Basle. »I will call my exhibition ›Basics‹«, is the Sybillic answer given in the catalogue by Christian Philipp Müller to the question posed by the American art historian James Meyer about the critical aims of his art. Is it possible to conclude from this that a critical approach remains the basis of his artistic work even today? Or does Müller rather want to tell us that this attitude is a thing of the past?
Anyone who has seen this artist’s retrospective in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basle will hesitate. For this presentation of works from the past twenty years looks very classy, very prestigious. Locational references, a basic point of departure for Müller’s interventions, vanish almost completely behind the post-minimalist, shimmering surface of his installations. A fundamental problem of so-called context art becomes apparent here: How can this art be exhibited retrospectively without completely losing the original connection to place and history – and thus the critical dimension as well?
Christian Philipp Müller was obviously aware of this problem. In his exhibition, he makes many attempts to counter the neutralisation of his works. For example, one current work takes as its theme the history of the Museum für Gegenwartskunst, which is housed in a former paper factory on the banks of the Rhine. Müller has copied the old wooden water wheel in the stream between the old and new parts of the museum, placing it prominently in the large entrance hall. A few tubs filled with old clothing – the most valuable paper was originally made from rags – accompany this sculptural memorial. It is handy that the artist originally learnt the profession of book printer: his framed »Gautschbrief«, a kind of traditional diploma, completes this complex installation. Even in the nearby media art forum plug_in – also part of the exhibition – Müller’s chain of associations continues to flourish rampantly, with hundreds of outdated computer models illustrating the history of the successor to the book medium. The way the artist succeeds in bringing all of these different references into play is nice, but a little innocuous, as no critical dimension such as in his earlier works can be discerned any more.
Christian Philipp Müller has always placed great importance on the formal, visual aspect of his work. However, in his best works, this classical side was strongly countervailed by the themes with which the works engaged. As an example, one could cite the »Grüne Grenze« (»Green Border«) of 1993, in which Christian Philipp Müller, as Austria’s representative at the Venice Biennale, looked at questions of national identity and (illegal) border crossing. However, it is precisely in this work that we see the difficulty I have mentioned with regard to retrospective encounters with location-specific art. Although the topic of migration is still of current relevance, the »Grüne Grenze« can no longer convey the paranoid mood that prevailed in Austria four years after the Iron Curtain came down.
Things get even more difficult with Müller’s performative works, such as »Kleiner Führer durch die ehemalige Kurfürstliche Gemäldegalerie Düsseldorf« (»Small Guide through the Former Electoral Gallery in Düsseldorf«) of 1986. Dressed in a uniform, Müller, then still a student at the Düssedorf Academy of Arts, led a guided tour through a collection that was taken to Denmark in 1806 for fear of Napoleonic troops. Four framed photographs of the performance – showing Müller lecturing in front of a painting from the collection – are united in one large frame in this exhibition, along with a text about the elector’s collecting activities. This double framing does highlight the problems of representation, but we learn next to nothing about the performance. The loss of immediacy becomes particularly evident if we compare this work with a closely related one by Andrea Fraser: the video »A Gallery Talk« of 1989 shows the artist taking a group of visitors on a tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and how, instead of providing information about the art works, she points out the questionable political and economic interests in which the museum is caught up. Even decades after the event, the institution-critique so eminently present in Fraser’s work comes over clearly and with its full power.
A great deal of good will is needed in this exhibition to perceive Müller’s real achievement – the linking of the formal language of Minimal Art with methods deriving from institution-critique and cultural studies. This is partly owing to the complexity of the works, which sometimes even seems a little laboured. It also derives from the fact that the curator, Philipp Kaiser, has put the focus of the presentation on the biographical component in Müller’s work. As he writes in his catalogue article, the »pivotal point of his (Müller’s) works is his own life story together with its historical, cultural, sexual and racist influences«, and not so much an analytical engagement with this context. This does not seem to worry the artist very much; at the opening, he beamed incessantly. At last, the artist who felt neglected by the official art institutions for such a long time has reached the Olympus of art. In such circumstances, a small correction is easily borne. And, after all, when you are fifty, you are allowed to be somewhat more conciliatory.
Translated by Timothy Jones