Michael Müller
Three Biographical Attempts
Chapter IV.: Self-Creation

Müller rarely composes the “self-portrait” as a literal portrayal of his own likeness. Instead, he develops forms and selects objects that represent the various aspects of his self-perception. His works meanwhile remain in a limbo between pathos and irony, hence between imbuing-with-meaning and showing-through-distancing.

Throughout his practice, Müller repeatedly utilizes the two Greek gods Hermes and Hermaphroditus as motifs, to concretely strike out on the search for the origin of meaning. He uses their help to explore drive as a manifold motor for human activity: one time lived out directly as sexual lust, one time sublimated and transferred to an artistic product. In doing so, the real as well as symbolic phallus and the threat of its castration plays a dominant role again and again.

Das gemachte Ich [en: Self-Creation] provides a survey of Müller’s oeuvre in every medium – drawings, paintings, sculptures, objects and performances, multiples and printed works, revealing the multifaceted creativity, formal inventiveness and wide conceptual range of the artist. Müller challenged the traditional confines of art to embrace a much broader, philosophical and humanistic practice. 

Consisting of a starting block, Duett, featuring Michael Müller’s footprints, pressed in plaster, are mounted on the footrests, which visualizes time advancing in both directions – the past and the future. The tense moment before the start of a race is frozen in the work, capturing the loneliness of the runner before taking action, “free” of any struggle or competition. The work was part of a performance in which the dancers stepped into the artist's footsteps in a literal sense. 

Similar to Duett, Dispositionen also features a duet. The mattresses, which otherwise serve as surfaces on which bodies lie, become something corporeal themselves. The mattresses resist this imposed transformation by wanting to return again and again from the imposed vertical, the human dimensions, to their original inanimate form, the horizontal. They are forced into their new form by the artist by means of tightened tension straps. In their new positioning, the mattresses communicate with each other as bodies on a gestural level, enter into a conversation, perform a duet. By covering the mattresses with acrylic, the artist has applied a skin to the objects, which at the same time appear like marble due to their colour and the coldness when touched.

Unfertiges Ich is printed on alu-dibond and covered with “water drops” of clear varnish. It revolves around the theme of potency in the sense of possibility. The left half of the image shows a free upper body in a boxer and high heels, while the right half features Michael Müller’s leg, whereby the swing of the boxer's legs merges into those of the artist, who thus connects the two halves of the image. Potentially realizable possibilities of the ego are shown, such as gender identity or the performance of individual expression. This is also reflected in the title, which emphasizes that the ego is always in a fluid state, changeable, unfinished – there is always potential and possibility.

Falscher Inder reveals conflicts in the biographical narratives and exemplifies them with Michael Müller’s “identity”. The form of the two pillars takes up the phallic lingam referencing the Hindu worship of the deity Shiva. The fresh milk poured onto the right column in a ritual gesture and brushed into a white square unites in itself the contradiction between material and form. The milk is religious in its materiality – the gift of the cow, which is sacred in India, and refers to the Orient. The white square into which the milk is brushed in – the ritual is reminiscent of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich's Suprematism, who in 1919 concluded his series of the famous black squares. This “milky” white square – a clear Western connotation that cannot be reconciled with Indian formal language.

The 378 individual pieces made of clay are negative handprints of the artist, which he formed in the course of one day. The starting point of Tageswerk is Michael Müller’s Protestant upbringing, which promotes a “work ethic” that ultimately legitimizes and fills a life before oneself (and God). In the course of forming the clay casts, a process of realization took place for the artist. While he initially followed the logic of capitalism that arose from Protestantism and tried to form as many impressions as possible within the given time, this initial condition changed over time to the realization that each individual piece demands its time in order to be completed, and the impressions are only complete when they conform to a form. From an assembly line production where each piece is “machine made”, they became individual and independent works of art.

Schamlippen (Die Kapitalisierung aller Ressourcen) represents the fetishization of the artist as a person in contemporary art, which ultimately culminates in the question: “What is the artist trying to tell us?” The viewer or the collector of a work of art wants to see and understand the artwork from the artist's perspective, to be a passive recipient of the artistic activity of the artist's creative act. This is accompanied by the desire for power and control over the artist's body, into which one would like to place oneself and which is supposed to cease to exist as an independent entity, not subject to change, transformation and development – a state that only occurs after the physical death of the artist, which objectifies a life and brings its ability to change, to be revised, to a conclusion. Corresponding to this are the photographic images of the clothes archived into a publication by Michael Müller, entitled “TEXTILOGRAPHY: The total capitalization of all resources or the connection of mind and matter, similar to a hooker.” Converting the clothes into images like police mug shots and identification service records, they are neutral, objective, sober, descriptive, treating the clothes as pure objects, without history, containing no experiences of the artist, materialized in stains, holes and traces.

The work By the time this postcard reaches you, I'll be dead by now is a reference to Japanese artist On Kawara's telegram series I AM STILL ALIVE. From 1970 to 1979, Kawara periodically sent telegrams to various people he knew, mostly friends and colleagues, with the content: “I AM STILL ALIVE. ON KAWARA”. The postcards, which are from India, pre-franked there and hand-addressed by Michael Müller, contain the text: “By the time this postcard reaches you, I'll be dead by now.” Part of the artwork is a contract concluded with the collector, which obliges the collector to take the postcards out of their frame and mail them after the artist's death. The empty frame remains as an independent artwork, which at the same time echoes the artist's eternal absence.

Pedestal for a Thinker is based on Auguste Rodin's Le Penseur [en: The Thinker] (1880). While it is assumed that Rodin depicts his thinker in a relaxed posture during his thinking meditation, the opposite is the case. The thinker is in one of the most tense and strenuous positions one can hold. So the figure is not busy thinking, absorbed in his thoughts, but holding his position and not slipping off the plinth. Accordingly, the figure depicted in Rodin's work is not a sophisticated intellectual, but a muscular athlete. Rodin used a boxer as a model. The tension of the situation depicted in Rodin's work is made clearer and intensified by Michael Müller’s mere representation of the plinth. The plaster plinth was used in Müller’s performances: The dancers were to take and hold the position of the original thinker, an exhausting and strength-demanding act that shows that Rodin's work of art is only possible as a snapshot, deprived of any temporality. By means of the performance, Müller tries to give this act back its temporal dimension. 

The three drawings are Michael Müller’s self-portraits, showing only a fragment of the self. But since they show gestures that are embodied expressions of individuality, they are at the same time total portraits of subjectivity, in which each fragment is more than itself – a perfect representation of the whole person. The gestures shown echo the arms of Christ at the crucifixion, in which a spiritual, transcendent dimension is revealed alongside the worldly physicality. The titles of the drawings, however, respond to this as a misdirection, since they refer to Indian mudras, the opposite of Christian symbolism. In the Indian-Hindu tradition, mudras are symbolic hand gestures used in everyday life and in religious practice. Interreligious overlaps are apparent – mudra means “a gesture to please the gods”, comparable to the gestures of Christ.

In the video Mach dich selbst (Do-it-Yourself), two hands are seen repeatedly touching each other, like a dance. In “self-touch”, the human being becomes aware of his “split” into subject and object. And experiences himself as such, he is at the same time the one touching and the one being touched, active and passive, accessing the world from the outside and yet part of the world.

Hugging a corner consists of four climbing holds placed around the corner of a wall. When the performer grabs the handles, a hug is created. The actually very intimate and emotional act of hugging is broken by hugging something hard, cold, inanimate.

The two figures titled up to day / schön stupider Vorgang are based on digitally 3D-scanned and plastic-printed historical African sculptures that represent the principle of autogamy and self-reproduction, on which the work series Abstract Autogamy is also based. In the form of an ethnographic investigation with artistic means, they show that this is not only a phenomenon that originated in Western capitalism, but an absolutely intercultural one that has remained unchanged throughout the ages and is inscribed in the cultural memory of all humankind.

ABOUT MICHAEL MÜLLER

Michael Müller (b. 1970, Ingelheim am Rhein, Germany) is an artist with a German-Indian background, whose manifold, proliferating oeuvre cannot be ascribed to any one-way interpretation. He continuously broadens the methods of his artistic expression, combining works on paper with painting, text-based work, sculpture, found objects, music, and performance. Müller studied sculpting and fine arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Magdalena Jetelová. From 2015 to 2018, he was a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2018, he was nominated for the Kunstpreis der Böttcherstraße, Bremen.

Recent solo exhibitions include “Drei biographische Versuche” (3-chapter series), Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2021-2022); “Schwierige Bilder”, Sammlung Wemhöner, Berlin (2021); “Stripping the Force – The Self and the Other”, Spotlight by Art Basel, Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2020); “Anton in a Bast Skirt”, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin (2020); “An Exhibition as a Copy”, Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2018); “Stripping the Force”, Kunsthalle Bremen (2018); “SKITS. 13 Exhibitions in 9 Rooms”, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2016). Müller’s works belong to many prominent museum collections including the Kunstmuseum Bonn, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, USA; among others. Müller lives and works in Berlin.

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