Clear New Worlds

By: Liviana Dan
Curator, 2009
Contemporary Art Gallery of the Brukenthal Museum, Sibiu, Romania


Armin Mühsam engages a semiotic discourse, based on an ambiguity of time as well as of space. He proposes a web of interactions, replacing the duality of man/nature with that of technology/ landscape. His works are comprehensive systems of structures - monuments of concrete, machines and roadways - which are in fact the ruins of a self-destructing society.

There is a big difference between nature as seen through a metaphysical lens and nature as accessible to human perception and reproduced by artists. Thus, Max Friedländer was right to consider landscape as being a reality of a phenomenological order, in the Kantian sense, and not a reality in itself.

One never knows the locations of the places that Armin Mühsam paints but one instantly realizes why humans are absent. Humanity is represented by its destructive fabrications: tunnels, dikes, walls, excavations, roads...an artificial landscape filled with technological architecture, or rather, a landscape as a backdrop for technology.

Mühsam's visualization of this paradox brings into discussion the "beauty" of utilitarianism, but also the wounds it inflicts. Everything that seems to have a logical efficiency, everything that seems to be suited for a new world is actually a sterile world after the disappearance of nature.