Manfred Müller:
Things to Remember

CLAUDIA BOHN-SPECTOR

It was mid-October 1999. Manfred Müller worked all night in his studio at the Santa Monica Airport and then took to the road at four o’clock in the morning to deliver an artwork to a corporate client in San Francisco. A native of Düsseldorf, Germany, who relocated to Los Angeles ten years earlier, he stood at the height of his career as a visual artist, prolifically creating, exhibiting, and selling work in the United States and in Europe. But hurtling along Interstate 5 that night, tired and overworked, Müller, and his fast-paced cosmopolitan life, was about to come to a sudden standstill. Startled by a passing car that appeared to be cutting him off, he slammed on the brakes of his Ford Explorer and spun out of control. As the SUV overturned, a box flew forward from the back and knocked him unconscious. The Explorer landed upside down in a field by the side of the highway. Help arrived within minutes and Müller was airlifted to a nearby hospital. Severely injured, he didn’t regain consciousness until days after the accident, confronted with the realization that his art and his life would never be quite the same.

Up until that moment, Müller’s near twenty-year career as an artist had unfolded along paths equally predictable and unexpected. Born on April 8, 1950, in Düsseldorf, in the heart of the industrial Rhine-Ruhr region of northwestern Germany, Müller had grown up very much a product of his time. Hardworking, disciplined, and resourceful, with a talent for technical proficiency and creative ideas, he had weathered all the trials and tribulations of a post–World War II German upbringing. His parents, Valentin and Annemarie, were busy rebuilding their war-torn lives when they met in Düsseldorf in 1947. Orphaned at age four, Müller’s father was a child of the streets, a radical survivor, who joined gangs of small kids to stay alive. Lacking a formal education, he eventually became a house painter and a “black-market kind of guy,” an ardent social democrat, atheist, and opponent of the Nazi regime, who avoided military service by hiding in basements and moving around the country.[1] Müller’s mother had a softer edge. Well educated and devoutly Catholic, she had arrived in West Germany as a war refugee from East Prussia with just a suitcase of belongings. Despite their parents’ early challenges, Manfred and his younger brother, Wolfgang, grew up in a loving and supportive home. Conversations around the kitchen table often revolved around leftist politics and the pros and cons of organized religion, subjects on which their father held strong opinions. Education, too, was important to Valentin, and he encouraged his sons to excel in school and seek out solid professional careers. 

The younger Müller, however, hardly seemed cut out for the rigors of academic life. Athletic, musical, and artistically gifted, he tired of school as a teenager and apprenticed as a technical draftsman, a career choice that was based on a misunderstanding. “Being a technical draftsman,” he recalled, “had nothing to do with drawing, which is what I had in mind. I wanted to do artistic drawings, more like an illustrator.” He nevertheless completed his apprenticeship, maturing on the job and acquiring a lasting appreciation for technical precision, architecture, and the intricacies of mechanical engineering, which would serve him well later in life. Shaped by his family’s leftist politics, he also became an avid union organizer, stirring his fellow apprentices into political action. In 1970, at the age of twenty, he switched his focus to graphic design, a passion that may have been fueled by his father’s work as a poster of billboards. “He was out and about even in the coldest winter, working with water and glue,” notes Müller. “He always came home with ads and posters that he liked, and he collected them. . . . Maybe this was why I became involved in graphic design.” Encouraged by a friend, he enrolled at the Fachhochschule Düsseldorf, a school of applied science, and began his studies in visual communication, including all aspects of product design, art history, photography, and illustration. One of his favorite professors, the artist and illustrator Rudi Assmann, introduced him to nineteenth-century Russian Realism, Expressionism, and the art of David Hockney. Müller started to live alone at this time, renting a small room on Drakestrasse in Oberkassel, on the left bank of the Rhine. In a remarkable coincidence and foreshadowing, his neighbor down the street was none other than Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), the embattled professor and art shaman at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, a man that Müller was very eager to meet. 

I had friends who were part of the academy. They always gave me some kind of echo of what was happening there. . . . I didn’t know [Beuys] then, but I knew that something very interesting was going on behind that gate. . . . One day I asked Beuys if I could visit him, and he very harshly said: ‘No way, I have no time.’ I met him later [at the Kunstakademie], and he was a big influence on me. 

When Müller arrived at the Kunstakademie in 1976, his career as a fine artist began in earnest. Founded in 1773, the academy is one of the premier art schools in Europe, and its impact on Müller’s work can hardly be overstated. The abstract sculptor Norbert Kricke was the director of the school, and Müller’s fellow students included some of the best-known German artists working today: Katharina Fritsch, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Markus Oehlen, and Thomas Ruff, to name just a few. In a remarkable stroke of good fortune, Müller avoided introductory coursework when the pioneering photography and performance artist Klaus Rinke (born 1939) invited him to join his master class. Rinke had abandoned painting in 1966 in favor of radical body-based performances, which profoundly shaped Müller’s early studies. “He was tough,” Müller recalls. “I wouldn’t even say he was a teacher. The idea was to bring young artists into the academy and expose them, not to a strict curriculum, but to work with experienced creative professionals. The program at the academy in Düsseldorf was very loose and unstructured.” Only a few months into the program, Müller was given the opportunity to stage his first public performance (figs. 1–2). 

I had done some performance works, which were basically a series of sequential photographs called Selbstschutz-Strategien (Self-defense strategies), where I poured ice water on naked bodies or popped a balloon in your face without any warning. . . . For my performance at the academy, I brought in a dog that had been trained to attack people. We had maybe two, three hundred people sitting around the classroom. And the handler would yell again and again: ‘Bleiben Sie stehen oder ich schick’ den Hund!’ (Freeze or I’ll send the dog!). And the dog was barking, of course, and going crazy. Then he’d release the dog. I was young and could easily wrestle with a dog. Then I’d ask him to call off the dog and repeat this, five or six times, for increased dramatic effect. I was falling all over the audience. It was very dangerous.

Heavily influenced by Rinke and the performances of Marina Abramović and Bruce Nauman that he had seen locally, Müller, a newcomer eager to make a splash, pulled out all the stops. His relationship with Rinke, tenuous from the start, did not survive the emulative gesture, however. Stumped by his student’s sudden prominence and outspoken membership in the leftist Spartacus Student League, Rinke dismissed Müller from his class within a month in a serious blow to the young artist’s ego. Still basking in the success of his first performance, Müller suddenly found himself back in basic training, needing to attract another mentor for his senior studies. Eventually, the sculptor Erwin Heerich (1922–2004) took him on as a student and assistant, and the two embarked on a fruitful, near-seven-year partnership that had a lasting impact on Müller’s work and career. In the 1950s, Heerich had also studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he and his friend Beuys attended the master class of Ewald Mataré (1887–1965), an acclaimed German painter and sculptor denounced by the Nazis as “degenerate.” After the war, Mataré was appointed the director of the school, a position he quickly resigned when he realized that many of his fellow professors had pursued successful careers under the Nazi regime. He remained at the academy as a teacher, however, and Heerich and Beuys soon emerged as two of his most prominent students. More than twenty years later, Müller drew deep inspiration from both of them, creating an art that to this day is delicately poised between Heerich’s elegant architectural minimalism and Beuys’s layered, metaphorical spirituality.

Heerich’s abstract sculptures, as Müller came to know them, reflect an abiding concern with simple geometric form. Preferring to work with plain, everyday materials, Heerich noted that for him, “cardboard, like [the plastic] polystyrene, had no specifically aesthetic or historical connotations. The materials are value-neutral to the largest possible extent.”[2] An artist with a conceptual outlook on his work, Heerich was not concerned with creating traditional art objects but “with making an idea material in terms of a specific problem: how space can be presented and formed.”[3] A two-time documenta participant, Heerich imparted to Müller not only the gift of a supportive partnership but also an enduring appreciation for architecture, simple materials, unadorned compositions, and exacting craftsmanship, which successfully engaged Müller’s earlier training as a technical draftsman. “Whatever I showed him,” Müller notes, “Heerich was always positive and constructive. He . . . was the greatest motivator and reinforcer.” Initially, Heerich’s formidable influence resulted in work that closely resembled the teacher’s own, like Müller’s Studio Objekte (Studio objects) from 1981 and 1982. But eventually, Müller conceived of complex geometric wall, floor, and table sculptures using recycled materials, such as Architektonische Skulptur Studien (Architectural sculpture studies) of 1982 (figs. 3–4), which took his mentor’s legacy in new, interactive directions. Like Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work Müller had seen for the first time at an exhibition in Cologne in 1978, Müller created pieces that actively engaged their architectural settings—punching holes in floors, busting through walls, or jutting out of doors and windows—in an effort to expand the sculptures’ physical realm.4This approach later led Müller to create elaborate sculptural installations that hovered indeterminately between ready-made assemblage, quiet reflection, and theatrical performance, revealing the significant influence of Müller’s other great inspiration, Beuys.

From Beuys, Müller derived a penchant for philosophical inquiry, narration, ritual, and, eventually, a self-reflexive approach that harnessed personal trauma in the pursuit of artistic expression. “Joseph Beuys definitely influenced that metaphorical part of my work,” Müller says. “You could not live in this area, in Düsseldorf, at this time and not be influenced by Joseph Beuys. . . . There is a deep psychology that is brought out by seeing his work.” Engaged in impassioned and often acrimonious debate with his public, Beuys had already been fired from his position at the academy when Müller and other students assisted him during the installation of the exhibition Prospekt/Retrospekt (Prospect/retrospect) at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1976. Mesmerized by the older artist’s brilliance and charisma, Müller closely observed how “he twisted things and loaded them with artistic energy . . . how effortless it was for him to bring things together that you would have never thought about before. That made me a Joseph Beuys fan for a time, but [ultimately] that was not the way I wanted to go. You have this iconic work in front of you, and you have no way to do that.” Nevertheless, Beuys’s sprawling installation Honigpumpe am Arbeitsplatz (Honey pump in the workplace) at documenta 6 in 1977 inspired Müller, who embarked on projects like Schubkarre (Wheelbarrow, 1981; fig. 5), Pflüger auf Grund (Plow on ground, 1981; fig. 6), and Krater (Crater, 1981; fig. 7), which are all significantly indebted to Beuys’ work. Krater was an ephemeral installation involving a large circular mound of black sand, a shallow pool of water, and a blowtorch hissing a tiny flame across the water’s reflective surface. This provocative work elegantly blended natural and man-made materials in a philosophical musing on the elements— water, earth, and fire—and industrial modes of production native to the Rhine-Ruhr region, an area that Müller knew well.

Having grown up near the Ruhrgebiet, the Rust Belt of Germany, Müller had an innate affinity for the crude allure of industrial settings. “I got really into these metaphors and ideas about soil, coal, steel, and gas,” he says. “I find it captivating: the raw materials of industrial production.” Another inspiration for his emerging works were the hard-edged photographs of Bernd and Hilla Becher, who documented the area’s vernacular architecture—blast furnaces, kilns, smokestacks, silos, and winding towers—in iconic black-and-white images. Müller particularly gravitated to the photographers’ interpretation of these ordinary constructions as “anonymous sculptures,” which was also the title of their first and hugely influential book of photographs, published in 1969.[5] The Bechers had started teaching at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf the same year that Müller enrolled there. Some of their students—Andreas Gursky, Axel Hütte, Thomas Ruff, and Jörg Sasse—supplemented their incomes by taking pictures of their fellow students’ artwork and performances, including Müller’s. Conversely, students from other master classes assisted the Bechers in their myriad photography campaigns, setting up cameras or preparing settings for a shoot, both in Germany and abroad. On one occasion, Müller accompanied the husband and wife team to northern France, where he was able to observe their exacting, if somewhat unexpected, working methods.

They had a big van with all the equipment, including chain saws. If there were trees or bushes in the way, they asked the students to clean them up. It took us maybe five or six hours to set up the camera. There was no one to take care of that, so we just did it. Just cleaned it up. It was fantastic to see how they photographed. There were lots of fights, about “move that bush” or “no, put it back,” but it was interesting. They were very risky. 

Müller was particularly taken by the Bechers’ complex interactions with a given site and their near-scientific approach to their subjects. Both tendencies resonated deeply with his earlier professional training and foreshadowed his future work with various environments. 

They approached a shot almost from the engineering side. They first take a picture head-on to get the symmetry, and then they take another picture at exactly ninety degrees, and another at ninety degrees, and so on. That, by the way, is how you create technical drawings. And, of course, it makes sense to make these images under neutral light conditions, which also fascinated me, having been a technical draftsman. 

Between 1980 and 1983, Müller created a series of Fotoskizzen, or photo-sketches, in the straightforward Becher style, focusing on simple wooden constructions of carousels and contemporary fairgrounds, called Wandernde Kulissen (Wandering backdrops, figs. 8–11). His multiple photographs of industrial barges floating down the Rhine, titled Stromaufwärts (Upstream, figs. 12–15), similarly betray the Bechers’ typological approach, highlighting both regional commerce and the boats’ inherent sculptural qualities. Architectural photographs remain close to Müller’s creative pursuits, though he often enhances them now with chemical splashes and other darkroom manipulations to impart a sense of mystery, ritual, and the handmade. 

Following his graduation from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1981, Müller increasingly came into his own. He moved into an industrial studio at the old slaughterhouse at Ratherstrasse 25 in Düsseldorf-Derendorf, sharing the large space with six like-minded artist-friends: Liz Bachhuber, Ernst Hesse, Annette Leyener, Wasa Marjanov, Christoph Rihs, and Martin Schilken. A six-month residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris had left Müller eager to replicate the collaborative mode of artistic production that he had appreciated there and that hearkened back to his heyday as a union activist. Artist collectives, where emerging artists banded together to pool professional resources, became increasingly popular in the 1970s and 80s, most prominently with the progressive group that surrounded Klaus Jung, Harald Klingelhöller, Wolfgang Luy, and Thomas Schütte in Düsseldorf’s Hildebrandtstrasse. A large, self-curated exhibition in 1981, provocatively titled Reine Weste, tote Hose (Clean slate, nothing happening), was a first critical success for the young Ratherstrasse group, and they proceeded to work and exhibit together, both in Germany and abroad, for the next several years. Large-scale works, like Thun Construction (1983–84) and Black Friday (1986–87, see page 77), constructed from industrial scrap materials, operated on the interstices of sculpture and architecture, much like the sprawling installations of the New York artist Alice Aycock. With site-specific works like Project for a Riverbank (1981, figs. 16–17) in Northern Italy, Müller entered the realm of earth, or land, art, commenting on specific natural or man-made sites through sculptural interventions. 

I started to think more in terms of space, of the way art and architecture intersect. . . . This integrating of art, sculpture, and architecture was the foundation for building these early installation pieces—sculptures going through the window, panes of glass, etc. And we made a name with that. That was the time when everything worked. 

Lucrative grants, international exhibitions, prizes, and public commissions soon followed, including a small group show, Paperworks, in 1987 at T. G. Art Gallery in downtown Los Angeles, which brought Müller to the United States for the first time. He eventually returned to Southern California for an artist residency and another group exhibition, BonAngeles, at the newly founded Santa Monica Museum of Art, creating his work Wall Street/Boyd Street (1989, fig. 18) specifically for this show.

I took a burned piano from a downtown Los Angeles gas station that interested me. The gas station had become a homeless shelter, I found out, and I heard that a neighbor burned it down, because it caused too much trouble. This was on the corner of Wall and Boyd Streets. I took a wheelbarrow and a sort of curtain that spilled onto a table like a waterfall. I had just come back from a show in Germany, where I had taken an old curved bench from a cafeteria and set it outside a window. I did a lot of sketches and drawings, but the final piece was a found object that I would weave into an architectural space. 

In 1989, Müller settled permanently in Los Angeles to be with his future wife, the photographer Rose Shoshana, whom he had met at the opening of the Santa Monica Museum of Art exhibition. Although his move to California brought professional opportunity, it proved challenging in the long term. “Let’s call it opening a new horizon,” he recalls. “This society has different values, different ideas from where I come from. It was very clear that I had a different historical background.” He rented a large studio at the Santa Monica Airport and began working on new sculptural works that were fueled by the discovery of ready-made objects from the area’s recently defunct aerospace industry. Excited by the large-scale assemblages of Los Angeles Surrealist Ed Kienholz, whom he had assisted as a student during an installation of his work at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, Müller jerry-rigged American junkyard materials and Cold War bric-a-brac into multidimensional sculptural constructions that were at once raw and compelling. 

Most pieces I got in the Lockheed Martin yards when they cleaned out their factories. That was huge for me, a revelation. Coming from Europe, I never thought I would get access to material straight out of the Cold War. I got the loudspeaker from the Lockheed cafeteria. I got the table of the Lockheed electrician. I got things that I don’t even know what they were, but they were parts of a huge industrial defense complex. . . . I had access to materials that I could never have had access to in Germany. Materials from the war are top secret in Germany, and here they are available.

Together with Bay Area artist Christel Dillbohner, Müller organized an exhibition in 1994 of industrial assemblages or “combines,” entitled Transformer: A Change of Past Perceptions, for the Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, a show that eventually traveled to Canada. Machinelike and hard-edged, his composite sculptures possessed an improvisational aesthetic that recalled the work of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely. Müller also continued to work in his Düsseldorf studio, creating large-scale public art works like Ringrotsiebzehngrad (ringredseventeendegrees, 1997) at the Universität Münster, a giant steel ring that seems to lean against the building’s wall of windows but doesn’t actually touch them. 

Found objects and environmental interaction remained key to Müller work. In 1998, after many years of preparation, he unveiled Twilight and Yearning (figs. 19–23), a site-specific installation under the Santa Monica Pier, introducing a large American audience to his work. In 1999, just weeks before his accident en route to San Francisco, Müller created a multimedia installation in Mexico City titled Palacio de Memoria (Palace of memory, figs. 24–25). Installed at the Museo de Universitario del Chopo in an elegant Art Deco pavilion designed by the early twentieth-century German architect Bruno Möhring for an international exposition in Düsseldorf in 1902, the project included an animated jumble of wooden church pews, piled one on top of the other and juxtaposed with a large shelf of handmade ceramic bowls, which poignantly evoked the inevitable social tensions of the early industrial age. Augmented with quotes by the leftist German poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Palacio de Memoria also reflects the dramatic social upheaval Müller had witnessed for himself in 1992 during the civil unrest after the Rodney King verdicts. “When there were riots in Los Angeles, people didn’t go to city hall to rampage,” he remembers. “They tore up their own neighborhoods and shot each other. One of the points I hoped to make with Palacio de Memoria is that we all live with the potential for aggression close by.”[6]  

Personal trauma, in the sense of severe shock to both body and mind, hit home when Müller’s life was violently disrupted by the car accident in October 1999, at a time when his bi-continental career was reaching a peak. Pried from his overturned vehicle and rushed to the hospital with a fractured hip, rib cage, and shoulder, Müller eventually lost his left forearm to a hospital-acquired infection, which had been discovered and treated too late. It was a devastating blow for an artist, especially one who had prided himself on his physical strength and his very corporeal, muscular art. “It was a big change to go from being this athlete to being handicapped,” he recalls. “You have to deal with being handicapped; your capability to produce and to be in this race, to be competitive. . . . It has a psychological effect.” It is a lasting testament to Müller’s resilience and creative ambition that his art and career barely suffered after the accident. Four years after the game-changing event, he unveiled a large-scale installation at the University of Southern California’s Fisher Museum of Art that directly addressed the wounds he sustained on that fateful night in California’s Central Valley. Demo: The Body Shop involved a one-and-a-half-ton Chevrolet Blazer, tipped on its side and wrapped in one thousand yards of black elastic fabric, reminiscent of industrial-strength packing tape, seat belts, and medical bandages. Silicone casts of his own body and severed left forearm only enhance a hauntingly personal installation that readily suggests the continued influence of artists like Kienholz and Beuys. Stationed in Russia as an aircraft radio operator during World War II, Beuys had been no stranger to trauma, and he often recounted his own dramatic experience of being shot down near the Crimean front. Although immediately rescued by Luftwaffe search commandos and transported to a German field hospital, he later embellished the story by claiming that roaming Tatar tribesmen had nursed him back to health by wrapping his body in fat and felt, a powerful, if invented, myth of resurrection. Müller’s own creative engagement of personal trauma, though therapeutic and hardly surprising, bewildered friends and critics alike. “People were shocked to see how far I went with that, with all the darkness you could imagine. . . . I think there is something under the surface. I was burning to do something like that. . . . It was a reflection of my traumatic accident, but it was also to test how much can I do with one hand.” 

Working increasingly with the help of assistants, Müller began to rethink his creative approach. He increasingly created drawings and three-dimensional objects made from cardboard or paper, reigniting a passion that reached back to his earliest days as a technical draftsman, illustrator, and graphic designer in Germany. Delicate paper sculptures, like Coat Survivor (1999, fig. 26) and his red and white Preludes (2010), are subtly scored and richly colored, with surface textures ranging from brushed metal to raw concrete to whitewashed stone. They hover on the wall like forgotten garments, enveloping imaginary bodies that have long since disappeared. Beautiful and monumental, they hug their phantom bodies like sacred shelters, exuding a spiritual power and ritual transcendence that invoke the spirit of Joseph Beuys. The human body, simultaneously strong and vulnerable, had been an element in Müller’s work since his earliest performances, but it now returned with a new urgency. Reaching back into his considerable oeuvre, Müller quietly transitioned from large-scale, site-specific installations to lighter, two-dimensional works that intricately engage color, line, and abstraction. 

You can’t solely survive on installation pieces. It kills you. . . . It becomes uncharming, too rough and harsh. You become like an entrepreneur, too much collaboration. You have to go back in your shell. You have to reflect . . .  because it balances you. I often see that in artists who have this talent to make spectacular installations, but who also have the talent of doing these sketches and drawings. You need to exercise your fingers, to refine the technique.

As a mature artist, Müller continues to avoid unnecessary gestures and empty decorum, striving for the simplest formal expression of an idea. In the summer of 2013, in preparation for a solo exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (LAMAG), he created a site-specific environment made solely of light biomorphic paperboard shapes that float on walls and columns (fig. 27). Elegant and still, these ghostly apparitions reach out to the viewer like silent witnesses, attesting to the creative journey of a man who responds to life with great imagination, clarity, and grace.

Taken from Objects Are Closer Than They Appear

Notes

1. All quotes by Manfred Müller are from the author’s interview with the artist in Los Angeles, between June 19 and July 4, 2013.
2. Invar Hollaus, “Heerich, Erwin”. In Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, vol. 71 (Munich: Saur, 2011), 44.
3. Ibid.
4. Kristine McKenna, interview with the artist, in Manfred Müller: Any Given Shape (Chicago: Roy Boyd Gallery, 2001). 
5. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Anonyme Skulpturen (Düsseldorf: Verlag Michelpresse, 1969).
6. Ibid., p. 14.