BIG PICTURE ARTIST
Melissa Keys
Monograph essay, Tom Mùller, Rhythms in the Chaos (2011)
Published by Big City Press. ISBN 9780980787818
'The diagram is rhythm emerging from chaos, the manipulation of chance to suggest the emergence of another world'.
Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W Smith, London, published by Continuum, 2003, pp.99-110.
In a number of senses Tom Mùller is a big picture artist. Globalisation, the environment, space and time all fascinate him. He seems to prefer vast data sets, expansive geographies, sweeping timeframes and sequences of history. And yet, at the same time, Mùller is attentive to fine detail, to the specificities of things local, to the poetry of small, momentary and fleeting things that resonate.
In this big picture sense Mùller is interested in structures, processes and dynamics. He understands the universe as an infinitely complex network of endlessly interconnected systems. In the natural world these systems are manifest everywhere, from the minutest forms of matter through to the grand architecture of the cosmos. In the corresponding human realm these dynamics are expressed through information and communication technologies and other network infrastructures. According to Mùller the natural world buzzes with a God particle zing, while the human world pulses with the transmission and exchange of value, authority and power.
Consistent with this world view, astronomical, geological, meteorological and other natural systems are in constant, ever-shifting interaction, just as human systems in the generic forms of bureaucracy and administration (from the nation state, to secret societies to two-person collaborative art practices) are animated by transactions, processes and protocols. In Mùller's scheme the realms of natural and human-made are not seen as separate, but rather as intrinsically interconnected and in continuous negotiation.
Much of Mùller's work takes the graphic form of elegant diagrams, models, charts and graphs. These superbly conceived images, sculptures and installations are 'think pieces' and exquisitely finished objects. His visual language is a refined, complex amalgam of the vocabulary of modernist art, design and architecture with the familiar contemporary forms of information graphics and the technologies of user interfaces. Mùller understands that economics, politics, science and history are all imagined, represented, disseminated and contested in these same forms, which neatly fit the data, scale and time frames that fascinate him. He also fully comprehends that the logic of these graphic devices designed to present and communicate information is embedded in the operating systems of all screen-based media such as smart phones, and that these systems are not only the dominant drivers of visual culture but are arguably re-wiring our brains. For Mùller diagrams are experiments in thought. He adapts their almost universally recognised forms and language to navigate and to socio-politically and poetically intervene in the complicated intersecting systems that constitute the world today.
Mùller's impulse to measure, chart, map, plot and track is balanced by his impulse to marvel and wonder. In his 2004 work titled Globalisation for instance, the artist presents an image composed from the borders of every nation state. Overlaid on top of one another, the boundaries of distinct territories are unrecognisable, losing their demarcation function. They are transformed into an otherworldly tracery, which brings to mind the delicate beauty of webs, satellite, interstellar and microscopic imagery. No longer able to discern individual entities, we witness the displacement and erosion of the nation state. Mùller thereby encourages us to contemplate the nature and potentialities presented by globalisation in a sense broader than mere economic integration. He warns of the dangers of cultural homogenisation and simultaneously highlights the possibilities for greater intercultural understanding.
The dizzying flurry of lines that compose Globalisation allow the viewer to imagine the multifarious dynamics of trade, foreign direct investment, capital flows, migration, cultural transmission and the diffusion of technology characteristic of this transformative process. All the while it is difficult to ignore the resemblance this image has to those we expect to see on screens in situation rooms surveilling unfolding global events, natural or otherwise. It seems in this anxious age of accelerating change we must invariably remain in a heightened state of alert; in perpetual crisis management and attended by a pervasive sense of dread. On a more abstract level Globalisation pictures the world reduced to a dense web of frail lines or a fuzzy erratic ball of energy that appears to be gathering, merging and disappearing down an illuminated aperture. Pivoting on a single point this poetic and quite simple diagrammatic form suggests at once both the earth's creation and destruction and fuses technological aesthetics with primordial matter.
Cartography and maps have long interested Mùller. His epically scaled Airstrip (2005) is based upon an exercise he completed to mark the location and direction of every international runway on a map of the world. The earth is known as the blue planet for its oceans and sky, and Airstrip registers the inscription of human systems on its surface. An elegant abstraction, it consists of an expansive arrangement of single and intersecting silver lines across a deep field of blue. Spatially ambiguous and allusive, the field is alive with possibility. At times the lines seem to glance across its surface, appearing to project beyond the edges of the work and in other instances they seem to recede into uncertain ocean-like depths. Indicating global transport and communication networks with GPS-like precision, each line also suggests the traces of passages such as the fine vapor trails of a distant jet aircraft or trajectories of meteorites flashing across the outer atmosphere. As a boy Mùller often flew with his father and Airstrip evokes the sense of boundless possibility and hope that the notion of flight continues to inspire in him.
In 2007, in the midst of the unprecedented but subsequently eclipsed global resource boom, Mùller presented Expedition. At once an open-ended reflection on Western Australia's status as a world center for the extractive resource industries and, more significantly, a meditation on the relationship between humanity and nature, this body of work encourages the viewer to delve beneath the surface and into the very interior of the earth. One large-scale piece, Mineral Range, consists of a jagged array of abstract forms resembling mountains or subterranean geological structures, as well as bar and line graphs recording industrial statistics and perhaps alluding to historical cycles, production outputs and market fluctuations. Despite their graphic simplicity Mùller's imagery manages to evoke the immense energies of geological dynamics, the complexity of ore bodies and the generative geometries of crystalline structures. Constructed with black stripes of vinyl on white acrylic ground Expedition demonstrates Mùller's precise dissection and analysis of the constituent elements of this industry, while also pondering the mysteries of the earth that sustains it.
Mùller is forever taking things apart and reassembling them. This is a reductive process which often leads to an expansive proposition. In the case of Vector Worlds (2007), he uses the most basic visual elements of points, lines and a limited palette to render an alternative, simpler universe. While referencing the one we currently inhabit, this alternate realm twinkles with pristine precision. Spectacular streams of shooting stars shower in neat parallel trajectories. Colourful beams of light suggest stars. Rendered using vector graphics (a technique/mathematical language often used to produce computer animation and games graphics), Vector Worlds simple technological aesthetic brings to mind sci-fi realms from yesteryear. Pulsing with optimistic energies, the work encourages us to launch our dreams into the wondrous, infinite blackness of space.
Energy is Mùller's medium and subject matter in his installation Spectrum (2007-08). Consisting of an array of uniformly white LED lights plotted along the exterior of a building, this major commission evokes the movement, speed and dynamism typical of the contemporary world. Calibrated against the slightly curved exterior wall and attached at various heights, the lights of varied length work individually and in concert to re-orchestrate our experience of the surrounding space. The viewer's passage animates the environment, creating a sequence or a rhythm, sympathetic to, but distinctly if pleasurably out-of-step with the immediate space it occupies. Inserted into the fabric of the urban environment, the immateriality of light is utilised by the artist to modify the hard infrastructure and functional-commercial equation that typically shapes these spaces.
Another of Mùller's recent works, Liquid Empires (2008), offers pause to consider the life-giving and enhancing properties of water, the earth's most basic essential substance. In the form of ice or liquid, water sculpts and shapes our environment. River systems resemble the body's circulatory system and Mùller reminds us that the relationship between our environment and our bodies is inescapable. Presented as series of elegantly fine, long and fragile filaments, this work is actually a most exquisite audit of our rivers allowing the viewer's mind to rove the wide, frequently dry lands we occupy to consider this finite resource. Each river's individuality is defined in part by the length and nature of its course - many familiar and some more obscure. Invariably one tries to imagine each in turn and to follow them on one's mental map. As we go through this process we cannot escape the in-between spaces where we know rivers do not flow. The act of imagining is transporting. Liquid Empires prompts the viewer to reconsider the artificial boundaries we draw between the natural phenomena that make up the world and instead emphasises their interconnectedness. It also reminds us that common to faith traditions, water is spiritually nourishing and replenishing - it is a salve for the soul.
The soon-to-be realised Rising Lotus (2010) is an unfolding new body of work resulting from a collaboration between Mùller and Swiss artist Jean-Thomas Vannotti under the name Maschi Fontana. A prototype sculpture and a series of diagrams in a triangular pyramid-like form that surveyors use to mark topographical highpoints is at the centre of this project. It is redolent with references to nature, spirituality and ancient civilsations. Echoing the historical resonances of the pyramidal structure Rising Lotus attends to the spiritual and transformative promise of art. Bringing together an eclectic combination of references and allusions to secret societies, earlier artists and performers (including some Mùller deeply admires and others ripe with comedic potential) this mutli-layered installation self-consciously explores the possibilities for art to contribute to meaningful dialogue, community and change. Incorporating a smoke machine and sound system Rising Lotus offers an experiential encounter with the power of art to elevate and to transform everyday life. Mùller and his collaborator's faith in the agency of art is affirmed in this at once playful and searching work.
An astute observer, subtle activist and deeply humane artist, Mùller posits far-reaching analytical links and associations between the seemingly distinct but invariably interconnected elements that together comprise the architecture of our world. His work is rich in ironic and sometimes humorous insights into how we grasp and assimilate knowledge and about the dazzlingly complex systems we inhabit. Even as we calculate the chances of eventual worldwide calamity, Mùller's thought-provoking practice offers vantage points from which to imagine optimistically better futures. His diagrams and graphs create rhythms in the chaos and suggest the emergence of other worlds and alternate horizons.
Melissa Keys 2010