Untouched Spaces
Deconstructing the Landscapes of Armin Mühsam
By: Peter Wolf
Astrophysicist, 2013
Observatoire de Paris, France
Armin Mühsam paints, what you might name "cultural landscapes", indeed it is the title of one of his early works (Kleine Kulturlandschaft). Quite generally, references to human culture and activity are omnipresent in his work and probably what first strikes the observer. Consequently, his work has been analyzed, not least by himself, in the historical context of, and in opposition to, traditional landscape painting that viewed untouched landscapes as the supreme creation of God. In Mühsam's work His supreme creation is replaced by the, supposedly, inferior works of man. In the words of Leanne Goebel he [Mühsam] is subverting the 19th-century notion of the noble landscape as an expression of God's omnipotence and benevolence and turns it into a sort of "technological sublime" in which the empty and meaningless works of man have replaced those of Creation. In that respect Mühsam himself views his work as the logical conclusion of e.g. Hudson River school painting, which celebrated the untouched American landscape as a manifestation of divine benevolence.
But, last I heard, God is dead and His supreme creation, the untouched landscape, simply doesn't exist and never has existed, like God himself. Consequently, the interpretation of Mühsam's painting as described above becomes difficult to sustain, indeed to understand. Which aspects of landscape are "untouched", "noble", which are "empty and meaningless works"? Is Mühsam's work really so obviously only showing us the destruction of supposedly untouched nature, by our industrial society? And if that is all, is it really worth saying? I can't help seeing more in his work: we learn to apprehend landscapes, the world, in its diversity. And by "apprehend" I mean that Mühsam is providing us with a language that allows us to see the world that surrounds us in a new light. God's creation is replaced by a complex interplay between some unknowable "reality" and the concepts and language we use to represent it. And that language evolves, slowly imperceptibly, but it evolves and therefore also the reality it represents. Mühsam's paintings are actor and witness in that evolution.
Note the presence of the instruments, the trestles, the set squares, the tripods. Those are instruments of construction, construction of the landscapes and the paintings they are represented by. Construction of reality and the language, the signifier, required to manufacture that reality. The construction of landscape, the construction of the meaning of landscape, the meaning of "untouched" landscape. Here the evolution of the painting goes hand in hand with the evolution of the meaning, the signifier evolves with the signified, the painting is our tool to apprehend what "landscape" and "untouched space" is.
Humans are absent. But not only humans, there are also missing spaces, corners and walls that we cannot see behind. In some sense Mühsam is painting the abstract notion of "absence". But not, as the naive interpretation (including the artist himself) would have it the absence of untouched landscape in the 19th century sense, but instead the absence of human traces, and I include all the geometrical elements. Nothing in the paintings represents a human construction with a well-defined and known purpose. Walls seem to be in the middle of nowhere, enclosing nothing. Geometrical shapes are scattered with no obvious use or logic. Tunnels and windows lead nowhere. These are not human landscapes, they are post-human landscapes, quite literally untouched spaces. They seem to abide to their own rules and laws, they have learned to exist of their own right without reference to their creation and creator. These landscapes are not the end of development of a human cycle, they are the end of human development altogether. It is post-human untouched nature. It is what a visitor from outer space might find long after humanity has gone, the post-humanoid natural landscape.
This is visionary art in its purest role. It's a shamanic vision that is helping us to interpret the reality around us and give meaning to it. I see this shamanic role not so much as a warning of a cataclysm [Leanne G.] but as a purely descriptive task redefining meaning and reality of landscape. The painting is here a kind of "pre-dictionary" that lays the ground for the change of meaning and reality of untouched space, and in doing so merely reflects what is already ongoing. What seems so rationally human in the paintings escapes us, there is no logic in its being, no human presence in its function. It becomes part of the land, and vice-versa, the "natural" elements (hills, trees, horizons, clouds, ....) are geometrized and merge with the "un-natural" ones. The distinction between untouched and touched becomes meaningless, and the result is an awe inspiring whole, much like the effect the Yosemite valley might have had on the first humans that set eye on it. And that's where shamanic art comes in, just like Lascaux, it is the way of apprehending, interpreting, and subjugating what we don't understand and do not control. Mühsam, the shaman, teaches us to see what is out there, he lets us name it (at least pictorially) and thus gives us power over it, the power of meaning.