frieze new york 2013, issue 2 - The Art Newspaper

FEATURE
THE ART NEWSPAPER FRIEZE NEW YORK DAILY EDITION 11-13 May 2013 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?
The 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? The 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 newspaper
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 Art (LAMoCA) and
the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis routinely fail to
include key details of Muehl’s controversial
history in biographies.
The 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 Art 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. The 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. The 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 Art, “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. These issues 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 Theo 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
“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”
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: “The 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 Arts. 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 issued 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.”