"Never, on our journey of one hundred and seventy years or so, have our horizons been broader and our prospects more promising."[1]
— Michael Ringier, 2000

"I always try to avoid having my works relate only to art itself."[2]
— Christian Philipp Müller, 2001

In the spring of 2000, employees of Ringier AG, Switzerland's largest publishing company, received their 1999 annual report in the form of a glossy, fifty-page publication. With its smartly designed layout and high-quality photographs of the corporation's operations throughout the world, the report more resembled an illustrated mail-order catalogue than a financial summary. Fully three-quarters of the front cover features an image of a deliveryman in a red car brimming with bound newspapers. The word "VOYAGE" runs across the top band of the cover in large embossed letters. The deliveryman thus assumes the identity of a Mercury-like figure, disseminating news throughout the world. Three women seated on a bench and wearing traditional dirndl folk costumes are represented on the back cover. Next to them is a smiling, bespectacled man dressed in a blue denim jacket, running shoes, and a baseball cap — the caption reads "Christian Philipp Müller having fun in Slovakia." Below, in nine different languages, a paragraph explains that Müller, "a Swiss artist who lives abroad," was commissioned to "tour the countries in which Ringier has business interests and produce a visual and written record of his impressions."[3] The publication consists of actuarial tables, annual statistics, and financial information on the corporation's global enterprise interspersed with photographs taken by Müller of Ringier's products (e.g., newspapers, magazines, cable television), employees, and the cities and countries within which the multinational corporation conducts business. Though more liberally illustrated than most financial reports, "Voyage: Ringier Annual Report" (1999) (henceforth "Ringier Annual Report") fulfills its role as an end-of-the-year summary. Yet, it plays a double game — at once a corporate document and a vehicle for actualizing the artist's project; a commercial commission and a critical artwork.[4]

The blurred, dual nature of the "Ringier Annual Report" questions the field of aesthetic production and reception in an era when corporations freely cross the borders of cultural institutions.[5] No longer providing any form of autonomy from the forces of economic power, the field becomes completely porous and perfunctory, subservient to the demands of the market.[6] Müller's double game, however, reveals an awareness of this problematic. As he puts it in a description of the Ringier project: "Not to become totally instrumentalized by commissions is not always easy and strategies have to be changed constantly.”[7] This bind, namely how to maintain a respectable level of artistic integrity in an era of unprecedented corporatization of all hitherto relatively autonomous fields, permeates deep into the layers of cultural practice. But this is by no means to suggest that Müller is the first artist whose work problematizes the perimeters of the restricted field in which it operates. The recognition that an art object's legibility, value, substance, and meaning is intricately dependent upon the institutional framework within which it is presented has been largely inescapable since 1917 when Marcel Duchamp (pseudonymously) exhibited a urinal on a sculptural base in the context of a non-juried show in New York. As with Duchamp, Müller strains the mythical and ideological codes of the institution of art in their present formation to the point where they begin to reveal their constructed nature; his projects unfold as critique. However, the younger artist's critique goes one important step further than the Duchamp legacy insofar as the nature of his critique is no longer confined to the field of artistic production and reception.

Müller's investigation of the perimeters of fields also characterizes "Green Border," produced in 1993 when the artist participated as a representative of the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In the months prior to the exhibition, he assumed the disguise of a hiker and (accompanied by a photographer) set out from Austria to cross the border illegally into the country's eight neighboring nation-states. Following each crossing, he took notes on what he discerned would be the most advantageous costume and accessories with which to traverse the boundary line between the states fluidly and unobserved.[8] These disguises were all based on national cliches. Thus, to pass into Diepoldsau, Switzerland, which entailed navigating through a stream, the artist proposed thigh-high waders and an angling kit; to enter Liechtenstein, a horse and riding gear; and to step over into Alsoszölnök, Hungary, a clog on a leash.[9] "Green Border" thus problematizes the relationship of territorial borders and the performance of identity. It presents the field of national identity as dependent on the repeated reproduction of handed down cultural myths. The willing participation in these traditions, the project further implies, contributes to the upholding and fueling of exclusionary principles that lie at the base of nationalism.[10]

Yet, while Müller's transgressions were not registered by the border officials within the particular field in which they were performed, they are easily detectable from the field of artistic production. In this sense, "Green Border" inevitably recalls Gordon Matta-Clark's "Reality Properties" (1973-1974). For this project, Matta-Clark purchased fifteen odd bits of real estate in the New York City boroughs of Queens and Staten Island for prices ranging from $35 to $75. These properties, left-over microparcels of land from an architect's drawing, were minute irregularly shaped plots between buildings and lots. Some of the strips of real estate are no larger than three feet square; others are a foot wide and three hundred feet long, others run along the edge of a street, while yet others are completely landlocked and inaccessible. All were documented by Matta-Clark with black-and-white photographs, and the latter were collaged sequentially. To these photocollages, Matta-Clark attached the title deed with his name and a topographical city plan of the location, thus presenting them as works of conceptual art.[11] As with Matta-Clark's "Reality Properties," Müller's border-crossing antics operate to highlight and problematize the complex network of socially, politically, and economically constructed seams that demarcate territory. In turn, the unitary ideal of a nation-state that is conventionally taken for granted and unquestioned is pried open by Müller and made strange and unfamiliar. The work is troubling: the coherence we assume in the fabric of the field is missing, or else strangely present with an insistence that disturbs, deriding the logical order it ought to have. In its emphasis on the limits and internal contradictions of a field, "Green Border" prompts us to consider fields as constructs that blur differences in favor of an abstract whole and opens up the possibilities of fluidity and change. However, Müller's project couples the type of cuts into geographical space that link it to "Reality Properties" with further incisions into the seamless form of more virtual spaces, such as the fields of national and cultural identity. The latter, in turn, are fundamentally disrupted.

Müller’s "Eine Welt für Sich. Ein Projekt rund ums Freihaus in Wien" (A World of its Own, A Project Around the Freihaus in Vienna, 1999), took the investigation of the field of national identity beyond the Austrian border deep into the center of the nation. For this project, the artist focused in particular on a small, close-knit district (Bezirk) in downtown Vienna (the city's Fourth District) and reconstructed with documentary exactness the history and current composition of the residents. Müller infiltrated the local community so thoroughly that many of the inhabitants posed for photographs and agreed to discuss their pride in the neighborhood on tape. The resulting oral testimonies and narratives are fascinating: some unabashedly describe the prewar Jüdischegeschäftsleute or the postwar Russian occupation, while others romanticize the present Austrian law that guarantees each citizen the right to a room with a view.[12] Müller's audiovisual installation was first exhibited in a long-unused room behind a cafe in the Freihaus district.[13] Made up of an archive of interviews and photographs, it subtly captured the tone (Stimmung) of the neighborhood and mapped the remarkably durable structure of dispositions, complete with an incorporated set of practical taxonomies, by which its denizens operate.

The featured participants in "Eine Welt für Sich" are identified by their names and professions (the range of the latter as diverse as artist, hairstylist, professor, florist, sauerkraut merchant, and museum director).[14] What unites them is their connection to the Freihaus district — a connection established through residence or business. While the photographs contribute to the cultural mapping, the oral histories of the district compiled by Müller are the project’s central element. As Astrid Wege observes in the short exhibition catalogue accompanying the project, the neighborhood emerges as "an intricate weave of diverging situations, as an amalgam of fictions, projections and facts that all together appear as reality.”[15] The result is a strongly referential project that at once explores how identity and subjectivity are fixed to geographical and often architectural sites and how certain districts are imbued with cultural, historical, and political connotations that are reproduced (consciously or otherwise) by the habits of the current residents. "Eine Welt für Sich" thus points to the cultural unconscious of a neighborhood that can transfer across internal, psychic borders, mythical identity to its future subjects. By seeking out a cross section of three generations of interviewees, Müller allows memories of historical sites (e.g., the location where Mozart composed the Magic Flute or the building that housed the first communist newspaper, Volkstimme) to surface alongside popular anecdotes of the district's past (e.g., the nightlife revolving around the Wurlitzer jukeboxes in the 1950s or the shooting of My Fair Lady in the 1960s). Though merely spectral, the effect of recollections of the past on the composition of the district and its present (psychic) borderlines is as powerful as current residences and businesses (such as an art cinema or an exhibition space). The internalized taxonomies that together compose the naturalized identity field in this neighborhood are reproduced and transferred across time through architecture as much as through language and social practices.

Both "Green Border" and "Eine Welt für Sich" investigate the overdetermining power of the fields of national and regional identity on the construction of subjectivity. The two projects explore the manner in which conventional codes within the confines of these fields make whole what is actually multiply fragmented. Rather than essential, individual subjectivity and identity are better characterized as processes that give form to the chaos of nature and society. At the same time, Müller's "Austrian" projects draw attention to the symbolic violence within these fields. By hypostatizing constructs such as "Heimat" or "Kultur" that have falsely achieved a status beyond politics, they problematize the ideological and mythical nature of contingent concepts and values put forth in such a way that they cannot be questioned. The symbolic violence is located in the naturalization of these concepts and the concomitant requirement that they be upheld. Here the dual nature of Müller's artistic strategy once again reveals itself. For by exaggerating one facet of the representation, its dialectical opposite, like a return of the repressed, is also evoked.

Müller's is thus an immanent rather than activist critique. But the restricted fields he chooses to infiltrate are structures already naively assumed to be separate from the processes of abstract rationalization that govern the everyday. This includes fields devoted to advanced education, such as the university, which, like nations and neighborhoods, also functions according to processes and dispositions naturalized over time. Historically, one of the fundamental tenets of the university as theorized by Alexander von Humboldt in the nineteenth century was its function as a site for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The ideal university was the economic world reversed. The fundamental law of this specific universe, that is of disinterestedness — which establishes a negative correlation between financial success and properly educational value — is the inverse of the law of economic exchange. But as with the field of artistic and, more generally, cultural production, economic forces have increasingly made themselves felt in the field of higher education through diminishing government support and the growing importance of fundraising in the private sector.[16] From the pressing need to matriculate larger numbers of students faster than ever before, to corporate sponsorship in the form of endowed chairs, programs, research, and facilities, the nineteenth-century university as an integral institution of the bourgeois public sphere devoted solely to the pursuit of knowledge has dramatically changed. This earlier ideal is also at odds with the growing pressure placed on students to convert educational into economic capital. As a result, today's curriculum is highly instrumentalized and increasingly caters to the student as consumer.[17] Terms such as accountability, numbers, and viability are used by administrators and boards of educators to threaten programs and courses that are not fully enrolled. The acquisition of knowledge within the increasingly corporatized university system is in turn transformed into the consumption of information. Just as the Freihaus district promotes itself as typically "Viennese," and therefore a crucial tourist attraction of Vienna, the field of the university is now in a position of advertising a product: namely, advanced education.

This was one of the themes Müller took up in 1996 when he was invited to participate in the NILEG-sponsored "Kunst am Bau" project at the newly relocated Universität Lüneburg.[18] The resulting two-part work spanned over four years. Part one, "The Campus as a Work of Art" (1996-1998) consisted of a series of silk-screen prints of the master plan of the campus of Universität Lüneburg superimposed over those of a hundred different universities, including Harvard, Mount Holyoke, UCLA, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and others.[19] In each instance, the point of convergence of the two plans (Lüneburg's and that of each of the other universities) was the location of the library. Once considered to be the most important component of institutions of higher education, the library traditionally occupied a geographically central location. "The Campus as a Work of Art" sought in part to determine the extent to which the library still remained the symbolic heart of the campus map.[20]

Müller initiated the project with an examination of Thomas Jefferson's model for the University of Virginia, which Jefferson, in 1817, designed so as to replace the centrality of the campus chapel or church with a library.[21] The artist then turned to Lüneburg and charted how the relocation of the library to the perimeter of the campus in the previous decade revealed an overall change in the University's emphases and priorities. Indeed, the second part of the project, "Prototypes Department" (1998), focuses on the shift in the center of power away from the library and toward the for-profit university gift shop, which sells "campus culture" in the form of university products (often associated with sports teams), such as sweatshirts, coffee mugs, jewelry, calendars, and the like.[22] These items have little to do with the educational mission of the university and more with fundraising and constructing a mythical identity. What they all have in common is an identifying symbol or logo (parallel to costumes and emblematic traditions that construct national identity) that affiliates them with the university. Just as the campus store replaces the centrality of the library, corporate-type logos (often related to mascots) replace the traditional "academic" seals of the university (which were often in Latin). Müller's "Prototypes Department" thus reflects on the increasing corporatization of the field of advanced education and the growing ascendancy of its for-profit sectors.

Selected by NILEG to work on these two projects over two years, Müller persuaded the University administration to allow him to co-teach a seminar. Significantly, this also permitted him to enter into the system, work directly with students, and fully immerse himself in campus life. Accordingly, he was in a position to discern the nuances in various programs and fields of study (such as which were more prestigious, how various disciplines marketed themselves or "attracted" students, and the like). The students in the seminar collaborated with Müller on the designs for the "Prototypes Department;" these consisted of two hundred university and college logos for Lüneburg. Each design employed a different typeface and layout to connote a distinct image for the university and the project as a whole was meant to appeal to as broad a constituency as possible. The aim of this process of "individualizing" curricular offerings through the use of a variety of logos was ultimately to mask the actual standardization of education and the increased corporatization of the university. As such, Müller's project points to how the logo becomes a false signpost signaling difference where none in fact exists.[23]

The dramatic transformations taking place within the context of the field of advanced education were acutely felt at Lüneburg, which was in the process of being radically reconfigured both conceptually (from a teacher's college to a major university) and geographically (a move to a new site). What may have been understated or hidden at a small, private, elite college was more conspicuous at the new Lüneburg, which had neither a reputation to adhere to nor a tradition to uphold. In addition, the Lüneburg model presented within the short history of its buildings a direct commentary on Germany since 1933. The teacher's college, initially opened as a group of unconnected buildings throughout the city in 1946, was one of ten institutions that were created in the immediate postwar period for the denazification-—through a process of reeducation — of existing schoolteachers and the training of new ones. The move in the 1990s to what were former West German army barracks whose function had been to house the border patrols who monitored the East/West divide provides a comment on Germany's postwar history as a split nation. The fact that the barracks were initially built in the thirties further evokes the legacy of the Third Reich on Lüneburg. Hence the transformation of Lüneburg from a military space to a site of surveillance and finally to a university is rich in the correlations it draws between architecture and power over time. Of course, the attempt to eradicate unwanted memories and unsavory histories is yet another function of a new logo. Rather than erasing the past, however, Müller's projects serve to underscore the growing overlap between the parameters of military institutions based on conformity and massification and a university on which the same principles are increasingly operative.

Once again, then, Müller interferes with the habitual perception of a field; turning around and reclaiming lost traces of structural layering by rupturing that field's present all-encompassing wholeness and revealing its highly contradictory nature. Like a surgeon with a scalpel, he cuts away the layers or strata that delineate the field of advanced education and exposes what extends beneath the surface. This practice of not only lateral and vertical but also synchronic and diachronic border crossing results in a number of vivid, demystifying projects that rekindle the residual legacy of twentieth-century practices of avant-garde agitation. Yet whereas John Heartfield and other photomontage artists in the 1920s and 1930s or the artistic front of the Situationists in the 1950s and 1960s devised agitprop strategies to subvert the official culture and dominant ideologies, Müller does not invent new forms of public communication. Rather, he works within already well-established practices of site specificity and institutional critique developed in the late 1960s and refined in subsequent decades that remain largely confined to the parameters of the art world. As with Daniel Buren's installations of standard vertical bars on canvas, Michael Asher's architectural interventions, and Marcel Broodthaers's museum fictions, Müller's projects problematize the present condition of the site and context in which they take form. But the younger artist's focus is significantly broader than early institutional critique's exclusive concentration on the material and ideological parameters of the container of art, encompassing a panoply of different fields, in particular their increasing overlap in the late twentieth century. Significantly, though, Müller's projects have consistently imagined the gallery or museum context as their inevitable site of exhibition.

It is in this sense that the "Ringier Annual Report" represents an important shift in Müller's artistic practice. Due to the very nature of the commission, the "Report" is no longer dependent on the traditional sites of display. Furthermore, on the surface at least, it has a very specific function serving the particular interests of the corporation. For one thing, it operates as a form of advertising by alternate means. In this exchange Ringier trades financial capital for the symbolic capital offered by Müller. The aim is to win over public opinion. Of course, the corporation would emphatically reject the notion that its commission of Müller had anything to do with marketing, just as it would the possibility that the work produced by the artist on its behalf was of genuine concern for regional and national particularities.

Through his travel notes and photographs for the "Ringier Annual Report," Müller subtly underscores that corporations, like nations, neighborhood communities, and universities, are by their very nature laden not only with official but also unofficial borders and histories that become apparent when one reads between the lines. This is something to which the artist alludes when he summons both the history of a divided Germany and a Cold War communist pact as he notes that most of the German speaking Vietnamese he encountered when visiting Vietnam for the Ringier commission had been educated in East Germany.[26] Also telling is the artist's recollection of an experience in Vietnam worthy of a Graham Greene episode: "I was asked to have dinner with the Swiss Ambassador, his wife, and their children Aline and Gregory. I also met their pet monkey Julie. The wines served at their colonial residence were Fendant and Dole from Switzerland."[27] As with the mobilization of national cliches in "Green Border," Müller's hyperbolic description makes us more than usually aware of its performative nature. But once again it is not merely an ironic gesture; it is also a critique of the corporation's self-presentation as a benevolent champion of heterogeneity. For such descriptions reveal that under the corporation's facade of regional markers, the structures of colonialism still flourish, as politics and corporate business are inextricably linked to the benefit of Western interests. Indeed, here we might recall the photograph used in the advertisement campaign for the Austrian pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, and also featured on the back cover of the catalogue supplementing Austria's contribution to the exhibition. It features Müller, accompanied by the two other artists representing Austria at the 1993 Venice Biennale, sitting in a traditional Gasthof dressed in Tracht.[28] Müller even goes so far as to don a pair of lederhosen.[29] He and the others thus conspicuously perform a mythical Austrian identity that has circulated widely in the cultural imaginary — filled with quaint mountain guesthouses and peopled with characters that might have walked off the set of the "Sound of Music" — and imply that these features allow the bearer of that identity certain privileges and rights not available to outsiders. Taking "Green Border"'s emphasis on the role of performativity in the construction of identity one step further, Müller's "Ringier Annual Report" project underscores the multinational's awareness of the strategic importance of mustering regional and national identities. For there is nothing decidedly "Swiss" in the mass media products it circulates globally. The overarching principle, after all, is financial gain.[30]

In the late twentieth century the proliferation of multinational corporations and the omnipresence of electronic communications systems have enabled the flow of capital to transcend materiality and to take place virtually across a broad spectrum of fields. Müller's "Ringier Annual Report," however, exposes the degree to which high finance is still dependent on camouflage as an operative principle. Lest the complete process of abstraction and the de-territorializing aspects of capital make people nervous, savvy multinationals such as Ringier have increased the prevalence of regional or national markers in their marketing and publicity campaigns. But the ostensiveness with which Müller renders these carefully crafted particularities, which operate to mobilize false regional and national identities and disguise the homogenizing process of globalization, highlights their ideological nature. Indeed, perhaps more than anything else, the Ringier Annual Report makes unambiguously plain the insidiousness of corporate attempts to give the appearance of individuality and difference where none in fact exists. By turning the "Report" against the corporation's ideological program, Müller reveals with astonishing clarity not only the shrewd rationale that lies beneath the surface, but, even more poignantly, the utter bankruptcy of instrumentalized language and administered imagery in the service of the accumulation of profit.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Christopher Davey, Branden W. Joseph, and especially Nora M. Alter for their editorial advice in the preparation of this article.

Notes

1. Michael Ringier, in Voyage: Ringier Annual Report, 1999 (Zurich: Ringier AG, Communication, 2000), 8.

2. Christian Philip Müller, in Beatrice Von Bismark, "Relocating The University: An Interview with Christian Philipp Müller," Branding the Campus: Art, Architecture, Design, Politics of Identity, ed. Beatrice Von Bismark et al. (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2001), 11.

3. The languages include German, English, French, Romanian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovakian, Cantonese, and Vietnamese.

4. Müller has produced similar graphic work on two previous occasions: in 1999 he designed the logo for The MICA Foundation; and in 1992 he designed the cover for Texte zur Kunst, No. 5. See George Baker, "Drawing in the Space of Graphic Design: Christian Philipp Müller's Work on Paper," The MICA Foundation Newsletter (spring/summer 2000).

5. By "field" I mean what Pierre Bourdieu defines as a separate social universe having its own laws of functioning, its specific relations of force, its dominants and dominated, independent of those of politics and the economy. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 162-163.

6. Of course, market determinations on cultural production have always played a vital role. However, I am arguing that in an era of advanced capitalism, the partnership between corporations and culture has reached an unprecedented degree of collaboration.

7. Christian Phillip Müller, Project Description, "A Sense of Place," May 2000.

8. Müller documented these border crossings with photographs and picture postcards from the frontier. Inescapably evocative of the 1960s postal card work of On Kawara. Müller's cards were mailed to several of his dealers announcing that he had just crossed another boundary. My account of this work is indebted to James Meyer, "The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site Specificity," in Platzwechsel: Ursula Biemann, Tom Burr. Mark Dion, Christian Philipp Müller (Zurich: Kunsthalle Zurich, 1995), republished in an expanded version in Erika Suderburg, ed., Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art (Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 23-37, esp. 28.

9. Needless to say, Müller's Western European heritage also played a factor in his relatively easy border crossings. In stark contrast, John Berger and Jean Mohr's 1975 scathing photojournalist work, "A Seventh Man," details the routine humiliation and degradation encountered by migrant workers from "underdeveloped countries" in Western Europe. See John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Seventh Man: A Book of Images and Words about the Experience of Migrant Workers in Europe (London: Penguin. 1975).

10. In Venice, Müller installed "Green Border" in Austria's "forgotten" pavilion garden, within which he located eight potted trees. Each of the trees came from one of the eight border regions into which he had successfully crossed without the proper documentation: Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia. Müller also dismantled the wall surrounding the garden so that the line between the Austrian pavilion and the "territories" represented by the pavilions of other nations was easier to cross. Included in the installation was a brief description, in the format of what one would find in a tour guide for outdoor enthusiasts and hikers, of the most advantageous way to carry out each of these crossings. Thus, for instance, to enter into Liechtenstein ("Level of Difficulty: No real danger") Müller recommends taking a train from Vienna to Feldkirch (seven hours forty-five minutes), a bus from Feldkirch to Bangs (fifteen minutes), followed by a forty-five minute walk to the border. Under the official category of "camouflage," he recommends a riding kit and horse and cautions that "Large cultivated fields offer little protection from view, making it not so easy to enter the village of Ruggell unseen." Also included in the installation were mounted reproductions of nineteenth-century etchings and descriptive entries from guidebooks of individual towns. See Christian Phillip Müller, Austrian Contribution to the 45th Biennale of Venice 1993 (Vienna: bei den Künstlern, Autoren und dem Kommissär, 1993).

11. See "Reality Properties: Fake Estates" (1973), in Corinne Diserens and Nuria Enguita, Gordon Matta-Clark (Marseille: Musees de Marseille, 1993), 183-189.

12. "Everyone in Austria has by law…a right to a window, which means a right to a view. For lack of a beautiful view, no offices could be built here and so the Generali dedicated this house to art." Sabine Breitwieser, from the project "Eine Welt für Sich," as cited by Brigitte Huck, "From Papageno to Preludin-Charly: On Christian Philipp Müller's Project around the Freihaus in Vienna,’’ in Eine Welt für Sich: Ein Projekt run ums Freihaus in Wien, ed. Christian Philipp Müller (Vienna: Verein Freihausviertel, 1999), 43.

13. As one observer described the abandoned room: "The site, once a storage for Austrian wines, either stood vacant for several years, or was used only sporadically in the past; its last tenant being the Austrian Postal Service. One first steps into a kind of transit area in the form of a cafe… This area, clearly visible through the large windows facing the street is the antechamber to the actual exhibition. It serves as a trigger for the real installation which is situated in a darkened room behind the cafe." Huck, 42-43.

14. Some of the quotes are featured in the catalogue Eine Welt fur Sich: Ein Projekt run ums Freihaus in Wien, and some are sampled on the CD supplementing the installation.

15. Astrid Wege, "Spotlights of Memory: A Journey with Christian Philipp Müller," in Eine Welt fur Sich, ed. Müller, 12.

16. As Bill Readings has grimly noted, "the University is becoming a transnational bureaucratic corporation, either tied to transnational instances of government such as the European Union or functioning independently, by analogy with a transnational corporation." Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 3.

17. Readings argues that the university "no longer participates in the historical project for humanity that was the legacy of the Enlightenment: the historical project of culture," 5.

18. NILEG is the acronym for Niedersächsische Gesellschaft für Landesentwicklung und Wohnungsbau m.b.H., Hanover.

19. Each of the 101 silk-screen prints superimposes the campus map of Lüneburg in red over that of another university in beige. See Astrid Wege, "On Location: Christian Philipp Müller's The Campus as a Work of Art," in Branding the Campus. ed. Von Bismark et al., 55.

20. One might go so far as to argue that even on campuses where the library geographically retains its centrality, a clear shift has occurred in its role as it has been transformed from an archive of knowledge to a structure of pure sign value. Indeed, with budget cuts resulting in fewer acquisitions and fewer funds allocated to expand storage space, more and more libraries are moving to electronic forms of information, making the actual library building increasingly obsolete. More than ever, then, the library's function today is similar to that of a museum: it stores archival and rare manuscripts and provides a (limited) space for exhibition. Thus it is not without irony that "The Campus as a Work of Art" is displayed throughout the library at Lüneburg.

21. "The example I used was Thomas Jefferson's University of Virginia, built between 1817 and 1826. Jefferson's design set a group of university buildings in a horseshoe shape around an otherwise empty field, the entire complex dominated by the library — a replica of the Pantheon in Rome on the scale of 1:2. The whole 'master plan' can be compared to St. Peter's Square in Rome. What makes it interesting is the way Jefferson has shifted the center of power. He replaced the church-the symbol of religious faith-with a library." Müller, in Von Bismark, "Relocating the University," 15.

22. Müller and the students constructed a design studio, where they placed an assortment of items decorated with the letters "ULG" — the monogram for Universität Lüneburg. Installed in the fall of 1998, the shop is inaccessible and the articles can only be viewed through a window. See Wege, "On Location," 58. See also Thorsten Clauszen and Karin Prätorius, "Souvenirs, Souvenirs," in Branding the Campus, ed. Von Bismark et al., 90-97.

23. By the very exaggerated production (200!) of the logos on display, Müller uses a strategy of excess to foreground the instrumentalization behind the creation of logos. Müller reveals how the very process of designing a logo banalizes the institution that it represents. But insofar as he, through the strategy of excess, reveals the banality of the logo, he makes its adoption problematic. Not surprisingly, Müller was not consulted when the Universität Lüneburg decided to adopt a logo of their own. Rather, the administrators of the University hired an external graphic-design firm.

24. [ed. note: not cited in text] Of course, Müller's own Swiss heritage was surely a factor in Ringier's decision to commission him for the project. In fact, that the artist was "born in Bienne, Switzerland" is prominently touted in the first pages of the Report. See Voyage: Ringier Annual Report, 1999, 9.

25. [ed. note: not cited in text] Ringier, in Voyage: Ringier Annual Report, 1999, 8.

26. Indeed, even the most cursory look at the countries with which Ringier now does business — Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic — reveals that it has profited from the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

27. Müller, in Voyage: Ringier Annual Report, 1999, 40.

28. Accompanying Müller are the Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub and the U.S. artist Andrea Fraser, both of whom were also part of the official Austrian Contribution to the 45th Biennale of Venice in 1993.

29. Pinned to the wall above Müller's head is a pamphlet entitled "Aushandpflichtige Gesetze," or "Regulations that must be displayed."

30. Another parallel among the institutions on which Müller focuses becomes apparent when one considers that Ringier touts itself as a mass-media corporation. For like the university and the modern nation-state, the media and the press were also initially part of an enlightenment project that sought to keep citizens informed of (and therefore involved in) important regional, national, and international developments. In addition, newspapers and journals were to provide a site for debate and critique, as well as a space for oppositional voices to be heard — the conscience of the rapidly changing social fabric of the bourgeois public sphere. Commonly known as the "fourth estate," media constitutes another field with its own set of symbolic codes. The transformation of the news-bearing agencies into their present condition is cunningly indicated by Müller, who includes photographs of front pages from a variety of Ringier publications with images of "pin-ups" and sensational headlines advertising "How Much You Can Save in a Tax-Free Paradise." Thus, the "Report" makes plain that although plenty of information is produced and disseminated by the vast media empire of Ringier, the corporation's interest is clearly not in the communication of knowledge or in the practice of critique but in the accumulation of profits.