Christian Philipp Müller

Signs in Abundance

When Charles Ephrussi received A Bunch of Asparagus painted by Édouard Manet in 1880, he paid Manet 200 francs more than the 800 francs originally agreed upon — apparently because he was so pleased with the result. Pleased in turn by the unexpected increase in his fee, Manet sent his patron an additional painting of a single stalk of asparagus and noted that this stalk had been missing from the original bundle. As Carol Armstrong writes in her essay “Counter, Mirror, Maid: Some Infra-thin Notes on A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” what the painter meant is that this small painting would make up the difference and that Ephrussi thus had now received the appropriate amount of asparagus for the amount he had paid.1

Through this “illusionistic substitution” (Armstrong) of painted asparagus for edible asparagus, Manet brought into play an “exchange value” associated with both the form of production and consumption.2 According to Armstrong, however, the insinuated “relative price of vegetables and paintings” raises fundamental questions, namely, whether an illusionary painted bundle of asparagus has a value “unto itself” or whether — relative to the valuation of the “real” bunch of asparagus — it is a matter of a “countable or weighable” articles whose value is produced by the luxuriousness of the represented object and the quality of the color application.3 Thus, Manet’s system of equivalences and substitutions did not aim to create a basis of comparison between reality and illusion, although it did set up analogies between the two on the level of taste, value, and exchange. The material value of an individual stalk of asparagus — determined by the purchase price — only increased through the symbolic relativation of the represented subject.

Over one hundred years later, the bunch of asparagus would become the object of another reflection on the processes of valuation at Hans Haacke’s Manet-Projekt in the exhibition Projekt 74. — Kunst bleibt Kunst which took place in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne on the occasion of the museum’s 150th birthday. On ten panels, Haacke documented the chronological history of collectors who had owned the Bunch of Asparagus, which had been in the museum’s possession since 1967. Each panel showed an owner and included personal information about each one. Thus, we learn that the painter Max Liebermann, barred from working in 1933 due to his Jewish heritage, had owned the still life. Other owners included Hermann J. Abs, Chairman of the purchasing committee of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, who was also the Chairman of the Deutsche Bank.

Through a simple, uncommented listing of dates and facts, Haacke aimed to make visible historical relationships that had been absent in history books. In order to prevent any possible references to the Nazi past of Abs, who had held a leading position in the economic politics of the Third Reich, the directorship of the museum instructed the exhibition curators to remove Haacke’s work from the show.4

Müller’s Worlds

Prologue
Their origins may seem alienating — at least from today’s point-of-view. For what finally galvanized this loose grouping of artists into action, or so they claim, was, of all things, the inglorious collapse of the art market some fifteen years ago, shortly before the outbreak of the first Gulf War. Almost all those present at their hour of birth agreed that it was because of the recession — then especially palpable in New York — that these hitherto marginalized, critical-theoretical artists were suddenly being accorded public space.1 In an article she wrote for the first issue of Texte zur Kunst, Isabelle Graw even went so far as to quote the following lines from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung: “By 1500, the once great Republic of Venice was already in decline… After the defeat of Angadello in 1509, enemy fire was seen even in the city itself. Not only had several banking houses been long since closed, but now, even treasury bonds were tumbling to new lows. That a time of such extreme peril should have coincided with the Golden Age of Venetian painting as manifested in the works of Bellini, Titian, and Giorgione […] is something that comes as no surprise to Renaissance scholars.”2 This implied a bold equation of Venetian masters with Christian Philipp Müller, Fareed Armaly, Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Renée Green, Clegg & Guttmann, Tom Burr and others, young newcomers to the international art scene.

No less programmatic was the periodical Texte zur Kunst itself, which the author launched in collaboration with Stefan Germer with the intention of having a publication devoted exclusively to conceptualist, contextualist, and political art criticism. Just a few years later, in 1993, there were so many exhibitions of contextual art taking place that there was talk of a paradigm shift.3 In his Project Unité, at that time a highly regarded project inside Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Firminy, curator Yves Aupetitallot allocated each artist a separate unit with the expectation that this would induce them to engage with their site.4 Also in 1993, exhibition commissioner Peter Weibel invited the Austrian artist Gerwald Rockenschaub to team up with two other artists of his choosing, namely Andrea Fraser and Christian Philipp Müller, to design a transnational pavilion as the Austrian contribution to the Venice Biennale. The year 1993 also saw Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen and Barbara Steiner curating the Backstage exhibition at the Hamburger Kunstverein, while Thomas Wulffen’s “Betriebsystem Kunst” edition of Kunstforum International came out one year later. It was again Weibel who was behind an exhibition in Graz called Kontext Kunst (Context Art) — the name that would henceforth be used to describe all the aforementioned artists. When the more than 600-pages-long catalogue finally appeared, it was intended as a compendium of universal validity, as the group’s manifesto, as it were. Yet, the tome was also symptomatic of Weibel’s tendency to claim this new art as ‘his’ discovery, if not ‘his’ invention — something of which Germer was publicly very critical.5

What Weibel had really done was to subsume the most diverse practices under a single label and then, by popularizing the discourse, propagate context art as a, by and large, coherent movement. Context art, in contrast to the deeply regressive image of art of the nineteen-eighties, was understood to be a paradigmatic response, because it returned to the critical tendencies of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies, except unlike Hans Haacke’s “Investigations of the Apparatus,” its focus was not on art as an institution.6 Instead, its institutional criticism was reworked and expanded to embrace an analysis not only of art, but also of society in general. All that these artists had in common, in Weibel’s opinion, was their practice of using research to make the context in which their interventions took place the sole object of their analysis. If Weibel ambitiously undertook to place context art in a cultural historical context, then he did so not just to ensure it was accorded its rightful place in art history, but also to delegate it to art history. The question of how history should judge this ideological co-opting of what was then a new artistic phenomenon and whether the periodical, Texte zur Kunst, or Weibel ultimately had the stronger title seems scarcely relevant to the present discussion. What is relevant, however, is that both promoters clearly had a keen interest in proclaiming the much yearned-for new avant-garde,7 whose genealogical origins were emphasized by James Meyer much later.8

If, as purported at the outset, the alleged link between art and market forces seems alienating to us today, then certainly, it is not because there is any doubt concerning the existence of such a link. The problem is rather that as it has grown from strength to strength. The new avant-garde has, itself, tied its own founding myth to the demise of the art market, and by so doing, made itself a slave of economic determinism. Not only does this determinism from without contradict the autonomic claims made by all avant-garde movements, but it could even be said that it repeats itself in the sufferance of the label “context art.” The so-called recession theory, moreover, implies that such an avant-garde can scarcely hope to be accorded legitimacy in times of economic prosperity — which, in turn, begs the question,9 “Is criticality, in the final analysis, no more than a temporary concession to the economic system?”

Unfixing Values

It does not seem inappropriate, on the occasion of Christian Philipp Müller’s first retrospective exhibition, to call attention to the year 1991, the year that Müller remembers as “the start of my life as an artist.”1 Given that Müller graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1986 and had already completed several significant projects prior to 1991, it is curious to me that this year is flagged in the artist’s mind as marking the start of his life as an artist. It prompts several questions regarding the general concept of “the life of an artist,” namely, what, in fact, signals its beginning? When does the life of an artist begin? When he is born? When he enters art school? When he finishes art school and is no longer a mere student? Perhaps it is when he first exhibits a work in a professional art gallery or when an artist whom he admires acknowledges him as a fellow artist. Maybe it is when he sees his name in print in an important art magazine or when he establishes a long-term relationship with a reputable dealer. Maybe the feeling of being a real artist sinks in when he sells a major work to a major collector.

In 1991, Müller made two paintings. One is small (10 x 13 inches) with the birth date of the artist, “2. Nov. 1957,” painted in white over a blue ground. The second painting is larger (61 x 76 inches). It is a dark brown monochrome with barely visible pencil marks indicating the space for the day, month, and year of Müller’s death, which is to be painted, when the time comes, by the owner of the work in the language commonly used in the place of the artist’s passing.2 Together, the two paintings constitute a single work (as yet unfinished!), entitled Two Important Dates in My Life, which had a key position within a larger site-specific installation presented at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in the same year. Like On Kawara’s daily date paintings, the obvious appropriative source here, Two Important Dates in My Life, calls up the march of time and the specter of death in a mode of representation that remains resolutely uninflected with expression or emotion. But unlike Kawara’s routinized serial repetition of marking each day one after another with a new painting, as if resisting mortality while being drawn toward finality at the same time, Müller’s two paintings simply bracket the artist’s lifetime, from birth to (future) death, with all the days in between remaining unmarked, falling somewhere in the gap between the two panels (Müller’s paintings further depart from Kawara’s precedent insofar as the first is displayed with the date reading vertically). This might lead us to conjecture that, for Müller, 1991 marks the start of his life as an artist because it is the year in which he made a work whose content is literally his life. But despite the work’s highlighting of basic autobiographical facts (dates of birth and death), it would be a mistake to interpret Two Important Dates in My Life as representing the artist in biographical terms. Rather, as with all of Müller’s prior and subsequent works in which the role of the artist is prominently figured or performed, Two Important Dates in My Life is less of an existential contemplation than an institutional interrogation.

With Müller’s design for these two paintings which defers the work’s completion to the completion of his life (and to a third party), the artist emerges, in fact, as an empty figure or position, a blank, whose substantiality will be determined retroactively and backwards from the moment of his absence. Destined to become the artist’s final work even if made fifteen years ago (ostensibly at the start of his life as an artist), Two Important Dates in My Life encourages a critical consideration of not so much the specificity of Müller’s life as an artist but the end of any artist’s production and the function or structural relation between this cessation and the construction of the artist’s works as a unified artistic oeuvre (and by extension the artist as a similarly unified creative source) that gains in meaning and value because of the cessation. In other words, Müller posits the death of the artist as a prerequisite for the completion of Two Important Dates in My Life in order to allegorically bring into view the conventionalized movement of valuation — artistic, historical, monetary — that occurs when an artist’s output comes to a halt upon his or her death. It is not birth but death of artistic production that is the real starting point; the difference in the sizes of the two paintings clearly indicates that the two important dates in an artist’s life are, indeed, not equally important.

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