Marianne Mueller: The World As Archive

When Marianne Mueller uses her camera to collect the ‘world’ the viewer experiences something of the twofold astonishment typically triggered by early photography: astonishment at how the eye of the camera can transform the world into an image and renewed astonishment at the world as it appears in the image. The camera becomes a tool for lending weight and dignity to the most insignificant aspects of the world. In his introduction to the first book ever to be illustrated with photographs, William Fox Talbot described the camera as the “pencil of nature” and explained: “The plates of the present work are impressed by the agent of Light alone, without any aid whatever from the artist’s pencil. They are sun-pictures themselves, and not, as some persons have imagined, engravings in imitation.” This “pencil of nature” acts like a magic instrument permitting nature to speak for herself. For the most part, Talbot showed everyday objects in his book – glass and china, a lace curtain, an open door, a pile of hay, fruit, a bust of Patroclus. In the reproductions they appear freshly minted, as though we were seeing them for the first time. The camera becomes an instrument that gives back the world its enchantment and invests it with an ideal eternal presence through images.



Mueller has revived this early photographic pantheism, which accords any moment and any thing the potential of a revelation. Her “pencil of nature” is no longer the ponderous plate camera, which made taking pictures a major undertaking. It is a portable 35mm camera, easy to use and inconspicuous. Designed to preserve ephemeral impressions, it is not a high tech device for producing perfect images, but might rather be described as a means of outsourcing memory. This explains why the 35mm camera forms the focal point of Mueller’s artistic activity. She has said of her decision to become a photographer: “I wanted to do something visual, but I knew I can only function by reacting to something that’s already there. I wanted to do something that wasn’t symbolic, narrative or purely formal. That’s why I became interested in photography.” This approach is encapsulated in The Proper Ornaments, a selection of photographs from the past fifteen years that is neither retrospective nor autobiographical. Mueller uses the book format as a platform for her non-hierarchic treatment of sense impressions, these traces of astonishment that she captures on film. With her, photography is essentially a declaration of love – for a person, a flower, a street corner, the whole world. She does not explain, she does not comment; she simply shows that every picture carries the same weight. As a collection of 35mm haikus, so to speak, The Proper Ornaments embodies a photographic aesthetic that eschews the fiction of autobiographic realism characteristic of Mueller’s early photography-as-diary.




Mueller called her first book A Part of My Life (1998), in reference both to its diary-like character and to the fact that the camera is part of her life: she never has, never will and, indeed, cannot separate life and work. Her pictures, which she takes at home or on journeys, have an elegant nonchalance that belies her faculty for spontaneous, on-the-spot concentration, a feature also characteristic of her drawing. Mueller is not among those who want complete control. On the contrary, she seeks moments that are moving and embraces the effects of chance. Her work might thus be said to be dedicated to Eros, though not in the superficial sense of an oeuvre dominated by the body and sexuality. These appear in her photographs as but one manifestation of Eros. She finds a tree just as inspiring as a penis. Each moves her in its own way, and genitals are merely one fact among countless others. Not unsurprisingly, some viewers – philanderers and puritans alike – miss the point of this cool, casual take on sexuality: they assume it to be the principal current in the stream of Mueller’s pictures, whereas her oeuvre as a whole indicates the exact opposite.

Mueller approaches photography freely, as a kind of constant companion, and this has led to a working process that consists of two stages. In her own words: “I decided that everything is important when I take pictures and that I wouldn’t decide what’s really interesting until afterwards. I wanted to stop pursuing subjects and just collect. I stopped printing contact sheets. Instead I had cheap 9 x 13 prints made of all of my shots and worked with these because they give me more spontaneous and immediate access to my material.” The process of collating, assessing and ordering the world collected in the photographs is as important as shooting them. The key to Mueller’s oeuvre lies not in single images but in sequences, as presented in boxes and books.



Grey cardboard boxes, a germ cell of Mueller’s work, contain photographs mounted in twos between panes of glass that can be viewed in any order. Countless boxes have accumulated over the years, laying the groundwork for her books and prefiguring the poetic fundamentals of her visual narratives. “The boxes started out as a kind of token of love. I put photos of things relating to a particular person or to shared experiences together in one box. Other boxes were themed – in series or in pictures that actually had nothing to do with one another but became related by being in the same box.” As viewers we relate differently to a box of pictures than to images displayed on a wall. The latter are public: anyone can look at them, but the relationship between box and viewer is more intimate. The box must be taken out and opened in order to engage with the photographs. In this way the pictures carve time and space out of the viewer’s life. The mutual interaction brings them to life, releasing them from their dormant existence in a nondescript cardboard box. The box binds the life of the pictures to the viewer, who becomes the artist’s accomplice.

Each of Mueller’s boxes stakes out a visual microcosm that distils a specific experience. By contrast, her books encompass a clearly defined universe, a self-contained macrocosm in which viewers are invited to immerse themselves. The boxes relate to the books as poems to an epic. In A Part of My Life Mueller composed a self-portrait of the artist as a young woman, the small universe of her own life. The Flock explores another small universe, that of an old man who breeds pigeons on a rooftop in Brooklyn. “I found a new subject in the figure of this pigeon breeder on our roof in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It, too, was a sheltered place, like the atmosphere of my flat in A Part of My Life. Something you can watch all day long. But it didn’t relate to me; it related to somebody else’s world and I was able to look at it with eyes schooled by looking at myself.”




Both publications distil the essence of a particular visual archive accumulated over a particular period. The Proper Ornaments also draws on an archive, but this time it is the entire body of Mueller’s photographs, that vast archive that all photographers acquire over the years. The Proper Ornaments does not show a small self-contained universe; its subject matter is the world and life itself. The book does not tell a story; no hierarchy governs the sequencing of pictures; there is no semantic intent. The human body forms a leitmotiv, related by analogy to a wide range of phenomena and charging them with eroticism. Eros seems to be pulsating through the world, eliminating the boundaries between inside and outside, private and public. Life dissolves into pure movement, as light as the lines in Mueller’s drawings. It is the Eros of a meandering gaze waiting for something to captivate and arrest it. This gaze is both the protagonist and the theme of The Proper Ornaments. At once profoundly personal and entirely unpsychological, the gaze generates Mueller’s images and becomes their subject matter as she works through her archives. Conveying neither explanations nor meanings, the picture becomes a place where gaze and world meet and meld; it is almost as if the distinction between subject and object were abolished the moment the photographer presses the shutter release. Yet the radically open-ended responsiveness that Mueller cultivates in her oeuvre cannot disguise a tacit utopian summons to restore enchantment to the world and a longing for Paradise lost.



By Martin Jaeggi

From: Marianne Mueller, The Proper Ornaments, Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich, 2008

www.mariannemueller.ch



All ASX Interviews, Essays, Galleries and Video by Subject: Marianne Mueller

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