Michael Müller: Werke

By Jesi Khadivi
Orginally published Art Review.com

In his first solo exhibition in the US, German artist Michael Müller (who has shows running concurrently in Düsseldorf and London), presents pairs of drawings and small paintings that not only converse, but complete each other. Best known for his work with drawing and text, Müller employs the act of drawing as an instrument of translation. Using each medium like a dialect of a mother tongue, he teases out exquisite variations in texture, perception, and understanding.

Müller's nine-part series (1 a:m_) Reflecting on Pink Elephants (all works 2008) is a restrained play of mirrored images. In Part 3: Reflecktion zu einem Fleck (Reflection of a blot), a small, high gloss painting of a Rorschach-inspired ink-blot on wood is echoed by an ethereal pencil drawing. Although it is discernibly the same image, the taut, hand-wrought scribbles imbue the drawing with a dreamlike, otherworldly quality. In Part 4: Diktatur der Form (Dictatorship of the form), a small piece of wood is painted a glossy white while the corresponding drawing is an exercise in compulsive mark making: the entire sheet is covered with small, delicately hatched pencil markings.

While Müller's work has clear formalist undertones, the exhibition does not suffer from a lack of humor or compassion. The two-part work Corner Love consists of a gestural gouache of an angler fish and a sculpture of a renegade minimalist cube snared on a fishing hook. One of the most gripping pieces is Der Versuch unter Hypnose abtrakt zu sein (The attempt to be abstract under hypnosis), a loving video meditation on the act of drawing, propelled by a minimal, ambient score. Three drawings produced during the making of the film accompany the projection in the mezzanine gallery.

Post Consumed

Originally published on Art Review's site

Center For Land Use Interpretation, Los Angeles
31 May – ongoing

Review by Jesi Khadivi

Approximately 38,000 tons of waste is produced in Los Angeles County each day (actually down from the 50,000 tons per day in the 1980s). Because of the city's feverishly-scrutinized sprawl, car culture, and mass entertainment, it's a common target for a critique on detritus. The Center For Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), a somewhat mysterious or at least deliberately ambiguous organisation with a practice that encompasses art, environmentalism, urbanism and sociology, has been examining the uses (or misuses) of fringe and post-industrial landscapes in the US since its inception in 1994. Their current exhibition, Post Consumed, offers a stark, unadorned view of the journey of LA's waste, from curbside to landfill. The exhibition reads like an artifact found in the future; CLUI's approach to presenting this rich investigation is minimal, direct and devoid of any hint of sensationalism.

Most of the information here is presented through four documentary videos, dispassionately titled 'Collecting and Sorting the Trash of LA County', 'Diversions in the Waste Stream', 'Inside an MRF (Material Recovery Center)', and 'Landfills'. Everyday household objects are presented on a pedestal, with corresponding placards explaining how these items comprise the city's waste stream. There's also information on a floating proposal for the future of the city's garbage: a plan to compact trash at El Puente, the county's largest landfill, and load it onto trains for disposal at the Mesquite landfill east of the Salton Sea.

While the city of Los Angeles is referenced frequently throughout the exhibition texts, there is nothing particularly local about Post Consumed. The photographs of vast, anonymous lots and sorting facilities could have been taken anywhere in the US. CLUI's deadpan, detached assessment of waste production and management only underscores the universality of this issue, as well as the anonymity of its perpetrators.

Post Consumed is neither hopeless, nor hopeful. CLUI's retro, instructional approach avoids the chest-beating histrionics that could so easily accompany such an exhibition, and for the most part resists aestheticisation. But there are a few moments in the videos where the material veers towards the artful: the hypnotic repetitive back and forth motion of trash compactors, the surprisingly graceful ease with which garbage workers sort through waste for recyclables. Throughout the exhibition a clipped, staccato pulse of information prevails, leaving the viewer guessing what CLUI's stance on waste management really is. By casting an unflinching eye on the mechanism of waste production, Post Consumed asks the viewer to think about how we structure the by-products of our effluence, whether the system works, and if and how we want to change it.