Many works of art, be they pictures or narrations, are aimed at producing certain effects. There are works that intend pleasure, change, and diversion. They try to achieve their goal through calmed forms or idyllic subjects, an appealing style or an agreeable manner of painting. There are others designed to create quite different effects like incite the recipient or cause shock, horror, or dismay. They depict catastrophes or terrible fates in wild, deeply moving forms. And there are those that make us think and consider things. Christian Philipp Müller's art clearly falls into the last category. Müller is an investigative artist interested in tracing ignored aspects of an artwork. In that, he is less concerned with effects but rather with the causes producing them. He focuses on the conditions of a work, on the prerequisites responsible for its genesis, dissemination, and reception. This is why Müller does not provide us with a pictorial narrative in his art but with questions of representation as such and, thus, with interlocking pictures and narratives. Müller usually takes several months to prepare a project in which he compiles sources. These sources can be of a quite different character — texts, descriptions, documents, reports, pictures. His research steps may be called deframing measures since his approach allows him to regard his sources isolated from each other. Müller shuns no difficulties and spares no pains for these deframing measures in which he separates causes from effects and facts from circumstances, engaging in comprehensive studies and extensive historical research. He proceeds like a scientist and frequently consults others to augment his knowledge. Müller's contribution finally presents itself as a form of critical evaluation of the information gathered. In this second step, Müller is an artist and no scientist. Although his projects are mainly comprised of pertinent comments, they are not spread by scientific channels. They rather turn into art, into an art of argumentation in an extended field of assessment. One might say that the deframed material is again inscribed into the frame of art, yet not merely in the form of pictures but also as a narrative. I would like to describe this second step as a process of embedment because it consists of recontextualizations, reentries, and inscriptions — a process in which one form of expression includes another. Pictures may be embedded in narratives, and narratives may be embedded in pictures. Müller, whose practice both as an artist and as a scientist is always appropriate and matter-of-fact, attaches great importance to the continuous transparency of his procedure. This evaluation can only be accepted as a method and not be taken as mere effect if it remains visible as such. This is important because it would not make us think otherwise. In Müller's opinion, judging artworks according to their outward appearance or merely aesthetical qualities means fundamentally misunderstanding them. He sees each work specifically informed by concrete circumstances, by the ideas emerging on site and during its genesis. This is why all characteristics of historical materials, including the quality of being a picture, a sculpture, an artwork, of causing diversion, horror, or pensiveness, can, in retrospect, provide insight into people of the past, their perception of the world, the social contexts and their development at that time through a sound verification of sources. It is Müller's ambition to reveal these different conditions, to disentangle the knotting of effects and causes — or in short and in a rather condensed form: the conditions of the possibility of others' art become the conditions of the reality of his own.

From the many issues Müller has dealt with in the course of his career, there is one thematic field that keeps recurring: the garden. It even serves as one of the crucial examples in his studies on the etiology of the perception of art. Müller's dedication to this subject may probably be best explained with his penchant for botany. Müller is an expert on the world of plants and is very interested in their varieties, species, and history. He also likes to observe his own plants thrive — a fascination he shares with many people. Apart from these very personal preferences, the role of gardens in his work seems to also have a number of other reasons. One of these is Müller's aspiration towards ever-higher levels of difficulty and the fact that he finds himself confronted with such challenges when studying gardens. For gardens differ from pictures and narratives. One might say that gardens, like all works of art, are designed to produce certain effects: they intend to offer rest and diversion and, sometimes, to cause amazement and awe. Yet, contrary to museum works, these effects may be acted out in gardens. Gardens not only promise a fictitious recreation as paintings do, but provide it actually. An idyllic landscape may perfectly grant leisure, while a cliff, a thunderstorm, or a sheer precipice will produce genuine unease. To put it in a nutshell: the effects of gardens are perceptibly similar to those of museum works but their causes are different.

In one of his first works, dating from a time when Müller was still a student at the Academy in Düsseldorf, a garden already provided the occasion for a study. To demonstrate his method of art as a concatenation of arguments, Müller increased the level of difficulty from the start. The affair became complicated because Müller’s garden did not exist. All descriptions of the reality of the garden he bad put on the agenda were conditions of its possibility. And yet the facts were more than mere fiction. Müller had chosen a historical garden that Prince Elector Carl Theodor had planned for the outskirts of Dusseldorf in today's Hellerhof district in 1755 as his subject. The garden was finally realized near Schloss Benrath, a few kilometers to the north. Yet, this was not of prime importance to Müller. He was less interested in the realized garden than in the idea of the garden in Hellerhof and in the pictures and theories that he came upon. During his preparatory research, he gathered all available information and dedicated himself to the history of its planning and the phases of its design, proceeding strictly along the lines of his deframing concept. For his second step, the evaluation of the material, he relied on a surprising, quite unconventional means of demonstration. He decided to offer a tourist tour. On several weekends, he accompanied a group of people interested in visiting the site that today presents itself as an anything but an imposing housing development on the outskirts. It was there that Müller gave an account on the gardens once planned for the Prince Elector. He would begin the tour by defining the position as follows: "We find ourselves in the main building of Hellerhof station. From the domed hall, we enjoy a good view of the estate and the planned Rococo garden."[1] Müller already centered on the view in his first remark. A number of black-and-white photographs show him emphasizing his comments with pointing gestures. He presented the fictitious garden to the visitors, expounding on its history, by referring to various occurrences and embedding his information in the local or historical context. He interrupted his remarks from time to time to introduce various monuments covered with linen which he had previously installed. He suggested the erection of six of these monuments to the public. The memorials were unfinished, as it were; the name and the biographical data of the person concerned were found on the front. Visitors could decide between two kinds of representation: a bronze sculpture on a stone pedestal or a simple stone slab with a quotation. Depending on their taste, they could choose among Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Goethe, Hirschfeld, and Montesquieu. The two kinds of representation offered were not random at all: while a figure is a picture, a panel with a text is a narrative. The selection of persons was equally deliberate. All of them were Enlightenment thinkers, especially those who reflected on the position of man, particularly on man's responsibility and the role of nature. For Müller, the outstanding historical figures were representatives of an epoch or rather the epoch-making change that emerged in Europe and elsewhere in the mid-18th century. Positioned between the grey new buildings of the Ruhr, these thinkers stood for a presence that had meanwhile been forgotten — a presence which nevertheless still exerted its effects, just like the geographical marks that Müller, using the historical plans, had come upon between access roads, paved sidewalks, and traffic islands. Originally, the ground plan of the garden had been square. Historical engravings show a clear geometric network with paths connecting its corner points and sides. The radial layout at its center was emphasized by a circular promenade so that, regarding the overall structure, the rectangle and circle (its two basic forms) playfully combined to square the latter.

As usual in Baroque gardens, the vistas are strictly axial and symmetric. Clearly outlined fields divide the areas, and the layout of the paths obeys exact proportions and the right measure. I cannot remember whether I mentioned it to Christian Philipp Müller, yet his accounts of Hellerhof naturally reminded me of my working place. I had been blessed with a similarly magnificent view of a historical garden until recently. About thirty years before the German Prince Elector, the Habsburg general Prince Eugene of Savoy had a magnificent palace built in Vienna. Palace and gardens bear the name Belvedere, which means "beautiful view." I had an especially beautiful view of it from my window. To be correct, I should not forget to mention that the palace was only named Belvedere approximately 150 years after its construction. This is not surprising from a historical aspect, for Baroque art was not so much aimed at producing optical vortices or tourist views but rather at creating a different form of perception, a much more comprehensive visibility. Strangely enough, the impact of Baroque gardens is strongest when seen from above, from a bird's-eye view, and not when strolling through their alleys or viewed from a window. Baroque gardens do not seem to call for an ordinary view but for an ideal position, for an inspection from infinite heights. This is why they strongly resemble maps: cartography also relies on an ideal position in heavenly altitudes. It is only from this unusual imaginative perspective that the circles, squares, labyrinths, and radii present themselves in their intended effects, as geometrical drawings and symbols of a world carefully measured out with compasses.

It is revealing that the Baroque view did not result from an extended perspective but was an unrestricted, frameless view — God's view, which is actually no view at all but a pure all-encompassing intelligible survey. The position in heaven was hypothetical and fictitious, similar to that of Müller's tour of the outskirts of Dusseldorf; the difference between the two unequal fictions probably being that Müller talked about the past at eye-level, while Baroque art focused on the future from an underside view. The attitude prevailing in the Baroque era was that the world springs from God's perfect reason and that God will always watch over it. Its reality is one in a state of possibility, which is predetermined, yet will see its completion in the future. The spiritual mentor of this idea was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the most distinguished polymath of his time. Leibniz thought the world not as composed of things, forms, and substances but of conceptual elements. According to their high state of consciousness, these elements, cognitive molecules, so to speak, are purely abstract, mathematical concepts. God is their highest embodiment. Leibniz called these conceptual elements "monads." He saw all life comprised of monads — animals, human beings, plants, even inanimate nature. The monads develop their particular being in the realization of their possibilities, by means of calculation, abstract deliberation, and logical conclusion, i.e., according to discursive criteria of knowledge. Leibniz used a now famous metaphor to describe that the monads do not exchange that knowledge among each other and stand isolated as individual entities: he said that "monads have no windows."[2]

For people of the Baroque era, there was no doubt that God occupied the highest level within this hierarchy, and, since God's reason was regarded as unrivaled, Leibniz concluded that there could be no better world than the world we live in. Thus, the gaze and its economy of desire and the people of that time had to orient themselves towards God's absolute wisdom. Clearly, they could not occupy his exceptional position at the top of all being. This was merely possible theoretically, either via a mathematical idea of infinity or an illusion of art, the hypothetical view of deluding images. The cartographical ground plans were one way to occupy this position fictitiously, the glorious frescoes in which gods crowd on church and palace ceilings were another. It is a peculiar point of intellectual history that people could not see the world from above in this way before the belief in God's omnipotent reason was broken, that is when the first manned test flights succeeded. This was already in the midst of the Age of Enlightenment. At that time, when Mozart looked up from the Vienna Prater into the sky and did not see God but people floating through the air in a balloon,[3] the criticism of absolutism had already begun to take effect. After the loss of religious sovereignty, the perspective had already shifted downwards. With Enlightenment, man lowered his gaze, to eye-level and even lower. In contrast to Baroque times, people of the subsequent era admitted that man, though aspiring upward and after absolute knowledge, also has an inferior nature preventing him to do so. Rousseau (1712-78) and Voltaire (1694-1778), two of the pugnacious minds of that era, for whom Müller, awake to these issues, had planned a monument in Hellerhof, ranked among the most eloquent proponents of this attitude which insisted on realities instead of possibilities, on a morally ambiguous world instead of the best. Both Rousseau and Voltaire accompany Müller's garden projects to this day as intellectual narrative figures.

Some years have passed since Müller realized his Baroque Hellerhof project. And his account of it has also something of a look back, yet a look back at an experience important to him, an experience still worth considering. Today, the Swiss artist lives in an apartment in Brooklyn, New York. The brown brick building is part of a pleasant row of houses facing a park. The name of this park to the west is Prospect Park, which means more or less the same as Belvedere. When I came to visit I thought that the name fit although its lush vegetation had no similarities to the flat ornaments of the Belvedere gardens. The park rather reminded me of the Prater, which once was a hunting ground with open meadows and woods — which is not surprising because Prospect Park is a park inspired by the notions of Enlightenment and thus informed by the ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire. It was planned by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) in the mid-19th century as a recreation area on the outskirts of the extending metropolis. Olmsted, the most influential landscape architect of his time, had previously been entrusted with designing Central Park. In both cases, he tried to incorporate the natural kinds of given scenery in his plans. Instead of right-angled parterres, we come upon grey and rough rocks with small charming ponds dug in between, meandering waters and paths, original wilderness and grassland. The wanderer is offered privileged prospects and picturesque views. Different terrain levels, vistas, and clearings grant a pictorial perception of nature. For the development of the dramatic character of these prospects, Olmsted relied on models from England but also on his impressions of the unspoiled landscapes of the American South.[4] His aesthetic penchant for an unstructured and more original nature was not uncontested in the United States at the time. This kind of nature was considered as wild, neglected, untamed. Even Rousseau and Voltaire were still exposed to critique and disparagement around the middle of the 19th century by the clergy, for example, as Olmsted remarked in one of his travel accounts.[5] It was a dispute centering on gardens that had other, far more profound reasons. The debate actually concerned the origin and the value of the universe and man's position in it, as well as the hierarchy of being beyond its definition as a windowless monad. While Baroque thinking had focused on what is more than man, on man's nearness to God and the angels, Rousseau, Voltaire, and Olmsted compared themselves and man to what is less. Instead of dealing with man's likeness to God, they explored his resemblance to lower forms of life, to animals, and to savages.

While Müller reminded me of these disputes, of Rousseau's "Emile" (1762) and Voltaire's "Candide" (1757/8), he led me to the other side of his apartment showing me a small guest room with an oriel. The view was magnificent; it encompassed the southern tip of Manhattan and the bizarre needles of its skyline. Müller told me how he had had breakfast here one September morning and watched the two airplanes hit the World Trade Center. While we looked out of the window, Müller impressively described how he had experienced the terrible spectacle (which was none). One does not really have to remind anybody of this catastrophe. Nobody can escape the traumatic memory of these impacts. Because of the pictures' lasting indelible effects, some people began asking themselves whether such an act of violence may be regarded from an aesthetic point of view at all. May we look at an event of this kind as a picture? Wasn't the window from which Müller had observed the incident and from which we now looked out together also a frame that provided an enclosure and created an aesthetic distance? Didn't the beautiful view of the explosion imply the negation of the beautiful that Kant had in mind when he expounded on the deprivation of imagination and the feeling of the sublime?[6] Whatever the answers to these questions may be, one has to admit that the terrorists had a precise idea of the effects these pictures might have and had carefully planned them. As everybody knows, they did not shrink back from destroying themselves in order to achieve the maximum shock. They also claimed an exceptional role regarding the visual exploitation of the incident by making use of something not possible for Baroque and Enlightenment: the combination of their diametrical views, the connection of lower nature and universal gaze. The terrorists acted like both supermen and inferior creatures. This blending of above and below was also reflected in the pictures of the assault spread across the whole world. The collapse of the towers was documented in the looks of the witnesses below observing the impacts from the street and became manifest in the satellite transmission mirrors above, which, from God's universal position, as it were, broadcast the event into every living room, whether they had a beautiful view or no window at all. Because of its double presence as fiction and reality, the assault exercised an influence on people that had been unheard of before. One has to go back a long way in history to find an even roughly comparable atrocity.

There is only one incident that caused a similar shock, yet this was long before the media age: the Great Lisbon Earthquake, the historically most sustainable event of the 18th century — which also marked the dividing line between Baroque and Enlightenment. The catastrophe gave rise to numerous contemporary accounts though none of the authors had been present in Lisbon as an eye-witness in 1755 (which was, by the way, also the year in which the Hellerhof garden was planned) as Christian Philipp Müller had on September 11, 2001 in New York: Kant, Voltaire, Goethe, Lessing, Bayle, and Rousseau[7] wrote comments or narratives relating to it.[8] Voltaire even dedicated the most crucial chapter of "Candide" to the Great Lisbon Earthquake. In passages rich in imagery, he describes how his unfortunate protagonist Candide is shipwrecked and stranded on the coast of Portugal when the earth begins to quake at the very moment of his supposed salvation. Barely having escaped the wilds of South America, Candide now thinks that the final end has come — and with it the Last Judgment, particularly in Lisbon, a God-fearing city of upright belief. Yet, Candide's tutor, Pangloss, a follower of Leibniz who is severely wounded, unshakably insists on God's absolute reason and refers to the city of Lima, which, though inhabited by heathens and savages, was also hit by an earthquake.[9] At the end of the book, after the two will have endured innumerable violations and defilements, he will ask Candide what all that has been for. And Candide will cryptically retort: "Let us cultivate our garden."

Prospect Park is "cultivated,"[10] as the French original has it, but not tilled — which would imply its use. What Voltaire had in mind was probably a peaceful use of nature and thus a moral lesson against its degradation and exploitation. Müller provided me with an example of a critique in Voltaire's vein. He told me about a project he realized at Bard College in upstate New York some years ago. Müller designed a long narrow steel tub lowered into the lawn of the terrain. He did not unfold his argumentation in the form of a tour for the campus of the college but rather decided to present the evaluation of his research in a sculptural work. The monumental volume projects obliquely from the grounds conveying the impression that it has sunk into the earth on one side. Actually, it was built as a form with increasing height, adjusted to the celestial coordinates. The volume, with its trapezoid-shaped sidewalls, was filled to the brim with earth. The steel bed, partitioned into several segments, contains plants. The overall impression of the object is that of an extended pedestal, a gangway with plants sitting on it like figures. Each segment reflects the agricultural yields of the various upstate counties. The fields are framings and embeddings in a literal sense. Putnam, Greene, Ulster, Orange, Dutchess, and Columbia present themselves from the east to the west. Before deciding on his selection of plants from the various counties, Müller talked to local farmers and acquainted himself with traditions of cultivation, as well as preferred varieties and their profitability. He especially looked into almost extinct flavors the sorts of which are being replaced by more profitable ones. His interest focused on old and new tastes, which is also why he titled his work "Hudson Valley Tastemakers." Today's economy in the Hudson Valley is mainly based on income from tourism and the taste of people who come from the city and look for recreation; the importance of agriculture has become marginal. It is rather the image of the landscape that attracts visitors. Müller has explored the reasons for this attraction and has found them in history. It was not only the proximity of the big city that made the valley a destination for view enthusiasts but also the fact that the fascination of depth had become manifest in pictures. Painters were the first to discover its merits and natural force of attraction. The most important group of American painters of its time settled in the valley around the middle of the 19th century, that is about the time Olmsted visited the American South and worked on his plans for Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The so-called Hudson River School, which preferred large format views, has influenced the perception of this landscape to this day. The painters climbed the surrounding elevations to obtain the survey necessary for the vast panoramas they became famous for. The tops of the Catskill Mountains' volcanic massifs offered especially "beautiful views" of a nature that was not only unframed in its horizontal extension but also far from being cultivated. Müller emphasized the degree to which these painters' pictures established prototypes informing the general image of the American landscape. Neither the photographic views of Yosemite National Park nor the Cinemascope format of classic Hollywood would have been thinkable without the Hudson River School painters' aesthetics and their long-distance representations. The longings these painters provoked had other effects too — effects that were far more significant. The paintings were of crucial importance for the outlook upon nature, for its exploitation, settlement, and cultivation. Thus, art became a harbinger of colonization. The painters, whose elevating views extended into the distance, were followed by settlers and farmers who cultivated the land and ventured farther and farther to the west and into the interior of the country as if entrusted with the mission to cultivate this (still foreign) garden by the painters.

Thus, the sublime — for Rousseau and Voltaire still raw and unspoiled nature, for Kant the awful negation of freedom — had become useful as a developmental motivation for the conquest of foreign nature. It had turned into the aesthetic accessory for a usurpatory project that, for example, still echoes in the United States' urge for globalization today. There had been no room for such presumption in the first half of the 18th century before its discovery and infection with the ideas of Enlightenment. For the boundless that exceeded human imagination had been God until then; it had been his exclusive domain to demand too much of man. But as long as people believed in the best world, there was nothing to be afraid of, and this included the greatest horrors. The 19th century, in which the fear of nature subsided and romantic feeling gradually began to appreciate the beauty of wilderness and things foreign, saw a redefinition of the aesthetic shudder in which pleasure and impotence were combined in a manner supporting creative endeavors for the first time. The resolution to overcome the fear of the foreign, which implied a reconsideration of the sea level of seeing in painting, was something new. The Catskills offered an elevated point-of-view but also encompassed an acknowledgement of the lowness of human pursuit. The confidence in civilization combined with a feeling of insurmountable fear of the foreign. This is also the background for the painters' ambiguous interest in the cultivation and colonization of the landscape on the one hand and the jungles of South America and the thickets of the Frontier on the other. Müller's garden on the Bard premises is an excellent answer to all these questions and, not least, a contribution to the reflection on today's horror. Like a compass needle, his wedge points at the elevation of the Catskill Mountains and, thus, at these problems. Offering a miniature confrontation of wild and cultivated nature, the vegetation of the tub also presents itself as a comment on the economization of nature. Yet, Christian Philipp Müller would not be Christian Philipp Müller if he contented himself with this context. As mentioned above, his arguments tend to permanently increase in intricacy. The more recent his projects, the more experience they incorporate, and the more information they contain. This also holds true for the Bard project. As if by chance, Müller, strolling back to the other side of his apartment into the room facing the park, remembered a lecture he held concerning his "Hudson Valley Tastemakers." The lecture was held in the city of Beacon situated about 50 miles south of the Bard Campus on the Hudson. Surprised at the additional dimension, I forgot to ask whether the event was to be regarded as a work of art like the tour of Düsseldorf-Hellerhof — which it was probably not. The lecture, so he told me, was part of a series of events addressed to the public in which contemporary artists talk about selected works. The Dia Art Foundation presents its Minimal and Land Art collection in a former factory on the banks of the Hudson River in Beacon. The exhibition includes works by Richard Serra, Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, and Joseph Beuys. One section is dedicated to the American artist Michael Heizer. This was the artist Müller focused on in his public reflections. Heizer became known for his enormous earthworks in the desert of Nevada, which he started in the late 1960s. The exactly measured structures are of such a monumental character that they can be best appreciated in the form of satellite images. This is why Heizer once said that his complexes "create an atmosphere of awe."[11] The shudder provoked by the land artist results from the presence of pure geometry, cool calculation, and formal austerity. As if reversing the ideas of the Baroque age affirming reality, Heizer's interventions unfold a pessimistic dark vision. Since his structures undermine their own foundations, Heizer called them "negatives," using the word Kant relied on to describe the sublime. His forms radiate no suddenness but the horror of decay. They do not burst under the pressure of the earth like the certainties of Baroque times under the weight of Lisbon but rather erode in geological slow motion. Though Heizer has generally only worked in the open, one of his works is on view inside the museum in Beacon: "North, East, South, West." Sinking from the floor of the gallery to a depth of several stories, various forms have been excavated and clad with sheet metal. The precisely cut geometrical volumes, cubes, a cone, a triangular trough, and a truncated cone, remind us of the surfaces of 18th-century gardens, calling for the same view from above which, however, reveals no frameless infinite vastness but a dark oppressing depth. As the language of these extraordinary monuments differs from that of figures resting on a pedestal, the American art historian Rosalind Krauss already spoke of sculptures in an "expanded field" in the 1970s.[12] The work requires neither a base nor an elevated position but rather withdraws into a nowhere land free from meaning, into a wilderness without life, and even behind its surface. No wonder that Heizer's approach offers a rich deframing potential for Müller's reflections. The orientation towards the sky, the sheer geometry, and the empty desert quarters that resist human cultivation stimulate his considerations concerning form, motivation, and nature. Müller adopted a contrasting approach by endowing his tub (weighing tons) with growth and attributing a changeability to nature that Heizer abstracts from for the sake of pure form. Though Land Art sculptures have fundamentally revolutionized the idea of what a monument is, they still present conventional objects and no arguments. Unlike Müller's inventions, which take pictures and narratives into account, they are not able to incorporate their own history or, let alone, explore it in conjunction with the aspects they obviously ignore: nature, life, and the alert eye.

Fathoming the reasons for views, images of nature, and cultural motivations requires a more flexible language of forms, an argumentation that is not reductive but rather succeeds in linking the contexts in question. What matters is to embed as many meanings and dimensions of understanding as possible. Müller's most recent project is such a manifold venture. It is charged with the numerous experiences of its forerunner projects and can probably be better understood when considering the artist's tendency to enhance the degree of difficulty with each step of research. Again, the starting point is the Baroque era or, to be precise, the Mozart anniversary of 2006, which was comprehensively celebrated in Austria. Müller was invited to make a contribution to the Melk Monastery. Not surprisingly, he chose its gardens as the site for his work. Melk Monastery is one of the most significant sights of the country, a powerful structure built on rocks above the River Danube. Erected about the same time as the Belvedere in Vienna, it would deserve the same or a similar name, for it towers above the valley, offering a wide view of prosperous estates and offering itself to be seen from afar. To prove his point, Müller showed me a number of new leaflets and old prints. Parts of the historical documents are meticulous records concerning the estates surrounding the monastery, evidently owed to the canons' pride and providing a basis for taxation. Müller's interest centers on the factual aspects of the pictures, which he reads as photographic inventories or a company's annual report. The views provide him with information on the varieties of plants cultivated, the kind of knowledge put into practice, the agricultural theories relied upon. The apple trees are actually chased like monads, the wine plantations arranged like strings of pearls, the fields in general laid out as on a drawing board. Apart from the estates on the surrounding land (intended for exploitation), the overall plan of the grounds appears to be a "Kammergarten," a small garden, situated in the hidden back part of the monastery's grounds. This area also includes a Baroque pavilion, which has an elliptical ground plan. The affected piece of architecture, which originally served as a refuge for the monks, has become a focal point for today's numerous scheduled tours. The monks could recover there after subjecting themselves to long periods of fasting or bloodletting. The interior of the pavilion is decorated with magnificent frescoes painted by the Bohemian Baroque artist Johann Wenzel Bergl around the middle of the 18th century. The scenes depict the original inhabitants of America offering various kinds of fruit for refreshment to new arrivals from Europe. Characteristically, Leibniz's construct of the world was still intact for the painter though the foreign and the risks of enjoying it had already been discovered. The peaceful gestures of the American Indians wearing feather headdresses welcoming the arrivals are part of a context including diverse exotic animals and bushes. Bergl depicted an idyllic world that was also fictitious because he had never been to America. Representing a kind of reversal of the speech held by Müller in Hellerhof, which described a nonexistent garden, the world depicted by Bergl does exist, even if not in this form. Only a few of his motifs correspond to reality. They seem possible though because they draw on contemporary sources, on accounts, pictures, and adventure stories. All the same, Bergl strove for plausibility and realism, for even a fictitious world has to resemble the real one since only an existing world is the best of all possible worlds. This is why the natives at the other end of the world are anything but malicious or ugly, but are rather depicted as noble savages — as the fruits of foreign nature are abundant and luxuriant. It is a different friendly world that presents itself as naive and does not seem to breathe anything of the awfulness of the sublime that was to become such cause for worry in the centuries to come. We do see nothing of the conquerors' bloody fights, nothing of the religious wars the missionaries of the Counter Reformation waged abroad, nothing of what Candide experienced during the earthquakes of Lisbon and Lima. In this cell for edification and pleasure, all horror is spirited away. That Bergl remained within the mode of the Baroque economy of looking also becomes evident in other aspects.[13] He employed all means of painting available to him in order to achieve the impression of immediacy, for example. He portrayed the animals and plants as individual objects, as tame and easily accessible without a window. The close view isolates both things and persons and endows them with a delusive presence and life. Sometimes, it even seems that individual figures climb the base to enter the pictorial narrative. These tricks helped Bergl achieve astonishing illusions and constitute a rare contribution to the discourse on figures and monuments. Apart from these stage-like scenes, the overall impression is an economical one. Some angels are enthroned in the ceiling fresco, and there are no balloons yet, as there were for Mozart fifty years later. The angels have wings — and enjoy the ultimate view of what happens. They see both the strangers in the picture and the visitors of the pavilion. Tall palm trees are the only exception to the contrast between heaven and earth: they grace intrados, corners, and edges and thus forge a bridge not only between base and ceiling but also between the various other levels of the frescoes' meaning — between fiction and fact, near and far, inside and out, Old and New World, and, not least, between the interplay of the seasons, for the exotic plants were really brought inside to overwinter in the well-lit hall.

A place not far from the pavilion provided Müller with the opportunity to visualize all these observations and readings. The axial position of the original water basin exemplarily accords with the standards of Baroque layouts. Müller had a rectangular tub installed there, which is slightly off the axis, but still corresponds with the celestial coordinates. North, west, south, and east, the points of orientation for seeing and being, are again included in the design, becoming visible as supports for the eye. The tub, which presents itself as a swimming island, is filled with earth to its brim like the one on the campus of Bard. It also contains plants. Contrary to the Hudson project, these are not useful local plants but plants originally imported from America. Only a few months after the first sowing in spring 2006, zucchini, tomatoes, pigweed, sweetsop, peppers, and sugar melons came up. In winter, when the basin has been emptied, the tub resembles a minimalist sculpture. The similarities to works by Tony Smith and Richard Serra are intended as is the dialogue with Michael Heizer. By sinking a base into an excavation, Müller reverses Heizer's negativity. Comparable to the Hudson project where Müller reacted to the painters' visual axis, he responds to Heizer's undermining here, and does so in a twofold way: formally, by letting the volume jut out, and in regard to its effect, by not provoking an impression of something sublime but by deciding for a small garden relating to Bergl's friendly vision of the foreign continent. Covered with plants, the island resembles a locus amoenus, a medieval garden of love, or a picturesque pastoral, the third and conciliatory type of perceiving nature besides idyll and apocalypse, particularly in times of terror and all-pervasive media.[14] The small plot of wilderness Müller allows to thrive in Melk is the condensed result of a long and in-depth argumentation, a form of art that considers both the European culture's comprehensive history of ideas and the New World's urge for conquest and ultimately aims at providing a window granting a view of the development of causes behind the attitudes responsible for it — with which the people cultivate their gardens or, in short, ethically and aesthetically confront the world and their nature throughout the times.

Notes

1. Quoted after: Christian Philipp Müller, exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2007, p. 68: "We find ourselves in the main building of Hellerhof station. From the domed hall, we enjoy a good view of the estate and the planned Rococo garden."

2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology (1714): “In addition, there is no way of explaining how a monad could be internally altered or changed by some other created being. The reason is that there is nothing which can be moved from one position to another, and it is impossible to conceive of any internal motion, which could be set up, redirected, increased, or diminished inside it. By contrast, this is possible in compounds, since they have parts that can change position. Monads have no windows to let anything in our out by. Accidents cannot detach themselves from substances, or travel around independently of them, as the 'sensible species' of the scholastics used to do. Consequently, neither substances nor accidents can get into a monad from outside." (§ 67.1, 7) Translation: George MacDonald Ross, 1999, http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk!GMR/hmp/texts/modern/leibniz/monadology/ monadology.html.

3. Mozart took a great interest in ballooning. He followed the French balloon showman Jean-Pierre Blanchard's ascension attempts in Vienna's Prater in spring and summer 1791. Since the beginnings of manned balloon flight in 1783, Blanchard had been one of its pioneers and was the first to cross the English Channel in a balloon in 1785, for example.

4. Charles E. Beveridge und Charles Capen McLaughlin (eds.), The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 2: Slavery and the South, 1852-1857, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press 1981.

5. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. With Remarks on Their Economy (1856), electronic edition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2001, p. 456: "There was no argument upon any point that the congregation were likely to have much difference of opinion upon, nor any special connection between one sentence and another; yet there was a constant, sly, sectarian skirmishing, and a frequently recurring cannonade upon French infidelity and socialism, and several crushing charges upon Fourier, the Pope of Rome, Tom Paine, Voltaire, 'Roosu,' and Jo Smith."

6. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, General Remark upon the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments: "Thus, too, delight in the sublime in nature is only negative (whereas that in the beautiful is positive): that is to say, it is a feeling of imagination by its own act depriving itself of its freedom by receiving a final determination in accordance with a law other than that of its empirical employment."

7. Jean Jacques Rousseau, "Brief über die Vorsehung," in: Die Erschütterung der vollkommenen Welt. Die Wirkung des Erdbebens von Lissabon im Spiegel europäischer Zeitgenossen, ed. by Wolfgang Breidert, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgemeinschaft 1994, pp. 77-93.

8. The authors reflecting 9/11 were Baudrillard, Derrida, Habermas, Margolis, Virilio, Zizek. Cf. Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism and Requiem for the Twin Towers, New York: Verso 2002; Joseph Margolis, Moral Philosophy after 9/11, Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press 2004; Paul Virilio, Ground Zero, New York: Verso 2002; Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, New York: Verso 2002; Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2003.

9. Candide, ou l’Optimisme (1759), English edition: Candide, or Optimism, Chapter V: "Scarcely had they ceased to lament the loss of their benefactor and set foot in the city, when they perceived that the earth trembled under their feet, and the sea, swelling and foaming in the harbor, was dashing in pieces the vessels that were riding at anchor. Large sheets of flames and cinders covered the streets and public places; the houses tottered, and were tumbled topsy-turvy even to their foundations, which were themselves destroyed, and thirty thousand inhabitants of both sexes, young and old, were buried beneath the ruins. The sailor, whistling and swearing, cried, 'Damn it, there's something to be got here.' 'What can be the sufficing reason of this phenomenon?' said Pangloss. 'It is certainly the day of judgment,' said Candide."

10. Chapter XXX, last sentence: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin."

11. "It is interesting to build a sculpture that attempts to create an atmosphere of awe." Michael Heizer in an interview with Julia Brown, in: Julia Brown (ed.), Michael Heizer: Sculpture in Reverse, Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art 1984, p. 33.

12. Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," in: October, vol. 8 (spring 1979), pp. 30-44. "The logic of sculpture, it would seem, is inseparable from the logic of the monument. By virtue of this logic a sculpture is a commemorative representation. It sits in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place." (ibid., p. 33). "In this sense sculpture had entered the full condition of its inverse logic and had become pure negativity: the combination of exclusions." (ibid., p. 36). See also Miwon Kwon's excellent analysis of Krauss' considerations in regard to Christian Philipp Müller's work: Fluktuierende Werte / Unfixing Values," in: Christian Philipp Müller, exhibition catalogue, Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz 2007, pp. 15-28.

13. Müller emphasized this by having an opulent meal served that comprised dishes from the New World. The guests find themselves in a foreign world as the monks once did — a world that is not yearned for but factually present exactly because it is fictitious and foreign.

14. A locus amoenus is a small closed garden area designed for loveplay in unison with nature. Its forerunner is the pastoral of the Ancient World. Together with apocalypse and wilderness, the pastoral constitutes one of three figures of thinking informing the attitude towards nature in cultural history. Greg Garrard has described these figures in regard to ecology and threats to nature in his recent book Ecocriticism; see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism, New York: Routledge 2004.