Christian Müller

This volume documents the New York-based, Swiss conceptual artist’s recent intervention--a planted basin, which he placed inside the reservoir of Vienna’s famous Melk seminary. The selection of plants calls up the notion of hortus conclusus or “small paradise garden.” This volume includes research materials, sketches, models and installation photographs.

The Swiss artist Christian Philipp Muller, who has been based in New York and Cologne for more than a decade, may be best known for a series of performances timed to his appearance in the 1993 Venice Bienniale: Green Border saw him cross over and back from Austria to adjacent territories repeatedly, each time illegally. Muller, who has also performed as a Dutch royal at ceremonious social occasions and costumed himself as a museum guard, given out mock-historical pamphlets and offered tours of student exhibitions, remains interested in all the questions raised by this sort of work--in context or site-specificity, in historical or cultural codes, in research and investigations of all sorts, and not least in surprising and entertaining the viewer. Christian Philipp Muller offers a concise survey of his oeuvre.