Kaspar Müller_Portfolio Press.indd

Transcription

SOCIÉTÉ
KASPAR MÜLLER
1983 Schaffhausen, Switzerland
2006 Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, Basel
2008 University of Basel, Faculty of Philosophy and History
Solo Exhibitions
2016
Buchhandlung Walter König / Berlin
jmseradzfghdsjkfhbycmxcfnbkladshj / Société
Francesca Pia / Zurich
Max Frisch Bad, with Cyrill Schläpfer / Zurich
Books / The Green Gallery / Milwaukee
2015
Kaspar Müller / Museum im Bellpark / Kriens
2014
Schätze der Erinnerung / Société / Berlin
Allegiance and Oblivion / Federico Vavassori / Milan
2013
I shrunk the Kids / Kunsthalle Bern / Bern
Forever Alone and Around the World / Kunsthalle Zürich / Zurich
talktalktalk (with Tobias Madison) / The Green Gallery / Milwaukee
2012
Zu Weihnachten (with Roman Signer) / Kunsthaus Zürich / Zurich
Stand-Up / Gasconade / Milan
2011
I was in Trinidad and learned a lot / Galerie Francesca Pia / Zurich
Corrective Detention / Société / Berlin
Atelier Amden Project / Curated by Roman Kurzmeyer / Amden
Circuit (with Emil Michael Klein) / Centre d’Art Contemporain / Lausanne
2010
Manorpreis Schaffhausen / Museum zu Allerheiligen / Schaffhausen
2009
Muster / Paloma Presents / Zurich
Bias / Kunsthaus Baselland / Basel
Don‘t Support the Team / Galerie Nico / Basel
2008
Permanent Vacation / Vrits / Basel
2006
Service / Vrits / Basel
Ich&Du Wir&Sie / Schalter / Basel
Group Exhibitions
2016
Sculpture Quadrennial 2016 / MMIC / Riga
The Hellstorm Chronicle / Galerie Barbara Weiss / Berlin
The emotional Content of the Revolution / Wesminster Waste / London
Team 404 / Zabriskie / Geneva
Société / Genthiner Strasse 36 / 10785 Berlin / Germany / +49 30 261 03283 / [email protected]
2015
Stipendium Vordemberge-Gildewart / Biel
The Grand Reception / Aachener Kunstverein / Aachen
Kaspar Müller / Part I / Cologne
The Longest Bridge / Off Vendome / New York
A Form is a Social Gatherer / PLYMOUTH ROCK / Zurich
Nimm´s Mal Easy / Ausstellungsraum Klingental / Basel
SOCIÉTÉ
2014
Postcodes organized by Gabriel Lima and Pedro Wirz / Sao Paulo
Europe, Europe / Astrup Fearnley Museet / Oslo
BAK Swiss Art Awards / Basel
Truth and Consequences / Pocari Sweats / Geneva
The St. Petersburg Paradox / Swiss Institut / New York
2013
X-MAS / Galerie Francesca Pia / Zurich
Trust (A mi izquerda) / Curated by Michele D`Aurizio / Galerie Balice Hertling / Paris
Log-O-Rithmic / GAMEC / Bergamo
2012
La Demeure Joyeuse II / Galerie Francesca Pia / Zurich
D‘après Giorgio de Chirico / Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico / Rome
Accardi (with Emil Michael Klein) / Federico Vavassori / Milan
La jeunesse est un art / Jubiläum Manor Kunstpreis 2012 / Argauer Kunsthaus / Aarau
Shake & Bake / Galerie Praz-Delavallande / Paris
A Strangely Luminous Bubble / Haute École d’Art et de Design / Geneva
2011
Corrective Detention / Société / Berlin
Dressing the Monument (with Tobias Madison) / Lynden Sculpture Garden / Milwaukee
Glee / curated by Cecilia Alemai / Blum & Poe / Los Angeles
Group show / Karma International / Zurich
Corso Multisala & TCCA / Kunsthal Charlottenborg / Copenhagen
2010
Belle-Idée #3 (with Damian Navarro) / Espace Abraham Joly / Geneva
Do it to Do it (with Tobias Madison) / Kunstverein München / Munich
Suppose this is true after all? What then? (with Tobias Madison) / Johan Berggen Gallery / Malmö
On Publications, Portraits, Public Art and Performance / The Modern Institute / Glasgow
Of Objects, Fields, and Mirrors / Kunsthaus Glarus / Glarus
Quick Brown Fox & Lazy Dog / Karma International / Zurich
2009
Tbilisi6 curated by Daniel Baumann, Nana Kipiani and Ei Arakawa / Tbilisi / Georgia
The Forgotten Bar Projec / Galerie im Regierungsviertel / Berlin
P. Arabian Horses / Layr-Wuestenhagen Contemporary / Vienna
The Line is a lonely Hunter: Drawings in New Jerseyy / New Jerseyy / Basel
Preview Dinner / New Jerseyy / Basel
Showroom 1: Q / Basel
Projects
2009
Galen (with Michael Klein) / Artist Space / Basel
Assistance for Robert Gober Wallpainting / Schaulager / Basel
2006-2008
Vrits / Artist Space / Basel
2012
Kadist / Kunsthalle Zürich Production Award
SOCIÉTÉ
Awards
2012
Kadist / Kunsthalle Zürich Production Award
2010
Manor-Preis / Schaffhausen
2009
Art in public space / Kanton Basel-Stadt
2008
Atelierstipendium in Berlin / Kanton Schaffhausen
Bibliography
2016
Kaspar Müller at Société, Berlin / CURA / December
Critics‘ picks, Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich / Artforum / October
‚Kaspar Müller‘ at Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich / blouinartinfo.com / October
Christie Chu / 10 Millennial Artists to Watch in 2016 / Artnet News / June
Kaspar Müller / Frankfurt Freakout / Flash Art / January
Kaspar Müller at Museum im Bellpark / Contemporary Art Daily / February
2015
grand opening reception / aqnb / December
Kaspar Müller “Schätze der Erinnerung” at Société, Berlin / Mousse Magazine / January
Kaspar Müller at Société / Contemporary Art Daily / January
2014
Art Writing Daily / Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori / December
D‘Aurizio, Michele / Kaspar Müller / Flash Art International / no 294 / p 104
Glauner, Max / von Zwergen und Hüten / Kunstforum International / no 224 / p 401
Obrist, Hans Ulrich / Introducing Kaspar Müller / Kaleidoscope / Issue 20 / p 89
2013
Packer, Matt / Trust (A mi izquierda) / Frieze Magazine / November
Rosenmeyer, Aoife / Kaspar Müller Picture a hat... / Frieze d/e / no 11 / p 120
2012
Rekade, Christiane / Symbolik und strahlende Oberflächlichkeit / Kunstbulletin / December / p 40
Kadist / Kunsthalle Zürich Production Award / Kunstbulletin / December / p 97
Fischli, Fredi / Kaspar Müller / Book Artissima / November / p 138
Codognato, Mario / D´aprés Giorgio / Artforum / April
Stand-Up! / Contemporary Art Daily / February
Rosenmeier, Aoife / Kaspar Müller / Art in America / February
Kaspar Müller bei Francesca Pia / Sonntagszeitung / January / p 40
2011
Michael-Klein, Emil / Circuit / Press Release / Centre d’Art Contemporain Lausanne / April
2010
Hoffmann, Annette / Kaspar Müller / Artline Kunstportal / June
On Publications, Portraits, Public Art and Performance / Press Release / The Modern Institute / April
Madison, Tobias & Müller, Kaspar / Qiuck Brown Fox & Lazy Dog / Karma International / January
2009
Latimer, Quinn / Locals Rule: Alternative Art Spaces Gear Up for Art Basel / Blouin Artinfo / June
Inzule, Egija / Kaspar Müller - Paradigm / Paloma Presents / October
Chelsea 4; Liverpool 4 / Provence-Magazine / Issue 1 / p 40
SOCIÉTÉ
2008
Arabian Horses / Used Future / no 38
Ubu / Used Future / no 17
2007
A perfect play / Used Future nr. 4
Publications
2016
Schätze der Erinnerung 2014-2015 / Edition Société 2016
2010
Colmar & Strasbourg / Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg
2009
Chelsea 4 - 4 Liverpool / Provence- Magazine Issue 1
2008
Arabian Horses / Used Future nr. 38
Ubu / Used Future nr. 17
2007
A perfect play / Used Future nr. 4
SOCIÉTÉ
CURA
KASPAR MULLER AT SOCIÉTÉ, BERLIN
View of “Kaspar Müller, 2016.”
Too Much Data by Tenzing Barshee Summer 2016, email: I was really in a positive mood.
In “jmseradzfghdsjkfhbycmxcfnbkladshj”, his third one-person exhibition at Societé, Kaspar Muller presents painted, printed and
assembled materials.It took one whole year, this fucked up, fantastic year, to make these works. How do you look at a world like
this? Through flags maybe. The mood is rotten, levelled by material density. Two or three colors, on par with each other, too
much data. There is clearly a distance, the length of projection, which al- lows to place pleasure next to melancholia.
Over summer the artist moves his studio and consequently reduces his work space to a fifth of its volume. The clothmaker who
sublets the new place leaves a sewing machine, a loom, and some sewing patterns hanging on the wall. The most evident things
easily become the most inadequate ones. Football, Brexit or smoking weed; it’s just paint on canvas, under the rule of the squeegee.
It isn’t really preferable to read the signs of our time as styles and vice versa, it isn’t attractive to read at all. The signs, which
signify knowledge and heritage, are eliminated. Books and flags. Something to say: the plumage of collectivity.
There is an inclination to buy canvas. Burlap, cotton and linen are on sale.There is an inclination to apply a sense of responsibility—never more than two or three hours con- secutively, in between these hot summer bike rides and ice cream, every day from
Moabit to Wed- ding with public radio announcements, anachronistic propaganda formats, avoiding dumb European roaming
costs on a smart phone, the return of the 30-minutes news cycle.Sunbathing in ambivalent anarchy, those colors, a Swiss make,
are inadequate. Those joyful, jolly colors, are colorant tools after all, a smeared state of affairs. The effect of potential and abstraction lies somewhere far beyond these picture planes, somewhere behind the sun.
This exhibition sums up a collection of events, one summer, one year, a European competition. Flags on the moon. Flags everywhere. How do the news relate? Various incoming reports on the results from multiple parallel worlds. It’s a thoughtless way to
work, nothing elaborate, a plain depiction, and a more permeable way to perform that Lee Lozano-thing, an already made callback to an older work;
fresh, runny water, this waste & hope, stuck up and in the sticks.
How to mix what you see at acrylic speed? Flags, rainbow colors and a fresh hammer-and-sickle graf- fiti somewhere on a fenced
playground. That’s manageable, and perhaps surprisingly contemporary because this is the present, partly. That is the whole
range of our present.
This exhibition attempts to delineate the world with oversimplified technique, incorporating a crass inadequacy, which, in its lifesize model form, purports both fallacy and sovereignty through a hot pile of assumptions, quotes, allegations, proposals, shared
understandings, misconstructions, compari- sons, intrusions, and other fantasies, which fail to neither ratify nor deny what’s
really what. The last painting hanging could have said: Keep calm and .
Recently, Kaspar Müller exhibited old books, bicycles and big words in different exhibitions.
There might be enough time to let these ideas dry overnight.
Originally published on http://curamagazine.com/tips/kaspar-muller-at-societe-berlin/, December 2016
SOCIÉTÉ
Artforum
Critics’ picks
View of “Kaspar Müller, 2016.”
Kaspar Müller
GALERIE FRANCESCA PIA
Limmatstrasse 268
October 14, 2016–November 24, 2016
Hordes of bikes of various styles and from different eras, some broken and some roadworthy but all untitled and from 2016, stand
or lean against the wall as if wrongly parked or forgotten in Kaspar Müller’s second solo exhibition at this gallery. Some seem to
be frozen in motion, pointing like vectors in different directions. These human-powered carriers cohabit with antiques and bric-abrac like a junk store of cultures and ideologies: an ancient bronze figure, a bust of Lenin on a pannier rack, and Homer Simpson
3-D slippers speared on handlebars. Caught in a hybrid state of shifting levels of value, all items remain in a collision between the
profane and the elevated. One is tempted to spin an infinite number of narratives from the objects’ absurd marriages, which stay
precarious in service of a polysemic ambiguity.
“What you inherit from your fathers must first be earned before it’s yours,” reads a billboard-size, rainbow-colored wall text in
a psychedelic retro font; the oldfangled-sounding quote is from a translation of Goethe’s Faust (1808). Seemingly embodying a
generational imperative to break free and make your own destiny, the return to one’s own heritage—a prepared collection of possessions and beliefs—loses its essence when meaning turns out to be a fragile construct, always in danger of being emptied out
or overwritten. And as the bikes maintain the illusion that they could be mounted again in an act of self-empowerment, breaking
out of the gallery space into a new life, the pathos-filled slogan “Ride off like a cowboy into your sunset” echoes from the walls.
Elisa R. Linn
Originally published on https://www.artforum.com/index.php?pn=picks&id=64562&view=print, October 2016
Press Release
SOCIÉTÉ
Schätze der Erinnerung
Hey, Kaspar.
So, to get started, should we talk about travel or about circulation?
When it comes to these images of Lake Zürich, it’s mainly a matter of place. A very specific place. When you see the images, you
won’t be in the same place, because they were all taken in Zürich, and the exhibition of the photos is in Berlin. So you would have
to travel, even just in your imagination, to a specific destination. It’s not that much about traveling in general, but about one place,
which might include traveling as a way of getting there – but then, that place has in a way traveled to Berlin. The lake is portrayed
in a number photographs, unique moments captured over a year, over 4 seasons, in different weather conditions.
What might follow could be called traveling, maybe, on a metaphoric level at least. Like memories don’t arise until they’ve been
reflected by something, mostly something superficial, like a texture, a picture, a sound, an object, or a scent. I want to use the lake
and the pictures first of all as a vehicle. Whether something breaks or reflects on it or just runs into emptiness and oblivion. At first
glance, these works have a potential that could be compared to that of postcards.
Could you say something about these photos, which you’re calling The Weather in Zürich – in relation to the works you’ve done in
the past about a hat?
I’ve done three projects with the hat: It started as a costume for an actor in my film about a specific place, or rather two places,
edited together into one ideal place: Colmar & Strasbourg. There’s a strong parallel to the idea of the mise-en-scène of an existing
place, to use it as a ready-made stage, not just with the facades but also to avail oneself of its “image” and reputation – though
the lake is an ‘empty’ stage, a stage for the landscape first and foremost. In my photos of Lake Zürich, there is no narrator, no guide
measuring and mediating the place, like there is with the actor in the film Colmar & Strasbourg.
The protagonist is the lake itself. Also, the photos are static, captured moments, nothing moves. In the film, motion is very important – not just as the medium, but also the very slow flow of the actor (with the hat) on the ships trough the canals of Colmar
and of Strasbourg, passing by the facades of buildings. Lake Zürich seems immobile, heavy. The rivers in Colmar and Strasbourg
never stay put, the water passes into the sea somewhere in Holland. Lake Zürich is a basin, it stands still. The actor was wandering through places of conserved and mediated memories and historicized education, instructed by audio-guides, through a selfinflicted and vain mock Atlantis, lost in debates and self-portrayal, feeding from the past, almost like a facade built after its own
cliché. It’s also a different way to recollect something when it’s mediated. The big, eye-catching hat had its origin in a promotional
hat from Heineken, which I re-tailored with different fabrics. It made the actor look like a drop-out magician hippie lost in a touristy
stage of colorful trippy half-timbered facades. The actor was constantly walking, or the ships were moving, so there was never a
still moment.
While the touristic facades in Colmar and Strasbourg look damned, rotten, a civilization falling apart, almost without any nature,
the lake looks like a utopian place, a treasure island, a safe heaven where nature and civilization have developed a symbiotic relation. The trees on the hills around the lake in Zürich have been cultivated so that one can’t see beyond the city, can’t see the rest
of the world behind the green edges. A cultivated utopia. Zürich is a very strong and powerful place and, compared to many of the
other places I’ve been, it still seems like an exotic place.
The lake is so clean, it’s actually classified as drinking water. The lake also has a symbolic value, of course, a basin contains things
under its reflecting surface that can’t be seen. Which is also a fact. It’s like a mirror in which you search for deeper things, but you
just reflect yourself. In this case, the whole landscape/sky is reflected. As for the images, they’re often divided by a horizontal line,
almost mirroring that scene.
Hm ... reflecting, mirror, reflect, reflected, mirroring ... Even if that mirrored surface is impenetrable, what might people read into
the simple fact of it?
As you say, one will want to read something into it, force it even, because it’s not acceptable for it to stop there, like with the image
of a postcard that I mentioned before. Also, these images seem so very known from the point of view of a collective memory. Only
very hard-boiled reception would leave it there. And I could only imagine Kleist or Poe finishing a story that would conclude with
the simple fact of a reflection, and even then it would feed from the disappointment and tragedy because more was expected.
Actually, I’m not averse to this. But before I come back to the mirroring, I want to mention the weather, which is very important for
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SOCIÉTÉ
the images, also given the fact that it’s reflected on the surface of the water. The weather is a very strong influence on the atmosphere and the ambience, and it expresses that on the lake in particular. I paid a lot of attention to the weather. In the time I took
the pictures, I captured very different weather conditions. Almost like in the German Romantic period, landscape and weather are
inseparable. And it can bring out memories and thoughts with a bit of help from drama.
But one might assume there must be a dark potential. Or a twin potential. That there must be another side. If not, the rejection of
any depth would almost amount to aggression.
Whenever one talks about Switzerland’s dark side, that’s when its landscape shines the brightest. It seems almost to express it in
that way because it demands an equilibrium. I just read a text from Jean-Luc Godard about the Swiss landscape. He says that as the
Swiss people have internalized the disreputable character of their country in relation to certain issues from the past and present,
that has been turned outside again. It’s the law of the équilibre. The landscape is there to clean that debt, and Godard assumes
that Swiss artists and filmmakers always see and portray the landscape with a bad conscience. He of course films it, though, because it’s beautiful.
What kinds of changes do you think occur when you combine images in the form of a grid (even if it’s just two images, or an uneven
grid)?
It’s definitely an uneven grid. These are handmade, rough collages. I mounted the photos on sheets of cardboard that I painted
with wall paint first. With all these horizontal lines from the lake, it’s almost like adding up, stacking up. Normally, when you bring
two images together, it’s a confrontation, which can lead to harmony or conflict. But because the horizontal line is so strong and
there are so many photos of the same topic, I think the gesture leads more to an addition than to a confrontation. When you look
up images of Lake Zürich on the Internet, you’ll find many pictures that look similar. So I’ve added my photos to a huge amount of
already existing photos of the lake. They build first and foremost a visual collective memory. Be it from flickr, Google, social media
or printed magazines. So with these images, it also begins to add up. We can only guess how the collective memory of an actual
visit in Zürich could be like. And I wonder how diverse that would be. I always liked the idea of using lists (making lists) as a means
of comparing things. A list, at least as long as it doesn’t have a purpose, is always complete, whether one takes something out or
adds something. With the grid and the amount of photos spread in the space, the focus in the comparison lies more in the differences than in the similarities. But after a certain number of pictures of the lake – after yet another image – the viewer probably
begins to feel indifferent about it. I want to push the images and, through that, to push the place into a beautiful redundancy and
oblivion. So, the dark side could be oblivion.
... to be continued ...
Conversation between John Beeson und Kaspar Müller
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Schätze der Erinnerung, Société, Berlin, December 2014
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Contemporary Art Writing Daily
SOCIÉTÉ
Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori
Installation view “Allegiance and Oblivion” at Vava, November 2014
It’s Zobernig tar+feathering, Julian Opie’s picto-programmatic brand, and other
iconographies existing in unplaceable cultural memory. But whereas Zobernig’s
genericism was a deflecting form of critique, maquettes for his fictionalized art
theater, Kaspar’s direct thefts of institutionalized styles is a reflexive and perforated form of identity, accumulating a piecemeal version, forming a pile of identity
rather than a package, to be sifted through rather than consumed, objects which
will never become whole. The new puzzle form of art’s conceptuality.
Originally published on http://www.artwritingdaily.com, December 2014
Press Release
SOCIÉTÉ
Allegiance and Oblivion
Installation view “Allegiance and Oblivion” at Vava, November 2014
“Allegiance and Oblivion” is Kaspar Mülle’s first solo exhibition at the gallery; also it launches the program of the new location in
via Ventura 6. The exhibition offers a continuation of the artist’s research around the migration of meanings and values commonly
attributed to images and objects. Articulated on the two floors of the gallery, it gathers a wide arrangement of artworks: at first
glance, the works give themselves to the viewer in the shape of icons or constellations of symbols; more vaguely, they operate as
devices that expand in space and time, to suggest alternative scenarios of dispersion and recapture. The title itself is meant to suggest a dialectical friction between a loyalty to the codes of cultures as of art (allegiance as devotion) and a reality of things which,
alas, we are not able to grasp and rather constantly fail to achieve (oblivion, as amnesia, but also nothingness, silence).
Exhibited in the basement, the work which gives the exhibition its title—Allegation and Oblivion (2014)—features thirty-six portraits of historical figures whose action or thought nourished the human faith in the idea of progress: characters who can be
recognized by the vague memories of school days, undisputed bastions of human culture; all gathered together, they rather raise
a cacophony of individualisms and believes and doctrines that force that culture into indistinctness, or the vanity of the mere exercise of memory and recognition. In the work, history’s exquisitely compiling ethos is deprived of any sense of reasonable evolution;
indeed, it exists only to make up for abeyance—in a vein of pure negative dialectics.
Müller often infuses his artworks with a certain black humor: some are conceived to comment on the creative process itself and
on creativity as a palliation of the effects of capitalist economy in sociocultural contexts such as the Western one in which we find
ourselves. A mode of the Müller’s process is indeed accumulation of objects and images, which are submitted to the viewer beyond any cataloging or order, but only and joyfully in their variety and heterogeneity. Works which develop into series—think of
furniture such as wardrobes, bookcases, trunks, etc., of which three examples are presented in the exhibition (White shelf, 2014;
Silver shelf, 2014; Trunk, 2014)—coexist with works that include series of objects and/or images—think of the crowns of blown
glass bubbles that are, perhaps, Müller’s most iconic work; or of The treasures of memory (2014) presented on the ground floor, a
crown of pearls and other precious which wraps the space as a subtle decoration.
In these works, a metonymic tension between the part and the whole, the single pearl and the whole crown, results, again, in a
collection of individualities that the viewer can only experience in two ways: through the juxtaposition between the parts, hence
the assertive exercise of comparing the quality of each pearl; or the awareness of one’s own otherness in relation to the work, an
entity alien to the viewer. These works are inclusive and engaging, but at the same they hint at the solitude as the work as of the
viewer, both subjects doomed to wander among a multiplicity of status and contexts.
In order to emphasize this mutability of objects and images, and of men, whether they are artists or viewers, the exhibition includes works that evoke Müller’s past: a canvas shows stills from the video Colmar & Strasbourg (2010); another one features stickers of photographs taken during a trip to Trinidad, a hint to the exhibition “I was in Trinidad and learned a lot” housed at Francesca
Pia gallery, in Zurich, in 2011. Three paintings, finally, winking at the iconographic style of British artist Julian Opie, cite Müller’s
exhibition “I Shrunk the Kids” hosted in 2013 at the Kunsthalle Bern. As in Allegation and Oblivion, these works do not stand for a
masturbatory celebration of the artist’s production and career—of history more in general; they rather attempt at forcing the artist
and the viewer to cohabit with the past. Artworks, exhibitions, such as the lives of individual, become codes themselves, symbols
to be reinvented, in that virtual dimension hovering between reality and abstraction, which is memory in the present.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Allegiance and Oblivion, VAVA, Milan, November 2014
Flash Art International
SOCIÉTÉ
Kaspar Müller I Kunsthaller Bern
After Julian Opie, 2013. Courtesy of Kunsthalle Bern
On closer inspection of the digitalized silkscreened reproductions of Julian Opie’s artworks (After Julian Opie, 2013), a number of
tiny diamonds glued to the canvas start winking at the viewer. This dainty marvel was my first impression of Swiss artist Kaspar
Müller’s solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, titled “I Shrunk the Kids.” Here, Müller displays a diverse group of works spanning a
variety of media — drawing, photography, video, painting and sculpture — that demonstrate a growing complexity in the arist’s
practice. Müller’s art attempts to linguistically jeopardize the raison d’être of art objects; and the several works on view linger on
the potential talkativeness of abstraction when confronted with the eventual poorness of the iconic: “They are pictograms,” says
the artist in regard to Opie’s figures, in the exhibition’s press release; “the ‘beforeand -after’ woman flashing her breast looks like
an airport security animation.” My perception as a viewer has been put through the wringer of a constant swinging of the artist’s
gaze between the specific and the generic. In two facing series of photographs (both Untitled, 2013), for example, the artist shot
pedestrians in different European cities, ac ing like a paparazzo: after noticing the vivacity of the urban landscape, one is left to
face the anonymity of the depicted individuals. The motley paintings on display (all Untitled, 2013) could also be called anonymous, generic — at least until one realizes their sophisticated layering, a tormented play of scratching away the surface in order to
achieve depth, and along with depth, meaning. “With abstraction comes language and knowledge. With figurative representation
comes empathy, desire, rejection,” Müller continues. Depth, like a philosophical stone, is probably what the angular, gloomy cabinet on view in the show (Angular shaped wardrobe, 2013) was concealing; but here as well I found myself in front of a surface, the
doors of the cabinet hinged at the wall, sealing no actual furniture. Müller is renown for his black humor — visiting his exhibition,
I learned that probably only irony can help us face the many intricacies of art theory today.
Michele D’Aurizio
Originally published in Flash Art International, January / February 2014
Swiss Institute
SOCIÉTÉ
The St: Petersburg Paradox at Swiss Institute New York
with Giovanni Anselmo, Jean Arp, Ericka Beckman, Barbara Bloom, Alex Mackin Dolan, Marcel Duchamp, Cayetano Ferrer, Douglas
Gordon, John Miller, Kaspar Müller, Sarah Ortmeyer, Tabor Robak, and Amalia Ulman.
In the St. Petersburg gamble, the house offers to “ip a coin until it comes up heads. e payoff doubles each time tails appears, with
this compounding stopping and payment being given at the $rst heads. By conventional defnitions, the St. Petersburg gamble has
an infnite expected value; nonetheless, most people share the intuition that they should not offer more than a few dollars to play.
Explaining why people offer such small sums to play a gamble with infnite expected value remains a contentious question in economics and philosophy. Based upon the theory of the same name developed by 18th century Swiss mathematicians, cousins Nicolaus and Daniel Bernoulli, e St. Petersburg Paradox invites artists to consider notions of risk aversion, expected value, and gaming.
An early experiment in the use of chance procedures as a means to suspend artistic agency, Jean Arp’s 1916 Collage géométrique is
one in a series of collages drawn from the random composition of tossed pieces of paper. Eighty years later, Douglas Gordon’s Bad
Faith gambles with the very creation of a new artwork by betting its entire production budget on the unlikely occurrence of snow
on Christmas Day in Stuttgart. Furthering this conflation of artwork and monetary value is a group of Marcel Duchamp’s Monte
Carlo Bonds (1924-1938), a playful attempt at bankrupting the Monaco casino through a flimsy financial scheme. With “Remnant
Recomposition” (2014), artist Cayetano Ferrer has created a site-specific installation composed of dozens of different carpets
specifically manufactured for casinos, where frenetic visual stimuli are designed to both obscure the wear and tear of 24-hour
gambling palaces and to brighten up the cold mechanics of adverse probability.
Tabor Robak’s new video, A* (2014), which was commissioned for this exhibition, channels the intensity of the gamer’s ups and
downs, ricocheting between the euphoria of an elusive win and resignation to inevitable loss. John Miller’s painting Labyrinth 1
(1999) renders a zoomed-in frame from the perennially popular TV game show e Price is Right at the height of mass media’s
ubiquity. Ericka Beckman’s $lm You the Better (1983), drawing upon the adversarial nature of team sports, animates the absurdity
of blithely entering into a game that cannot be won. New works created by Alex Mackin Dolan, Kaspar Müller and Amalia Ulman
engage with the internet’s refraction of aspirational consumption. Elements of Dolan’s painting are culled from disparate images
and memes born out of $nancial anxieties, while Ulman’s large digital prints of found postcards revel in the romanticization of what
American economist and sociologist orstein Veblen has described as “pecuniary canons of taste” (e eory of the Leisure Class,
1899). Müller’s stack of prints, entitled Tropic of Cancer (2014), exploits the rote vocabularies and unpredictable social dynamics
of online peer-to-peer commerce, as the artist offers the entire contents of his Berlin apartment for sale via a dedicated phone
line (+4917690988107, 24/7). e Swiss Institute’s website will encourage bidding on a different item each day. http://tropicofcancer2014.tumblr.com/
Barbara Bloom’s 1992 artist book Never Odd or Even (the title itself a palindrome), along with four works from her eponymous
series of butterfly cases, illustrates the possibility of the zero-sum game conjectured by the Bernoullis’ famous paradox. Sarah
Ortmeyer’s new sculpture series, SANKT PETERSBURG PARADOX (2014) scatters a miscellany of chessboards across the main gallery, with game pieces replaced by 109 eggs of various sizes and types in a precarious equilibrium. is sense of tension and an
undercurrent of mortal jeopardy charges Giovanni Anselmo’s 1968 untitled sculptural installation, in which a pair of 250-pound
stones maintain live wires in close proximity. is masterpiece of Arte Povera is an extreme testament to artists’ enduring interest
in relinquishing authorial power, sustained across historical avant-gardes and guided to this day by what Georges Bataille calls, “
the giddy seductiveness of chance.”
“Gambling generates by way of experiment the lightningquick process of stimulation at the moment of danger, the marginal case
in which presence of mind becomes divination -that is to say, one of the highest, rarest moments in life.”
Walter Benjamin, Notes on a eory of Gambling, 1929
Published on the occasion of the exhibition St. Petersburg Paradox, Swiss Institute of New York, 2014
Kunstforum International
SOCIÉTÉ
Von Zwergen und Hüten
Installation view “I shrunk the kids”at Kunsthalle Bern, 2013
Die Ausstellung von Kaspar Müller in der Kunsthalle Bern “I Shrunk the Kids ” erzählt von großen und kleinen Leuten, von Nöten
und Hüten. Eine nähere Betrachtung. Als Reaktion eines Besuchers auf die Arbeiten Kaspar Müllers im Eingangssaal der Berner
Kunsthalle ist ein breites Spektrum vorstellbar. Das kann, je nach Befindlichkeit und Hintergrund, von heller Begeisterung bis zur
Verärgerung reichen: Was haben hier in aller Welt, die Figurinen eines Julian Opie zu suchen? Das Publikum war draußen vor der
Tür von einem Plakat empfangen worden, auf dem ihm die Fotografie eines sorgenvoll gebeugten Engels Schutz und Trost versprach, und die zugleich an jenes Heer von sentimentalen Himmelsboten erinnerte, das als populärkulturelles Gut Wohnstuben
und Friedhöfe bevölkert. Dass hier nicht, wie der Betrachter zunächst denken könnte, eine Grabskulptur des 19. Jahrhunderts
abgelichtet ist, sondern eine jener Performances, die in Fußgängerzonen als living sculptures dargeboten, für einen Großteil der
Bevölkerung als Gipfel zeitgenössischen Kunstschaffens gelten, kann als erste Finte des jungen, 1983 in Schaffhausen geborenen
Künstlers stehen. Die zweite also, die hemmungslose Appropriation der opieschen Strichfiguren-Pin-Ups wie „Woman taking off
man’s shirt in two stages 1“ (2003), das er als „After Julian Opie“ zwar nicht in Vinyl und mit orangem Hintergrund sondern als Siebdruck in Rot, aber im annähernd gleichen Format und gleicher Aufdringlichkeit präsentiert. Vier weitere Siebdrucke „After Julian
Opie“ vervollständigen die Eingangshallenparade bis ins Treppenhaus, wo eine Kniende auf weißem Hintergrund sich anschickt,
das Treppengeländer herunterzurutschen. Ist ihre prekäre Plazierung als Kritik an der sexualisierten Ikonik zu deuten? Oder die
winzigen Glasbrillanten, die beim näheren Besehen auf der Leinwand kleben, als Hinweis auf die Fetischisierung von Frauenkörper,
Bild und Kunst?
Eine Antwort darauf wird es mit Kaspar Müller nicht geben. Ebenso wenig man eine eindeutige Antwort darauf erwarten kann, warum die unbekümmerte Affirmation, der erborgte Paukenschlag das Entree gestaltet: Husarenstück, Schildbürgerstreich, Konzeptualismus im Geist einer Elaine Sturtevant, all das schwingt dabei mit, allerdings um den Preis, dass die Latte für das Folgende hoch
gelegt wird. Müllers Copy-Paste-Strategie findet sich bereits im Ausstellungstitel „I Shrunk the Kids “. Und er gibt ein Programm vor.
Er zitiert den Walt-Disney-Blockbuster „Honey, I Shrunk the Kids“ von 1989, von dem man vermuten kann, dass er einer der ersten
Kinoerlebnisse des Künstlers gewesen ist und heute ganz oben in dessen camp-Liste steht. Er erzählt von den Abenteuern vierer
Nachbarskinder, die sich durch die Maschine eines genialen Erfinders geschrumpft als Winzlinge an Monsterameisen vorbei durch
den Vorgarten kämpfen – Allmachtphantasien paaren sich hier eng mit Angst vor Selbstverlust, eine Paarung, die sich leicht auf die
Arbeit eines Künstlers übertragen lässt. Warum soll man nicht wie Opie die Puppen tanzen lassen? Warum soll man nicht mit Opie
das Publikum an der Nase herumführen dürfen? Und ist es nicht Aufgabe und Prinzip der Kunst, das Kleine für das Große zu halten,
oder, um es im Kuratorendeutsch zu sagen, „Wahrnehmungsgewohnheiten
aufzubrechen“? Genau dies führt er dann auch gleich links vom Vestibül mit zwei Arbeiten „Ohne Titel“ (2013) aus: An den Stirnseiten des Raums sind im regelmäßigen Raster jeweils in DinA4 und DinA5 6 x 6 Laserdrucke sauber an die Wand gekleistert:
Schnappschüsse des Künstlers von jungen Menschen. Auch hier bleibt wieder alles offen: In wie weit darf man Müllers Dekor
konzeptuell oder gar kritisch als Einblick in die Facebook-Kultur aufgeräumten Kinderzimmers verstärken zwei Objekte: Ein barocker Holzschrank in der einen Ecke und diagonal gegenüber, als wären sie gerade daraus entfleucht und hier erstarrt, eine Schar
kleiner Pappmaschee-Kopffüßler in der anderen. Ihr narrativer Konzeptualismus wiederholt sich im Hauptsaal, wo fünf Gegenstände – ein Verkehrskegel, eine Gasflasche, frisch lackierte Metallfässer und ein Hydrant mit Kinderklamotten lustig kombiniert,
der Hydrant trägt zum Beispiel einen orientalischen Schleier, – ihre Geschichten erzählen wollen. Bei allem Humor entgeht der
Künstler auch bei dieser stummen Versammlung nur mit Mühe jener Geschwätzigkeit, die er in seinem Video „Forever alone and
around the world“ (2013) zum künstlerischen Prinzip erklärt und einem sprechenden Stoffzylinderhut in den Mund legt. Dieser
darf sich vor dem Hintergrund sonniger Urlaubsbilder schwebend in einem 20-Minuten-Videoloop Gedanken zur eigenen Existenz
und Kunst machen. Seine dürftige Quintessenz: „I can be whatever you want me to be.“ Wenn man dies Statement auch für das
Facit der Berner Ausstellung nimmt, hätte man bei aller Chuzpe und humorigem Spiel ihres Autors mehr Haltung erwartet.
Max Glauner
Originally published in Kunstforum International, Issue 224, 2014
Kaleidoscope
SOCIÉTÉ
Introducing Kaspar Müller
Untitled, 2012
HUO How did everything begin? How did you come to art, or how did art come to you?
KM Three weeks after I finished high school in Schaffhausen, I moved to Basel and worked at a bank for one year to save money
for university. It also helped me avoid making a decision about whether I should go to art school. I thought I could learn more in
university and keep doing art by myself. I eventually decided to sign up for the art school in Basel. I was accepted without a preparatory class with a mixed portfolio of earlier works. Of course, there were also a few artists whom I admired when I was in high
school, which is a bit funny to me today — mostly Dutch painting and a few comics. When I was a child I initially wanted to become
a cartoonist. But there are a lot of children who wanted that.
HUO What were your early influences? What were the inspirations in Switzerland? When I grew up in the ’80s, Fischli/Weiss were
the biggest influence on me. Did you have similar figures to whom you related at the very beginning of your practice?
KM There was an exhibition in London by Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth that impressed me a lot. It was like a refreshment relaxing the spasm a bit. I still find it amazing today. There was a player piano with a composition comprising different pieces that
more or less worked harmonically together, but then fell apart into a sort of cacophony. I was also attracted to this strange flatness
in Bruegel and Manet — how different layers both recede and dissolve and come up to the foreground by actually being in the
background.
HUO Where would your catalogue raisonné begin? What is the number one in your future catalogue raisonné? What is the first
work that isn’t student work anymore?
KM It’s a blue faucet that I showed in my first gallery exhibition at Nicolas Krupp in 2009. It’s painted in a very rough way. This drawing is drawn with oil pastels and its approach to drawing looks a little bit like painting, but actually takes an opposition to painting. It
is so insanely suggestive, yet also almost flat: it has an obvious motif and line quality — every line is comprehensible. And because
it’s a water faucet, it shows a passage: something emerges from somewhere, fills the sink and disappears again.
HUO In Switzerland, there is something very unique in your generation. There is no group with a manifesto, but there are a lot of
collaborations, exchanges and dialogues. This dynamic art scene has attracted a lot of attention internationally. There was a super
strong scene in Zurich in the ’80s, but it became more diffuse and people moved away in the following years. Somehow, in your
generation, something seems to have shifted in Switzerland that made it less urgent to move away. I would be interested to know
what the driving forces are. In every group there are people who hold it together and I would like to hear your thoughts about the
Swiss context and how you relate to the other artists like Tobias Madison and Hannah Weinberger, as well as the different Swiss
artist-run spaces.
KM Yes, there are those artist-run spaces that almost stand in for this dynamic; it is where this dynamic started in a way. There is
also an urge to not move somewhere else right away, but to measure strength amongst friends and mutually interested artists — to
really challenge each other. It’s not always harmonious; it’s a dialogue and a way of working on and with each other. In what I did
with Tobias Madison, one can perhaps point out our respective interests and how they converge, which also results in confrontations. One sees this in the work, but at the same time it’s also about being able to avoid convenience because we weren’t only easy
on each other. That’s how it was in Basel. After I participated in an artist-run space called Vrits in Basel with a group of five people
from 2006 to 2008, Emil Michael Klein and me, who both were part of Vrits, founded a new space in our studio.
1/2
HUO What was this exhibition space called?
SOCIÉTÉ
KM Galen, the name stands for a hill in the Canton of Valais. It’s something between a mountain and a hill — a gentle hill where
one doesn’t know if one should climb it, or if it’s worth climbing, because to call it climbing would already be over-motivated.
HUO Who showed there?
KM The first exhibition was Andreas Zybach, who did an absolutely crazy show. We blew our whole budget for the entire year with
his show and had to refinance the following exhibitions a bit. It wasn’t very much; the whole budget for the year was 5000 CHF.
And he made this exhibition where he bought two steel barrels, four pipes, two new digital cameras, half a ton of bricks and I think
something like one hundred kilograms of carrots. We drove those to Munich, threw them into a big machine and what came out
was a powder that he mixed with water and then sprinkled onto the walls. That was actually quite genius — purely visually it had
this John Armleder effect, but on the other hand it was still the same ingredients, just in a different form. After that, we showed
Damian Navarro from Lausanne, then Andri Bischoff from Graubünden and Emanuel Rossetti’s first exhibition.
HUO Can you say a little bit about how Vrits and Galen anticipated New Jerseyy?
KM Yes, that was a super dynamic, ruthless approach to art, where one wasn’t afraid to request a piece by Isa Genzken. There
wasn’t a wellknown director running it, but Tobias, Emanuel and Dan Solbach, which brought about a very different reality. We
simply did a lot ourselves. There was something going on all the time; it was an incredible exchange. It was a little bit rough, especially at the beginning. It was a trial not to hesitate for too long. We made an exhibition with Fabian Marti although our artistic
approaches are not very close to one another. Emanuel called and said: “Listen, you two, I know this is going to be a clash, but in
three weeks you are doing this exhibition together.”
HUO So it was a lot about improvisation, energy, free jazz, these kinds of moments?
KM It was also about not laying everything out for such a long time before making decisions. Instead, we worked in a more rustic
way and brought things together where we knew it wouldn’t end up in harmony, but the opposite: in a dialogue that something
could develop out of.
HUO I was in Switzerland visiting my parents during Christmas in 2010 and Peter Fischli called me. He told me that it was urgent
that I drive to Schaffhausen to see this Manor-Kunstpreis exhibition of yours, which was your first larger, institutional solo exhibition. This is where it all came together for the first time, the whole vocabulary, the whole language — like those glass beads, which
reappear all the time.
KM Yes, I still like that piece very much. It is extremely superficial. Glass beads are this simple seduction, as in the case of Columbus, who I think traded beads for gold, or my interest in threading them like a necklace. This is akin to the idea of a list, that a list
— if it isn’t directed towards a purpose — is as a tool or technique to compare diverse elements amongst each other and to search
for the differences.
HUO There was also a video in Schaffhausen, which reappears in the Kunsthalle Zürich in a different form. They are both tourist
excursions, which is a different thread in your work. Can you maybe say something about this, the video in Schaffhausen and then
about expanding upon it for the new video
in Zurich?
KM Yes, yes, yes. The video in Schaffhausen is essentially about the two cities Strasbourg and Colmar, which I cut into one cityscape, like a model for a historic European city. I was fascinated by this legacy in Europe — what one associates with it and how
these cities convey themselves. The video has a character who walks through these two cities, going with the flow and simply letting things happen. He wears a Heineken beer fan hat, which evokes both corporate merchandising and the bohemian with a top
hat in the 19th century, thus connecting merchandise with nostalgic elements. The camera follows this figure, like tourists follow
a tourist guide who holds up an umbrella. In a way, the hat replaces the person. First there was the person wearing the hat, then
the hat becomes the symbol for the project and eventually the hat has eaten or replaced the actor. The hat also reads one of my
texts, which brings into question how much an artwork speaks and how much I speak, although it is clear that it must stem from
me. The hat doesn’t develop too much of a personality, but stays trapped in this construct. That’s why I chose the computer voice
and just inserted the text. It’s an infinite, looping monologue.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Originally published in Kaleidoscope, Issue 20, 2014
2/2
SOCIÉTÉ
Frieze
Trust (A mi izquierda)
‘Trust (A mi izquierda)’, 2013, installation view 2
The closing sequence of Terrence Malick’s 2012 film To The Wonder shows a Catholic priest (Father Quintana, played by Javier
Bardem) working through a crisis of religious faith. On his community rounds we see him wandering the poor neighbourhoods
of small-town Oklahoma and at the bedsides of the disabled and infirm performing his typical priestly duties. In the course of his
journey, Father Quintana’s doubts in God’s remote and intervening powers become exasperated. He resorts to arranging his belief
according to his own personal geometry: ‘Christ to my right / Christ to my left / Christ behind me / Christ before me,’ he narrates
as he dejectedly goes from place to place, borrowing words from an old prayer of Saint Patrick.
Taking its subtitle from a translation of Father Quintana’s words, ‘Trust (A mi izquierda)’ (On my Left) was a group exhibition curated by Michele D’Aurizio according to a similar compass of divine faith on decline. This was an exhibition that was less about an
authoritative God or the traditions of religious ceremony, and more about establishing a faith closer to home, summoned through
the personal objects of architecture, art and design. The exhibition’s press text declared references to the interior architecture of
the Shakers, Le Corbusier’s priory at Saint Maria de le Tourette, and the purist décor of the private home of Luis Barragan in Mexico
City. These references served as an evocative sampler of the spiritual investments that have preceded us in the architecture and
design of the long-lost 20th century; a complex web of touchstones for this small-scale exhibition of 12 thematically evasive works.
The exhibition presented an unlikely and intriguing alliance of artists, from Memphis Group designer Ettore Sottsass, through artists of different generations (including Bernhard Hegglin, born in 1989 and Pierre Gilardi, born in 1942), through to the Dogma
studio of architect’s Pier Vittorio Aureli and Martino Tattara. Most of the works seemed to shirk any clear religiosity. Nicolas Ceccaldi’s sculpture Bornogo: Lord of Power (2012), installed high on the back wall of the gallery was the only work that declared its
own divine significance, with its title recalling a character mentioned in Dr. John Dee’s 16th-century esoteric manuscripts. It was
also possible to regard the arrangement of works by Gedi Sibony, Gilardi and Sottsass as a series of domestic altars; the sandals
and brightly coloured comb of Gilardi’s Sandali e pettine (1967) like someone’s personal effects put aside during prayer. Most of
the works in ‘Trust (A mi izquierda)’ were occupied with other quasi-religious spectres, whether channelled through the bewitching furniture of Kaspar Müller’s Angular Shaped Armoir (2013) or through Rey Akdogan’s work in two parts, clip on (b) / clip on (b)
offcut (2011–12), which presents the elements of a distressed display board as though ripped apart to expose its hidden messages
locked within.
Indeed, many of the works in the show seem to have been chosen precisely because of their internal, concealed and self-made
logics. Uri Aran’s Untitled (2012–13) presented a table of found material appropriated into an intensely private, ritualistic order,
together with a framed photograph of a girl extending her hand (in blind faith) to what we might assume to be a horse or another
animal in a petting zoo. Hegglin’s works were two slight, wall-mounted objects that shared a title that read like a lexicon of shapeshifting possibilities – Blendin, Uhrzeiger, Coin Something, DJ Mental Theo, Jawbreaker, 24.12.2006, DXS, Sakiz, Bar de Ligne (2013).
We might have had to remind ourselves of the religiosity that prefaced ‘Trust (A mi izquierda)’, but these works emphasized art’s
own forms of organizing something to believe in.
Matt Packer
Originally published in Frieze Magazine, November 2013
SOCIÉTÉ
Frieze
Kaspar Müller picture a head..
Once there was a hat. A tall top hat, sewn from patches of garish violet, black and multicoloured velour, not unlike the Mad Hatter’s
in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865). Its flaccidity approaches the cartoonish headwear worn by some sports fans. Made
by the mother of artist Kaspar Müller, the hat appeared in Müller’s film Colmar & Strasbourg (2010), perched on the head of a
man as he navigates these cities, on foot and aboard a tourist boat. The cover of the catalogue for Müller’s 2010 exhibition at the
Museum zu Allerheiligen in Schaffhausen – Müller’s home town – features a photograph of the hat against a white background. It
appeared again in 2011, at Francesca Pia in Zurich, in blue saturated prints, both stills from Colmar & Strasbourg, and an image of
the hat underwater, as if in a fish tank. At The Green Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in March this year, Müller showed the film
Forever alone and around the world (2013). The hat returns yet again, front and centre, digitally superimposed on changing background images of various landscapes. Grown up and now independent, the hat – through a fold approximating a mouth – gives a
ten-minute monologue about its birth, fame and travels, as well as speaking with some insight about its part in a broader system
of production, reproduction and distribution.
Since its debut, the hat has operated as if it were a portion of dough containing yeast starter, carried through to activate a number
of subsequent works in which Müller applies different tactics to address questions of how a thing can be itself and a prototype at
the same time. The hat is always presented as an image and never in the flesh, yet the more it is flattened by image processing,
hovering over other images in an obviously artificial arrangement – in the recent film as well as in work in development for his solo
show later this year at the Kunsthalle Bern – the more it is anthropomorphized.
Müller’s work ranges from physically tangible sculpture to shadowy reproductions of images. If his sculpture Hand With Cigarette
(2011) – a tiny hand holding a oversized cigarette butt, nailed to a wall – has fleshy corporeality, then many of his images are occluded and challenge perception, be they the blue-printed street scenes from Colmar & Strasbourg or For Ever Alone and Around
the World (2013) with its evident lack of depth. Recent photographs of urban settings – akin to stock images – also bear a lingering
sense of artificiality. In contrast, Müller’s chains of individually blown, bright glass baubles strung across rooms – like those shown
at Société Gallery in Berlin for his 2011 exhibition Corrective Detention –were most definitely physically present, but their vocabulary was one of decoration and surface appearance.
Considered en masse, Müller’s investigation is a comparison between the solidly real object and the evanescent image. Not that
this division is antagonistic. Rather it is an enquiry into when one becomes the other, where they meet or if they can coexist. Reproduction and its dissemination is key: Müller has, for example, shown drawings made on photocopies of previous works. As in
film or television dramas, the artist knowingly picks up narrative strands from previous episodes of his practice, building on his cast
of characters.
Given the ease of file sharing today, entertainment products – films in particular – are often loss leaders for spin-off merchandise
that will generate profit. The resulting adaptation and diffusion of the initial film both compromise its status and secure its fan
base and longevity. Take action figures as an example: extracted and isolated from a filmic narrative, their framework is jettisoned.
The figure is put in the hands of the public – or its children – who will reactivate the narrative in their own contexts. There are
other strategies too: the film can become the book, the book the film, the film the series, round in circles seemingly ad infinitum.
Viewed from this perspective Müller’s hat begins as a prop, then is gradually pushed up the billing to character status, though we
remain uncertain as to whether it is an individual or an archetype, or even a trademark. Across his practice Kaspar Müller makes
test scenarios in which he deflects the energy of an original into other entities. What is Müller, like most artists, doing if not ultimately merchandising? In the resulting reiteration and dispersal, direction is lost and authority destabilised. But, perversely, new
cumulative energy is gained.
Aloife Rosenmeyer
Originally published in Frieze d/e, September/ October 2013
SOCIÉTÉ
Artforum
“D’après Giorgio” I Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico
Artists’ houses are always intriguing, for there the dichotomy between person and artist, private and public, vision and banality
emerges in all its contingency. The Roman apartment where Giorgio de Chirico lived with his wife Isabella from the period following
World War II until his death, in 1978, is no exception: The innovative and original charge of his work clashes with the cozy, bourgeois environment of his home. With this in mind, curator/critic Luca Lo Pinto has invited artists from around the world to install
work throughout the apartment, provoking once again the subtle and evergreen question of the relationship between art and life.
Some of the works evoke de Chirico’s life and character. After a long and troubled relationship, de Chirico reconciled with his brother Alberto Savinio shortly before the latter’s death in 1952. At the funeral, he took three laurel leaves from the crown placed on
the tomb and placed them under glass along with a photo of himself and his brother. Thinking of this anecdote, Dan Rees arranged
some dry leaves on the glass of a window in the house (O Brother, 2012). Since it is well known that de Chirico often declared many
of his works to be forgeries (and many fakes still make their way around the secondary market), Benny Chirco decided to make a
faithful copy of de Chirico’s Cavalli in riva al mare (Horses on the Seashore), 1924, and to exhibit it with its frame disassembled, as
if by an expert attempting to establish the work’s authenticity. Tobias Madison and Kaspar Müller imagined the house itself as a de
Chirico painting. They scattered various stones wrapped in preprinted images throughout the apartment, where they were used as
doorstops, creating an enigma within that “painting” and evoking a certain idea of movement. Olaf Nicolai must imagine de Chirico
as a dreamer: He placed a typewriter, which visitors could use to write on sheets of letter paper bearing the logo of an imaginary
dream cooperative, in the artist’s bedroom.
Others took their cue from specific de Chirico paintings. Martino Gamper placed a footstool of his design in front of an armchair
in the house. Its colors match those in de Chirico’s Bagni Misteriosi (Mysterious Bathers), 1973, exhibited in the same room. Nina
Beier’s contribution is Dead Drop, 2012, a leopard-print scarf placed on Isabella’s bed, bringing to mind the leopard-skin cape
she wore in a 1940 portrait in the apartment—as if, having finished posing, she had thrown it onto the bed. Luigi Ontani created
a d’après of himself, or rather, a work in the style of his own 1978 Autoritratto nudo d’apres Chirico, which, in turn, quoted de
Chirico’s famous nude self-portrait of 1945. In Ontani’s new photograph, SenilSeminodo, 2012, he resembles de Chirico in his selfportrait in a way he couldn’t have at the age of thirty.
Giulio Frigo painted two oils on canvas meticulously following the instructions in a manual on pictorial methods that de Chirico
wrote in the 1920s, while Luca Trevisani made scans of various motifs from de Chirico’s work, such as horses or still-life objects.
During the scanning process, the artist moved the different elements around, to produce completely abstract compositions, in contrast to de Chirico’s careful figuration. Finally, perhaps one of the most interesting works in the exhibition is by Luca Vitone, inspired
by de Chirico’s many still lifes—specifically by the fact that he painted them from plastic-fruit models. Vitone set the dining-room
table with a sandwich and a slice of cake, all made of plastic, accompanied by the maestro’s preferred drink, Punt e Mes, thus remixing the relationship between art and life and paraphrasing the deliberate ambiguity of de Chirico’s work.
Mario Codognato
Originally published in Artforum, April 2012
Contemporary Art Daily
SOCIÉTÉ
Kaspar Müller I Stand-up !
Installation view “Stand-Up!” at Gasconade, 2012
After moving to Los Angeles in Autumn 1989, Martin Kippenberger bought a 35% share in ownership of an Italian restaurant called
Capri in Venice, California. The artist’s obsession with the Ford Capri, an American car that took the name of the most cinematographic Italian island, is an open secret. More than enjoying the pleasure offered by cultural mash-ups, Kippenberger was interested in eating a plate of spaghetti Bolognese every day. It goes without saying that this is not the place to discuss the quality of an
Italian recipe prepared by (supposedly) American cooks for a German palate (who called spaghetti “noodles,” sic.) Kippenberger
ate his spaghetti sitting always at the same table, and every person who entered the restaurant couldn’t but see him.
In 1989 Kaspar Müller was a child. He was born in 1983, in Schaffhausen, a town in northern Switzerland near the Rhine Falls. In
the house where he lived with his parents, the TV was in a cabinet that Müller had to open in order to watch the colours chasing
each other on the display. After the beginning of his career as an artist in the years 2000, he has been participating in many exhibitions in commercial galleries, institutions and non-profit art spaces, mainly within Switzerland. In June 2011, sitting in a café in
Zurich’s railway station, in front of a tomato soup, Müller has accepted the proposal of a solo exhibition in the non-profit art space
Gasconade in Milan.
The Gasconade project took its first steps in January 2011, during a phone call between the space’s founder and Federico Vavassori,
when the two speakers were more than 400 miles far from each other. Eight months later Vavassori opened his commercial gallery,
with which Gasconade shares its office and exhibition space, alternating their parallel programs. The word gasconade appeared in
the founder’s notes in a list including the words braggadocio and rodomontade. Since these terms are all synonyms of bombast, it
is presumable that the founder was interested in concepts which had nothing to do with the idea of “lightness.”
Besides, Vavassori says that in the previous Autumn the founder had read the book L’uccello e la piuma. La questione della leggerezza nell’arte italiana by Luca Cerizza (Vavassori himself read that essay in only three hours, taking advantage of the fact that
his friend and future gallery-mate had forgotten a copy of the book in his car.) It is logical to conclude that Gasconade was born
out of the purpose of setting apart, with no hesitation, the experiences discussed by Cerizza, focusing on the younger generation
of local artists.
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The domain www.gasconade.it was bought eight days after the above-mentioned meeting with Müller. Since then, the Swiss artist
(who was wearing a black suit during the meeting, not because he was supposed to go and visit his parents, but because he had
spent the night in a cocktail bar without, however, making remarkable romantic conquests) has been aware that his exhibition
would be an exception proving the rule, a necessary transgression of Gasconade’s precise aim at promoting the work of mostly
Milan-based young artists. After all, Müller likes rules, but he likes breaking them even more. The group of works that the artist
has presented in his exhibition focused on the human side of art production, at a time when dematerialization and outsourcing
of production processes exert an increasingly higher influence on creativity. As most of his artists peers, Müller is part of a category known as “post-studio” artists. Although in some of his works he uses the techniques of applied arts, this happens because
technique is a human knowledge; it represents the chance to show off a virtuosity that machines are unable to reproduce. More
than fifty blown glass bowls have been lined up along a rope installed in the exhibition space. Focusing on the differences among
the bowls rather than on their similarities, Müller precisely decided how and where to place each item, so that the complexity of
the work itself has been constantly compromised by the singularity of the elements that composed it. The artist has been gently
replying to the expectations that common onlookers have on works of art: he tend, indeed, to formalize a conceptual process in
a product endowed with aesthetic and monetary value. After all, glass bowls are transparent, fragile, charming; and they hang on
the spectators’ heads.
The history of a work of art, of an exhibition, of an art space is based on the aspirations of a number of people. During youth, ambition cannot be set apart from daily actions. Sometimes it is in contrast with the process that professionalizes passions, some others
it accelerates it. By quoting Bruce Nauman, Müller wrote to Gasconade’s founder that “The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths.” In The New Spirit of Capitalism Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello argue that the claim (emerged during the 1968
riots) of a better consideration of the role played by individuals at their workplace has been assimilated by capitalism, which plans
people’s daily lives according to perspectives of professional success. In such a context, is it still possible to laugh at our failures?
Is it still possible to display them on a stand-up stage? Müller’s exhibition, the artist’s first one in Italy, has astonished spectators
leading them to ask: should art play any role in contemporary society or should it rather represent a place where roles do not exist?
Some people wondered whether love is still possible, some others what they would do the day after.
This exhibition has been made possible with the support of Instituto Svizzero di Roma.
Originally published in Contemporary Art Daily, February 2012
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SOCIÉTÉ
Kaspar Müller
Installation view “I was Trinidad and learned a lot” at Francesca Pia, 2012
Zurich Kaspar Müller’s work is as difficult to pin down as mercury. This exhibition, “I was in Trinidad and learned a lot,” opened
with a series of stills from his 2010 film Colmar & Strasbourg, made for his Manor Art Prize show at the Museum zu Allerheiligen in
Schaffhausen, Switzerland. The film (not on view here) leads us through the eponymous French cities but without differentiating
between them. They seem almost like one place, a caricature of a quaint “Old World” town—with canals, half-timbered buildings
and cobblestone streets, and the clean, touristic feel of a Disneyland simulation. A figure with magnetic appeal, wearing a tall
colorful hat, appears in the various locations. Once he is glimpsed, often amid sight- seers, the eye searches for but cannot always
find him. At Francesca Pia, the film stills, presented as single images or in grids of four or six, were printed in a monochromatic blue,
making the settings even less specific, although the man in the hat could still be spotted.
A ballet-type barre was placed diago- nally across the second gallery space, unadorned but for a few revolting lumps of chewed
gum adhered to its under-side. This is No Fear (2011), made in collaboration with artist Tobias Madison. The surrounding walls
featured an array of works, including two small, distressed wood cabinets, both Untitled (Cabinet), 2011. These hung with their
doors closed, their potential secrets concealed. Several Cattelan-like rubber body parts, such as a cigar-wielding hand, were nailed
up unceremoniously around the room.
A short two-part text, also created with Madison, accompanied the show. The first part retold Voltaire’s Candide in the folksy
vernacular of a comic strip. The second referenced Truffaut’s film Day for Night (1973), which is titled after the cinematographic
practice of shooting nighttime scenes in daylight. The illusion of night ated through a number of techniques, often involving the use
of blue filters— likely a clue to Müller’s chromatic manipulation of the Colmar & Strasbourg stills. Truffaut’s film circles around the
making of a movie and asks which is more important: the real lives of the actors and director or the fiction they are employed to
depict. Like Truffaut, Müller raises questions about authentic experience, by spotlighting various forms of artifice in the everyday
world. With Colmar & Strasbourg he made a stage of real-life settings and placed an alienated protagonist on it. At Francesca Pia,
he created an environment in which the viewer could experience his or her own alienation, surrounded by illusory images and
proplike objects that refused to cohere into a narrative. His approach stands counter to dominant methods of constructing meaning, but it runs the risk of baffling the viewer once too often.
Aoife Rosenmeyer
Originally published in Art in America, February 2012
Kunstbulletin
SOCIÉTÉ
Kaspar Müller — Symbolik und strahlende Oberflächlichkeit
Im Rahmen der Reihe ‹Bilderwahl› suchten die Mitglieder der Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft auch in diesem Jahr ein Werk aus der
Sammlung des Kunsthauses aus. Ausgewählt wurde die Fotoserie ‹Weihnachten›, 1993, von Roman Signer. Auf Einladung der
Gastkuratorin Gabrielle Schaad reagierte der in Berlin und Zürich lebende Kaspar Müller darauf. Christiane Rekade
Rekade: Du wurdest vom Kunsthaus eingeladen, zu den Werken von Roman Signer für die diesjährige ‹Bilderwahl› eine Arbeit zu
konzipieren. Was zeigst du?
Müller: Die Kunstgesellschaft hat von Roman Signer eine schwarzweisse Fotoserie gewählt. Es sind Abbildungen einer Aktion. Signer lässt eine Tanne in eines dieser Verkaufsnetze verpacken und wirft sie schliesslich von einer hohen Brücke hinunter. Daneben
werden eine Installation sowie eine weitere Fotoarbeit gezeigt. In all diesen Arbeiten kommt die Tanne vor. Der Titel ‹Weihnachten›
bezieht sich ganz explizit darauf. Die Fotos sprechen stark von den einzelnen Bewegungen und Entscheidungen dieser Aktionen. Es
sind jedoch auch Arbeiten, die ich sofort auch mit dem Gesamtwerk von Roman Signer in Verbindung bringe. Mich hat vor allem
die dokumentarische Abbildung einer Aktion interessiert und die Haltung des Fotografen dazu. Ich habe mich entschieden, Fotocollagen zu zeigen, die zwiespältig sind, da es einerseits um die Dokumentation des Geschehens auf den Bildern geht, andererseits
um eine fotografische Haltung. Diese ist näher bei der People Photography und den Paparazzi, vielleicht auch bei einer gewissen
Art der Porträt-Fotografie.
Rekade: Was ist auf den Fotos zu sehen?
Müller: Vor allem junge Menschen, die ich im letzten Sommer ungefragt und meist unbemerkt aus nächster Nähe fotografiert
habe. Es sind etwa dreihundert ausschnitthafte Bilder entstanden, von denen ich jetzt eine Auswahl getroffen habe.
Rekade: Wie hast du es geschafft, dass du nicht bemerkt wurdest?
Müller: Ich habe mich nicht besonders auffällig oder unauffällig verhalten. Manche haben sich vielleicht kurz gewundert, als sie
mich bemerkten, aber es waren Hunderte von Leuten mit ihren Kameras unterwegs, das gab mir eine gewisse Anonymität. Die
Möglichkeiten dieser Praxis sind zwiespältig. Beat Streulis Strassenfotos fand ich immer faszinierend, auch wenn meine Position
viel physischer war, ich ging eigentlich immer nah ran. Ich habe nicht mal den Sucher benutzt, sondern nur den Display. Streulis Inszenierung aus Distanz ist eine ganz andere. Er ist ein präziser Scharfschütze mit einem porträtistischen individualistischen Ansatz,
ich bin eher der willkürliche
Amokläufer, der in der Masse auf- und untertaucht. Natürlich gibt es dabei auch eine leichte Verletzung der Privatsphäre. Ich
denke aber nicht, dass man es mit den fotografischen Intimitäten auf sozialen Netzwerken vergleichen kann. Es ist eher etwas sehr
Gegenteiliges.
Rekade: Es geht dir also nicht um die Darstellung oder Enthüllung spezifischer Situationen. Wonach hast du dann gesucht?
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Müller: Ich fand im Zusammenhang mit Signers Arbeit und mit dem Thema Weihnachten den direkten Blick auf Menschen, auf
eine Bewegung, die scheinbar ausserhalb der Kunst stattfindet, interessant. Es geht bei den Fotos um Oberflächen und Texturen
von Kleidern, Schmuck und Accessoires – respektive deren Symbolik –, die auch eigentlich viel weniger kommunizieren, als sie
vorgeben. Die Bilder sind ebenso grossartig und erhaben, wie sie banal und ritualisiert wirken. Im Grunde fällt alles mit der Körperlichkeit in den Bildern zusammen und mit der endgültigen Oberflächlichkeit der Fotografie. Dennoch behaupten sich die Körper,
trotz ihrer Austauschbarkeit oder Anonymität. Man kann viel hinein interpretieren, gerade weil die Bilder Menschen zeigen, und
man läuft Gefahr, empathisch zu sein oder in eine Art Spiegelstadium zu verfallen. Das führt dann schnell über das hinaus, was
wirklich zu sehen ist. Aber das ist auch gut so. In dieser Auseinandersetzung sehe ich einen Bezug zum Ritual von Weihnachten und
dem Ritual der Kunst.
Rekade: Warum hast du gerade die Uferpromenade des Zürichsees als Aufnahmeort
ausgewählt?
Müller: Weil ich eine gewisse Vorliebe und Faszination für den Stil in Zürich im Jahre 2012 habe. Es könnte aber genauso gut
woanders sein, würde dann aber auch anders aussehen. Es ist quasi eine persönliche und formale Entscheidung. Vorbei ist vorbei
Rekade: Wie präsentierst du die Fotos im Kunsthaus?
Müller: Ich drucke die Digitalfotos als Laserprints aus und klebe sie auf weissen Fotokarton. Es ist eine direkte und einfache Art
der Präsentation, wie eine lückenhafte Fotostory oder eben eine Collage. Mir ist das Format sehr wichtig, das des Papiers und der
Fotografie. Dabei geht es auch um Grenzen und Normen. Die Papiere sind flach auf die Wand geklebt, ohne Glas davor.
Rekade: Hat die Arbeit einen Titel?
Müller: Ja, sie heisst ‹Acta est fabula›.
Rekade: Mich erinnern die Bilder an den Stil der frühen Aufnahmen von Wolfgang Tillmans und ich sehe darin Augenblicke der
Jugend, Momente der Schönheit, der Poesie und damit auch ihrer Vergänglichkeit. Der lateinische Titel – ‹das Geschehene ist eine
Fabel›, im Sinne von «vorbei ist vorbei» – geht ja auch in diese Richtung. Geht es dir auch darum?
Müller: Natürlich. Das passt ja auch zu Weihnachten, so was zu feiern. Ritual der Kunst
Rekade: Ansonsten scheint Weihnachten in der Arbeit keine Rolle mehr zu spielen...
Müller: Weihnachten kommt als direktes Symbol nicht vor. Die Symbolik von Weihnachten und die Symbole selbst ändern ja ständig. Für mich hat Weihnachten vor allem eine kalendarische und eine soziale Bedeutung. Es ist ein fixes Datum im Jahr, an dem
ich zu meinen Eltern reise. Andere Verwandte, deren Konstellationen sich ständig ändern, kommen dazu. Es sind Tage, in denen
ich auch Freunde treffe, in denen Partys stattfinden. Die Läden sind geschlossen und man ist ein wenig blockiert, besonders wer
aus kulturellen Gründen nicht daran teilnimmt. Die Feiertage sind oft einfach freie Tage. Die Jahreszeiten haben mit Weihnachten
eigentlich auch nichts zu tun, bei uns fällt es halt in den Winter. Es ist im Grunde jeder Tag Weihnachten.
Rekade: Ich erinnere mich, dass du vor einem Jahr ein Projekt realisiert hast, bei dem du die Weihnachtssymbolik explizit eingesetzt hast.
Müller: Das war an Weihnachten 2011 in Amden für ein Kunstprojekt, das Roman Kurzmeyer kuratiert. Ich wollte mit mundgeblasenen Glaskugeln, die ich zuvor als Skulptur gezeigt hatte, eine Installation realisieren und die Berghütte, also den Ort selbst,
schmücken. Wir sind am Weihnachtstag da hochgewandert und dann gab es Champagner, Konfekt und Panettone für die Gäste,
die Kinder haben geschlittelt. Es ging sehr um das Ritual der Kunst und von Weihnachten, auch das soziale Ritual. Das Wetter war
grossartig und die Kugeln, ein typisches dekoratives Weihnachtssymbol wie die Tanne, haben in ihrer ganzen Oberflächlichkeit
gestrahlt und wir haben uns damit selbst ein wenig gefeiert und den Anlass.
Christine Rekade
Originally published in Kunstbulletin, 2012
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Artline
Kaspar Müller
Der Basler Künstler Kaspar Müller provoziert in seinen Arbeiten das Abwegige.
Atelierbesuche findet Kaspar Müller wahrscheinlich ziemlich widersinnig. Doch der Basler Künstler und diesjährige Manor-Kunstpreisträger Schaffhausen ist zu höflich, einen anderen Treffpunkt vorzuschlagen. Dass viele seiner Arbeiten am Schreibtisch entstehen, hatte er schon im Telefongespräch erwähnt und wirklich passen seine Werke im Atelier in der Kleinhüningerstraße auf
mehrere DIN-A4 Blätter, in Gruppen unterteilt, eingetütet und ordentlich getackert. Oben rechts. Es wundert nicht, dass Kaspar
Müller (*1983) diese Form der Dokumentation gewählt hat. Denn es ist nicht ganz leicht, den roten Faden zu erkennen, der alles miteinander verbindet: die Strohmänner, die er in seiner Einzelschau „Bias“ im Kunsthaus Baselland 2009 gezeigt hatte, die
Glaskugeln oder die Holzskulptur, die er zusammen mit Tobias Madison für Daniel Baumanns Ausstellung im Modern Institute
Glasgow konzipiert hat. Er wisse gar nicht, sagt er beiläufig, ob sie noch stehe. Glasgow sei eine toughe Stadt. Ein wenig hat man
den Eindruck, diese einzelnen Dossiers funktionieren wie Module, die je nach Reihenfolge und Kombination Charakteristika seines
Werkes stärker hervortreten lassen. Einmal sein Denken in Materialien, das andere Mal Oberflächen, die sich durchaus ob ihrer
Schönheit selbst denunzieren.
Wie viele aus seiner Generation kollaboriert Kaspar Müller intensiv mit anderen Künstlern. Die Szene ist klein, man hat zusammen
studiert, gemeinsam Off-Räume initiiert, betreibt sie noch (Vrits, Galen) oder fühlt sich ihnen einfach verbunden (New Jerseyy).
Anfang dieses Jahres etwa lud Karma International in Zürich zu „Quick Brown Fox & Lazy Dog“ ein. Die Ausstellung löste das Format einer Gruppenschau so formal wie clever. Thomas Julier etwa schuf eine Tapete im zeitgenössischen Op-Art-Look, von Tobias
Madison stammte das Gestell und Kaspar Müller fügte als Skulptur Papierbälle ein, deren Drahtkonstruktion die Linien der Tapete
aufnahm, die aufgeklebten Haare jedoch verliehen dem Objekt etwas Ambivalentes. Dass hier ein leicht konsumierbarer Look produziert wird, weiß natürlich auch Kaspar Müller. Es sah aus wie ein typischer „Züri-Laden, kommentiert er trocken die Ausstellung.
Und dennoch zeigt sich hier eben eine Fragestellung, die ihn interessiert: welche Bedeutung schaffen Oberflächen und wie lassen
sich diese lenken. Daher auch die Serie von mundgeblasenen Glaskugeln, die Kaspar Müller häufig in Bündeln hängt. Man kennt
sie aus dem Kunstgewerbe, womöglich hält man ihre offensichtliche Schönheit für Kitsch. Erstmal alles andere als cool war auch,
in der gemeinsamen Basler Ausstellung mit Fabian Marti im New Jerseyy einen Fisch aus Holz zu zeigen. Den Stamm dazu hatte er
selbst ausgesucht, den Fisch daraus geschnitzt und auf einem schlichten Stahltisch präsentiert. 200 Kilo Holz auf 100 Kilo Metall:
300 Kilo Präsenz und Pathos. „In der Kunst ist alles Selbstbehauptung“, sagt Kaspar Müller. Sobald man etwas in die Welt setzt,
behauptet es sich selbst und muss es auch.
Auch in seiner neuesten Werkreihe geht es Kaspar Müller um solche Brüche. Die ersten seiner aktuellen Holzschnitte sind derzeit
in der Ausstellung „Of Objects, Fields and Mirrors“ zu sehen, die Daniel Baumann für das Kunsthaus Glarus kuratiert hat. Gut 100
sollen es werden, sie zeigen Comicfiguren, Einzelbilder aus Asterix, Disney-Figuren oder Robert Crumb-Szenen, auf die Bedingungen des Holzschnittes heruntergebrochen, als Zusammenspiel von Linie und Fläche, Schwarz und Weiß. Was in dieser Vermischung
von Comic und Holzschnitt passiert,
ist ein paradoxer Prozess. War der Holzschnitt vielleicht einmal der Comic der Neuzeit, ist er heute ein aufwändiges Handwerk,
der Comicstrip jedoch ein populäres Unterhaltungsformat von industrieller Reproduktion. Das einzelne Comicbild erfährt eine
Aufwertung durch den künstlerischen Prozess, gedruckt wird jedoch in Serie, zusammen mit Thomas Julier, als „Hippiekunst am
Küchentisch“, wie Kaspar Müller sagt. Keine Frage, Kaspar Müller mag es pointiert.
Annette Hoffmann
Originally published in Artline, October 2010
Blouin Artinfo
SOCIÉTÉ
Locals Rule: Alternative Art Spaces Gear Up for Art Basel
BASEL, Switzerland— “Fair is a fair is a fair is a fair,” yes, but Art Basel might be the fairest of them all. Its eminence is such that its
hometown — a small, often lovely medieval city sewn together by the jade-green ribbon of the Rhine at the locus of Switzerland,
France, and Germany — has become synonymous with the art fair it hosts for one week every June. For unlike New Yorkʼs Armory
Show and Londonʼs Frieze, sited in teeming metropolises with seismic art worlds, Art Basel simply has Basel: an international
border town that features a sprawling pharmaceuticals industry, the inevitable Swiss banks, and the headquarters of illustrious
architects Herzog & de Meuron.
Despite Baselʼs outsize number of world-class museums — from the Kunsthalle Basel, expertly helmed by Polish curator Adam
Szymczyk, to the grand dames of the Beyeler and the Schaulager — itʼs still easy for visiting New Yorkers, Berliners, Londoners,
Angelenos, and Muscovites to forget that Basel has an active contemporary-art scene that is engaged 52 weeks a year.
During Art Basel this month, the cityʼs estimable alternative-art scene will make that fact a little bit harder to forget. Year-round,
Baselʼs mostly artist-run off-spaces — among them, New Jerseyy, Showroom, and the nascent Galen (as well as Radio Arthur, an
art–centered Internet radio station) — mount inspired exhibitions, publish experimental magazines, and stage ambitious performances that pull together local artists and international art stars with remarkable assurance. This monthʼs bag of events — from a
“hobbies” magazine launch, to an atypical window display, to a series of concerts, to a dynamite-determined installation — promises to be the same mix of the rigorous, the riotous, and the relaxed that characterizes the Basel experimental-art scene as a whole.
Last yearʼs Art Basel saw New Jerseyy — a gallery located at Hüningerstrasse 18 in North Baselʼs industrial environs and run by
independent curator Daniel Baumann and local artists (and Used Future publishers) Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti, and Dan
Solbach — briefly turned into a boxing club. Guest-curated by Swiss art doyen John Armleder and some of his students, Clinch/
Cross/Cut filled the space with the requisite bags, gloves, and weights, and featured a schedule that had participating artists sparring and jogging in the dusky evenings.
This year, in an equally inspired if less athletic bit of programming, Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad, whose rather Romantic take on
subjects as various as Easy-E and Expressionism is on view in the New Museumʼs “Younger Than Jesus” triennial, will be painting
the storefrontʼs windows for a new work called What Leaf? What Mushroom? The otherwise empty gallery will be locked, and a
series of concerts will be held nearby featuring Nils Bech, a weirdly enchanting singer prone to a kind of operatic cabaret, and New
York artist Richard Aldrich and composer Stefan Tcherepnin, of the famed Russian composing family; heʼs fourth in line after Nikolai
(1873-1945), Alexander (1899-1977), and Ivan (1943-1998).
Bech will perform the evening of June 9, at Lothringerstrasse 108, after Ekbladʼs opening; the last time he sang at one of her
exhibitions, he performed a gorgeously strange riff on Agnes Vardaʼs seminal film Vagabond. On June 10, Aldrich and Tcherepnin
will perform in the subterranean room of Schlachthofstrasse 10 — an architecture studio and music space situated nearby at the
French border — following a performance by the darkly impenetrable electronic duo Le Dépeupleur, so named by its principals,
Kasper Toeplitz and Zbigniew Karkowski, after a Samuel Beckett short story.
While New Jerseyyʼs identity is rooted in its North Basel construction-site ethos (itʼs funded by the Nordtangente-Kunsttangente,
an arts directive aimed at revitalizing the crane-strewn area), Showroom is a decidedly more itinerate project. Begun in 2006 by
artists Tobias Kaspar and Pascal Storz and curator Egija Inzule, Showroom has featured spirited programming with a motley crew
of curators and artists and temporary exhibition spaces. During this yearʼs Art Basel, it will turn textheavy, with an exhibition (at
Hammerstrasse 133, a Kleinbasel storefront surrounded by Turkish fast-food joints and located just blocks from the Messe) and a
magazine launch, each preoccupied with the Word. The show, curated by Inzule, will feature a magazine work by John Knight, a
contribution by the English artist and postmodern fabulist Ryan Gander, and printed matter based on gallery advertisements by
famed French critic, collector, and gallerist Ghislain Mollet- Vieville, the famous champion of Minimalism and Conceptual art. Mollet-Vieville’s salon-like Paris apartment has been recreated in its entirety at the Musée dʼart moderne et contemporain (MAMCO)
in Geneva.
The exhibition will also launch Provence, a new publication “devoted to hobbies” in all their myriad forms, edited by Showroom
curator Tobias Kaspar as well as Daiga Grantina and Hannes Loichinger. The first issue features disparate offerings from Ceryth
Wyn Evans, Basel artist Kaspar Müller, and Merlin Carpenter, as well as an essay by Andrea Legiehn on the 1980 Richard Gere film
American Gigolo and a reprint of Richard Princeʼs “Menthol Pictures,” which first appeared in the celebrated (and now defunct)
American magazine Real Life in 1980.
If Showroomʼs present activities are concerned with a kind of devotional literature, Galenʼs show should prove to be a bit more
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explosive. The newest space of the three, Galen is run by artists Emil Michael Klein and Kaspar Müller. (As is often the case in Basel,
both have shown work at or otherwise been involved with the previous two spaces.) Galenʼs inaugural show will feature Andreas
Zybach, a Swiss artist based in Berlin whose work often engages energy systems and inspired engineering, such as the pneumatic
Self-Producing Pedestal, a tunnel in which human movement triggers drips of paint to coat a nearby canvas. Called Barrels — Bricks
— Cameras — Carrots — Doors — Pipes, the new work will gather the preceding grocery list of items at Galenʼs space at Kleinhuningerstrasse 94, where they will be assembled for a class picture of sorts, then driven to a German factory, where they will be
crushed into a colored powder. This powder, a poster made from the photo of the original elements, and a possible performance,
will be on view at Zybachʼs opening on the afternoon of June 6, as well as at his regular gallerist Johann Königʼs booth in the fair
proper.
This yearʼs Art Basel falls at a time when the art world is in full self-reflection mode: Anxious debates about whether the global
recession will ultimately be good for art or will simply starve even more of its artists are being waged daily. Art Basel is exactly
the kind of art event that brings this kind of anxiety to the fore. But however the excitable predictions play out, it is telling that in
the fairʼs very backyard a different kind of art world continues to thrive, one in which ambitious young artists make work, curate
shows, and produce publications in a manner less showily DIY than simply pragmatic. Perhaps only in an alarmingly moneyed time
of exhaustive consumerism could a city be put on the map by its art fair. If so, the sober global after-party (not to be held in the
hotel lobby) might be just the right time for the city to return to simply being itself.
Quinn Latimer
Originally published in Blouin Artinfo, 2009
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La Ricotta
C H A P. I.
He wants more than he can and what he can he is not aware of.1
C H A P. I I.
The Good Thief
C H A P. I I I.
For his first solo exhibition Don’t Support The Team at Galerie Nicolas Krupp, Kaspar Müller presents drawings: Winsor & Newton
oil pastel, paper, sewing pins. The works included are arranged in several groupings of homework / of work done at home. The categories include sewing, cutting, wood, hand, water, compress, nothing, pink, and music. The formal drawing strategies employed
here bring the material together—partially—in a manner not unlike that which might be used to retrieve choice elements from a
combined dumpster for a defunct art supply shop and a one-horse hardware store. In fact many of the motifs as well as much of
the source material for this work were acquired from just these types of establishment.
C H A P. I V.
Kaspar Müller’s previous works include names, photos, watercolors hung on the wall with office tape, sentences, sculptures made
of colorful cotton, girls with their hair blowing in the same direction. Müller was part of the artist-run space Vrits in Basel. Seven
days after the Don’t Support The Team opening new works will be on view at the Kunsthaus Baselland, his first institutional solo
exhibition. He currently lives in Berlin.
C H A P. V.
We are not really asked to decide or consider; they lay it out for us to think as little as possible. They tell us we are overwhelmed,
that we should take the easiest of the options laid out before us. This exhibition is a place to prompt to decide and consider. As
expectations change so eventually will decisions, considerations, and maybe even wishes.2
C H A P. V I.
Egija Inzule
Understood something? Completely beating around the bush.
But we do know. We do know.
This.
And then.
To be so monumental, with pins. So aptly demonstrates that there is something to say, or that there is
nothing to say, but that one wants to say something.
Out of complete boredom.
To turn around seven times, to question again, negotiate and agree again.
C H A P. V I I.
- No more than four questions.
- Thanks.
First: What do you mean to express with this new work?
My intimate, profound, archaic Catholicism.
What do you think of Italian society?
The most illiterate masses and the most ignorant bourgeoisie in Europe.
And what do you think of death?
As a Marxist, I never give it any thought.
Fourth and last question:
What do you think of our great director Federico Fellini?
He dances.
He dances.
Thank you, congratulations and good-bye.
“I am a force from the Past...”
It’s a poem. In the first part, the poet describes certain ancient ruins whose style and history no one any
longer understands, and certain hideous modern buildings that everyone understands. Then he resumes:
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SOCIÉTÉ
“I am a force from the Past. Tradition is my only love. I come from the ruins, churches , al tarpieces , forgotten hamlets in the Appennines and the foothills of the Alps where dwell our brothers. I walk the Tuscolana Way like a madman, the Appian Way like a
dog without a master. I behold the twilight, the mornings over Rome, over Ciociaria, over the world, like the first acts of posthistory,
which I witness by privilege of birth from the utmost edge of some buried age. Monstrous is the man born from the bowels of a
dead woman. And I, adult fetus, wander, more modern than any modern... in search of brothers... who are no more.”
Did you understand anything?
Sure, a lot. You walk the Tuscolana Way...
Write down what I tell you.
You understood nothing because you’re an average man, right?
Well, yeah.
But you don’t know what an average man is. He’s a monster. A dangerous criminal . Conformist , colonialist, racist, slave trader, a
mediocrity! Have you got a bad heart?
No, thank God.
Too bad, because if you were to drop dead right here, it’d be good publicity for the film’s release. You
don’t exist anyway. Capital acknowledges the existence of labor only insofar as itserves production. And the producer of my film is
the owner of your paper as well.
Good-bye.
C H A P. V I I I.
Chapters one and two try for associative contextualization. Chapter three addresses the kind of material concerns generally called
for in this kind of text as a “detailed description of what people will actually see or experience.” Chapter four offers a background
based on biography. Chapter five posits the encouragement of active reception as potentially implicit in particular forms of authorship/intentionality/cultural production. Relationship of chapter five to this particular work is not entirely clear. Chapter six
introduces conceptual process, possibly the most important chapter here if the one least likely to make a difference for most viewers and readers. Chapter seven takes the important step of causing the reflective reader to question the sincerity of all aforementioned efforts and pos i ted as sociat ions . Chapter eight does nothing but summar ize.
Tobias Kaspar and Christina Linden
Dialogue out of “La Ricotta”, 2009
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Katalog HGK Basel
SOCIÉTÉ
egg to egg..
.. ashes to ashes - könnte man weiterfahren - and dust to dust. War das so gemeint? Eher nicht, denn dafür ist das rhetorische
Level der Bildsituation zu unstimmig, um nicht rätselhaft zu sagen, was auch wieder zu hoch gegriffen wäre. Eine ins Bild gesetzte
Vanitas-komposition alter Schule hätte eine gewisse Serenität und zeigte ihr Motiv oder
ihre manifeste Message, wenn auch weitgehend metaphorish verkleidet, unverstellt. Die silberne Kugel funktionierte darüber hinaus wahrscheinlich als konvexer Spiegel, der mir mit seinem Weitwinkel schliesslich auch noch Einblicke in Bereiche ausserhalb des
beschränkten Bildrahemens eröffnet und damit Rückschlüsseauf die konkrete Raumsitoation des Arrangements erlaubt.
Vielleicht ist es der bricolage Aspekt, die prekäre Kargheit des Bildes, die meinen Geist in der Betrachtung und im Nachdenken
darüber immer weider abschweifen lassen... der Kunst- oder Designanspruch des arrangements macht schliesslcih, dass wir einen
Mehrwert erwarten, der die einzelenen Elemente in einem umfassenden Sinn- oder Formzusammenhang erscheinen lässt.
Dieser implizierte Styling-kontext verweist unter anderem auf eine Gleichgewichtssituation, die auf ihrem Kulminationspunkt eine Begegnung oder Konfronatation der zwei eier - auch eine Symetrie beinhaltet. Ich muss an den französischen Künstler Ange
Leccia denken, der in den 80er jahren alle möglichen Identitäten frontal - selten prallel - gegeneinander oder zueinander zu einer
spektatkulären tautologischen Beziehung fühgte: die gute alte Concorde, riesige Maschinen, Motorräder oder Fussballtore. Momente narzisstischer Genügsamkeit. In unserem Fall kommt aber noch ein weiteres Gleichgewicht hinzu: die tragflächeder Eier. Es
scheint, dass das auf einer Latte und ander Rückwand abgestützte Brettchen von der Kappe in Balance gehlaten wird, die an der
vorderen Ecke hängt. Es handelt sich dabei um eine, wie das Logo der MLB verrät, originale Baseball Cap, was auf ein was auf eine
witeres visuellen Gleichgewicht hinweist, in der Form der zwei zu einer art von dreidimensionalen Ying und Yang-Symbol vernähten
Lederzungen des Baseball Balls. Und sollte es wirklcih um Baseball gehen, dann hätten wir mit dem silbenbeknauften Gehstock
auch noch den Cheerleader Baton zur Hand. Aber das ist wohl auch nicht das verdeckte Motiv dieser Komposition.
Auf dem surrealistischen Weg oder dem der Absurdität kommt man nicht viel weiter, denn in diesem Stilleben findet sich keine
Spur von lautreeamontscher Schönheit einer Begegnung eines Regenschrimes und einer Nähmschine auf dem Seziertisch. So bleiben schliesslich nur die Eier als zentraler Gegenstand: zwei Eier in gehobener Position. Und das führt am Ende zu einer weiteren
Abschweifung, zu hHmpty Dumpty, der eiigen Figur aus dem englsichen Kinderreim, die Alice in der Welt hinter dem Spiegel als
impertinenter Chefsemiotiker begenet. Auf einer Mauer sitzend, fand er es übrigens sehr ärgerlich, als Ei bezeichnet zu werden,
den er ahnte wohl schon seinen endgültigen Fall. In unserem fall haben sich zwei Eier zusammengetan. Vielleicht hilfts, wenn da
jemand plötzlich die Kappe aufsetzt.
Max Wechsler
Originally published in Katalog HGK Basel, 2006

Kaspar Müller_Portfolio Press.indd

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