I still remember exactly how I got to know Markus, so to speak. It was in a book that Robert Fleck had published in 1983 to inject a little modern thinking into the nostalgia for turn-of-the-century Vienna so rampant at the time. The title was Weltpunkt Wien. In it, Markus had published an essay in which he compared an Italian Baroque veduta engraving showing the Trajan’s Column before the Baroque churches of Santa Maria di Loreto and Maria al Foro Traiano with a photograph of the Karlskirche taken from the same angle, exposing the latter as a replica of this veduta. He coherently demonstrated the processes of recopying that occur between pictures and reality, and between eras. Not that he would have drawn the line at that. He pursued his argument further all the way to Adolf Loos and his passion for antiquity.
Aesthetic transfer, recopying processes, re-encodings, the transcultural life of forms, finding traces of other visual cultures in Western modernisms: these subjects would continue to interest him later on.
It was a fruitful period, the 1980s, in which I too was being socialized in Vienna, still in architectural circles at the time. In those years, Markus filled the position of art critic that had been vacant across Vienna and successfully reclaimed it in Falter, with a small team. His pleasant tone, schooled in the American method of art criticism, was as salutary as his perpetually rather distanced stance, which had at times been very much missed in the nepotistic worlds of the Vienna postwar avant-garde. This was also the time during which, thanks to the imaginative inclusion of Western post-punk and neo-minimalism, the Viennese art scene found itself in its last major boom that was recognized as such internationally. Curated by people like Helmut Draxler, whose ideas I could readily relate to, a new interest in abstraction beyond the Neue Wilde romanticism emerged on the club and artist band scene. Again, it was Markus Brüderlin who summarized it, in a now-legendary issue of the magazine Kunstforum which he edited, calling it Island Austria. Thus, a man who emigrated from Switzerland became a significant agent in transmitting this new Viennese spirit. Several careers that enjoy worldwide fame today were promoted, if not launched, by this maneuver.
It was therefore only logical when Rudolf Scholten, arguably the last Austrian Minister of Culture who saw his duty as more than just administration, asked Markus if he wouldn’t like to become one of the federal curators, equipped with carte blanche and a budget intended to make the prospects for a successful state subsidy policy for contemporary art a reality. Markus thereupon founded Kunstraum Wien and proceeded to exhibit there artists such as Michael Asher and Art&Language.
During his inaugural press conference, he said – this was in 1994 – that Vienna was still missing one thing before it could be considered a true art location: an international journal for contemporary art. He finally asked me (I had offered my services as an art critic and an architecture critic in the absence of an editorial post for this purpose in the founding team of the Standard) if I wouldn’t like to work on such a project. I said yes, and we founded Springer together, now called springerin. Markus provided the start-up capital, as one would say these days, and guaranteed funding for three years. That has allowed us to keep working until today.
Markus confessed to me years later that he had actually envisioned something more like the German Kunstzeitung. He never intervened as others did, however, when we showed greater interest in other transfers – later termed the Visual Turn, postcolonial theory or, for simplicity’s sake, “discourse.” That would have exceeded the bounds of his impeccable understanding of the separation of powers.
When he answered the call to return to Switzerland in 1996, at the end of his appointment as a federal curator, and moved into the beautiful house built by Renzo Piano in the garden of the collector and gallerist of the first avant-garde, Ernst Beyeler, in Riehen near Basel, he found an environment there that was conducive to pouring his energy into exhibitions. These focused on the relationship between interior and exterior space and were also frequently devoted to pre-modernism and erratic artist figures. Increasingly, a theme came to the fore that had probably been one of his most intense preoccupations throughout the past decade – closeted student of Henri Focillon and George Kubler that he was: Ornament and Abstraction (2001) and how traces of different, sometimes warring aesthetic epistemologies and realities converge within them. His exhibitions devoted to abstraction and to ornament were arguably his very own contribution to the debate on Islam. He would surely never have wanted them to be understood exclusively as such, however. He had always maintained a very distant stance concerning the political aspects of art, but these exhibitions did make a statement. Following his commitment at the Kunstmuseum Wolfburg (2006) in Basel, he cast his interests into a distinct program, always holding unfashionable views to the last, for example of the “textile” aspects of art, or Japan and the West. He had presumably made the acquaintance of Alois Riegl and Gottfried Semper in Vienna and read their work.
After Markus left Vienna, we saw each other only sporadically, usually at the Venice Biennale, where he always greeted me with “Ah! The Springer” (I don’t think he ever spoke of the “springerin”). Even though we were actually interested in a somewhat roundabout way in the same themes. Now, as the press release from the Kunstmuseum Wolfburg tersely notes, Markus Brüderlin has passed away “suddenly and utterly unexpectedly” in his home town of Frankfurt am Main. He was the same age as me. Without his engagement at a crucial time, there would be no springerin. And my life would have probably turned out quite differently. Thank you, Markus, for your courage back then and for your later scrupulous distance.
Translated by Jennifer Taylor