Gallery installation:
“Schweigen ist Silber”(Silence is Silver), 2010
Wall-object with natural white loden cape. Aluminum, silver color, straw; 100 x 110 x 55 cm.

“Reden ist Gold“ (Talking is Gold), 2010
Floor sculpture with red loden cape, aluminum, gold color, straw; h 90 cm, d 164 cm.

12 Photographs:
Laminate, loden, frames, glass; photographs, 20 x 30 cm; frames, 50 x 50 cm. Edition of 3 each. Published by Artelier Contemporary, 2010.
“Back to the Garden” I and II
“Don’t Look Now” I and II
“Fool’s Gold” I and II
“Seasons Greetings” I and II
“The Only Way is Up” I and II
“In Good Company” I and II

“White on White,” 2010
Diasec, 60 x 80 cm. Edition of 5.

“Red on Red,” 2010
Diasec, 60 x 80 cm. Edition of 5.

“Burning Love/Lodenfüssler,”
Produced for the exhibition “Der schaffende Mensch – Welten des Eigensinns,” Schloß Trautenfels/Universalmuseum Joanneum in cooperation with regionale10, HD Video, 16:9, 38 minutes.

The Austrian state of Styria has been producing loden cloth for more than five hundred years, using it to make traditional clothing. This fabric both creates and represents a local identity in equal measure. For his exhibition “Ach wie gut, dass niemand weiss,” Swiss artist Christian Philipp Müller, who lives in New York and Berlin but always focuses on specific sites in his work, has taken the simple cut of a cape once designed to protect the wearer from the Alpine weather as the starting point for an expansive installation. Müller is interested in the ambiguity of a material usually associated with such solid values as down-to-earthness, patriotism, and conservative convictions: being red and white instead of the usual green, the “Wetterfleck,” or weather-proof cape, assumes a different aesthetic effect and semantic content.

The seemingly archaic garment is theatrically exaggerated, its new colours reminiscent of religious or occult apparel from the realm of legends and secret societies. In a wall-mounted work (“Schweigen ist Silber”/ Silence is Silver, 2010) and a conceptually related, floor-mounted work (“Reden ist Gold“/ Talking is Gold, 2010), these textile capes, hanging in folds, are contrasted and combined with metal agricultural relics so as to condense the traditional function and the vicissitudes of the history of (artistic) materials and connotations in a minimalist installation. In photographic works (all 2010), the garments are staged in the rural setting of Styria and in the urban ambience of New York and Miami. The exhibition presents these photos, which raise the question of cultural transfer and allocations of identity, in wall display cases on fern-colored loden. In two new Diasec works (“White on White”; “Red on Red”, both 2010), photos found by Müller are arranged in the form of narrative pictorial tableaux, which create a fragmentary atlas of the (sub)cultural uses and codings of the colors red and white.

Christian Philipp Müller’s project “Burning Love, Lodenfüßler, 2010,” created for regionale 10, is on show at Schloss Trautenfels until the end of October 2010. It consists of a film documentation of a performance in which twenty firemen from Mitternberg carried a fifty-metre-long, wool-white loden coat through the Styrian countryside and, derived from this, a sculpture and museum display of images on the history of loden. In 1993, Müller represented Austria at the Venice Biennale together with Gerwald Rockenschaub and Andrea Fraser. His sculpture “Die neue Welt” has been permanently installed in a baroque pool in the gardens of Melk Abbey since May 2006.

Text by André Rottmann