In 1999 the largest Swiss media conglomerate, Ringier AG, commissioned Christian Philipp Müller to produce an artist’s project to accompany their corporate annual report. What he offered the company was an annual report as a work of art. Traveling to every major Ringier outpost during the fall of 1999, including locations in Asia and Eastern Europe, Müller supplemented the requisite statistical representations of the company — i.e., bar graphs and pie charts — with dozens of color snapshots and excerpts from his travel diary. Alongside the accounts on cash flow, income and from electronic media, and the costs of paper stock and ink, for example, the report showed an image of glistening Slovakian sausages, as well as one editor’s comment on how women’s magazines reflect the changing goals of women in her country: “30 years ago most girls dreamed of becoming famous singers, 20 years ago actors, and 10 years ago, models. Today’s goal is solid professional training and a secure future.”[1] The report further evidenced the artist’s social mobility, which gave him access to the company’s highest level actors, such as the Swiss ambassador to Vietnam, who served the artist fine Swiss wine upon their meeting (and who keeps a pet monkey) as well as to lower level employees, like the courier Müller accompanied to the company’s printing facilities, and the editor in Prague who showed off her pet tarantula. Thus, under the artist’s design supervision, the conventional high gloss corporate document became permeated by a surplus of alternative information and subjective impressions. The result is an “annual report-cum-travel diary,”[2] an idiosyncratic and fragmentary “portrait” of differences of social class, ethnicity, nationality, and gender that serves to perforate the monolithic identity of the Swiss-owned multi-national corporate “empire.”

Müller ’s labor in this project might be hard to distinguish from that of a journalist, a human resources consultant, a designer, or a sociologist. After all, it is based on facts and observations gathered through interviews with company managers and employees, and via tours of their facilities and workspaces. Yet Müller’s gaze, while no less distanced, differs from the anthropological or sociological gaze in that its object does not readily conform to instrumental uses. The heterogeneity and excess of information pressure clear categorizations, while the apparent objectivity of scientific observation is replaced by a self-conscious aesthetic presentation combining visual and narrative elements. It is precisely this form of subterfuge that affords Müller a special status and occasion for commentary.

The type of aesthetic work Müller has practiced for over fifteen years is collaborative, interdisciplinary, and site-specific or contextual.[3] Müller treats art institutions (or other kinds of institutions like Ringier) not merely as neutral containers for the presentation of works of art but as historically, materially, and symbolically specific frames of reference and influence. As such, Müller’s practice can be seen to take a sociological approach to the field of art. The “business” of art — from the site of production in the studio to the sites of display and distribution in galleries, collections, museums, corporations, auction houses, magazines, and catalogues — its itself made the object of inquiry. Thus, the institutional site or context for the work, which might be a literal place or a virtual location within a historical-archival, discursive, or representational context, is a primary agent in both informational and formal aspects of Müller’s work.

Disciplinary boundaries are often breached in Müller’s practice. Trained in design and the fine arts, Müller frequently draws links between the fields of architecture, design, the visual arts, and literature when analyzing a given contest. In “The Campus as a Work of Art” (1996-98), a project commissioned by the public developer of the University of Lüneburg, Germany, Müller conducted a seminar with students and faculty over two semesters on the subject of campus planning and campus art in order to pose questions to the community about the relationship between aesthetics and educational ideals.[4] While his research process doubled as pedagogy, Müller’s two-part material results were of a graphical nature. A series of 101 silkscreens featured paired campus plans, each one superimposing Lüneburg’s plan in red with a second plan in beige drawn from the seminar’s research on over 100 international campuses. The plans in each silkscreen were aligned according to the location of the library on each campus and organized along fifteen thematic categories, such as “Alma Maters of Germany’s Post-War Chancellors and Presidents” and “Universities as the Wellspring of Social and Political Change.”[5] The second part of the project, “Department of Prototypes” (1998), produced in collaboration with students, consisted of displays of over 200 prototypes for merchandise branded with a new logo of University of Lüneburg designed by the artist. The physical display of the prototypes—ranging from the traditional college sweatshirt to mouse pads and cutlery—in a former porter’s office could only be viewed through the windows of the permanently closed building, just as the website was also designed for browsing only. The physical inaccessibility of the prototypes on display reflected the highly symbolic functioning of the logo-emblazoned products as identity markers for the young university as it assumes many of the characteristics of transnational corporations in the competitive atmosphere of the global academic village.[6]

For artists like Müller, who inherit the lessons of the industrialized, mediated, and intellectualized procedures of minimalism, pop, and conceptual art, the work of art often takes on ephemeral forms more akin to a process or an event than a handcrafted object, a shift which challenged the traditional premium put on the expressive gesture of the artist. The powerful role society grants to the artist, now displaced onto the effects of persona and rhetoric, continues to be another important area of critical inquiry in Müller’s work. In his thesis exhibition at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in February 1986, Müller donned the uniform of a museum guard (not an uncommon job for an art student) and performed a gallery tour on the history of an absent set of paintings (the royal collection of the city’s art school). Doubling as a lecture on reception history and the sociology of taste, Müller delivered the talk while his audience actually viewed the latest works of Müller ’s classmates.

During the same period, Müller produced, through the city’s tourism bureau, an artwork-as-tour entitled “Carl Theodor’s Garden in Düsseldorf-Hellerhof.” Conducted by a team that included the artist dressed in a bow tie and suit and trailed by three musicians, this tour of unrealized monuments to celebrated figures from the history of philosophy, such as Diderot and Rousseau, involved narrative projections of an archaeology of the past onto existing sites. The tour described the plan of an eighteenth-century garden and palace designed by Nicolas de Pigage for Elector Carl Theodor, which had been proposed for a site that had become a banal contemporary suburban development. The performed tour served to highlight the historicity of notions of natural beauty and the key role of the artist as an arbiter of distinction of taste and class.

Of the many cultural guises that Müller has adopted in the course of his work since the mid-1980s, his 1997 project “A Balancing Act,” for the venerable German exhibition institution of documenta, is perhaps the most powerful statement the artist has made on the subject of the artistic persona and its institutional stature.[7] Responding to curator Catherine David’s historical and archival approach to documenta X, Müller chose to examine the history of two site-specific artworks from past documenta exhibitions: Walter de Maria’s “The Vertical Earth/Kilometer” (1977) and Joseph Beuys’ “7000 Oaks” (1982-87). In the performance part of the project, Müller adopted the uniform and mute persona of Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who famously traversed a line between the twin towers of New York City’s World Trade Center in 1974. Placing his own artistic identity between two artistic father figures, Müller (as Petit) literally walked a line on the grounds of the Friedrichspatz, emphasizing both the physical displacement of the de Maria and Beuys works caused by a redesign of the plaza in 1996 and the symbolic spectrum that the two works mark as canonical examples of the diametrically opposed lines of modernist art — formalist and political. The duality of this artistic inheritance was further emphasized in the half-oak, half-brass sculptural prop that Müller used as a balancing bar during the performance. The range of forms that constitute “A Balancing Act” — the sculptural prop, a display of documentation pertaining to the historical works of de Maria and Beuys, and a performance which was seen by most as a video document — underscored both the fragility of physical works of art and their status in the institution. The work’s condition as a set of physical traces — archival, sculptural, and performative — served also to emphasize the historical changes to the work of art, the very forms of artistic labor in which institutional and historical frames have come to figure so prominently in the aesthetic field. “A Balancing Act” suggested that the artistic persona, and perhaps ultimately art’s function and critical potential, is a multiple personality, equal parts spectacle, parody, and vulnerability.

Notes

1. Christian Philipp Müller, diary entry “Bratislava, September 1999,” VOYAGE, Ringier Annual Report 1999 (Zurich: Ringier AG, 2000), 28.

2. Michael Ringier, the company’s CEO, coined this term for Müller’s project in his address to the readers of the report. Ibid., 8.

3. On the uses of the term “site specificity” in recent art, see Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” October 80 (Spring 1997): 85-110.

4. Müller’s project for the university, exemplifying his sociological approach, took the occasion of the young university’s move to a new consolidated campus in a former military barracks on the edge of town to raise a series of questions on the ways the identity and intellectual pursuits of an academic community is shaped by the physical conditions and ideals that constitute the “campus” in a broad architectural, historical, and cultural context. See Christian Philipp Müller, The Campus as a Work of Art: Art, Architecture, Design, Politics of Identity, Beatrice von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller, Astrid Wege, and Ulf Wuggenig, eds. (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2001).

5. Text for each of the fifteen university categories were written by cultural theorist Astrid Wege and were displayed with the silkscreens throughout the University’s library.

6. For more on this phenomenon, see the remarks of Ulf Wuggenig and Masao Miyoshi in The Campus as a Work of Art.

7. See George Baker and Christian Philipp Müller, “A Balancing Act,” and George Baker, “On Christian Philipp Müller ’s ‘A Balancing Act,’” October 82 (Fall 1997): 95-113, 114-118.