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“Grüne Grenze”
Christian Philipp Müller
Christian-Philipp Müller develops here a social and historical
context of nationality, nature and the role of the artist.
For his work, which he has been pursuing since the 1980s,
is critical of institutions, and he slips repeatedly into diverse
roles: city or museum guide, botanist and here a tourist
hiker. The video shows him in open countryside, illegally
crossing the borders from Austria to Italy, Liechtenstein,
Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovenia,
to Switzerland and Slovakia – in the year 1993. Here he
crossed green borders that were not permanently under
surveillance; most of the time they are not easy to make
out. His casual clothing – a culturally coded sign for affinity
with nature and basic freedom from suspicion – served
as camouflage. Müller is therefore making himself an
accomplice to illegal border crossing, and is questioning his
own role in the process: if an artist crosses national borders,
is it still art or is it illegal? Does artistic freedom also
end with the border?
These questions were posed very concretely when a controversial
debate arose concerning the invitation to Müller,
as a non-Austrian, to attend the Biennale. This prompted
the creation of the work. For, since its founding in
1895, the Biennale has been a predominantly national art
show. 1895 is also a significant year for the next element
of the installation, the Indian ink drawings with their
archive stamps. It deals with draft designs for the “Kronprinzenwerk”
[Crown Prince Work] – the last great encyclopaedia
of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy from 1895.
Two hundred and sixty four artists, some highly renowned,
were commissioned at the time with drawing landscapes
and localities from the provinces. Since the 19th century,
“natural borders” have helped to determine the territorial
claim of nation building, and the artistic genre of the
homeland landscape has been central for its cultural
anchoring in European societies. In the “Grüne Grenze”
and “2562 km”, Müller moves not only on the border between
art and illegality but also rebels against the conglomerate
of representative art, idylls and homeland-associated
national feeling.
Artist, born 1957, lives and works in Cologne, New York.
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