. Finally, in 1992, it was closed and completely rede­veloped. Due to the extensive fencing and surveillance resulting from the redevelopment as well as the regulation of access, the park’s previously utopian character was unable to be preserved. Platzwechsel explored the functions, possibilities, and limits of art in a given social context. Far from being able to intervene in a salutary way, the works of all four artists focused on the connection between the Platzspitz and the adjacent Landesmuseum in relation to the model of a public space under surveillance. Their individual investigations were brought together in the tower oriels of the Landesmuseum (the best observation points for the park), the central loggia of the museum, and the spaces of the Kunsthalle, an industrial building. The Platzspitz was analyzed with regard to its function as a public space from the Middle Ages through the nineteen-nineties, with the work Platzwechsel realized on multiple levels. The artistic explorations served, first of all, to transfer the park to the exhibition spaces, thus focusing attention on it; in addition, the works con­centrated not just on those features of the park foregrounded by the political controversy, but drew aspects of seemingly secondary importance into the center of consideration.

Taking four oriels in a tower of the Landesmuseum as their points of departure, the artists adopted four different positions with regard to the park and the historical museum. Biemann critiqued the ethnocentric principles of Swiss national typology with its subdivision into various regional identities. Burr explored the history of the park from the perspective of gay politics, while Dion analyzed the natural history of the island. Müller established a connection to the park by erecting a platform from which the Platzspitz could be better observed. In the central loggia, whose tripartite arched windows look out over the redeveloped park, the artists installed a collaborative textual work. As a commentary on the view of the freshly planted rose gardens, multi­layered captions on the glass panes in multiple colors and languages related some of the interpretations offered over the course of the centuries as to the significance and function of the park. The four artists met once again in the spaces of the Kunsthalle, where their individual projects were combined into an overall impression. In his installation, Müller brought together significant features of the Platzspitz, thereby undertaking multiple “changes of place” (“Platzwechsel.”) A concrete pedestal identical in size to that of the Salomon Gessner monument[1] at the Platzspitz — a monument characteristic of the idealistic pastoral idyll of the eighteenth century — was installed in the Kunsthalle. The concrete pedestal in the Kunsthalle supported a replica of the guardhouse which, years before, had served for the surveillance of the drug scene on the opposite side of the river. Here, however, the little building was lined in delicate blue silk like a sedan from the eighteenth century and was set into the concrete pedestal in such a way that upon entering it, the visitor descended to the level of the museum floor and was seen as a bust from the outside, framed by the sculpture. “Platzwechsel showed the network of references and meanings woven through this identity, the places, and histories. And thereby they are presented not as something special or essential, but as a function or a process.” (James Meyer)[2]