31 in Chelsea

“During the past few years Chelsea became a one-stop shopping destination for high-style contemporary architecture as well as high-end art, and the results can be depressing. For every significant building that went up, the neighborhood seemed to produce a half-dozen or so inferior knockoffs. The feeling on the streets now is the same as it is in most of the galleries: the sheer amount of work, and the mediocrity of most of it, can make the effort of sorting out the good from the bad too painful to contemplate.”

Christian Philipp Müller’s “31 in Chelsea” takes up the rapidly changing neighborhood where Murray Guy has been located since its establishment in 1998. This new work builds on two previous projects: Interpellations, presented in 1994 at American Fine Arts Co. in Soho, in which Müller inserted mock entries for the art gallery into New York travel guides, and Around the Corner, conceived in 2006 at Orchard on New York’s Lower East Side, during which he offered a series of guided walking tours of the gallery’s environs. In both of these works, Müller staged a cluster of relations between specific art galleries and broader neighborhoods and inhabitants, coordinating “disconnected times and spaces to bring the contradictions of the present into a sharper focus.”

Müller’s new project examines the structure of an urban neighborhood at a time when the very concept of a neighborhood—whose components are defined by their geographic proximity—is itself being rapidly reshaped by new forms of communication, exchange, and circulation. Beginning with the question “What is Chelsea?”, Müller has arranged 31 visits and conversations with a broad cross section of Chelsea residents, organizations, and businesses. Not programmed by any overall sociological or demographic strategy, his visits comprise a sort of derivé, where one encounter leads to another. These range from the Hudson Guild Senior Center to the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, a nightclub promoter, an executive at Google, a painter, and a restaurant owner, to name but a few.

Müller will use the gallery to stage the traces from his visits, organizing this archive into 31 boxes (one for each day of the show), which will confront the viewer as a hybrid between a portrait, a map and a calendar. On January 14 at 6:30pm, he will gather his collected material into a performance, to be presented at the nightclub 1OAK, which has been located for the past 3 years in a lavishly renovated space below Murray Guy.

Müller’s attempt to represent an expansive neighborhood like Chelsea over 31 days in a commercial art gallery involves a degree of absurdity, within which we might locate a space for reflecting on the gallery’s relations to its surroundings and to its audiences, relationships which involve different registers of visibility and invisibility, connection and “autonomy.”

Christian Philipp Müller (b. 1957 Biel, Switzerland) has exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad. Major projects include Fixed Values at the Palais de Beaux-Arts, Brussels (1991), A Sense of Friendliness, Mellowness, Permanence at American Fine Arts Co., New York (1992), Green Border, Austrian Pavillion, 45th Venice Bienniale (1993), Interpellations, American Fine Arts Co, New York (1994), A Balancing Act, Documenta X, Kassel (1997), Hudson Valley Tastemakers, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson (2003-present), and Apollo Soyuz, Manifesta 7 (2008). From 2006- 2008, Müller was a partner in the collaborative gallery Orchard, where he organized the exhibitions Around the Corner (2006) and Cookie Cutter (2008). In 2007, he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Basel, which coincided with the publication of a monograph on his work by Hatje Cantz.