ZURICH
James Meyer (JM): How did you decide to become an artist?

Christian Philipp Muller (CPM): When I was sixteen, I was sent to a career
advisor. I had to give a sample of my writing. The advisor went back to my
parents and said: "You know, this is an artist, but he's too young and he
should have a real education first." I just recently read an article on Thomas
Hirschhorn and the same thing happened to him. His parents also said, "You
should become a typographer." From the Reformation on, typography was
considered something between crafts and academia, between blue collar and
white collar. And so that's what they made me learn.

JM: Where did you learn about typography?

CPM: For four years I was an apprentice in a typography workshop. I went to
school one day a week and squeezed in another half day for art classes. When I
was almost twenty, I had to join the army. That was the summer of 1977. I
decided I needed to do something cultural before disappearing into the army. I
went to the documenta 6 with the two adjacent pavilions by Dan Graham, the
honey pump of Joseph Beuys, the tower digging the hole for the "Vertical Earth
Kilometer" by Walter De Maria, and George Trakas's "Union Pass" in the park. I
didn't just go and see it once. I spent a whole week there. It was the last
week of "liberty."

JM: After that you went to Zurich.

CPM: I went to the School of Applied Arts (HGKZ). At about the same time I
took classes at an art school that split off after 1968 from the official
applied arts school, "Farbe und Form" (F+F), because there was no fine arts
education at the time. They offered evening and weekend classes, very much
based on collaborative performances. That was around 1979. It was influenced
by people like Vito Acconci -- very body related. I also took video classes at
a video collective, there we worked with Port-o-packs -- that gigantic, bulky
equipment.

JM: You were becoming a professional designer.

CPM: Yes, but I lost interest in creating for commercial clients and spent more
and more time in the fine arts. At first "F+F" was like the graphic design
education on the side. I still had a nine-to-five job as a freelancer. I
couldn't just say from one day to the other, "I am becoming an artist." It was
more like stepping stones. When I was at the at the "F+F" it was all about
collaboration and process and not about the product. I needed something that
was my own. So I started looking around in Hamburg, Berlin, and Düsseldorf.

DÜSSELDORF
JM: And you arrived in Düsseldorf when?

CPM: Around 1983. But there was a time of going back and forth, where I would
officially still be enrolled in Zurich, but I would spend most of my time in
Düsseldorf. I entered there as an advanced student.

JM: But of course the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf isn't any art academy; it's
considered the leading art school in Germany and it had a whole tradition,
with Beuys, Richter… It must have been very lively when you were there.

CPM: My trigger, why I went there, was when I saw Joseph Beuys and Andy
Warhol behind the Kunsthalle am Grabbeplatz, in front of the galleries Schmela
and Konrad Fischer. That's when I said, "Okay, that's the place to be. Where
they are, I have to be. That's where it happens." I started there as an
auditor of Jurgen Partenheimer.

JM: Who else did you study with in Düsseldorf?

CPM: I was accepted by Fritz Schwegler. Schwegler did drawings, paintings,
objects, all based on the whole Schwitters idea. He was famous, as an
interpreter of the Ursonate, Schwitters's sound work.

JM: He would perform it himself?

CPM: And he did sound pieces himself where he was kind of singing, but in a
speaking voice, a speaking song so to say. He invented his own iconography. I
went there, because he was the only one who would accept somebody who wouldn't
say "I'm a painter, I'm a sculptor, I'm a photographer, I'm a video artist."
It was totally open; and he left me alone, basically. In 1984, Kasper Konig
curated von hier aus, a show about the different art movements that came out
of the Rhineland and out of Dusseldorf specifically. It was held at the
Convention Center. With that show, the city of Düsseldorf promised Kasper
Konig a teaching job at the Kunstakademie. His class was called "Kunst im
öffentlichen Raum," or "public art" -- we didn't know what that was.

JM: So what did he do?

CPM: Every student wanted to go to his lectures because he was a celebrity.
We knew that he could turn students into stars like Katharina Fritsch and
Thomas Schutte. Everybody at the art school wanted to be next to the guy.

JM: You were interested in the process of star-making?

CPM: I was very intrigued. He just sat there and chatted. In the second week,
he said that he had a history of publishing, with his brother, Walter Konig.
Most people left. I became his assistant. That was 1985 to 1986, a time that
was very crucial, because Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys died.

JM: So what did being Kasper Konig's assistant entail?

CPM: His teaching basically consisted of having his friends over on the way
to Skulptur Projekte Munster. They were doing site visits in Munster and at
the same time, they could stop by in Düsseldorf and give a presentation of
their work. We were exposed to Dan Graham and Rodney Graham, Jenny Holzer, and
Fischli Weiss. I organized trips, made posters. It was a full-time job.

JM: But it was also at that time that you did the piece, "Kleiner Fuhrer durch
die ehemalige Kurfurstliche Gemaldegalerie." Was this tour your first piece?

CPM: No, I date my work back to 1984. I did collaborative works earlier on in
Switzerland.

JM: What was the context of the piece?

CPM: "Why do I feel so depressed in Düsseldorf? Why is this such an ugly
place?" I was asking, "Was this ever a beautiful place?"

I found out that it had once been a park city, that you could walk throughout
the whole city under a canopy of trees. There was always water and it was very
lusciously green. Everything was destroyed during World War II.

JM: So you have two tours in 1986, and they both have to do with Carl Theodor:
one at the site of the pleasure palace and the other at the Kunstakademie.
Could you relate the works?

CPM: The connection was obvious. I was researching the historical identity of
Düsseldorf, it used to have a very strong cultural identity in the eighteenth
and nineteenth century. I researched the center of town and the suburbs. Where
did the city originate? And where does the city become suburban sprawl? The
identity of cities mostly is located in their center. You have the opera, the
museum, the marketplace. The further you go away from the center, the less
culture one can find. I wanted to go to this wasteland, like Smithson, where
there is "nothing," and give these places and people a fictional identity, a
fictional past. I initially developed the outdoor piece in Konig's seminar. It
took a long time to research because I studied eighteenth-century gardens and
Enlightenment theories of the sublime: the English, the French, the Italian,
the Dutch -- all these different aesthetics. During my re­­search, I came upon
the pleasure pavilion in Benrath/Düsseldorf. Im­­mediately in the history of
Benrath, you come across Wilhelm Lambert Krahe, a painter who founded a
private drawing school in 1766. He and his assistants painted the frescoes for
Benrath. The Duke was so pleased with the finished work and rewarded him by
elevating the private drawing school to the official Düsseldorf Painting
Academy.

JM: Düsseldorf did not have a Painting Gallery anymore. And so you gave a tour
at the Art Academy?

CPM: My performance consisted in a fiction to bring fifteen highlights back.
Since 1805, after the paintings were moved from Düsseldorf to Munich, they are
part of the world-famous "Alte Pinakothek." The Academy building has a similar
architecture as a museum or a castle. I wrote in my leaflet, that the Art
Academy would be turned into the Painting Museum. You have a yearly one-week
show, students showing their production at the "Rundgang," scrambling for
attention. I did a comparison with the eighteenth century. I gave a daily tour
of an hour and a half, dressed as a museum guard. Of course, I didn't have the
Rubens or the van Dycks or the Velazquez in Düsseldorf, instead the students'
works were on view. I talked about the relationship of the Duke and his
collection, about the status of each individual artist and how much in demand
his work was.

JM: The work had several angles. It's about the desire of the collector to
have significant works of art, and that of the artist to be collected. It also
seems highly specific to the Düsseldorf Art Academy, because you're engaging
the architecture there. So what was the connection between each station and
professor, and the painting that you discussed?

CPM: It was random. I selected highlights of the former Duke's painting
collection and picked those works that everybody knows from reproductions.

JM: But why did you launch your practice as a performance? Why didn't you do
an installation or a publication?

CPM: It was an installation and a folder as well. It was all of the above. On
each floor there is a ninety-meter-long hallway. As an artist you were just
allowed to your allocated spot. I took over a whole floor. I made a huge
billboard sign on both ends over the whole width of the hallway and I put up a
sign that said, "Please do not touch pictures or frames," an exact replica of
what you find at the "Alte Pina­kothek." In a free edition of 1000 copies I
displayed my narrative of the history of the Duke's collection and original
descriptions of each painting in French and typography of the eighteenth
century. The dramatic architecture, those twenty-foot ceilings are similar in
Florence and in Dresden, that's how paintings are still presented.

JM: Why did you do a piece about the historical gallery? Why not do a piece
about the contemporary scene?

CPM: I was interested in the fact that nothing much had changed in the last
two hundred years.

JM: What had not changed?

CPM: Taste is subjective and desirability of art is very much linked with the
social status of the artist. I stated how some of the artists in the
collection were court artists and had the social status of servants. And yet,
there would be other artists, living for instance in Amsterdam, to whom the
Duke had to apply to get an audience! You have a whole range of power, and
that's what I was talking about -- the relationship between power, social
status, price, and taste. On my tour I quoted for instance Diderot, a visitor
of the Duke's collection. Many people came through and had heated discussions
on taste. I quoted their aesthetic judgments.

JM: Did you see this in the Cologne art world at the time, as well?

CPM: You just exchange the names.

JM: What was going on in Cologne in 1986? What interest faded away?

CPM: The Neue Wilde, New Figurative Painting.

JM: What's coming up at that time?

CPM: All the Americans. Konig invited Benjamin Buchloh for one week in 1985,
and he exposed us for the first time to the work of Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler,
and Barbara Kruger. It was a complete opening of doors, pushed wide open. We
also had one week with Johannes Cladders, the former Director of the Museum in
Mönchen­glad­bach who was very inspirational. He talked about his relationship with Broodthaers, Beuys, and Buren. It was so lively, it was really art in the making,
not just looking at slides.

BRUSSELS
JM: I'd now like to move forward to the works you made around the subject of
modernist architecture and design, with a particular focus on Le Corbusier,
and, of course, at Saint-Étienne, Andre Malraux. How do we move from the
eighteenth century to postwar France?

CPM: That goes together with my move from German-speaking ­Düs­­­seldorf to
the bilingual city of Brussels in 1988. I was fed up with the one-dimensional
culture in Germany. It was maybe at most two-dim­­en­­sional: American and
German. Being Swiss was always difficult.

JM: You felt like an outsider.

CPM: I was looking for a place that had multiple identities. Brussels is
multilingual.

JM: You were interested in a more cosmopolitan situation.

CPM: I wanted to find the roots of Marcel Broodthaers who used to live in
Düs­­­seldorf. There were multiple links between Belgium and Germany: in the
persona of Konig, Belgian curator Chris Dercon, and filmmaker Jef Cornelis.

JM: But how does that get us to this interest in urban design, in Le
Corbusier, that whole set of work?

CPM: That's something I had carried around with me all the time. That comes
out of my education in Zurich, the art school, my graphic design teacher.
That's where we were taught the "modulor"-system of Le Corbusier, a system
that could only produce aesthetic results. He used this for his architecture,
furniture, typography: for everything, every aspect of human life. I was
invited to do a show in Antwerp. Antwerp is known for Rubens, for van Dyck,
for its history. It's also known for the "Wide White Space," for Broodthaers's
shows there. In 1990, I had a white cube at disposal at the Micheline Szwajcer
gallery which was my first gallery show. I visited Antwerp, and it was
striking. It was like Düs­­­seldorf on the Schelde River. You have a highway
bridge and a pedestrian tunnel to the other side of the River. The other side
has nothing, some nondescript high-rises, one-story family homes, and sports
fields. I had done performances in 1986, dealing with suburbia in Düs­­­seldorf,
therefore I went to the place in Antwerp that had the least amount of culture,
history, or anything.

JM: How did Corbusier come into this?

CPM: There was an important competition for this site in 1933. When I
researched this nondescript part of Antwerp, I came across many proposals for
developing this area of not just Le Corbusier but also of many of his
contemporaries.

JM: It wasn't his mature Ville radieuse but sort of an early version of it?

CPM: When you look at the plan for Paris, the form of those high-rises is
different, later he developed the light-efficient, Y-shaped high rise type
called "gratte-ciel cartesien."

JM: You made three sculptures in the shape of those towers and scaled these to
the viewer's body.

CPM: The ideal man for Le Corbusier measures one meter eighty-three
centimeters, six feet. I turned the inside of the gallery into an outside. I
lined up three identical sculptures to form an interior street. At the
entrance, two huge enamel plates were installed. One was taken from the table
of contents from the cover page of the Ville radieuse book by Le Corbusier. I
took the original typography and enlarged it to the size of a highway sign. It
had a list of all the cities where Le Corbusier wanted to implant these high-
rises: Moscow, Montevideo, Stockholm, Algiers…

JM: You made visible a plan for that "other" part of Antwerp that had never
been built.

CPM: On the invitation card was a quote from Le Corbusier from 1935, where he
talks about his ideal master plans: "In place of so many small, scattered
skyscrapers, a few large ones will be set up between 42nd Street and 55th
Street, in groups. Distance will be overcome. And hours will be saved and
usable. In Algiers, a single skyscraper will suffice. In Barcelona, two
skyscrapers. In Antwerp, three skyscrapers."

JM: What's this interest for you in modernism and its utopic ambitions?

CPM: Why did they fail? Complex systems did not allow much improvisation. For
instance, Le Corbusier divided the different layers of traffic. He wanted to
give people access to light in high rises, and created wide open public
spaces. Instead of suburban sprawl and allowing everybody their dream of a
little house, people had to live close together under one roof. When you don't
finish each element of a master plan, the overall concept is bound to fail. Le
Corbusier wanted to perfect everything. I asked myself what happens if you
refuse his system?

JM: This "utopic" vein of your work of course speaks back to your design
education. Yet, here you're not designing; you're stepping back and thinking
about what design is. You're reflecting on the artist's desire to have a
social impact through design. Who better than Le Corbusier?

CPM: I'm fascinated that he had a split identity. In the morning, he dressed
and used his studio as an architect and in the afternoon, he changed his
outfit and the location to become an artist. Two separate outfits, locations,
identities. What was missing in his architectural master plans is the kind of
creativity and elements of chance, which he reserved for his art.

JM: You consider the artist's social role in the installation "Fixed Values,"
Brussels, 1991-92. You organized an auction of the work which you had made
until that point. John Baldessari burning his paintings comes to my mind. Your
gesture was not to destroy the early work, but to sell it.

CPM: We're not talking about early work, but leftovers. I didn't stage an
auction. I did all the steps leading up to one. I was faced with growing
interest in my work at that time. I had made already several books and I had
shown in New York and around Europe. My name was slowly becoming known. I had
a name, but no product.

JM: Why not?

CPM: I preferred to have a direct relationship with my audience. I didn't
want to be alone in my studio.

JM: You speak about performance, but you became an installation artist and
you have done a lot of objects. Is that a contradiction? Or did you find a
way into the object that you felt engaged the viewer again?

CPM: I had an invitation to the Palais de Beaux-Arts. It really is a palace
of fine arts; it is situated next to the Royal Palace in Brussels and was
planned as a utopia by Victor Horta during the depression. In this ideal
palace a concert hall, a movie theater, and a fine arts museum were united in
one building. From the very beginning, there was not enough money to realize
exhibitions. Horta went way over budget. An auction house took over one wing
of the Palais des Beaux-Arts. It was striking to me to find this auction house
inside the museum. And you just stumble right away over the practice and life
of Marcel Broodthaers. His specific aesthetic is partly known through his use
of these auction house vitrines. In "Fixed Values," I put myself up for auction.
Since Yves Klein or Piero Manzoni, you can sell shit, you can sell air, and
people will buy it. I filled an auction-house vitrine with my left-overs to be
read on one hand as the site-specific auction-house display, on the other hand
as "Broodthaers's" aesthetic and the related specific exhibition history of
the Palais de Beaux-Arts with Michael Asher, Daniel Buren, and others.

JM: The history of institutional critique?

CPM: In the seventies, there have been incredible shows and I was being fed
this specific exhibition history by the curator of my show, Dirk Snauwaert. My
show took place in transitional spaces on the way to the auction house and the
main exhibition spaces.

JM: In all of your projects you design everything. How would we describe your
attitude towards design in your work? Is it expedient? In the service of a
concept?

CPM: It's always in the service of a concept.

JM: Certainly, there's a great interest in design in contemporary art. Where
does your work fit?

CPM: I like using a given aesthetic and changing the content to play with
expectations. To take a certain packaging, a certain display, a certain façade
and to change its content.

JM: You appropriate particular designs to reflect on how things, places, and
experiences are marketed.

CPM: Take the artist book for the Micheline Szwajcer show: It's a square
format, hand-printed in silkscreen on heavy cardboard and bound with metal
spiral binding. I adopted the design and the colors of "Le Poème electronique,"
Le Corbusier's publication of the Philips Pavilion at the World's Fair 1958.
Instead of regular paper and a classic binding, I used heavy cardboard and
metal spirals to give the feel of a children's book. It's a subliminal message
and very ironic that this was presented as a guide book. It's really the last
object you would take outside in the rain to go for a walk.

NEW YORK
JM: You moved to New York in 1992 and you started showing at American Fine
Arts with Colin de Land. Your first show, "A Sense of Friendliness, Mellowness,
and Permanence," with its witty wainscoting and lighting and the "menu" that
was at the front of the show listing the line-up of artists at American Fine
Arts. As I recall, it was a café look, because Colin would serve coffee to
clients. There was indeed a "sense of friendliness and mellowness" at that
gallery. Your piece was commenting on Colin's, we could say, "marketing
technique."

CPM: My show tried to improve on Colin. He prepared the New York audience for
my solo show with a summer group show. He combined artists with a certain
genealogy from Douglas Huebler, Stephen Prina, and Christopher Williams to
Andrea Fraser, Tom Burr, and myself.

JM: So Colin was setting up this narrative?

CPM: Interesting was the fact, that he dedicated two-thirds of his space at
40 Wooster Street to "art" and one-third to "social life." In the front of the
gallery, he set up a funky café with a leased fancy Italian coffee machine,
and a swinging door, like in a Western saloon, leading into the exhibition
space. Over that door was an engraved sign that he must have found somewhere
-- or maybe he had it made -- that said "Art Gallery." I had long discussions
with Colin about this division between the café, a social space, and the white
cube. He was serious about establishing the café and was dissatisfied by only
presenting and selling art. That was the time just after the First Gulf War in
1992, when the art market had completely collapsed. The harsh eighties were
"humanized." Sterile marble and stainless steel interiors of corporate
headquarters were covered up in artificially aged wood to provide a sense of
mellowness. We're not in this tough eighties anymore, we're all family.

JM: Starbucks…

CPM: That's a little bit later. My show was based on the faux bistros in New
York: Felix, Pastis, etc. Just when I was moving to the U.S. everything "hip"
had the look of "old world."

JM: It was a commentary on the gentrification of Soho. That was also the time
when the Soho art scene was in trouble. After the stock market crash, the art
market collapsed. So the idea was to bring clients in, to make it more
friendly.

CPM: Make it mellow.

JM: It was the beginning of "relational aesthetics" with all that
"generosity." But your installation at American Fine Arts -- even though the
wainscoting was wood, a very warm wood lit by warm lights -- it was a very
cold installation. There were no chairs, no place to sit. It was de-
familiarizing, the room was not a cafe but an installation.

CPM: It was also based on Adolf Loos, who wrote "ornament and crime."

JM: And in the back was your bookcase, "Ma Bibliotheque." There were openings
with your publications, but the rest was wallpaper.

CPM: A very fancy wallpaper called "Bibliotheque," that I appropriated. It's
an illusionistic image of used books. I turned my books into a big sculpture
that was for sale. It dramatically altered Colin's formerly very cluttered
office.

JM: Why did you move to New York?

CPM: Düsseldorf was terribly European, and the whole Buren-Haacke-Broodthaers
connection was European as well. I wanted to get to the source of contemporary
American theory.

JM: What do you mean by American theory? Postmodernist aesthetics?

CPM: I met Andrea Fraser and Mark Dion through Fareed Armaly in Cologne. I
heard about their teachers, among them Craig Owens and Benjamin Buchloh, the
School of Visual Arts, and the Whitney program. Hollywood covers Europe with
their productions. I wanted to go to that source, too.

JM: The source of both theory and popular culture.

CPM: Yes, those two components.

JM: You were introduced to the U.S. through this particular group of artists
who had gone to the Whitney program, who had studied with Owens; some of them
had been in ACT UP with Douglas Crimp. Did you feel part of a community and in
what way did you feel a sense of artists' community in New York?

CPM: At this early stage, I truly believed in a sense of family and the
urgency of gay politics. For a gay man New York was always the El Dorado. That
was one of the reasons I came here.

JM: Let's move to one of your key works, the Austrian Pavilion of the Venice
Biennale of 1993, which you shared with Andrea Fraser and Gerwald
Rockenschaub. You were now moving into a commission-based public art practice,
which will continue in other forms.

CPM: Artist Gerwald Rockenschaub explained to me the concept of a
transnational pavilion by Austrian commissioner Peter Weibel. They both
invited Andrea Fraser and myself to realize a project for the Austrian
Pavilion. Rockenschaub occupied the central space and thematized the building
itself, designed by Josef Hoffmann in 1933. Andrea focused on the structure of
the Venice Bienniale and the meet­­ings of the national commissioners. The
Austrian nation, which I had to represent, became my topic. Before the opening,
there were wild and polemic reactions against the concept of a transnational
pavilion, Andrea, and myself.

JM: It was a very timely topic because the Iron Curtain had come down just a
few years before, and there was this "problem" of im­­mi­­gra­­tion to Austria
and a revival of Austrian nationalism.

CPM: Austria was not part of the European community yet. Austrians were very
much concerned with losing their national identity, their border with the
former Communist regimes was the most porous to enter the West. They were
concerned with securing the borders both physically and mentally.

JM: Which makes your piece so appropriate for that point in time. And, of
course, since 9/11, the border has become an even more loaded concept. You
responded with a multimedia piece. There was the installation in the
pavilion's conservatory, with its northern trees transplanted to a
Mediterranean climate, reversing the old notion of the winter garden. There
were also drawings of Austria in that room. How did you select them?

CPM: Austria is just a torso compared to the expansive Austrian-Hungarian
Empire before World War I. I went to the very Kafkaesque National Archive in
Vienna, where the national pride has been preserved and to the Albertina to
look at watercolors of Austria and their territories. I tried to find artworks
that dated back to the high point of Austrian national identity, but I was
immediately told that I could forget about borrowing anything for the
precarious situation in the pavilion in the Venice Biennale. The next thing I
un­­earthed were landscape drawings for an encyclopedia that was produced in
1896, the same year the Biennale was founded. It was a last attempt to cover
all aspects of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in its entirety. I found an
archive that preserved all these sketches that were later transformed into
woodcuts and chose eight depictions of border regions. I wanted to find out if
I could perceive the changing national identities crossing a wooded area
between Austria and its eight neighboring nations. It is all about loss,
everything I showed in the Austrian pavilion used to be Austria.

JM: In a sense, the objection to you and Andrea being part of the show was an
expression of that feeling of loss. What about the wood table you placed in
the garden?

CPM: I took the measurement of the representative main portal that defined
the center and the axis of the former symmetrical pavilion. I used these four
meters for my round table and transplanted them to the backside. Hoffmann's
asymmetrical nineteen-fifties addition to the original pavilion includes a
symbolic tree piercing the roof structure. My table turned around that tree
and was composed of different Austrian timber in the form of a pie chart,
representing the actual breakdown of the national forest. It also served as a
display for our Biennial merchandise.

JM: What about the garden itself and the wall you knocked down?

CPM: I basically followed the logic of Hoffmann, who already expanded the
sculpture garden. I also stripped down the trees from the overgrowth from the
past fifty years and chiseled out the lines that Hoffmann found when he
expanded the garden. I removed the curved wall, securing the sculpture garden
and broke down the border and opened it up literally and metaphorically.
Ironically, you could immediately see another wall behind it, the wall that
defines the territory of the Giardini Biennale Gardens. There's barbed wire on
top of that.

JM: The Giardini, the territory of art! Beyond the city of Venice, this
project was a reflection on the international exhibition as such. Since 1993,
there has been an explosion of Biennales and Triennales around the world. The
"globalization" of the art world is much discussed. How do you relate this
project to what's happened since?

CPM: Years later you still have the pavilions, organized along restricting
national categories -- that has never changed. What has really changed is the
number of Bienniales around the world…

JM: … and of pavilions in Venice, including the new pavilions outside the
Giardini. More and more nations understandably want to have representation
there. Both your and Andrea Fraser's contributions are prophetic of what was
to come: an increasingly "global" art scene where national identity still
matters but also is traduced, and you have this new category of the
"international" artist. After you crossed each border, you sent a postcard to
your dealer alluding to On Kawara stating "I crossed the border and I'm still
alive."

CPM: I should point out that the photos of my illegal border crossings are
more reproduced than the actual installation in Venice. There is a general
misunderstanding that I showed these photos in Venice, they were only used in
the catalogue and for media purposes. But in Venice, during the opening week,
there was only this rumor that I crossed all the borders illegally and had
been caught entering Czechia. 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.

JM: Two figures of travel are staged here: the transnational artist and the
non-artist who faces the actual perils of migration.

CPM: I stressed the fact that as an artist I'm a kind of symbolic fool. It's
only art, it's entertaining. Political refugees risk their lives.

JM: You are taking the concept of your tour and move it into a different
realm.

CPM: In Düsseldorf I moved from the center of town towards the suburbs. For
my Venice Bienniale contribution I did not represent Austria by its capital
Vienna. I represented the edge, the fringes, where something becomes something
else. In German, green border means "porous" border, an area that's
unprotected.

JM: What is it about the border that interests you so deeply?

CPM: I hate fixed identities. I believe in multiple identities.

JM: What do you mean "believe" in them?

CPM: 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, at 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.

JM: During the past decade you've worked for different kinds of patrons,
including corporations, universities, and museums. How do these different
conditions inform your work?

CPM: It was enriching to have direct exposure to a wider audience, not
necessarily interested in contemporary art.

JM: Let's turn to the question of critical practice. Your works reflect on the
conditions of art-making and the artist's role. The art market, which was
depressed when you and your generation of artists were emerging, was a
congenial context for critical work, because there wasn't as much money to be
made then. But now there is so much money to be made, the auction houses are
selling work by very young artists, the art schools are being raided: The
market for contemporary work is sky high. How do you feel about being a
"critical artist?"

CPM: I'm confident calling my show in Basel "Basics."