DONALD JUDD (1928 –1994) Untitled (87-40 Menziken) anodized aluminum and black Plexiglas · 9 7/8 x 39 3/8 x 9 7/8 in. (25 x 100 x 25 cm.) · Executed in 1987 © Judd Foundation / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Visit the Private Sales Online Gallery Spring Session · Open through June 30 <strong>The</strong> Online Gallery offers a convenient and flexible way to view works available for private sale outside the auction timeline. This season’s selection of Post-War and Contemporary art features works by Andy Warhol, Mark Tobey, Donald Judd and Sam Francis. Contact Alexis Klein Post-War and Contemporary <strong>Art</strong> aklein@christies.com +1 212 641 3741 christiesprivatesales.com
FEATURE THE ART NEWSPAPER FRIEZE NEW YORK DAILY EDITION 11-13 May <strong>2013</strong> 7 Otto Muehl, Nahrungsmitteltest (Food test; far left) and Waschschüssel (Basin), both 1966 PHOTOS: LUDWIG HOFFENREICH; © K.H. HEIN; COURTESY OF GALERIE KRINZINGER, VIENNA, AND FRIEZE NEW YORK If you show, should you tell? <strong>The</strong> ethics of displaying work by the paedophile artist Otto Muehl. By Christian Viveros-Fauné History is filled with horrors committed in the name of religion. But what about art created in the process of a crime? <strong>The</strong> case of Otto Muehl—whose photographs are on display at Frieze New York this week in a major presentation on the stand of Galerie Krinzinger (B45) from Vienna—presents a notso-clear instance of what should be done with the work of an artist who is also a criminal. How should galleries, collectors, museums and art fairs display objects made by people who have been convicted of detestable offences? In 1991, Muehl, one of the pioneers of Viennese Actionism and the founder of the infamously authoritarian Friedrichshof commune in Austria, was arrested for “sexual abuse of minors, rape and forced abortion”. A historical figure whose star is on the rise after a slew of recent museum exhibitions, Muehl’s detention, conviction and ongoing drama have been covered unevenly outside his native Austria. Although his story has made the mainstream press in southern Europe (Muehl and his followers also started communes in La Gomera, Spain, and Faro, Portugal, where the artist currently resides), his offences have, in loftier latitudes, drifted into an artworld blind-spot. In 2011, a correspondent for Spain’s El País <strong>new</strong>spaper published a popular novel based on the 88-year-old’s saga; meanwhile, important institutions such as Tate Modern in London, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary <strong>Art</strong> (LAMoCA) and the Walker <strong>Art</strong> Center in Minneapolis routinely fail to include key details of Muehl’s controversial history in biographies. <strong>The</strong> Walker’s online précis of the artist proves a case in point. Penned by the curator Philippe Vergne for the 2005 exhibition “Bits & Pieces Put Together to Present a Semblance of a Whole: Walker <strong>Art</strong> Center Collections”, it makes mention of “a lawsuit [that] resulted in a seven-year jail sentence” without specifying any of the offences for which Muehl was tried and convicted. <strong>The</strong> Tate, for its part, mostly mirrors the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of the Walker and other museums. Asked to provide a curator to speak about Muehl and museum policy regarding exhibiting art with a loaded history, the Tate’s communication department responded via a written statement: “Otto Muehl’s conviction was referred to in the wall text alongside his works. <strong>The</strong> text stated: ‘In the 1970s, he founded the Actions Analytical Organisation commune, which lasted until 1991, when he was imprisoned for drug and sexual offences.’” Muehl’s work has resurfaced recently in the context of a 2010 retrospective at Vienna’s Leopold Museum, as well as in several large-scale museum exhibitions. Among these are “Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary <strong>Art</strong>, “A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance” at Tate Modern and “Explosion” at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Unlike the Leopold Museum’s survey—which engendered vigorous debate about works that depicted Muehl’s actual victims and elicited an unprecedented apology from the artist— the displays in LA, London and Stockholm offer little insight into the questions that dog the relationship between Muehl’s art and life. <strong>The</strong>se <strong>issue</strong>s are pivotal, especially as Muehl and his fellow Actionists—Hermann Nitsch and Günter Brus among them—repeatedly espoused the view that art and life were indivisible. For <strong>The</strong>o Altenberg—former member of the Friedrichshof commune, sometime Muehl collaborator and curator at Galerie Krinzinger—Muehl not only represents “the visionary schizophrenia of the 20th century”, he also demonstrates that, despite Altenberg’s previous beliefs, “you can’t combine art and life, and to do so is a very dangerous thing”. Though he has no doubt that Muehl is guilty, Altenberg remains sufficiently enthralled by his art to continue to help disseminate it throughout international galleries, museums and art fairs—and, in an exhibition context, he prefers to avoid mention of the artist’s crimes altogether. “I believe you can separate Otto Muehl’s art from his life,” he says. A second former commune member, Hans Schroeder-Rozelle, takes a dim view of this approach. A representative of the group Report, created expressly to address the rights of victims during two Muehl surveys—an exhibition at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in 2004, and the Leopold Museum show—Schroeder-Rozelle recognises Muehl’s right to show his art, but insists on the right of the artist’s victims to be properly “<strong>Art</strong> lovers, collectors and museums should not only be sensitive to art and the artist involved, they also have to be sensitive to the victims” represented when it comes to displaying certain contested objects (Re-port helped both museums to identify and remove works in which the victims of abuse appeared). “Of course the art is important,” Schroeder-Rozelle says. “But in this case and others, art lovers, collectors and museums should not only be sensitive to art and the artist involved, they also have to be sensitive to the victims of this history.” For some, the Muehl case proves that art requires an ethical road map. When asked about the ethics of exhibiting Muehl’s art, the curator Robert Storr recalls Mike Kelley’s Pay for your Pleasure, 1998, a famously confrontational installation about art and criminality, for which the artist created 43 portraits of painters and writers emblazoned with their own outlaw quotes. In Kelly’s installation, a painting of Oscar Wilde included the following citation: “<strong>The</strong> fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose.” Storr concurs with the Irishman’s sentiment. “I think that’s basically right, though clearly not if the crime is implicated in the work. My general theory is that if you do a large-scale presentation, then you need to do a full accounting. If you’re going to show individual pieces, you may not have to,” he says. Asked whether there is not a greater obligation to inform the public about an artist’s crimes, the curator of hundreds of museum exhibitions and the 52nd Venice Biennale demurs. Referring to the fact that the sculptor Carl Andre went on trial for murdering his wife, the artist Ana Mendieta, allegedly by pushing her out of a bedroom window in 1985 (Andre was acquitted), Storr says: “I don’t think that should be mentioned every time he does a show.” Muehl’s case finds a remarkable parallel with the conviction in the UK last month of the artist Graham Ovenden for six counts of child indecency and one of indecent assault; his drawings and paintings of naked children have been widely exhibited. Ovenden was charged with similar offences in 2009 and 1993. At those times, his case garnered widespread support from the art world, especially among high-profile figures such as David Hockney, Peter Blake and Piers Rodgers, the former secretary of the Royal Academy of <strong>Art</strong>s. But Ovenden’s recent conviction has resulted in a partial about-face from some in the British art community, with the Tate removing images of 34 of Ovenden’s prints from view, both online and in the museum, at least until its review “is complete”. Storr’s clearly delineated parameters, in fact, may yet signal an unspoken rule—at least, among more enlightened curators and museums. A recent communication from the Tate included the following information, appended to its previously <strong>issue</strong>d statement: “In relation to Ovenden, the Tate is seeking further information to clarify whether there is any connection between the making of the works held in the national collection and the artist’s recent conviction.”
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