March 8 – April 20, 2002
Galerie Christian Nagel, Köln Cologne
Twelve display cases, MDF, painted; glass, adhesive letters, chocolate, cocoa, plaques with text; each 35 x 55 x 27 inches
– A Taste for Money — Belgium, 2002; collection of Eduard Zapp, Düsseldorf
– A Taste for Money — Germany, 2002; private collection, Berlin
– A Taste for Money — Finland, 2002
– A Taste for Money — France, 2002
– A Taste for Money — Greece, 2002
– A Taste for Money — Ireland, 2002
– A Taste for Money — Italy, 2002
– A Taste for Money — Luxemburg, 2002
– A Taste for Money — Netherlands, 2002
– A Taste for Money — Austria, 2002
– A Taste for Money — Portugal, 2002
– A Taste for Money — Spain, 2002
The Sweetest Place on Earth, 2001, MDF, painted, glass, adhesive letters, paint, photographs, five wall boxes, 9.75 x 622.25 x 5.5 inches Private collection, Berlin
Courtesy of Galerie Christian Nagel, Cologne / Berlin
The Exhibition as Medium
Let us briefly recall A Balancing Act, the work which Christian Philipp Müller produced for documenta X in 1997 and which has been described in great detail both by himself and by George Baker.13 What Catherine David, as director of documenta X — which incidentally bore the subtitle, retroperspectiv — expected of Müller was that he engage with the 7000 Oaks that Joseph Beuys had created for documenta 7 in 1982, the first tree and basalt column of which can still be seen today on Kassel’s Friedrichsplatz. After Beuys had died, his widow and son placed the last pairing alongside 7000 Oaks at documenta 8 in 1987. Walter De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer of 1977 is to be found in the middle of the same square — which admittedly has shifted slightly owing to the installation of an underground parking lot. For Müller, these two visible relics in the cityscape of Kassel by De Maria and Beuys represent the two poles of twentieth-century art: At the one extreme there is purely autonomic, aestheticizing art and at the other, the art of social conscience. To reconnect these two poles, Müller staged a public performance six weeks prior to the opening, in the course of which he spanned a rope between Beuys’s oak tree and basalt column at one end and De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer at the other. Under the guidance of a professional tightrope walker, he then walked up and down this rope, retaining his balance with the aid of a pole, half of which was made of oak and the other half — like De Maria’s Vertical Earth Kilometer — of brass. Müller’s archive contains a reworked postcard of the World Trade Center, which is, in fact, a multiple by Beuys. Whereas Beuys appears to transfigure the towers by naming them Cosmos and Damian, Müller’s twin towers represent the two monoliths, Beuys and De Maria. The figure that links the two complexes, of course, is Philippe Petit, the tightrope walker who on August 7, 1974, to the amazement of the crowds on the streets below, really did walk a tightrope he had spanned between the twin towers, retaining his balance with the aid of a six-meter-long pole — at least until he was arrested and taken into custody.14
Finally, at documenta X, there was an installation by Müller, the central axis of which took the form of a six-meter-long pole with historical documents of relevance to Beuys’s 7000 Oaks on one side and documents and photographs of relevance to De Maria on the other — all of them meticulously labeled. Positioned on the same axis as the pole was a video screen showing Müller’s performance and opposite it a window the artist himself had knocked in the wall to afford a view of Friedrichsplatz. This window was flanked on either side by photographs of the dramatic changes the square had undergone during the two World Wars. Of interest to us here, however, is not the specific geographical site of this work, but rather the question of how Müller’s work presents itself as an interweaving of various points. By presenting contradictory positions as equally legitimate, he visualizes their dialectical interdependence, it being the difference between them that makes first, one and then the other, come alive. The view through the reopened window is literally framed by its historical context, while the central positioning of the pole on a plinth of the kind used by De Maria resembles a display. What the ephemerality of Müller’s exhibition within an exhibition exposes, above all else, are the relational structures on the theme of the work that are latent within it.
The US artists’ collective, Group Material (1979–97), spent almost twenty years theorizing the exhibition as medium and vehicle for the communication of information and, in so doing, described it as an empirical system whose specific narration bears the stamp of symbolic and ideological organization. The artist Julie Ault, a member of Group Material for many years, compared the exhibition per se with the display of merchandize. She highlighted those relational interpretations of the same, not only shape content, but also, actually constitute content.15 The reflections of Group Material were formative for artists like Müller. At first glance, this seems to apply primarily to Müller’s complex installations, such as his Forgotten Future of 1993, in which he associates diverse discursive complexes with historical strands of information — although the same could also be said of his contribution to documenta, which, after all, was model-like staged. In A Balancing Act, Müller ironically takes up one of classical modernism’s typical allegories to expose himself — on a tightrope spanned on the ground, and hence, far removed from all risk of injury or failure — through his teacher to a process of professionalization. Müller’s interest in this act has less to do with its potential as an allegorical description of his own role as an artist than with the way in which the figure of the tightrope walker is able to bring together the very different complexes of Beuys and De Maria, which despite their geographical proximity do not in fact have anything in common. The figure of the tightrope walker literally straddles the discourse, delivering a performance that contributes to the constitution of meaning. It follows that Müller’s staged argumentational installations can never be read as entities, for what the addition of active performance makes clear is that meaning is conceivable only as something temporary and provisional. Furthermore, it is, above all, the explicitly model quality or divaricate nature of the installation that exhibits the exhibition, rendering it, at last, visible. Instead of analyzing the institutional parameters, what Müller does is to analyze that very process that opens up spaces for action within which the uses and ends of the means of exhibiting can be renegotiated.16
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