Painting Deconstruction

By: Maggie Vaughn
Ph.D. candidate, University of Kansas, 2019
Lawrence, KS


Armin Mühsam's recent paintings represent an exciting shift in the artist's body of work. Provoked by his desires for personal and aesthetic transformation, these works contain some of the artist's first explorations of line and pattern in painting. They are also complex experiments in deconstruction. In them, he exposes and complicates distinctions between abstraction and representation, creating multiple layers of meaning for viewers to unpack.

Mühsam reached an artistic crossroads in 2015. For almost twenty years prior, the artist painted industrialized landscapes that address humanity's relationship to the environment. Eerily void of figures but replete with human intervention, the artists' clean, precise paintings are both visually pleasing and unsettling. Calm skies and bridled terrain convey a sense of placidity. Manicured plants, precise architectural structures, and construction equipment indicate human efforts to expand their geographical presence and sculpt the natural environment to suit their needs. Clean, smooth surfaces and sharp edges define both natural and industrial elements, creating strange stylized forms that are both recognizable and unfamiliar. The artist's use of earthy colors and three-dimensional space typical of illusionistic landscape paintings draw viewers into a seemingly familiar experience of depicted nature. However, as Mühsam states, "when they actually spend time with it, it's a horror story." The distinctions between natural and human-made forms collapse in his alluring, but entirely artificial landscapes.

Feeling as though his art practice had become as formulaic as his manicured landscapes, the artist set out in search of new ideas to refresh his aesthetic. He put aside his paintbrushes and began collaging colors, patterns, and shapes that he cut from readymade sources such as magazines and books. Mühsam arranged these non-objective cut-outs into layered compositions, filling a small sketchbook with fresh material. The artist also began "collaging in space" at this time. His sculptures, or assemblages, combine wood, acrylic, and other materials that are both manipulated and found. According to the artist, collage functions for him as a "meta-language" that "gives you the zeroes and ones to then recombine in whatever way you want." It helped him expand his visual vocabulary and refresh his compositions. When he began painting again, he did so predominately with the colors and shapes that he discovered while collaging. His explorations in these new mediums gave him the freedom to incorporate elements of geometric abstraction into his precise, three-dimensional compositions for the first time in his artistic career.

Although geometric abstraction is a new addition to Mühsam's iconography, it is not to the artist, who was exposed to western art history during his adolescence in Munich, Germany. His use of abstraction recalls the non-objective works that are often thought to characterize the pinnacle of achievement in twentieth-century modern art. Mühsam depicts straight-edge polygons in flat, unmodulated colors that resemble the formal innovations of the first abstract painters, such as Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich. Unlike these modern artists, however, Mühsam depicts his abstractions within three-dimensional spaces that are based in reality. He foregrounds his geometric shapes against white wall interiors that resemble exhibition spaces and manicured landscapes that call to mind the artist's previous body of work. Placed within the illusionistic space of the canvas, Mühsam's geometric shapes act as both representations of abstract art and nonobjective entities. Their ability to function representationally is underscored when they appear on the walls of exhibition spaces, where they can be interpreted as artworks-within-artworks.

Mühsam also depicts paintings of landscapes in his recent works. Although they retain the denaturalized appearance of his earlier landscapes, the artist no longer pairs them with depictions of industrial architecture. Instead, Mühsam depicts his landscape paintings-within-paintings in exhibition spaces, drawing attention to their artificiality by exposing their metaphorical "frames." Jacques Derrida described the concept of frames, or parergons, as devices that enclose artworks and define their structures and meanings. Although they are created by forces extrinsic to the painting, the conditions under which frames define artworks are often hidden. Uninterrupted, frames inscribe and limit the meanings of art. Derrida argues that frames cannot be recreated or eliminated; they must be disrupted and exposed through the process of deconstruction.

At an educational roundtable in 1994 Derrida stated, "The very meaning and mission of deconstruction is to show that things—texts, institutions, traditions, societies, beliefs, and practices of whatever size and sort you need— do not have definable meanings and determinable missions... and that they exceed the boundaries they currently occupy." Mühsam deconstructs the meanings of abstraction and representation in his recent paintings by depicting both abstract and representational artworks-within-artworks. He complicates the boundaries between the two, exposing their interdependence and shared condition as constructed images.

Elements of geometric abstractions that are distinct from the walls of Mühsam's spaces also resist framing. They can be read as freestanding sculptures or two-dimensional abstractions that are both part of and distinct from the more illusionistic spaces in or on which they appear. Based on colors and shapes that make up his collages, these forms retain aspects of the collage aesthetic. Their sharp edges imply the use of straight-edged tools such as rulers. Their clearly delineated perimeters separate them into self-contained units that appear stacked. By layering forms like collage pieces, Mühsam suggests that they may exist on different planes that recede into space. In many of the paintings, unseen light sources cause geometric forms to cast rigid shadows onto their architectural surroundings, implying that they contain volume. Although layering and shadows situate some of these abstractions within the illusionistic space of the canvas, the frequent absence of surface modeling conveys their flatness and contradicts any implied three-dimensionality. The planar patterning that covers some of their surfaces juxtaposes the spatial depth of the compositions' backgrounds, making viewers aware of the canvas. Bold lines delineate sections of the canvases like drafting notations, drawing viewers' eyes across their surfaces rather than back into illusionistic space.

Mühsam deconstructs the elements of representation that he is familiar with as a trained draftsman and painter. He draws attention to the power of artists to construct realities by creating spaces and forms that oscillate between flatness and three-dimensionality. The nearly ubiquitous presence of the tools of construction in his recent paintings underlines the role of the artist-creator. Ladders, sawhorses, and building materials denote his gallery-like spaces as the built environments of the artist's imagination.

The simplified shapes and exposed structures of Mühsam's geometric abstractions recall the pioneering achievements of Russian Constructivism. In works such as Alexander Rodchenko's Spatial Constructions and El Lissitzky's Proun series, the artists created constructions that lack the hand of the artist and reveal the processes of creation by using raw materials and externalizing the works' structures. Departing from previous artists who developed distinct styles, the Constructivists produced geometric works that could be recreated by non-artists. Their precise, straight-edge forms evoked a machine-made rather than hand-made appearance and blurred the distinctions between art and industrial production. Influenced by the October Revolution of 1917, which brought the Bolsheviks into power and helped to establish the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922, the Constructivists linked art-making to the building of society. They believed that their artworks could work in the service of the Revolution to enact social change.

Mühsam's artworks are not quite as utopian as those of the Constructivists. The geometric abstractions of Mühsam's paintings are often delicately constructed, but impossible. Many are precariously balanced, defying gravity. Some are top heavy and destined to collapse. Others contain illogical structures with conflicting vanishing points and maze-like lines. Their confounding structures are more akin to Op Art of the 1960s, which is characterized by spatial ambiguity and disorienting optical effects. In the artist's own words, these structures are "visualized absurdity."

Mühsam uses the formal language of Constructivism to paint new structures that deconstruct the Constructivist's socio-political artistic mission. Although they aimed to create a new society, the movement ended before the 1930s, never reaching its utopian goals. Speaking about the relationship between his recent paintings and the group, Mühsam stated, "these allusions to Russian Constructivism are also, I suppose, musings on the futility of their kind of utopian thinking that you could change society through art." The artist's nonsensical formal arrangements speak to his perception of Constructivism's unsuccessful efforts to use art for social progress.

Although Mühsam's recent paintings demonstrate the irrationality of utopian pursuits, such as that of the Constructivists, they also reveal an intense respect for and fascination with the possibilities of abstraction. The artist's careful and methodical construction of his impossible forms, evident in the mathematical precision of their conflicting angles and lines, demonstrates the earnestness of his exploration into the Constructivist experiment. Likewise, his complex deconstruction of the meanings of abstraction and representation reveals his analytical interest in the abstract experiments of modern artists. Speaking about his relationship to art history, Mühsam stated, "I've always seen myself as simply jumping into the river of art history and letting myself be carried by the water for a while, and then I die and someone else takes my place and does something similar."