When Charles Ephrussi received "A Bunch of Asparagus" painted by Édouard Manet in 1880, he paid Manet 200 francs more than the 800 francs originally agreed upon — apparently because he was so pleased with the result. Pleased in turn by the unexpected increase in his fee, Manet sent his patron an additional painting of a single stalk of asparagus and noted that this stalk had been missing from the original bundle. As Carol Armstrong writes in her essay “Counter, Mirror, Maid: Some Infra-thin Notes on A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, what the painter meant is that this small painting would make up the difference and that Ephrussi thus had now received the appropriate amount of asparagus for the amount he had paid.[1]

Through this “illusionistic substitution” (Armstrong) of painted asparagus for edible asparagus, Manet brought into play an “exchange value” associated with both the form of production and consumption.[2] According to Armstrong, however, the insinuated “relative price of vegetables and paintings” raises fundamental questions, namely, whether an illusionary painted bundle of asparagus has a value “unto itself” or whether — relative to the valuation of the “real” bunch of asparagus — it is a matter of a “countable or weighable” articles whose value is produced by the luxuriousness of the represented object and the quality of the color application.[3] Thus, Manet’s system of equivalences and substitutions did not aim to create a basis of comparison between reality and illusion, although it did set up analogies between the two on the level of taste, value, and exchange. The material value of an individual stalk of asparagus — determined by the purchase price — only increased through the symbolic relativation of the represented subject.

Over one hundred years later, the bunch of asparagus would become the object of another reflection on the processes of valuation at Hans Haacke’s "Manet-Projekt" in the exhibition "Projekt 74. — Kunst bleibt Kunst" which took place in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne on the occasion of the museum’s 150th birthday. On ten panels, Haacke documented the chronological history of collectors who had owned the "Bunch of Asparagus," which had been in the museum’s possession since 1967. Each panel showed an owner and included personal information about each one. Thus, we learn that the painter Max Liebermann, barred from working in 1933 due to his Jewish heritage, had owned the still life. Other owners included Hermann J. Abs, chairman of the purchasing committee of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, who was also the chairman of the Deutsche Bank.

Through a simple, uncommented listing of dates and facts, Haacke aimed to make visible historical relationships that had been absent in history books. In order to prevent any possible references to the Nazi past of Abs, who had held a leading position in the economic politics of the Third Reich, the directorship of the museum instructed the exhibition curators to remove Haacke’s work from the show.[4]

A painting that had functioned as a private work of art — with Manet’s still life of asparagus making reference to the traditionally feminine-coded realm of food preparation — became, in Haacke’s reconstruction, a document of the role played by modern art in the ongoing efforts of Federal Republic of Germany’s postwar society to expel the Nazi past from public consciousness.

In 1984, ten years after the scandal surrounding Haacke’s "Manet-Projekt," Christian Philipp Müller produced "Siehe da, ein mögliches Leben hat sich eingerichtet" — his first work of art according to his official catalogue of works. Conceived as site-specific research on the history of an outlying area of Düsseldorf, the work can also be understood as a socio-cultural case study on the history of a collection within the private context and culture of everyday life. Since World War II, post-war architecture had destroyed the area of the city where the artist lived at the time. The artist put notices in mailboxes in his neighborhood requesting old photographs of this area. In this manner, he hoped to capture a view of how it once had looked. As Müller recounts, the response was overwhelming: he received a huge amount of photos — primarily from his landlady and a butcher’s wife who also gave him old SS identity cards of family members. Müller realized upon further research that her apartment was stuffed full with hand-crafted objects and works of art of all kinds: paintings, treasure chests, trophies, mirrors, and additional objects that her family had received during the period of famine in exchange for meat and sausage products.

Müller organized the photos given to him according to decade and thereby created a sequence that spanned the years 1880 to 1984. The photographs included images of the slaughterhouse and also showed family leisure activities, one showed a number of people boarding a ship bearing the words “Kraft durch Freude” (strength through joy). Arranged in chronological order, the photos were accompanied by short texts that had a structure organized according to the original distribution of the objects in the living room.

The artist thus assumed the role of an archivist and curator — yet, he (re)constructed the history of the objects in a way that had little to do with traditional scholarly or historiographical methods. Instead, he used a non-coherent form of montage that manifested visual and textual information in time and space. In other words, Müller created an indexical system of relationships based on technical and formal parameters that reflected on the depiction of “history” also as a depiction of the conditions of (re-)presentation. The exhibited photographs could also be interpreted as phenomena of media history since they documented technical developments from posed studio photographs to the personal instamatic camera.

"Siehe da, ein mögliches Leben hat sich eingerichtet," a collection as­­sembled through a moneyless system of exchange, became an arbitrary model for an exhibition of the culture of daily life spanning over 100 years — from the imperial period to the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the Federal Republic of Germany, the current government at the time. Intended as something different from the classical model of the art collection, Müller’s work revealed that the relationship between taste, value, and exchange had both a con­­­­text-specific and contingent basis. Consequently, an inherent external position was developed within the “aesthetic field” Müller ad­­dres­sed — a position of involved distance, which is expressed in the categorical distinction between aesthetic fields and the realm of the social, but threatens to disappear given an undifferentiated equivalence of the two. Comparable with Marcel Broodthaers’s "Musée des Aigles," Müller’s model was compiled with the aim of using the classifying categorization of artistic, popular aesthetic, scholarly, and ordinary objects as the subject of an institution-analytical reflection on criteria (for works of art) based on the logic of representation and identity. As in Manet’s twist of ideas, the real “economy of signs” is also visible in Müller’s approach, in the sense of a denaturalization of the capitalistic principle of exchange as an artistically constructed system of equivalence and substitution.[5] However, the issue here is not about a comparison of a real and painted asparagus in a painterly discourse concerning the rules and paradoxes of valuation in a culture of commodity, but it is about a matter of comparability between sausages and treasures in the context of a state of exception caused by desperation and hunger. Addressing a historically specific form of exchange, the work demonstrates a structural relationship to the field of Hans Haacke’s investigations, with their time and identity-specific references, and continuity in relation to positions of ownership and power, as in the example of Manet’s painting.

"Siehe da, ein mögliches Leben hat sich eingerichtet" prefigures a relationship to the conditions of the framing, function, and reception of modern art — a relationship that reflects on methods and systems and that is relevant in specific ways to all works and projects of Christian Philipp Müller. A central motif is a consideration of the constitutive functions of taste, value, and exchange within cultural and social hierarchies of value. It goes without saying that this does not exclude the kind of symbolic processes of value creation touched on here through references to Manet and Haacke, which inadvertently recall patterns of identity (western European, male, heteronormative, etc.), constitutive of the matrix of modernism. Nevertheless, the references to Manet and Haacke serve to examine Müller’s methods as an understanding of art in the sense of a symbolic and material form of production of signs — above and beyond contemporary discourse — that mediates the historic, cultural, political, and economic. This is an understanding that goes against the common belief in a distinct identity for the logic of artistic work and institutional value, which is separate from realms of the social; instead, Müller attempts to uncover figures of difference and discontinuity, alterity, and contradiction within the formative and developmental history of modernism.

If I attach such considerations to Müller’s early performances, installations, and exhibitions, I do so to demonstrate how the logic of identity manifests itself as an effect of a heteronormative production of signs. Already indicated in "Siehe da, ein mögliches Leben hat sich ein­gerichtet," a sex-specific view of value and exchange systems would emerge more clearly in the following investigations of subject-object relationships.

An important example is the exhibition "Forgotten Future" that took place at the Munich Kunstverein in 1992. As the title indicates, the exhibition addressed historic utopias that had been repressed from contemporary consciousness and that had originated from the phase of modernism which — as Helmut Draxler wrote in his capacity as director of the Kunstverein — was popular in the late nineteen-fifties and whose "concepts of harmony between art and aesthetic social hygiene" did away with "the classical potential for conflict between technology and the social."[6] By drawing references between three significant projects from this period — Le Corbusier’s "Poème électronique,"[7] Nicolas Schöffer’s "Kybernetische Stadt" (Cybernetic City),[8] and Veit Harlan’s film "Anders als du und ich" (Different from You and Me)[9] — he allowed the latent complicity between a universalistic understanding of modernism and supposedly defeated totalitarian concepts of society, which tended to negate (their own) particularity. Here too, it was the technique of montage that drew attention to generally invisible and/or naturalized structures. Interlinking the three projects revealed specific constellations of motifs — multimedia spectacle (Corbusier), dramatic lighting (Schöffer), and cinematic lighting techniques (Harlan) — that brought out a rigid heteronormativity as the subtext of an apparently “enlightened” modernism. Seen together, the documented and, in some cases, reconstructed works of Le Corbusier, Schöffer, and Harlan were thus clearly legible as a symptom of a contradictory and dominant social morality positioned bet­ween an obscured past and a shining future. An ethic that — as the examples were clearly able to show — tends to engender a “synthesis between art and technology” through “advanced” ideas in the context of a capitalistic culture of commodity and spectacle.[10]

Comparable to "Siehe da, ein mögliches Leben hat sich eingerichtet" was also the interlacing of asynchronous spatial and temporary axes in "Forgotten Future," which illuminated the exhibited material in terms of its structural relationship to Müller as author and “curator” and the site of the presentation.[11] On the one hand, this was achieved through the integration of one of his own works from the exhibition, "Porte bonheur": Here Müller drew an analogy between his own and Le Corbusier’s catalogue of works by writing all the locations intended for Le Corbusier’s “Ville radieuse” on the wall in a vertical list and all of the places he had exhibited up to that time in a horizontal list.[12] On the other hand, in the Kunstverein he also reconstructed parts of the “miniscule bureau” of Le Corbusier’s private room-within-a-room of­­fice in Paris. As such it represented an equivalent to the traditional white cube of modern art exhibitions, which here had been robbed of its original function and served instead as a passageway that corresponded to a black box of the same size recalling a theater or cinema, in which Edgard Varèse’s composition "Poème électronique" could be heard.

Images of the exhibition show that Müller integrated the architecture of the Kunstverein into the signification process through his concept of asynchronous montage: an “empty container” was thus transformed into a complex of interlaced passageways, functional spaces, demonstration surfaces, and projection surfaces. In other words, the space was transformed into a spatially and temporally determined system of equivalences and substitutions that produced a multiplication, differentiation, and specification of viewer standpoints and perspectives.

In repeated references to Le Corbusier, which are distorted by site-specific contextualization, the position of the immanent outsider is assumed through Müller’s technique of montage and consequently establishes a relationship of involved distance to the object of critique.[13] Bringing together the works of Schöffer and Harlan makes visible the proximity of (popular) modern utopias from the fields of architecture, art, film, music, and technology to anachronistic and deci­dedly homophobic plans for society and the future.

Combining methods of institutional analysis and site-specific investigations with those of Cultural Studies is manifested in "Forgotten Future" as a specific interest in the constitutive interrelationship be­tween universality and particularity within one’s own fields, namely contemporary institutional and aesthetic realms.[14]

Thus, "Forgotten Future" corresponds to Andrea Fraser’s thesis, according to which “institutional critique can only be defined by a methodology of critically reflective site-specificity.”[15] Bearing in mind Müller’s approach, one could flush out Fraser’s definition with James Meyer’s term of the “functional site,” which originates from Cultural Studies and which the U.S. art historian coined to describe site-specific works of the nineteen-nineties: “The functional site may or may not incorporate a physical space; it certainly does not privilege this place. Rather, it is a process, an operation occurring between sites, a mapping of institutional and discursive filiations and the bodies that move between them (the artist’s above all). It is an informational site, a locus of overlap of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places and things: an allegorical site, to recall Craig Owen’s term…. The work is no longer an obdurate steel wall, attached to the urban plaza for eternity. It is a temporary thing; a movement; a chain of meanings devoid of a particular focus. The functional site thus courts its destruction; it is willfully temporary; its nature is not to endure but to come down.”[16]

With “information,” “allegory,” and “time” terms have come into play over the course of expanding the definition of site-specificity through linguistics and semiotics that show a connection between the conceptual approaches from the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies and postmodern discourses of the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties: aspects that are also inherent to "Siehe da, ein mögliches Leben hat sich eingerichtet" and "Forgotten Future."

References to artistic and theoretical currents in the period between 1984 and 1992 described here were topical largely in the world of U.S. American discourse. Christian Philipp Müller — who had grown up in Switzerland, had trained there as a typographer and graphic designer, and had ultimately landed at the Düsseldorf Academy in the class of Fritz Schwegler — had different points of reference than his colleagues in the United States. As he relates, he owes his knowledge about art to exhibitions like "documenta VI" (1977) that awakened his interest in Vito Acconci, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and feminist performance and video practice. This interest had already been formed by his studies at the Schule für Farbe + Form (1982–84), a re­­form project of the 1968 generation that was based on integrative methods, such as dance and theater. Mentioning that Müller was initially involved in the gay and lesbian movement and in a politically engaged video cooperative, the "Video­laden" in Zurich — and a little later also in the Berlin post-punk scene as a graphic designer, among other things — is not intended to prove the authenticity of his position. Rather, this kind of information reveals indicative points of overlap, not only in terms of Müller’s development, but also between the identity politics movement and the international media art scene. These kinds of overarching interconnections find confirmation in Müller’s layouts for newspapers, handouts, and banners and in his design for "1. Reader der Schweizer Schwulen und Lesben" (First Reader for Swiss Gays and Lesbians); they also have an impact on the importance of design, graphic design, and print media in all the concepts behind his works — both in terms of form and content. One example in this context is the magazine Texte zur Kunst, whose original image — with an emphasis on text instead of high-gloss photographs and with black and white images — was developed by Müller. The close relationship between Texte zur Kunst and the program at the time of the Christian Nagel Gallery in Cologne, founded in 1990, and which continues to represent Müller, exemplifies to what extent taste, value, and exchange function as the three central ideas in Müller’s body of work that are somehow always associated with (temporary) superimpositions of artistic, art critical, and commercial spheres of interest. As Müller’s biography clearly demonstrates, such aspects of strategic marketing usually do not offer sufficient explanation for the construction of “authorship” that is constitutive to the development of a body of work.

One reason for his decision to shift careers at age twenty-seven and attend the Düsseldorf Academy had to do with a brief observation, as Müller recounts, which made Düsseldorf seem like just the “right place.” He saw Beuys and Warhol on the street in front of the galleries Schmela and Fischer: It was a brief but decisive moment, which — as one might speculate — generated a mental identification with two emblematic figures in art, whose image must have bathed such an unauratic place as Düsseldorf in a promising light.

The awareness that a glamorous and — in the case of Warhol — queer artistic persona is always associated with a media savvy “star quality” is reflected in a photograph produced in conjunction with Müller’s project "Carl Theodors Garten in Düsseldorf-Hellerhof": in the figure of a young glasses-wearing academic striding ahead at the front of a student-like troop, one recognizes a parodic inversion of Beuys’s shamanistic representation of himself as a pedagogical visionary. The photograph conveys an impression of an atmosphere of a departure from the academy, but one does not quite know where to. The fact that the image would wind up as the catalogue cover for a retrospective must have been, at most, an unconscious fantasy at the time. From today’s point of view, it documents a group of people who were apparently aware that it was necessary to enter into new territory together in order to accomplish something in the art world. In this sense, one can view another photo of Müller’s, in which the artist points his finger to a new development in Düsseldorf-Hellerhof — as an “establishing shot” for a still-to-be-defined site at the interface between art, the public, and the media. In contrast to the studio production economy predominant in the nineteen-eighties, Müller’s gesture creates a literal mediating relationship to a performative (self) staging of the artist-researcher in the tradition of conceptual art and land art. In this context, his appearance in the role of an academically adept “guide” can be understood not only as a move away from the naturalized image of the artist, but also as a fractured assumption of an artistic stance which is more closely associated with the production of information and knowledge than objects and images.

How Müller broached the issue of the typically male and heterosexually coded image of the artist through role-play could be ascribed to his function as the assistant of Kaspar König, who was appointed Professor of Art in Public Space at the Düsseldorf Academy in 1986. Thus, it was incumbent on Müller to host the artists and curators that König invited. In this way, he came in contact with the works of Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Jef Cornelis, Fischli/Weiss, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, and others, who more or less explicitly represented a viewpoint that was principally critical of the notion of a work and an author. As Müller explained in a conversation preceding my contribution to this catalogue, up until that point he had hardly encountered the positions within contemporary art criticism that had originated in the nineteen-eighties in New York in the context of magazines like October or institutions like the Whitney Program or the New Museum of Contemporary Art. It is therefore even more remarkable that Müller, who — in contrast to the “postmodern” historicism popular at the time — viewed history as an undifferentiated wealth of subjects and styles, already developed historically critical models of site specificity and institutional critique in the mid-nineteen-eighties. Here, Müller’s performance "Kleiner Führer durch die ehemalige Kurfürstliche Gemäldegalerie Düsseldorf" in 1986 is a good example;[17] it “reconstructed” a historical collection,[18] which had previously migrated to Munich, through a fictive presentation during the annual open house exhibition of the academy. What Müller claimed to be the return of the collection to Düsseldorf could be understood as a gesture contrary to an essentialist understanding of the notion of the contemporary as well as a departure from the present into another possible logic of historical time. The figurative melding of an (absent) past and a (given) present proved to be a strategy that turned the academy exhibition into an imaginary collection, and as such into an “illegitimate” work of art. In this manner, Müller ap­pro­priated Duchamp’s model of the ready-made in the sense of a fictionalization of an institutional code. In the hallways he hung signs translated into three languages that instructed visitors not to touch the pictures or the frames. Here, the immanent inversion of “conceptual proposals” reminiscent of Yoko Ono, Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, and others, took up the core notion of such concepts: the possible translation of visual works into linguistic definitions as well as the associated informationalization of the commodity and exchange value of art. The folder[19] Müller designed with information on Carl Theodor’s collection functioned in this context to present the academy to the “outside” and declare it a public institution. In terms of conceptual publicity strategies "Kleiner Führer durch die ehemalige Kurfürstliche Gemäldegalerie Düsseldorf" inherently implied a thesis common to postmodern discourses, namely that the paradigm of production (in homology with the industrial age) would be replaced by that of simulation (in homology with the information age).[20] His consciousness of the importance of signs in his approach to the conditions of artistic production came through in his performances as an exhibition guide, for which he wore a uniform from a security guard company. As in his photograph as a guide, Müller distanced himself from the identity of the nature-boy, bohemian artist propagated by the Düsseldorf Academy — an identity that generally represented elements of gender-specific inclusionary and exclusionary rituals.

However, what those who participated in his tour actually got to see were not just “immaterial” signs, but artwork from the actual classes exhibited in the hallways in conjunction with the annual open house. Müller annotated these works with descriptions from the works in Carl Theodor’s collection and thereby referred back to the historical relationship between patrons and court painters, which in the modern art business has since been transformed into a system of sponsors, collectors, gallerists, curators, and “freelance” artists. At the same time, it recalled an era when the transition from absolutism to enlightenment took place, and when burgeoning scientific rationalism became complicit with the development of a capitalistic system of production.

Here, bringing a vanished past into the present, as Müller did in his performance, assumed a complex layering of dimensions. The En­­­lighten­­ment’s proposition of future and progress and — a result of a critical reinterpretation of the Enlightenment — the historical avant-garde’s promise of utopia were projected back onto a fictive historical archive, which, as in the case of the fictive painting collection, documents a site-specific phenomenon on the eve of the formation of bourgeois society. Thus, the academy appears to be a place where the construction of artistic identity seems to immune to its own historical processes — a negation of alterity and difference. What this means is clearly exemplified by "Carl Theodors Garten in Düsseldorf-Hellerhof," a work that followed the "Kleiner Führer." The subject was a building commissioned by the Elector as a “then in vogue pleasure castle in the form of a hermitage,”[21] which was ultimately built in Benrath and not in Hellerhof. Müller offered tours through the new development that was currently under construction in Hellerhof. An underlying structure of the tours was the thesis that Nicolas de Pigage (1723–1796) had planned the garden complex for this area, but it was later realized a few kilometers to the north in Benrath. This new figurative montage of a factual and possible present revealed the identity of place, time, and (artist’s) subject as a blind construct compared with its alterities, differences, discontinuities, and contradictions. Also, in this example we see Müller’s concerns unfold: a desire to enable a decoding of the gender-coded interplay of taste, value, and exchange that makes up the aesthetic field.

We learn that "Carl Theodors Garten" was structured according to two opposing patterns. While its axial structure was still oriented towards the strict geometry of the French garden, other elements, such as a naturalistic imitation of organic forms of channeling water, transitioned to the more open forms of English landscape gardens. These complexes made it possible for the owners to retire from the public courtyard into more intimate bucolic spheres. As Müller’s de­scription makes clear, the construction of private space was accompanied by an idealization of “natural country life” that was expressed in the playful labyrinth-like patterns of the pathways. This kind of stylized natural landscape corresponded with specific dramaturgies of sexual relationships. Müller’s reference to the bacchanalian shepard games brings to mind erotic conventions that can hardly be reconciled to the bourgeois sexual mores of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The same applies to his reference to Carl Theodor’s affinity to the Enlightenment thinker Voltaire, with whom he not only had “conversations about contemporary building plans and magnificent gardens” but with whom he cultivated “an almost intimate social intercourse.” The material Müller researched revealed additional references to homo-social relationships and queer, campy motifs. While Müller’s quote from Charlotte von Stein characterizes Goethe as “a disgustingly fat,” short-armed and thus unattractive man, a quote from Martin Hieronymus Hudtwalcker give a completely different impression: he talks about Goethe’s “ravishing gaze” and how “certainly any youth […would like to] fling their arms around his neck and any young girl [would desire to] embrace him.” As in "Siehe da, ein mögliches Leben hat sich eingerichtet," "Forgotten Future" and "Kleiner Führer," the work "Carl Theodors Garten" consists of an asynchronous interweaving of visual and linguistic “information” that in itself accesses a broad range of historical subtexts. The cartographic reconstruction of a feudal garden complex within an urban framework does not necessarily reflect what we think we see. The question whether the meandering rococo-like pathways projected onto the space of the present can be read as signs of alterity and difference, discontinuity, and contradiction that have now become illegible is perpetuated by the “living sculptures” that were played by his colleagues from the academy, who appeared like ghosts of an enlightenment that has not necessarily already come to an end.

In an overview of the works discussed here, Müller’s working concept seems to be a reflection on the conditions of production and reception of aesthetic signs within the frame of perception of a heteronormative order. Instead of idealizing what was “a better time,” in which gender and sexuality were not yet subject to bourgeois morals, territorial markings appear in Müller’s montages that attempt to delineate privileged and unprivileged subject positions. This kind of demarcation made visible by Müller — ramparts that appear “natural” in the context of "Carl Theodors Garten" — are intended to make us more sensitive to the underpinning structures of hierarchy, ownership, and power, which are inherent to the aesthetic field as a system of taste, value, and exchange.

Notes

1. Carol Armstrong, “Counter, Mirror, Maid: Some Infra-thin Notes on A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” in 12 Views of Manet’s Bar, ed. Bradford R. Collins, (Princeton, 1996), pp. 25–46, here p. 28.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p.29.

4. In protest of the censorship, Daniel Buren hung photocopies of Haacke’s "Manet Project" in his section of the exhibition. Marcel Broodthaers and the gallerist Paul Maenz also expressed their solidarity with the artist. See Hans Haacke, eds. Walter Grasskamp, Molly Nesbit, and Jon Bird (London and New York, 2004), pp. 56–59.

5. Even before Pierre Bourdieu’s studies like "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste" became popular in the circles of artists and authors involved in institutional critique — which, along with Müller, included Fareed Armaly (with whom he had worked closely in the early nineteen-nineties), Marc Dion, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Fred Wilson — the distinction between traditional descriptions of class and capital described therein already played a more or less explicit role in the ideas of the artists named above. The universalistic social utopia of trans­ferring the practice of art into life, which according to Peter Bürger was an aim of the historical avant-garde, was here to become the object of a deconstruction and reconstruction or a dominant, idealistic or, in a postmodern sense, rejected notion of modernism.

6. Helmut Draxler, in Christian Philipp Müller. Vergessene Zukunft, exh. cat. Münchner
   Kunstverein (Munich and Graz, 1992), catalogue cover.

7. Together with Edgard Varèse he had designed this for the Philips pavilion at the
   World’s Fair in 1958 in Brussels. In his catalogue text, Draxler describes a “synthesis between art and technology” in the form of a “total work of art—[a]spectacle[s] comprised of light, color, rhythm, images, and sounds.” See Helmut Draxler, “Harmonie und Hygiene. Aspekte einer Modernismus-Rezeption,” in ibid., pp. 4–27 (see note 6), p. 4.

8. Here he developed a technocratically oriented version of fascist concepts of “Volkshygiene” (people’s hygiene), which entailed a hetero-sexist rhetoric expressed in his design for a “center for sexual leisure,” which was “a kind of orgy cellar that only admitted hetero couples.” Schoeffer ‘feminized’ the planned building: gentle forms, pink colors, the whole structure in the form of a female breast. See Manfred Hermes, “Elevation. Im Jahr 2000 wird die ganze Welt schwul sein!,” in ibid., pp. 30–53, here p. 42.

9. The film is considered an important example of the kind of persecutory homophobia of the Nazi period that continued into the Adenauer era. As Wolfgang Theis describes in his contribution to the catalogue, the reactions of the FSK (Freiwillige Kontrolle der Filmwirtschaft/Voluntary Control of the Film Industry) and the civil and church press was not any less homophobic. Based on his research, Theis’s thesis reveals that the original version of the film as well as statements by Veit Harlan even evidence a critique of discrimination against homosexuals, although “his style of directing would raise […] doubts about the sincerity of his ‘enlightening intentions.’” See Wolfgang Theis, “Anders als du und ich (§ 175),” in ibid., pp. 56–72 (see note 6), here p. 72.

10. Helmut Draxler, in ibid. (see note 6), p. 4.

11. Draxler describes him as such: “Here the artist acts as a curator who groups and installs historical material in such a way that it can produce contemporary content.”
    Ibid. (see note 6), p. 6.

12. Ibid., p. 10.

13. See Christian Philipp Müller’s contribution to "Back to Babel: Project Unité" (Firminy, France, 1993), in which he explored the problem of noise control in Le Corbusiers apartment block.

14. These are methods, which are also characteristic of works by Fareed Armaly, Andrea Fraser, Renée Greene or the collective group material. See Helmut Draxler, Die Gewalt des Zusammenhangs. Repräsentation, Raum und Referenz in den frühen Arbeiten von Fareed Armaly, (Berlin, 2006).

15. Andrea Fraser, “What is Institutional Critique?” Written based on notes for a talk at “Institutional Critique and After,” a symposium held at the Los Angeles County Museum in May 2005. The English text is unpublished to date but was kindly provided by Texte zur Kunst. Published in German translation in Texte zur Kunst 59 (September 2005), pp. 87–89, here p. 87.

16. James Meyer, “Der funktionale Ort/The Functional Site,” in Platzwechsel, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Zürich, pp. 25–41 (Zurich, 1995), p. 27. In his essay, Meyer refers to the works of Ursula Biemann, Tom Burr, Mark Dion, and Christian Philipp Müller.

17. This tour took place in conjunction with the “Jährlicher Rundgang der Kunstakademie Düsseldorf” (Annual Open House of the Düsseldorf Academy).

18. The collection of Elector Carl Theodor of Pfalz-Sulzbach (ruled 1742-1799), which was transferred to Munich in 1806.

19. Including a performance by the artist as a security guard, photographed by Andreas Gursky.

20. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death (London, 1993).

21. See Christian Philipp Müller’s accompanying booklet for the guided tour.