Katja Schroeder Lamp that illuminates an illuminating Lamp

Horst Müller brings to his contemplation of spaces and objects through and in which culture is inscribed an interest that is both philosophical and instinctual. It is not the obvious stories that underlie these spaces and objects that he seeks. Rather what interests him is their self-referential potential as he probes their ontological core – an untertaking that sometimes gives his works a melancholy and ironic feel. The central thesis is that cultural objects can never reveal themselves. Nothing refers beyond itself without ultimately becoming self-referential, although this self-referentiality has its own stories to tell. Thus, Müller’s works always involve two objects or places or parts which mirror, repeat, or double each other, referring to themselves and at the same time staking out a cosmos. Space and object here can be viewed as a model of self-knowledge.
In Lampe, die eine Lampe beim Leuchten beleuchtet (Lamp that illuminates an illuminating Lamp) two table lamps stand on the exhibition space floor like a pair of twins. They are far more identical than identical twins could ever be, in virtue of their industrial manufacture. And yet there is something almost human in the way they seem to nestle up to each other, the one – as the title laconically declares – illuminated in its illumination by the other. The work represents not so much an ontogenesis of utility articles perhaps as a tautological commentary on (or even a tacit critique of) art for art’s sake. One could reformulate the title to read ›Art that illuminates what art is‹. It is a particularly relevant reading in the context of the readymade, which explicitly aims at examining when and why something ceases to be a mere object and becomes what is called art. The self-referentiality of the title deliberately eschews reference to a model of explanation, rather the tautology performs a reductio ad absurdum of the idea of knowledge. Sole result of the process of visibilization is observation of that very process, just as a mirror mirrors another mirror as an unending sequence of one and the same empty image.

Lamp that illuminates an illuminating Lamp 1999 / 2006