"Das Interieur ist die Zufluchtssätte der Kunst."[1]

"Si le moderne est une fonction du sujet, son sens, son activité n'est pas de faire du nouveau, mais de faire de l'inconnu: l'aventure historique du sujet. Ce qui permettrait de reprendre les oppositions habituelles, entre tradition et l’invention, l'ordre et le désordre. Oppositions bloquées: Les deux chèvres sur le pont."[2]

Christian Philipp Müller's art is primarily contextual though not exactly site-specific. The material shape of each work is different. The objects, if any, are traces and reference points of an investigation into the conditions and prerogatives of contemporary art production. This is the case for a few other interesting artists. Christian Philipp Müller's particularity is in the resistance to identity. In a strictly formal logical sense, this is a paradox. Müller's venture into non-identity constitutes his identity. But since he develops his practice within an independent though not a closed social system — the art world — this formal paradox actually is a productive dialectical relationship. The tension between identity and non-identity can be situated in the rationale of the relation between his strictly personal works (the personal exhibitions), the guided tours (involving the audience), his collaborations with other artists (with Fareed Armaly) and the contributions to larger projects (mostly the lay-out and design of exhibition catalogues). We think that in this, Müller's work touches an important issue, also in historical terms. Indeed, the critique, refusal or negation of the subject has been a prominent constituent of art production and of theory in the last 30 years. On the level of procedure, this resulted in the rejection of the physical act of artistic creation, the putting out of production to a subcontractor, mainly a craftsman, and the gradual discrediting of the physical object of the work of art, while iconography emulated the critique of the subject when dissolving narrative composition in favor of monotony, emptiness, repetition and the grid or the exchange of linguistic codes. Most of this criticism concerned the understanding of the human subject as an individual. The unit/identity pair to denote the human individual — what Alexander Kluge calls "the narcissistic 'I'"[3] — was dismantled as antagonistic when considered as a social being. Moral as the justification of conduct was unveiled as instrumental and repressive in the pursuit of individual prosperity.[4] Nevertheless, the negation of the subject was neither absolute nor unreserved. The final negation of the subject by the subject, suicide, doesn't seem to be a familiar practice, not even among hard-liners. Almost all artists reserved their rights of individual creation, both in artistic and in economic terms.

Different from the reductionism of the antagonistic strategy, Christian Philipp Müller develops his artistic practice in terms of research into the possibility and conditions of the dialectical relationship between personal subjectivity and intersubjective activity.[5] In early 1990, Christian Philipp Müller travelled with a fellow artist, Fareed Armaly, from Cologne to Stuttgart, Zürich, Graz and back to Cologne. The journey originated in an installation that they produced together for the "Köln Show."[6] This joint contribution consisted of a tape with functional music that was played in the staircase of a fancy gallery building in Cologne. Armaly's contribution to the catalogue was a text on the phenomenon of functional music (also called muzak, wallpaper music, shopping center music).[7] Müller reproduced a comparative chart concerning the efficiency of the music, with curves that illustrated the progressive stimulation of different parameters like tempo, rhythm, instruments and the dimension of the orchestra.[8] Apart from delineating both artists' different approaches of the issue, these contributions mainly substantiated their awareness of the "Nachschub" project's ultimate motivation as purely economic speculation upon human resources. In his catalogue contribution, Christian Philipp Müller proceeds from a basically visual element: the chart. Its idiosyncracy contains ample aesthetic references. Even without mastery of its code, the chart could be read autonomous as an aesthetic image, loose from its actual content. The awareness — though not necessarily the understanding — of the chart's functional content remains a precondition for aesthetic appreciation. Aesthetic appreciation of the chart, occurring unconsciously in its natural environment, the 'Muzak' business ("beautiful chart"), is the main issue in its adopted environment, the art world ("the chart is beautiful"). The metaphor describes commerce and art as two areas of production with an inverted tendency of their value codes. Together, they realize top surplus value.

The "Köln Show" piece subsequently developed into "Auftakt 1990," an exploratory inquiry through its participation in a traveling group exhibition in galleries of the above-mentioned cities.[9] Here, the sounds of the opening party were recorded and added to the functional music. Apart from the sound piece, the installation also contained five framed texts, displayed in a row. The two longer texts (of 16 and 17 lines) concerned the theme of passage. The first commented upon physical passage, like waiting rooms, corridors, elevators and staircases, as transition rooms. The immediate reference was the hall of the Hetzler building as the installation's architectural and ideological setting. But it also recalled Benjamin's observations on 19th century Parisian passages: "Die Passagen sind ein Zentrum des Handels in Luxuswaren. In ihrer Aussttatung tritt die Kunst in den Dienst des Kaufmanns."[10] The second text discussed the opening, the vernissage of exhibitions as an abstract ("spezielle Art") transition room from not-exhibition to exhibition and from the former to the actual episode. The three shorter texts (2 of 8 and 1 of 7 lines) concerned the type, the use and the advantages of the music in the installation. When in one of these texts, the customer is described a walker/stroller, an inhabitant of the passages, Benjamin's "flaneur"[11] is brought up (unintentionally) and adapted to the new conditions of commodification. According to one critic, the installation for the "Köln Show" remained unperceived as site-specific art. Perhaps, this happened because it was not site-specific art. The installation could have been repeated in any other gallery building, and in fact, it was. One should not deplore the fact that the reception by a predetermined public failed. Eventually, early site-specific art often remained unperceived exactly because the predetermined public did not encounter the categories that it came looking for. It was thus confronted with its own preconditioned viewpoint. It can only be a hopeful sign that artists are still able to disrupt, or at least to question, the inhabitants of the contemporary art scene. Instead of thinking about how to achieve reception for the artist, it would rather help to consider one's own supposedly sophisticated reception tools to find out where they harden into cliché.

The image of the flaneur refers to Christian Philipp Müller's works "Kleiner Führer durch die Ehem, "Kurfürstliche Gemäldegalerie Düsseldorf" and "Carl Theodors Garten in Düsseldorf-Hellerho" (both of 1986) or his participation in a film like "Een openbaar bad voor Münster," a documentary on the exhibition "Skulptur Projekte Münster" of 1987.[12] We will discuss the historical promenade/guided tour with projects for monuments through the garden of Kurfürst Carl Theodor. The tour was accompanied by an illustrated 31-page-booklet ("Programmheft" in German). It occurred over four weekends in October 1986.[13] The dramatis personae of the work can be classified into four different types. Christian Philipp Müller was the initiator, organizer, guide, artist and key performer. Six other people, three speakers and three musicians, completed the performance team. The public was the condition, audience, interlocutor and fellow-traveller on the trip through the historical landscape. The fourth group consisted of historical persons like Goethe, the architect of Schloß Benrath, Nicolas de Pigage, Kurfürst Carl Theodor zu Pfalz-Sulzbach, Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, etc. They only appeared in the catalogue and in the commentaries of Müller. The composition of this group dependeds upon the choices of the artist and on the proposition of the city of Düsseldorf to erect monuments in the new development area to remind the young inhabitants of the history of their new "Heimat." Starting from the city's plan, Müller charted a walk through the area to determine sites for monuments. He used the occasion to outline the itinerary on an imaginary 18th century garden and palace, including relevant information on the architecture and proposing 18th century subjects for the monuments (see above). His excursion into history was not about how it really was or how it could have been. The past tense indeed would have been ill-adapted because the historical project, Pigage's garden for Hellerhof, had not disappeared since it wasn't even realized at its originally intended location. The conditional adverbial clause — if the garden would have been achieved, ... — was inappropriate since it was actually realized though not on the location where it was planned. In his sixth reflection on the concept of history, Walter Benjamin stated that "Vergangenes historisch artikulieren heißt nicht, es erkennen "wie es denn eigentlich gewesen ist". Es heißt, sich einer Erinnerung bemächtigen, wie sie im Augenblick einer Gefahr aufblitzt."[14]

Fairly recently, Hellerhof started to develop into a suburb of Düsseldorf with typical mass-produced houses with a small private garden. The cheap design of the buildings, displaying poor architectural quality in an aesthetic of routine and dullness, is completed with a small private garden. This mimesis of the predominance of the private sphere (garden, television, fences) over the appearance of the public sphere (the sameness of the architectural skin) in the first place illustrates the condition of the private and the public as antagonistic qualities.

Hellerhof was also initially chosen as a building site for Schloß Benrath, an example of the 18th century architectural type of "Eremitage" that attempted to synthesize the house and garden, nature and architecture. This castle with garden was eventually built a few miles further away as a residence for the Kurfürst Carl Theodor, who had his main residence in Mannheim.[15] The architectural type was developed under and for Louis XIV to provide him with a place where he was not an entirely public creature and where he was able to pursue his fantasies of a harmony between man and nature. We should not be surprised that this occurs at the moment when Western thought realized that the specificity of the human being is to detach its own history from the history of nature. This consciousness of freedom and independence also aroused a feeling of loss. Emancipation means a loss of innocence. From now on, the human species is responsible for and to itself. Independence invokes a responsibility that can only be assumed by the human as a social being. This is the actual moment of the death of God, the hypostatized anthropomorph link between man and nature. Alienation identifies the experience of loss when the subject only realizes its independency in opposition to the object (nature). It announces the coldness of the lonely in the crowd (the privileged) and of the lonely crowd (the underprivileged). Reification occurs when the alienation process escalates into the alienation of the subject from its own subjectivity. This happened under Capitalist-Industrial society, leading to the roads which were paved at exactly the same time that the Schloß Benrath was built.

Situated high on a hilltop (literally) overlooking the city of Saint-Etienne, the Maison de La Culture et de La Communication (MCC) is one of those materialized institutions of French decentralized "action culturelle." Its location, architectural type, general conception and formal structure represent different aspects and the contradictions of a socially inspired cultural policy that originated in the 1930s (with a revival in the 1960s). Christian Philipp Müller's work at the MCC concerned the notion of culture in cultural institutions, its social pertinence and the way this is contained in the visual document of the place and its contents. In the first small exhibition room of the Espace d'Art Contemporain at the sixth floor of the Maison, a secretary sat at her desk with a photograph on the wall behind her. The photograph depicted Malraux sitting at his desk in the Ministry of Culture at the Palais Royal in 1967. The MCC of St.-Etienne was built in 1968. The second room contained a rectangular disposition of low concrete walls. The disposition of the walls coincided with the tectonic grid of the ceiling. The upper part of the longitudinal walls was covered with fabric. Each top of the transverse walls had 58 holes, containing a four-leaf clover. The title of the exhibition was "Porte bonheur," and was translated in the catalogue as "Good Luck Charm." The catalogue, conceived by Müller, is the third part of the exhibition.[16]

Müller's artistic strategy is circular. Initiated from a visual impulse, Müller's work "Porte bonheur" pursued socio-historical speculations to end up in a rather straightforward visual presentation, both in the material installation and in the catalogue. He started from the rectangular grid. The reason for choosing the grid can be found in the catalogue. The mainly visual documentation in the catalogue shows that the grid is a particularity that can be noticed throughout the visual material related to the MCC, and to Modernism in general. One of the photographs in the catalogue shows Malraux, surrounded by a grid-like display of photographs of masterpieces for his "Museé imaginaire" (p. 7). Instead of being 'exhibited' diacronically, like in the book, the synchronic presentation of the works of art shows the reduction of highly different material objects, considered to be masterpieces of art, to an identical format. Müller emphasized this reductionism by juxtaposing this photograph of Malraux to a series of 24 photographs of heads, mainly from sculpture from all periods, but also from a mosaic, paintings, a mask, drawings and a stained-glass window. All reproductions had the same form and dimensions. Only the image changed. Obviously, the iconographical value of the "Museé imaginaire" cannot prevent it from being a statement of the internal contradictions of a utopian social project that did not interrogate its own conception of culture in terms of sociological stratigraphy.

As we indicated in the introductory paragraphs, and specified in the analysis of a few works, Christian Philipp Müller's aesthetic production encompasses various degrees of personal involvement. He virtually abandons the conflict of individual identity with its surroundings.

The aforementioned might suggest that Christian Philipp Müller implements the old dream of intersubjectivity. However, far from having utopian ambitions, his production remains particular and isolated even when operating in a more complex intertwining of subjects, like in the collaboration with Armaly. One is reminded that the work is no scheme of utopia; it neither confirms nor conforms to what is constructed as reality. Müller's work demonstrates in different degrees both the awareness and inescapability of the alienation of the subject. Some of his works, like "Eh! bien prenons La plume" or the layout and design of Texte zur Kunst maintain the antagonism between thoughtfulness, consideration and diplomacy on the one side, and control, dominance and influence on the other. But in all their isolation they also preserve the glimpse of a possibility of intersubjectivity. The friction between the attempt to articulate the debris of history and of damaged communication, the awareness of the artist's social privilege (and therefore obligation) to ungoverned speech, as well as the peripatetic approach and the recognition of the hopelessness to circumvent the impossibility of immediacy, results in open-ended works that incite the receiver to reconsider the conditions of his understanding of aesthetic production. Müller's work operates not as a negative model of a naive utopia but as a speculation upon windows in the social monads as the basic condition to reconstruct an unrealized subjectivity.

Notes

1. Benjamin, Walter, Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts, in: Benjamin, Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften, Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 1980 (2), p. 178.

2. Meschonnic, Henri, Modernité Modernité!, Lagrasse, Verdier, 1988, pp. 35-36.

3. Kluge, Alexander, Response to Jutta Brückner in: New German Critique, No. 49, Winter 1990, p. 106.

4. Apart from Nietzsche's effort to an emancipation of Enlightenment through a critique of a unquestioned ethics, another, less passionate but not less important critique of ethics is Weber's analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and the rise of Capitalism. See: Weber, Max, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Vol.1), Tübingen, J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1972. Indispensable secondary source: Schluchter, Wolfgang, The Rise of Western Rationalism. Max Weber's Developmental History, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, Univ. of Calif. Press, 1981.

5. I thank Christian Philipp Müller for his substantial assistance and for our numerous discussions. Luk Lambrecht's introductory efforts and support were of seminal importance for the text.

6. The "Köln Show" (a shared initiative of 9 galleries in Cologne), (April 24-May 26, 1990). The bilingual German/English catalogue was titled "Nachschub Supply," edited by Isabelle Graw and published by Spex publishers, that also distribute Spex, a music magazine. "In September of last year (1989) we met for the first time to discuss the idea of a joint exhibition of young or internationally little known artists." From the statement by the galleries, exh. cat. p. 7.

7. Armaly, Fareed , Supply Song, in: Nachschub Supply, Op. Cit., pp. 86-89. The title referred to art as subject and object in the commodity cycle. More on this in a forthcoming article on Fareed Armaly.

8. In: exh. cat. Nachschub Supply, Op. Cit., p. 101.

9. Group exhibition Fareed Armaly, Cosima von Bonin, Michael Krebber, Christian Philipp Müller, Joseph Zehrer: Galerie Ralph Wernicke, Stuttgart (April 30-June 2); Galerie Birgit Küng (Fifth Third Bank corp), Zürich (Opened May 29); Galerie BleichRossi, Graz, (June 12-June 23); Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne (July 13-August 4). All dates 1990.

10. Benjamin, Illuminationen, p. 170.

11. Die Menge ist der Schleier, durch den hindurch dem Flaneur die gewohnte Stadt als Phantasmagorie winkt. In ihr ist sie bald Landschaft, bald Stube. Beide bauen dann das Warenhaus auf, das die Flanerie selber dem Warenumsatz nutzbar macht." Benjamin, Op. Cit., p. 179.

12. By Jef Cornelis and Chris Dercon for the Flemish Belgian Radio and Television (official federal state broadcasting institution).

13. Carl Theodor's Garten in Düsseldorf-Hellerhof mit Christian Philipp Müller. Historische Führung mit Denkmalprojekten, Düsseldorf, 1986 (4, 5, 11, 12, 18, 19, 25, 26 October). The 'Führung' got the headlines, including photograph, on the front page of the Düsseldorfer newspaper Heimatnachrichten of October 6, 1986.

14. Benjamin, Op. Cit., p. 253.

15. His predecessor, Carl Philipp, never visited Düsseldorf. He had the famous collection of the Düsseldorfer Gemäldegalerie transferred to Mannheim. The latter issue concerns Christian Philipp Müller's "Kleiner Führer durch die Ehem. Kurfürstliche Gemäldegalerie Düsseldorf" from the same year at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf, partly housed in the former quarters of the Kurürst's collection. On this: Graw, Isabelle, Jugend forscht (Armaly, Dian, Fraser, Müller), in: Texte zur Kunst, No. 1, Autumn 1990, pp. 167-168.

16. Christian Philipp Müller," Porte bonheur," Saint-Etienne, Maison de Ia Culture et de Ia Communication, 1989 (June 8-July 13).