Zurich
James Meyer (JM): How did you decide to become an artist?

Christian Philipp Müller (CPM): When I was sixteen, I was sent to a career advisor. I had to give a sample of my writing. The advisor went back to my parents and said: “You know, this is an artist, but he’s too young and he should have a real education first.” I just recently read an article on Thomas Hirschorn and the same thing happened to him. His parents also said, “You should become a typographer.” From the Reformation on, typography was considered something between crafts and academia, between blue collar and white collar. And so that’s what they made me learn.

JM: Where did you learn about typography?

CPM: For four years I was an apprentice in a typography workshop. I went to school one day a week and squeezed in another half-day for art classes. When I was almost twenty, I had to join the army. That was the summer of 1977. I decided I needed to do something cultural before disappearing into the army. I went to the documenta 6 with the two adjacent pavilions by Dan Graham, the honey pump of Joseph Beuys, the tower digging the hole for the Vertical Earth Kilometer by Walter De Maria, and George Trakas’s Union Pass in the park. I didn’t just go and see it once. I spent a whole week there. It was the last week of ”liberty.”

JM: After that you went to Zurich.

CPM: I went to the School of Applied Arts (HGKZ). At about the same time I took classes at an art school that split off after 1968 from the official applied arts school, “Farbe und Form” (F+F), because there was no fine arts education at the time. They offered evening and weekend classes, very much based on collaborative performances. That was around 1979. It was influenced by people like Vito Acconci — very body related. I also took video classes at a video collective, there we worked with Portopacks — those gigantic, bulky equipments.

JM: You were becoming a professional designer.

CPM: Yes, but I lost interest to create for commercial clients and spent more and more time in the fine arts. At first “F+F” was like the graphic design education on the side. I still had a nine-to-five job as a freelancer. I couldn’t just say from one day to the other, “I am becoming an artist.” It was more like stepping stones. When I was at the at the “F+F” it was all about collaboration and process and not about the product. I needed something that was my own. So I started looking around in Hamburg, Berlin, and Düsseldorf.