Christian Philipp Müller's critical art practice is preoccupied with mapping the institutional and geopolitical parameters of the vernacular. His work is a mise-en-scène of various disciplines of knowledge, conducted by an artist in multiple roles as an archivist, researcher, communicator and performer. The issues of national identity and the construction of borders remain in the centre of Müller's investigations of the economies of site and the politics of belonging. For his "Green Border" installation, 1993, realized for the Austrian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, the artist, dressed as a hiker, crossed Austria 's green borders eight times illegally. "In my instructions to cross the borders, I proposed the perfect outfit to blend into the landscape. The most inconspicuous figure today is the tourist,”[1] confesses the artist while describing the ground-breaking project which became an icon of artistic discourse on the politics after 1989 and the issues of national representation. The entire oeuvre of Christian Philipp Müller seems to act as an "anti-eigensinn" statement. In a conversation with James Meyer, he confesses: "I hate fixed identities. I believe in multiple identities... We're all being reduced to stereotypes. We're typecast because our society cannot grasp multiple identities. When I jump over that brook, where you see me in-between, on the border: that's very much what my work is about. It's a hybrid. You have an image and you have a caption, and in your brain you try to relate what you see and what you read. What I'm trying to do is adjust. I'm trying to find the medium, the scale, the space, and the involvement of my own body that brings the message across. For example, in Venice, I was not showing the work of Christian Philipp Müller. I don't present myself as the product. I present circumstances. The way I work is along themes, given and chosen.”[2] His fieldwork, installation/performance "Space Rendez-Vouz," conceived for "Manifesta 7," 2008 is a complex site-specific edifice of references where the Futurist Fortunato Depero encounters the Cold War dreams of outer space conquest, the global industries and folkloristic allegories. Müller's "Carro Largo" parade populated by people in traditional costumes, like the 1936 "festa dell'uva" by Depero, was an ambitious attempt to rewrite the dogmas of regionalism, using the critical vocabulary of a globalized world. Christian Philipp Müller's art practice (along with the work of, amongst others, Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser) has been described by James Meyer as an exploration of the so called "functional site": an expanded site, which in opposition to a (physical) fixed place, is understood as "a process, an operation occuring 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 overlapping text, photographs and video recordings, physical places and things: an allegorical site…"[3] Thus defined, the work is a movement, a chain of meanings; a function appears in a passage between sites and points of views. Meyer emphasizes the importance of a meeting between the producer and the site, where the essential identity of artist and community collapses or is gravely challenged. Such a practice bears features of "discursive performativity," a certain social masquerade that facilitates profound research, critical engagement and identification with the theme and the subject.

Müller's "Burning Love" (Lodenfüßler), prepared for the exhibition "Fabricators of the World. Scenarios of Self-Will," is a multilayered, almost monographic, investigation of regional identity through a particular case study of the typically Enns valley tradition of fabricating laden, a thick woolen cloth used by the local tailoring industry of vernacular fashion. The project's sensual title appropriates a name of a knitting pattern, "Brennende Liebe," developed by local manufacturers of socks and first encountered by the artist while visiting the knitting workshops, organized by the Trautenfels Castle. Müller's "Burning Love" (Lodenfülßler) which provides insights into the production and usage of a costume that indicates national identity and a sense of belonging, traces not only the mechanisms of craftsmen's ethos and the construction of national pride and emancipation. It also defines the tradition as a synergy of life and community spirit and it articulates the need of (historical and ideological) continuity and cultural diversity, as expressed in a slogan, found in the Loden Steiner catalogue of 2009/2010: "Zukunft braucht Herkunft, denn je globaler die Welt, desto wichtiger die Wurzeln." (The future needs tradition, for the more global the world, the more important are roots.) Müller's project includes a particular performance: a 41-km long procession of 25 members of the local community carrying a sort of collective costume made of 50-meter long Steiner laden-fabric as a spectacular mobile sculpture through the Enns Valley towards the Landscape Museum of Trautenfels Castle. Traveling between contexts, heading behind the always too narrow confines of one cultural expression, the artist stages a mise-en-scène of the local and the worldly, echoing, amongst others, the actions of James Lee Byars who in 1968 fabricated the world's biggest dress worn by 500 people around New York City's blocks or the work of Christo, Helio Oiticica or Robert Morris. Müller's, yes indeed, uncanny fashion show cum ritual is a unique, one and only, performative portrait of a local hero — a celebration of passion, often called "burning love"...

Notes

1. James Meyer and Christian Philipp Müller, "A Conversation," in Christian Philipp Müller, ed. by Philipp Kaiser, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst (Basel, 2007), p. 41.

2. Ibid, p. 56.

3. James Meyer, "The Functional Site," in Platzwechsel, Ursula Biemann, Tom Burr, Mark Dion, Christian Philipp Müller, Kunsthalle Zurich (Zurich, 1995), pp. 25-29.