Implied Spaces. A Guide to Armin Mühsam’s Paintings

By: Mirjam C. Wendt
Curator and Art Historian, 2019
Berlin, Germany

Catalog or exhibition essays often start out with a description of what there is to see, or they skirt around the semantics of the show’s concept. Others unpack the artist’s key biographical dates. I am not sure what added value such approaches could provide. On the one hand, we can see the work in the exhibition with our own eyes (or reproductions in a catalog); while on the other hand the artist’s biography, read in isolation, does not necessarily hand us the key to his work. To be sure, all his iterations, experiences, joys, and sorrows play a part, but only to the degree that the work of art extracts them from his personal life story and transforms them into intensities many will recognize. Each time this kind of participation happens, it is a leap into the unknown, a potential source of discomfort or anxiety for the viewer. As one communicates with the work of art, the closely guarded conception of one’s self is always confronted with unexpected changes, for leaping can also mean falling. A good catalog or exhibition essay is therefore always a benevolent companion that subtly builds bridges or supplies ladders where one might fall from especially great heights; it leads the way where the work of art recedes into darkness and provides words where there would otherwise be muted silence. Regardless of whether the text is needed or not, at least it doesn’t elevate itself above the art, nor does it claim to do the seeing for the viewer, but rather links the two of them in the process of communication. As you enter into a personal dialog with Armin Mühsam’s work, I would like to offer this essay as such a companion.

Let’s start with first impressions. I look around the show titled “Present Hypotheses.” What do I see? What do I feel?

In order to verbally get a grip on what is visual, I start with keywords: space, space art, art space, architectural forms, objects as such, pared down, flatness, constructed perspectives, stacked and overlapped but not agitated, strange yet satisfying, contemplative. I sense an immensely powerful emptiness.

I am struck by the absence of the person that by all rights should still be present, for who else would have used or wanted to use the stepladder I see in the middle of the room that is pictured in the painting “The Salvaging of an Idea?” Or, to inquire farther into the past, who else would have made the ladder? It becomes evident that humanity isn’t so much absent as merely not pictured, because it has left a trace with all its tools and products. Armin Mühsam’s paintings are devoid of visual protagonists, which are probably even more present for that very reason. This striking presence of absence reminds me of a sentence in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore: “...that missing element was rapping on the glass window separating presence and absence. I could make out its wordless cry.” Yes, that must be what I initially sensed as powerful emptiness.

Facing the stepladder in the painting is another product: A canvas with geometric forms in front of trees in a landscape. What at first glance seems banal becomes enigmatic upon closer inspection. Are the represented geometric objects themselves artworks that sit in the middle of the painted landscape? – artworks cubed, so to speak? Sculptures within a painting within a painting? If they are sculptures, why don’t they cast shadows like the trees? If, as objects without a shadow, they do not partake in the physics of the painting’s realistically rendered space, in what impossible place are they so precariously stacked? Could it be that what is manifested here is the logic of the canvas itself, the realization that all the three-dimensionality of painting is merely simulated and that every pseudo-spatial unfolding can collapse any time, back into its original state of pure, vibrating color shapes? The other painting depicted in the canvas, whose abstract color stripes faithfully repeat all the hues in the first canvas, might actually enact this very process, as if it was itself absorbing the painted space. Is this what the title speaks of? Is this the idea that is being salvaged?

Once our eye has registered this topological anomaly, it can’t help questioning what initially looked like a clear and intuitive compositional structure. What seemed self-evident to the viewer gradually reveals cracks that become impossible to ignore. Nobody can say whether these cracks won’t become bigger and swallow the whole image, because its depicted space doesn’t seem to have a reliable border separating it from its surrounding space: As soon as you ask about the painting’s frame, the problems multiply – the artist plays a double, even triple trick on us. An art object as a representation within the representation of an exhibition, presented as the view of a space where art is exhibited. It makes one’s head spin, in delight.

Each one of Mühsam’s pieces is rigorously composed. Everything is in its place and deliberately assembled. References to Rene Magritte or Giorgio de Chirico come to mind. What is an image; what is being? What is real? What is perception? Giorgio Morandi once said, “I happen to believe that there is nothing more surreal, nothing more abstract, than reality.” My thoughts continue to spin. What is space? How does one situate? How can I orient myself? Some of Mühsam’s paintings (“Formalist Generalizations”) offer me blueprints. Can they help me find the way? To find my way? Seeking. Getting lost. Finding. Where? In life? Or am I simply there? Nobody asks. It is not possible to draw a really clear line between reality and illusion. The boundary between the two seems to be constantly moving and varying, continuously folding and unfolding in new ways.

Let’s explicitly stick to the exhibition space, because I know a thing or two about it, and we often see it pictured in Armin Mühsam’s paintings. For starters, it is unique in its function as a communal space. You know exactly which rules to follow in a school, a police station, a church, a public restroom. A space where art is shown stands in singular contrast to these locations. We actually enter it expecting an absence of rules, owing to its paradoxical status as a societally sanctioned exception. Its content is undetermined and can therefore be anything: a place for experimenting, a public safe space where questions and relationships are negotiated, a place free of restrictions and thus a refuge, a place for thinking and not a crusty repository of the past. All told, it is a protected space, an island for unrestricted thoughts. Yet: shorelines are in constant flux; islands can be reclaimed by the sea. Societal rules might return to the exhibition space as rigid formalisms. White walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, a particular way to hang the pictures: all this is so familiar to the viewer that he simply doesn’t register it and thus doesn’t realize that the apparent absence of rules has in fact always been part of a normative way of presenting art. By making it an explicit component of his work, Armin Mühsam directs our attention back to this space. The painted exhibition mirrors the real one and brings it into the viewer’s focus as something that all of a sudden cannot be accepted unquestioningly. The abovementioned folding and unfolding of the three-dimensional color space is here joined by the folding and unfolding of the societally coded exhibition space.

What kind of place is this space? What are its characteristics? If we look at it on the most basic level, as white cube, it appears to be the epitome of neutrality. Almost devoid of sensory cues, it demonstrates its exceptional status in our society to the point of negating all traces of humanity, unless the latter is explicitly part of the art work’s content. The exhibition space wants to be the faceless container for the work of art, whose pure presence should be experienced directly, unimpeded, and without distraction.

If Armin Mühsam disagrees with this notion, he does so subtly but deliberately. The white cube is not a vacuum. An exhibition is not merely a presentation of objects but also an accumulation of interspaces, of non-spaces, of voids. The act of showing something always begins with the decision of not showing something else. It is a clear decision to do without. We don’t know whether the stepladder in “The Salvaging of an Idea” is meant to be there for the installation or the de-installation of the exhibition, nor do we know whether the story of the exhibition starts or ends, but the ladder points to something being enacted. It carries into the painting the residue of everything that is tacitly accepted as a precondition for showing a work of art: the curatorial effort of selecting, omitting, and – never without bias – arranging; the physical and often dizzying effort of climbing the ladder and hanging the work. When you enter the actual exhibition space, all traces of this have usually been removed from sight. Mühsam reverses this erasure by mirroring it back into the real space via the painting. The white cube is not a vacuum but the culmination point of cultural practices and decisions, a place where nothing is ever shown neutrally, but where everything is always preferred, channeled, influenced, and canonized. To deny this would be ideology.

The fact that Armin Mühsam’s paintings do not proclaim this insight in a loud and facile manner is a marker of their quality. Instead of agitating, they invite contemplation. Our first glance enjoys the harmony of plane, geometric shape, and color. It would indeed be legitimate to stop at this point. If art is freedom, it is also the freedom to resist the compulsion to engage in theoretical discourse. If we choose to proceed, it turns out, remarkably, that that we do not switch to a metalanguage. We do not add an external discourse; rather, the painting itself guides our eyes to strange details such as the abovementioned absence of cast shadows, which lead to the collapse of the composition’s apparent harmony and coherence. Something is not right. Something is mysterious. A question is born from the painting itself.

We look for reasons in order to understand. We are afraid of the incomprehensible. We associate a Why?, a This is weird! with ignorance, even stupidity. Reasons are constraints in the form of cultural traditions and norms. A teacher asks a question that he could answer himself. I, the student, have to explain or know, otherwise I don’t make the grade and fail. In the context of an exhibition, we are confronted with completely new creations and assignments. It is natural to feel apprehensive about this, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Works of art do not exist so we answer their questions; they exist so we can ask questions with them.

As a curator, I am reminded by Armin Mühsam’s works to continually strive for a language that points things out, one that helps to reveal the ambivalence of the work of art. I find it necessary to speak in a manner where the art is allowed to ask questions rather than provide answers. I want to pay attention to the works of art, to show my respect and care, without locking them into a space already governed by preconceived interpretations, just as one would talk to someone pleasant (if at times difficult) and keep them company on a walk through an unfamiliar landscape. Every dialog is a new conversation, every relationship newly negotiated, every name newly given.