The artfully draped garment worn, once upon a time, by the nymphs of antiquity led an anachronistic afterlife. In the allegories of love of the Renaissance, it became a mere piece of cloth from which the human form had disappeared, falling from the body of beautiful Venus to the edge of the picture, but gaining “figural autonomy” in return; centuries later, it found its way into the viewfinders of the “New Vision” as a rag in the streets of Paris; and finally it returned, in the late 1960s, in Robert Morris’s intricate felt sculptures. In an essay on this curious Nachleben, the French art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman has made the attempt to think the actuality of “paradoxical […] indestructible things […] that come from far away and are incapable of passing once and for all.”[1]

Christian Philipp Müller displays a comparable sense for unexpected constellations of what seem at first glance to be disparate contexts and recurrent motifs; in painstaking research, he has developed a close attention to the contradictory “independent existence”[2] and historical vicissitudes — and the drapery, at once veiling and enveloping, always on the threshold of anthropomorphism[3] — of a cloth that has long been worn on the body but, beyond issues of functionality, also forms the metaphorical and metonymical fabric from which the cultural memory, the highly traditional present-day everyday life, and the labor history of a region are made. Based on this research, Christian Philipp Müller has realized his project “Burning Love (Lodenfüßler)” (2010) in the surroundings and rooms of Styria’s Schloss Trautenfels castle.

Müller places loden, a cloth that is produced, processed and worn in the area and both anchors and represents the local identity, at the center of his most recent work, which consists of an exhibition display (in the form of a pictorial tableau mounted to a wall), a performance, and an expansive sculpture that leads the viewer through two rooms on the castle’s upper floor; part of the Universalmuseum Joanneum, the castle also hosts a collection of exhibits documenting the natural and cultural histories of the neighboring Enns valley and Ausseerland regions. Yet the artist, who lives in Berlin and New York but always works on the site, does not establish a hierarchy between his artistic method, which is indebted to the history of post-minimalist sculpture and Land art as well as a conception of site-specificity enriched by a recourse to sociological and historiographic forms of research,[4] and these artisanal artifacts as well as the imagery — surrounded by ethnographic and, increasingly, commercial connotations — derived from the loden manufacture located at the place of the exhibition and the associated codes implied by the area’s typical Alpine traditional dress. For as Didi-Huberman’s remarks on “fashion and its cloaks” emphasize, the “vestiges, the forms of Nachleben” can be found “everywhere: they sneak into history’s every single nook — that of art, for example.”[5] Accordingly, “Burning Love (Lodenfüßler)” is not the first time that Christian Philipp Müller’s oeuvre, which he has developed over the past twenty-five years, has addressed the relationship between identity and tradition, in the guise of traditional native dress, in a context-reflective project that places the registers of the social and the aesthetic, allegedly incompatible in (post)modern art — or the ostensibly unbridgeable antinomies between content and form — in dialectical interrelation. The more urgently, then, do we need to clarify with regard to this concrete work (beyond this coherency within a critical-reflective artistic practice): Which aspects and forms of the afterlife of a material and the layers of meaning implicit in it does Müller stage at this scene? On the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the Basel Museum of Contemporary Art in 2007, the artist stated that, to his mind, to work site-specifically means to precisely position oneself outside a context.[6] “Burning Love (Lodenfüßler)” marks no exception to this principle — paradoxical at first glance, it is nonetheless a both fundamental and productive part of Müller’s method, indebted, particularly in the present project, to the programmatic conjunction of both local and artistic self-will with the intrinsic logic of aesthetic production and experience.

As has been customary for more than five centuries, the wet loden (the term derives from the Old High German lodo, coarse woolen fabric), cut into panels measuring ca. five by five feet and died in a variety of colors or left in its natural wooly white, has been left to dry in the mountain air outside the Steiner loden fulling mill in Rössing near Ramsau am Dachstein on a wooden tenter under a canopy. Further processing will turn it into Wetterflecken — a simple and versatile cape literally called a “weather patch” — Schladminger, Walkjanker, and other elements from the region’s repertoire of traditional apparel. The image of this monochrome surface seems to extend through the Alpine scenery of Styria like an abstract streamer; to the eye trained in art history, assisted by a detail from a photograph of the loden-covered tenter at the fulling mill, which Müller integrated into his “exhibition within the exhibition” — a show with the flair of a culture-historical presentation consisting of Müller’s own photographs, archival materials, and oil paintings found in the castle and its vicinity — immediately recognizes the formal similarity with the sculptural interventions of “Land art” in ostensibly untouched natural sceneries far removed from the centers of contemporary art, such as the windblown fabric of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “Running Fence” (1972-1976) north of San Francisco. On the other hand, Müller has thus not only established a close association between the region’s fabric manufacturing industry and the canonical art of post-minimalism, but also alluded to decisive changes in the way this picturesque landscape has been perceived and defined since the war, perceptions and definitions that also concern the unfading afterlife of loden as a material, concrete form, and carrier of cultural meaning, which Müller, as it were, follows step by step in this work: from the site of artisanal and agricultural labor to the backdrops of the leisure and tourism industries. Accordingly, Müller’s collection of images and documents from the local history of this highly traditional fabric, the primary material of his site-specific project for the exhibition “Fabricators of the World. Scenarios of Self-Will,” illustrates the contradictory codes that have defined this material over time.

Nowadays, once loden and other Alpine traditional fashions leave their ancestral home in the social structure and customs of a community with strong regional roots and make an appearance in the inner cities of, say, Graz, Munich, or Münster — let alone Hamburg! — they are read as demonstrations of the wearer’s traditional values, economic prosperity, and bourgeois self-image. Yet as Müller seems to emphasize, this garb made of sheep’s wool, ostensibly so easy to interpret, conceals a paradoxical history of “dynamic reversals”[7]: in the early nineteenth century, Archduke John of Austria — who gave his name to the Universalmuseum in Graz, which now operates Schloss Trautenfels, which was briefly also used as a youth hostel — beginning with his own court, rendered loden dresses socially acceptable as an expression of loyalty to the homeland and patriotism, initiating a transformation of the social status and habit the material signaled. Loden apparel had once been the preserve of those who needed efficient protection against inclement weather during their work in the mountains; but starting in the 1860s, affluent Jewish families from Vienna, and later intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig, spent their summer vacations in Bad Aussee, where they naturally wore the local traditional dress. Finally, Konrad Mautner sought to preserve its character as “native cultural patrimony” by creating a collection that forms the cornerstone of today’s Kammerhofmuseum in Bad Aussee. Then as now, the locals in their native garb are joined by tourists who, somewhere between conviction and travesty, come here to clad themselves in loden; the former actor and career politician Arnold Schwarzenegger and the deceased rightwing political histrion and governor of Carinthia Jörg Haider have also been seen wearing loden in high-publicity photographs. Despite the fabric’s general reputation for a lack of refinement and a certain robustness, the other branch of the Steiner family, which produces loden in the area surrounding Schloss Trautenfels, counts exclusive fashion houses such as Yves Saint Laurent and Dolce & Gabbana among its clients; as its advertising slogan “Keine Zukunft ohne Herkunft” (“No Future without Roots”) indicates, it has built its success on a profitable combination of local loyalties and stylish cosmopolitanism. Müller’s tableau thus encompasses a broad historical vision, from the current polysemy of a fabric whose internal contractions are virtually irresolvable back to its purely functional beginnings as a versatile cloth protecting its wearer against inclement weather. An altered version of this original loden, a sleeveless green cape, is still worn by hunters, but also, as a number of photographs show, adorns the artist during on-site visits in the area.

In “Burning Love (Lodenfüßler),” Christian Müller uses this archaic model from the repertoire of Styrian traditional fashion as the basis for his site-specific examination of the historical changes undergone by the representation of regional identity, relating it to the “figural autonomy” of the drapery of textile materials in post-minimalist art and their equally anthropomorphic and performative implications. Müller turns an entire panel, more than 150 feet long, of wooly white loden from Steiner’s fulling mill in Rössing into an oversized Wetterfleck that offers room and protection for no fewer than twenty people. To this end, the artist has cut the required number of circular openings into the loosely woven fabric before it was fulled; this latter process[8] lends the neck openings of this piece of collective apparel individual organic contours and soft edges. On May 13, Ascension Day, before the exhibition even opens, Müller will send his loden on the roughly 15-mile trip from the place of its production to the exhibition rooms at Schloss Trautenfels. On the one hand, this peregrination through the Styrian landscape, somewhere between a performance, a parade, and a procession, creates the moving image of an abstract monochrome surface that has suddenly and unexpectedly become very dynamic, even come alive, realizing the anthropomorphic dimension that is always already inherent to the fabric and its folds, which evoke the figure of the human body, even before the loden can be treated with the cuts, seams, dyes, and applications that prepare it for its destiny in Alpine apparel. In this sense, Müller, by sending a raw panel of loden — which, in its basic materiality, seems far removed from all association with regional traditional dresses and thus open to alternative projections — on its way, literalizes the “wealth of morphology and meaning” that “a simple cloth can bring to our attention” in aesthetic experience.[9]

On the other hand, Müller’s work, unlike the pieces of Land art that were among its art-historical inspirations,[10] and beyond the nominalist claim that any ordinary material can be turned into art, uses this simple cloak to establish a social community in the public space, one the panel of loden equally constitutes and holds together. As in earlier works, Müller thus bridges, at least temporarily, the ostensibly insurmountable gap that has opened in the history and theory of (post)modern art between the domains of the aesthetic and the social.[11] The rectangular piece of fabric we have encountered as an abstract sculpture resting on the floor or as a colorful stand-in for the picture — thus, for instance, in Cosima von Bonin’s or Falke Pisano’s exhibitions — is taken into use, worn on the body and sent across the hills and valleys. Voluntarily united beneath a collective Wetterfleck that is no longer or not yet one, but also brought together by the threads of the fabric for their joint migration from the manufacture to the museum at the castle, the participants in this performance are temporarily tied to, or dependent upon, one another. Müller thus finds a moving and dialectical image for the fact that, despite what tourism managers and culture functionaries suggest, the identity of the “fabricators” of the area cannot be represented by, or reduced to, local traditional dress. The folds of the loden keep this characteristic fabric — allegedly the manifestation of local self-will — afloat, somewhere between a formless heap and a carefully arranged, solid, and permanent form.[12]

Müller’s “Burning Love (Lodenfüßler)” also casts a retrospective glance at a series of thematically related works in which the artist has examined questions of regional or national identity and its representation. In the Austrian Pavilion at the 1993 Venice Biennale, Müller — a Swiss national, he was invited, with the American Andrea Fraser and the Austrian Gerwald Rockenschaub, to represent the Alpine republic, a decision of the Austrian Biennale commissioner at the time, Peter Weibel, that some considered inappropriate — presented his work “Green Border,”[13] which has since become a classic. The back cover of the catalogue as well as the poster advertising the pavilion show the three artists united in a quaint traditional inn (called, in Austrian German, a “Beisl”) and dressed in traditional Austrian garb,[14] as though to point out how absurd the exhibition spectacle’s aspiration to present a competition between nation-states, an idea that had long been obsolete, had become in an age of globalized contemporary art. Rigorously separating Austria’s view of itself from the outside perspective, the work rendered the myth of Austrian identity — taken to signal a closed society holding long-established privileges — legible as a rather simplistic form of marketing.[15] Similarly, the back cover of the annual report Müller created for Ringier in 1999 — he visited all international branch offices of the Swiss media corporation for the project[16] — is adorned by a photograph entitled “Christian Philipp Müller having fun in Slovakia,” a humorous mise-en-scène of the simultaneity of globalization and its very real effects with archaic self-images: the artist, wearing a baseball hat and a jean jacket, can be seen at the museum of local history and culture in Liptov, sharing a bench with three women wearing colorful traditional dresses. The ambivalence in the cultural coding of traditional apparel was also the subject of Müller’s exhibition “The Family of Austrians” at Galerie Metropol, Vienna, in the fall of 1993, which drew on the representation of life in rural Austria in Edward Steichen’s famous ethnographic survey of the world, the atlas of a “Family of Man.” The invitation card showed Müller in a picture taken in the context of “Grüne Grenze,” dressed as a hiker who, not unlike the artist who created the work shown at Schloss Trautenfels, approaches the question of Austrian self-presentation as an outsider of sorts. Display cases contained dresses from the Bregenzerwald region surrounded by sales brochures and didactic film material from the archives of the Viennese Institute for Costume Studies, which aimed to present regional authenticity as a marketable commodity — a folkloristic molding of national identity that was a match for Steichen’s representations, scattered, in magnified prints, across the gallery, of rural life in the Austria of 1955, which suggested a form of backwardness that looked positively exotic to postwar American eyes.[17] By comparison, Müller’s new work emphasizes even in its title those connotations of local traditional dress that elude calculation and control. It is customary for the men of the region to wear the typical Lederhosen with knee-high socks called Lodenfüßler (loden footwear) adorned with intricate knit patterns: one that must absolutely be placed symmetrically on the shin is called “Brennende Liebe” (“Burning Love”). Even this traditional and, for some observers, disconcertingly conservative woolen fabric as well as its use in traditional garments, then, preserve in all form an indelible vestige of human desire.[18]

In his outdoor performance, Müller mobilizes a particular dimension of his panel of wooly-white loden: its anthropomorphism, its ability to foster a sense of community, to permit a multiple rather than rigid conception of identity.[19] One reference in “Burning Love (Lodenfüßler)” is a happening James Lee Byars held at Anny de Decker’s gallery “Wide White Space,” Antwerp, in 1969. Under the title “Pink Silk Airplane,” Byars brought a piece of fabric measuring almost a hundred by a hundred feet to the exhibition space; he had cut a hundred circular openings into it, enabling a hundred people seated on the floor to take off on an imaginary voyage: “And so after a while everyone sat on the floor, shrouded in a cloud of pink silk, and floated in an atmosphere of festive wonderment. Those who thought the whole thing was ridiculous and didn’t want to join such a crazy situation got out as soon as they could. But those who played along immersed themselves, a little self-consciously, in the pink dream and, looking in bewilderment at the faces around them, smiling or lost in reverie, recognized friends.”[20] But Byars’s interest in 1969, just like Müller’s four decades later, was not in creating an opportunity for a happy experience of community, an idea that would be revived by the “relational aesthetics” of the nineties;[21] instead, the social cohesion established, then as now, by a piece of fabric is sometimes tainted by moments of involuntary membership. Byars reenacted his “Pink Silk Airplane” a month later, when he visited Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts, where Müller would be a student in the eighties; but now, as de Decker recalls, “after around a hundred people had taken their seats, he cut the fabric with scissors and the airplane disintegrated into airy pink angels, joined in groups of two or three depending on how Byars had cut them out.”[22] Just like Müller’s loden, then, the silk fabric offers no guarantee of “Friendliness, Mellowness, and Permanence,” to quote the title of a project the Swiss artist implemented in 1992.[23] Byars does not grant what began as a “shapeless wadded bundle”[24] a Nachleben in the form of drapery in which the “human figure,” though it “has disappeared as reality,” remains present as “suspense.”[25]

Müller, by contrast, does not cut the panel, which has served twenty people as a temporary overcoat during daylong actual journey on foot, into pieces; instead, he transforms it into a sculpture that, after the prelude made by his tableau on the history and present of the loden, extends through two rooms at Schloss Trautenfels, encountering, at the end of the tour, a film that documents the collective effort by which this mass of fabric covered the distance from the fulling mill to the museum. Shapeless in the way of a sculpture that adheres to the aesthetic of post-minimalism, the loden now meets the viewer as a tactile object; where it was once held up and in shape by the heads and bodies of twenty people, simple racks, roughly as wide as a pair of shoulders and made, like the interior floors in the castle, of larch wood, now keep it floating above the floor of the exhibition rooms. This arrangement retains the presence of the human figure: despite what is often said of this formation in postmodern art, Müller’s minimalism does not content itself with the tautology of allegedly elementary forms and neutral materials that present to the viewer’s eye only what is right there to see. Conscious of the enduring anthropomorphism of sculptural form and mindful of the history — Müller exhibits it — of the dynamic reversals undergone by the fabric from which it is made, the dialectical image of this work instead builds a bridge from “the sense of vision and touch” to the “semiotic sense[s] or meanings with their ambiguities.”[26] The general power of Nachleben that, according to Didi-Huberman, manifested itself in Robert Morris’s felt pieces likewise appears in Müller’s sculpture as an “eternal presence of metamorphoses”[27] — the metamorphoses, in this case, of loden as a fabric and a carrier of meanings rooted in the specific context in which, as so often in the Swiss artist’s critical-reflective works, the production and exhibition of contemporary art programmatically coincide.

Yet as “Burning Love (Lodenfüßler)” illustrates in the constellation of a seemingly idiosyncratic pictorial tableau with the performative activation of an oversize Wetterfleck in the landscape and an expansive sculpture that combines the fabric and its regional connotations with the history of art since minimalism, it would be a misconception to read the method of Müller’s work as deriving its critical potential from complete assimilation to a given context. As Müller emphasizes in the description, quoted above, of his understanding of site-specific praxis, such works must always aim to reflect, to quote the philosopher and art critic Juliane Rebentisch, the “double site” of art, i.e., the established conventions of the exhibition and production of art in relation to its social function as a whole.[28] As a consequence, a work such as Müller’s project in Styria “superimposes, as it were, upon the space defined by the life-world a virtual space, a second-order space defined by the play of meaning set in motion by the work’s relation to its visible as well as its invisible contexts.”[29] Accordingly, even works developed with a view to a concrete site such as “Burning Love (Lodenfüßler)” develop social relevance not by leveling aesthetic issues, but, on the contrary, only because the “constitutive tension between what is represented and what is representing reflectively energizes all content such that the ostensible self-evidence of the latter is dissolved by the processual logic of the works experienced as aesthetic even when the artists believe this content to be central.”[30] In such works, the interrelation between a material and its meaning never comes to rest — on the contrary, as Müller’s deliberately limited perspective on the historical vicissitudes and contradictory current realities of loden demonstrates, its signification is structurally open, eluding the artist’s intention as well as the attempt to tie it irresolvably to one site. Refracting the afterlife of a fabric and its site-specific contents in this self-reflective intrinsic logic of aesthetic experience without playing the social off against an art that is perfectly conscious of its constitutive sitelessness: therein lies Christian Philipp Müller’s self-will.

(Translation from the German: Gerrit Jackson)

Notes

1. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna (Berlin and Zurich: Diaphanes, 2006), 15-16. For the French original, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna. Essai sur le drapé tombé (Paris: Gallimard, 2002).

2. Ibid., 23.

3. Ibid., 27; and cf. Gilles Deleuze, The fold. Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 1993), 140.

4. Cf. the seminal essay and discussion of Müller’s work by James Meyer, “The Functional Site,” in Platzwechsel, Ursula Biemann, Tom Burr, Mark Dion, Christian Philipp Müller, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich: Schweizerisches Landesmuseum 1995, 24-39, as well as, from a historical perspective, Miwon Kwon, One Place After Another. Site Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002).

5. Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna, 55.

6. Cf. Miwon Kwon, “Unfixing Values,” in Christian Philipp Müller, exh. cat. Museum für Gegenwartskunst Basel, Philipp Kaiser (ed.) (Ostfidern: Hatje Cantz, 2007), 26.

7. Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna, 25.

8. In the traditional process called “fulling” or “waulking,” a wooden cloth is felted in lukewarm water (ca. 30-40 centigrade) with curd soap by applying pressure and friction, resulting in a denser fabric (the material shrinks to ca. 60% of the original volume).

9. Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna, 137.

10. Works that come to mind include those created by Franz Erhard Walther in the 1960s as well as Hélio Oiticica’s “Parangoles;” regarding the latter, see Sarabeth Buchmann, Denken gegen das Denken. Producktion, Technologie, Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (Berlin: b-books, 2007), 228-30.

11. See George Baker and Christian Philipp Müller, “A Balancing Act,” October 82 (Fall 1997): 110-11, 115, where the authors use the occasion of Müller’s project of the same title for documenta X (Kassel, 1997) to reflect on the history of public sculpture on Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz and the tensions between formalism (Walter de Maria, “Vertical Earth Kilometer,” 1997) and committed art (Joseph Beuys, “7000 Eichen,” 1982-87). “Burning Love” (Lodenfüßler) can in this regard be read as a continuation of this critical examination of the historical basis of site-specific art.

12. Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna, 42.

13. Cf. Christian Philipp Müller, 72-79.

14. Such portraits were also part of the work almost adjusted to the new background, 1993, which was included in the exhibition “Whatever Happened to Institutional Critique?,” curated by James Meyer and shown at Colin de Land’s gallery American Fine Arts, Co. (New York).

15. See also Alexander Alberro, “Unraveling the Seamless Totality: Christian Philipp Müller and the Reevaluation of Established Equations,” Grey Room 1, no. 6 (2002): 20.

16. For a more extensive discussion, see André Rottmann, “Faksimile: Kalkül und Anschauung in Serie. Überlegungen zu den Ringier Jahresberichten 1997-2008,” in Bildwelten des Wissens. Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik, Horst Bredekamp, Matthias Bruhn, Gabriele Werner (eds.), vol 7.2 (Wladimir Velminski, ed.), (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2009).

17. See Christian Philipp Müller, 136-39, as well as Christian Meyer, “Christian Philipp Müller and the Family of Austrians,” Camera Austria 49 (1994): 15-23.

18. Cf. Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna, 27.

19. For the significance of this concept in Müller’s work, see “A conversation between James Meyer and Christian Philipp Müller, “ in Christian Philipp Müller, 56.

20. James Lee Byars, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Bern, Johannes Gachnang (ed.), (Bern: Stämpfli, 1978), s.p.

21. For a discussion with a view to Müller’s critical work, see George Baker, “Relations and Counter-Relations. An Open Letter to Nicolas Bourriaud,” in Zusammenhänge herstellen/Contextualize, exh. cat. Kunstverein in Hamburg, Yilmaz Dziewior (ed.), (Cologne: DuMont, 2003), 134-40.

22. James Lee Byars, s.p.

23. For the exhibition “A Sense of Friendliness, Mellowness, and Permanence,” held in late 1992 at American Fine Arts, Co., New York, see Baker “Relations and Counter-Relations,” 135, as well as Christian Philipp Müller, 132-135.

24. James Lee Byars, s.p.

25. Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna, 27.

26. Georges Didi-Huberman, Was wir sehen blickt uns an. Zur Metapsychologie des Bildes, Munich, 1999, 159. For the French original, see Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1992).

27. Didi-Huberman, Ninfa moderna, 137.

28. Cf. Juliane Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, trans. Daniel Hendrickson with Gerrit Jackson (forthcoming), Rebentisch accordingly emphasizes quite rightly that “the strength of site-specific art has always been not in pretending to be able to escape the relations of production but in heightening the awareness of these relations and the fault lines associated with them,” Ibid., 266.

29. Ibid., 263.

30. Ibid., 278.