A Multitude of Echoes:
The Art of Manfred Müller

HOWARD N. FOX

The trajectory of Manfred Müller’s artistic development has been rich in experimentation and aesthetic discovery, culminating in engrossing results. His oeuvre comprises large-scale, heavy-duty sculptures, assemblages, installations, photographs, paintings, drawings, collages, and molded paperboard constructions. But this diverse body of work in divergent mediums is unified by consistent intelligence and formal curiosity that endlessly engage the physical transformation that the artist perceives to be inherent in his chosen materials.

In the mid-1990s, Müller’s early constructions and “combines” (if we may borrow a descriptor more usually associated with Robert Rauschenberg) were fabricated largely from machine parts and industrial “leftovers”—components of automobiles and aircraft, ventilation ducts, electric or gasoline-powered motors, and similar junk goods. Reminiscent of Francis Picabia’s early twentieth-century antic collages, which seemed both paeans to and a wry mischief making of machine age rationality, Müller’s constructions defied—subverted, really—the very logic and utility that defines our notion of “machine.” These complicated, visually acrobatic sculptures plainly cannibalize extant machinery, repurposing their parts into purposeless presences that assert themselves with flamboyant theatricality. In this period of early artistic maturity, Müller may be regarded as an articulate proponent of large-scale improvisational construction making in the company of historic forerunners ranging from proto-Dadaist Marcel Duchamp to Constructivists Antoine Pevsner, László Moholy-Nagy, and César Domela to mid-century modernists like David Smith, Alexander Calder, and Jean Tinguely to contemporary colleagues, such as Mark di Suvero, Alice Aycock, Dennis Oppenheim, and Müller’s own mentor, Erwin Heerich.

Working in Düsseldorf, Germany, in the early 1980s, Müller had jerry-built many similar improvised sculptures from industrial discards. When he moved to Los Angeles in 1989, the post-Cold War aerospace industry was beginning to downsize from its heyday as a major economic engine in Southern California, and giant corporations like McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed were disposing of heavy-duty aviation and rocketry innards in salvage yards; some of those components ultimately migrated into Müller’s improbable constructions. Black Friday, a work from 1986 to 1987 (partially refabricated in 2013 for the present exhibition, which is otherwise comprised mainly of work originating from the mid-2000s to the present), is constructed from a cylindrical steel section, about the diameter of a large water main, juxtaposed with a vast industrial fan attached to the wall. The fan looms pendulously, encroaching on the viewer’s space like the Incredible Hulk. It’s a daunting elephant in the room. It is characteristic of Müller in his large-scale combines to willingly—perhaps willfully—challenge the comfort zone of the gallery space and the viewer’s place in it. Many of his works from the mid-1980s, whether suspended from the ceiling, attached to support columns, or breaking through a wall and claiming dual spaces as they traverse from one room into the next, engage the surrounding architecture.

Müller’s fascination with unseemly juxtapositions and intrusions also surfaces in a body of photographic works beginning in 1998 and continuing sporadically since then. These works often feature what he describes as a Romantic photograph—that is, a visually dramatic one—of a public space, such as an open drawbridge spanning the Chicago River, or a view of that city’s skyline, or the shore beneath the Santa Monica Pier amid that structure’s supporting timbers and the deep shadows they cast on the sloshing tidal flow. Then he alters the black-and-white image, quite intruding upon its intrinsic visual magnetism, through solarization, an old darkroom technique of briefly exposing the photographic paper to bright light while the image emerges in its chemical baths, causing the final picture to appear more like a photographic negative than a normal print, and/or bright pigment dissolved in medium applied randomly to the surface of the finished photograph. Sometimes Müller subsequently places a pigmented sheet of construction paper—a uniform color field with no imagery—to abut the printed image, to jarring effect. These interventions into conventional photography call into question both the inherent properties of the medium and Müller’s artistic appropriation of it into the realm of deliberate alteration and aberration, an intervention not only into the facticity of the particular photographic image but also into the aesthetic project of pictorial photography itself.

Müller’s early audacity contrasts with his more recent paper “drawings” and sculptures made of construction paper and paperboard. Intuitively conceived as formalist entities and exquisitely executed with careful precision, they have a spare elegance and a no-nonsense approach to form and materiality. These so-called drawings are actually collages, pieced together from monochrome sheets of paper, which are hand-painted and razor-cut by Müller to incorporate into sophisticated compositions. The anatomy of these compositions is in part determined by their perimeters, their silhouette; but a more subtle, less visible, yet equally real, activity transpires in their interior space, where paper is laid over paper or sheets are matched edge-to-edge atop their paperboard backing. These paper-to-paper “mating” acts are almost imperceptible at first glance, and the viewer may have to squint a bit to discern the seams where the papers meet.

Müller’s aesthetics of the edge can be tricky. The border of a three-dimensional expanse expresses its two-dimensional property: the edge acts, in effect, as a line or a line segment. In Müller’s concise, quiet paper constructions from the 2000s, the edge is where the drama is. Some of these collaged “sketches,” as Müller calls them, use ordinary store-bought manila folders that he “enamels” with a surface of, for example, black oil pastel. He then affixes those planes of treated paper to a ground of white or colored board. Simple enough—indeed, quite minimal in technique and execution—but the folders’ die-cut rounded corners and the declivity of their tab cuts serve as major visual drama, analogous to an unanticipated key shift in a Haydn string quartet or a coloratura trill from a bel canto aria in a Mozart opera.

In other works, Müller may underscore a charcoal-gray plane of paper with an umber-colored paper substrate that extends perhaps no more than a sixteenth of an inch beyond the surface paper’s edge, evoking what Müller describes as a “halo effect”—a vibrant nimbus of color that “levitates” the paper layer atop it and jolts the viewer’s mind and eye with sudden evidence of nearly hidden—and nearly intrusive—vitality. And that visual interruption is so physically slight that it might not show up clearly in a printed reproduction of the object, yet it is electrifying to anyone who sees it up close and personal, perceiving it for the object that it truly is. Müller subtly but insistently engages and manipulates the work’s materiality. Often the sheets are lightly scored with grooves that he “draws” into the surface using the side of a screwdriver blade; the effect is scarcely visible at a quick glance, but it imparts passages of textural definition that course across certain areas of the picture plane—and not across other areas. Sometimes you have to look hard to discover these marks, but they impart a definite drama and eventfulness to the final work.

Despite the centrality of these flat works in Müller’s art during the last eight years or so, he also works three-dimensionally, using expanses of construction paper that hang loosely off the wall as relief forms and in an ongoing body of volumetric paperboard constructions. The recent paperboard constructions, especially, strike the eye as careful, formal études, or meditations, on composition, materiality, and color—visually quiet, self-contained, and intimate, maybe even a tad prim. But, in fact, they are imbued with a multitude of echoes of worldly things outside of themselves. For as formalistic as they are, they are also about process and their own facture. They are decisively sculptural, yet they are formed from flat paperboard that Müller molds through moisture into biomorphic, shapely, hollow volumes that may be either freestanding or wall mounted. He occasionally cuts irregular holes into their surfaces, which serve as windows of a sort, allowing glimpses into the forms’ interiors. The undulations and dimensional modeling, which engage light and shadow, are wrought entirely from material that was originally flat and brittle—a feat of manipulation and transformation that has little to do with the “inherent” properties of Müller’s chosen medium.

Further, they appear monochromatic—usually white or earth-toned—yet they are swarming with vestiges of the transformative application of pigment, either translucent water-based washes or more opaque oil pastel. When seen in concert, they reveal myriad softly colored yet unmistakable and intriguing variations: the range of hues that might be generically called “white” are more accurately described as ivory, sand, buff, alabaster, titanium, oyster, snow, eggshell, and so forth. Their color value may be variously luminous and brilliant, chalky and glaring, or dusky and smoldering. And their application is patently observable as hand-applied—not brushed, not sprayed, not daubed, but rubbed on, by hand. They are white, yes, but they are also so much more.

Like Jean Arp’s sculpture, their biomorphic shapes suggest organic, protozoan life forms. But they are not simply biomorphic; even at their most abstract, they are more anthropomorphic, evoking, specifically, the human body. Some works in Müller’s studio at the time of this writing (July and August 2013) are wall bound, loosely resembling torsos or the crucified Christ’s shoulders and outstretched arms. Absolutely no pictorial image is limned or depicted—all of the objects, whether wall bound or freestanding, are non-objective abstractions—but these works’ volumes, shapes, and scale are anthropomorphic and engage viewers and their own bodies one-on-one, cohabiting the beholder’s space as if they were stand-ins for human entities. Put simply (perhaps too simply), they are personable presences in the viewer’s presence—they are not shaped paperboard things to be clinically observed so much as formalistic “phantoms” vaguely referencing the human physique.

It would be disingenuous to omit mentioning here that in 1999 Müller lost his left hand and part of his forearm in an automobile accident. While he subsequently undertook a body of work (including a complex installation piece) related to the physical, emotional, and artistic consequences of that trauma, the artist acknowledges that the injury changed his technical working methods in very specific ways and it altered his studio practice—that is, his aesthetic approach—generally. The accident transformed his art’s aims, techniques, inquiries, and insights. However, it would be equally disingenuous to read his subsequent evolution as a playing out, or an acting out, or an assertion of his unfortunate accident; rather, it seems that the event catalyzed artistic possibilities and potentials implicit in his work all along. For example, in his earlier recombinant improvisations, there was an implicit, fundamental acceptance of the convertible nature of all things, whether through natural processes (such as rusting, corrosion, or breakage) or through human intervention (such as the “junking” of old equipment, the chancing upon it, and the repurposing of it). At its core, Müller’s art has always acknowledged and embraced the properties of transience, mutability, and dynamic process.

With all this talk of two- and three-dimensionality, it seems appropriate to remark that Müller’s art, in fact, lives in four dimensions. This is nothing special; everything that has material form exists in three-dimensional space and fourth-dimensional time. But Müller’s art has always very much engaged time, largely in the visible record of its own manufacture. To some extent, he is a faithful devotee of what in the 1970s used to be loosely described as “process art,” and which remains a fundamental working method for many artists today. But Müller was among its early explorers. 

Process art, upon its earliest articulation, was an indication, an index, of the artist’s engagement with his chosen materials and their nature; the result of that involvement was not presumed to evince the artist’s virtuosic mastery and dominance over his materials, like a feudal lord controlling his serfs, but to reveal a kind of complicated dance, or encounter, or wrestling match, or “copulation” of the artist and the material part of the world that attracts his attention and activity. The resulting artwork, whether an object or an installation, is the record of that physical, imaginative, and aesthetic encounter. The philosophy of so-called process art resists the notion of the artisanal “hand” of the artist as a register of individual artistic “genius” and “vision” to produce a “precious object” but instead asserts the primacy of the maker’s involvement with his or her materials and technical procedures and the facticity of the resulting work (which could be an installation, a social circumstance or phenomenon, or a performance, as well as a freestanding object). Neither the artistic intent nor the created object stands alone; they form an equation.

Manfred Müller is, for the most part, an object maker; his works are handmade and are almost always complete objects that can be transported from his studio and exhibited in any space—even if they occupy that space obstreperously. But his objects function and declare themselves as having been brought forth in a dynamic world of real events and in minute studio-bound manipulations that are not of mythological significance, nor of historical import, nor of precious material glorification and viewer adulation, but rather of emphatic, deliberate involvement with commonplace materials—paper, paperboard, pigment, machine parts, photographs—that surround us in ordinary situations every day. In the high modern tradition, no illusion, no preciousness, no vanity is deployed. Müller causes his interventions to make viewers take note and heed every considered action that he has taken in the studio. The result is the artist’s engagement with us, and ours with him, through the object itself.

And clearly, that encounter takes place through a passage of time; Müller’s works are presented not as frozen and perfected objects, as if they had existed that way timelessly in the past and will continue that way in the future, but rather as an expression of how they came into being in the first place. Müller’s sculptures openly disclose the process of their formation, and in fact, they are about their genesis as much as they are about their present manifestation. To carefully observe a Müller sculpture or constructed paper sketch is to behold every step of its development as an art object that exists in the world that it and the viewer cohabit. What Müller creates is not an illusory image of a timeless world that we are meant to peer at; we viewers are part of its ongoing history, a history that Müller acknowledges resides as much in himself and in ourselves as it does in the object itself.

Taken from Objects Are Closer Than They Appear