by Adela Lovric // July 16, 2024
Invited by Ludwig Forum’s curator Eva Birkenstock to conceive a site-specific intervention for the museum’s two 14-meter-high walls, Ulrike Müller approached the idea of monumentality from multiple angles. On these colossal walls that face each other in the museum’s space, aptly named the Light Tower, the artist created two murals, ‘Paper Body (ghost)’ and ‘Paper Body (pointer)’ (2023), as temporary monumentalizations of her two small-scale collages. Integrated in the lower part of the latter mural is a changing group of six collages from the artist’s series ‘Instrumentarium’ (2021) that, like the templates for murals, evolved during a time of pandemic. Departing from these centerpieces and affixes, Müller’s exhibition examines the spatial and institutional dynamics of the museum, starting with variations in scale and value: between a drawing and a painting, as well as between a piece of paper and the museum’s largest walls.
Ulrike Müller: ‘Monument to My Paper Body,’ exhibition view, Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023-24 // Photo: Mareike Tocha
The monumentality of the building itself, which has been protected heritage since 1987, drives these artistic inquiries further. A model of the museum, exhibited between the two murals, once again reconfigures the spatial relations, albeit with the effect of an on-the-nose joke. Jenny Holzer’s massive LED piece, exhibited in the same space, visually screams truisms that appear almost as captions to Müller’s playful display of abstract compositions on walls, paper and enamels. Müller’s overall practice is often concerned with power dynamics and relationships between bodies and abstraction, and enmeshed with queer-feminist art practices and communities. Exhibited in a conceptually cohesive way alongside Holzer’s work and the miniature version of Ludwig Forum, her work points at her interest in alternatives to biased evaluations of worth.
Ulrike Müller: ‘Monument to My Paper Body,’ exhibition view, Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023-24 // Photo: Mareike Tocha
‘Monument to My Paper Body’ echoes Dan Hicks’ proposition of collective monumentality as a way to counter the so-called “toxic monumentality” and “reimagine monuments beyond nostalgia for colonial patriarchal iconography.” While it can be said that all monuments are of and for the collective, they are typically in service of a narrowly defined, exclusionary order of the world. Müller’s idea of monumentality, however, speaks of and for “the Other.” It is carried through her interest in the discarded and the devalued, which starts from her own body of work—her “paper body”—initially created from scraps of paper and then blown up to dizzying heights; translated to a medium that resists paper’s vulnerability and ephemerality, yet executed with simple materials such as commercial wall paint and sponge. Monumentality is also challenged in the exhibition in the temporal sense—the murals are not intended to rest there for eternity as projections of power and superiority, or repositories of one true history and public identity, but to be replaced by the next exhibiting artist’s intervention.
‘Miniatures’ (2014), a group of 13 small enamel works linked by a string in a geometric arrangement, is displayed in the Light Tower at the front wall of a staircase. Particularly intriguing in the context of the exhibition is the format of a wearable enamel pendant; Müller describes it as “a small format for painting and a large format for the technique.” With this work, the artist was concerned with questions about monuments (the grandiose) versus amulets (the intimate) as representing two different alienation strategies, and the theory about sculpture that draws from these two opposites. As an intricate jewelry-like artwork exhibited on a museum wall, ‘Miniatures’ establishes a link between a human and an architectural body.
Ulrike Müller: ‘Monument to My Paper Body,’ exhibition view, Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023-24 // Photo: Mareike Tocha
In the adjoining graphic cabinets, Müller shows ‘Templates’ (2010–23), a collection of almost 200 vector drawings installed directly on the wall as a continuous frieze that provides a catalog of shapes, formations and repetitions. Around 20 enamel paintings replace the respective graphics in this fluid display, examining the development of motifs and color patterns. This approach is characteristic of the artist’s method; she frequently employs repetition in her work, leading to an accumulation of her unique vocabulary, which she regularly expands, edits, translates and reinterprets in novel ways.
Ulrike Müller: ‘Monument to My Paper Body,’ exhibition view, Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023-24 // Photo: Mareike Tocha
In three additional museum spaces, Müller and Birkenstock collaboratively employed a weighty artistic-curatorial strategy of activating the museum’s collection to resonate with the artist’s new and older pieces. Both well-known and seldom-seen works from the Peter and Irene Ludwig collection of modern art are juxtaposed with Müller’s graphic and textile pieces, aiming to underline a variety of her investigations, methodologies and fields of interest. An almost overwhelming variety of works by artists Laurie Anderson, Belkis Ayón, Lygia Clark, Nancy Graves, Svetlana Kopystiansky, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Miriam Schapiro and Fahr El-Nissa Zeid, among others, makes these attempts somewhat harder to decipher. The works, as well as the connections between them, require careful consideration with the artists’ repertoire of ideas and interrogations in mind.
Ulrike Müller: ‘Monument to My Paper Body,’ exhibition view, Ludwig Forum Aachen, 2023-24 // Photo: Mareike Tocha
Through this thoughtful (if not overthought) selection of works from the collection, Müller seeks to challenge the criteria for what is deemed significant and deserving of preservation, display and public recognition; what is permitted to occupy space and in what manner and magnitude; and how gravity, power and privilege are distributed within a museum setting. The monumentality of an institution—a museum with its collection and its role in shaping grand art historical narratives—is thus called into question. Together with the highly coherent display in the Light Tower as the heart and soul of the show, this sprawling showcase raises questions of relevance and power while not shying away from probing the institution that houses it.
Exhibition Info
Ludwig Forum
Ulrike Müller: ‘Monument to My Paper Body’
Exhibition: Dec. 9, 2023–Aug. 18, 2024
ludwigforum.de
Jülicher Straße 97-109, 52070 Aachen, click here for map
