Anklam, Nico: On the witnessing of the creation of images. Gerold Miller and Gustave Courbet, Excerpt from the catalogue: works 2015 - 2025
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Gerold Miller’s work is not only on display in many places, it is also much discussed. Miller is one of the most rigorous sculptors, although one could argue that he is in fact more of a painter – at least if one follows Donald Judd’s definition of painting in his essay „Specific Objects“ from 1964. A cool, minimal metal container, though an object, may be the only logical next step when it comes to painting. Then again Miller works quite sculpturally – in the true sense of the word – particularly in moments when he appears to be painting while dragging one of his objects, tied to a car, behind him. Much of Miller’s artistic practice can be placed within the art-historical frame of American abstraction and concrete art, the colorfulness of Pop Art and the metallic surfaces of the Hard Edge.
But that might not be the full story. Curiously, when asked in an interview a few years ago which works of art were important to him, Gerold Miller did not mention the Minimalists or the American Expressionists, nor Constantin Brancusi or even Umberto Boccioni. All could easily be linked to Miller with regard to concept or content, surface or form. Miller may be associated with Brancusi and Boccioni in particular because of his chosen home of Italy. Instead, Miller brings up Gustave Courbet, more precisely Courbet’s work L’Atelier du peintre. Allégorie Réelle déterminant une phase de sept années de ma vie artistique (et morale) from 1855, currently part of the collection at Musee d’Orsay. The difference between, on one hand, Courbet’s allegorical figures and multilayered surfaces and, on the other, Gerold Miller’s reduced and (at first sight) impersonal-looking objects could hardly be greater. And yet it is this painting that Miller cites. Now I can well imagine that in Gerold Miller’s studios, from his beginnings in Stuttgart to the present, as he works between Berlin and Pistoia, there are just as many people as there were in Courbet’s studio, or that Gerold Miller needs just as much space as there was in Courbet’s atelier. But it is probably something else that brings Courbet and Miller close together here.
In L’Atelier du peintre, Courbet places himself slightly to the right of the center. We see him in his studio, in front of the canvas, wearing striped trousers and a collar. His left hand is holding a palette, his right hand a brush that is hovering above the canvas. Courbet is so deeply immersed in the production of the painting that the nude model behind him and the little boy next to him are themselves gazing spellbound into the landscape being created on the canvas before them. The artist as well as the allegorical and real figures that surround him – from future and past pictorial material – gaze in fascination and become witnesses to the creation of Courbet’s picture. Here is where Gerold Miller comes into play. Like Courbet, Miller is fascinated profoundly by the emergence of the image. A work like Monoform 48 from 2015 literally sets the parameters on the wall in the form of two lines that protrude into the room in an L-shape. It delimits a space within those lines and creates an image in a place where there is actually nothing. Courbet’s painting measures 359 cm Å~ 598 cm. Miller’s Monoform 48 measures only two centimetres more in width while the height remains variable and is adapted to the respective exhibition space. Whether it is the frames that defne the picture in the first place or the reflective objects that sound out the exhibition spaces (such as the aluminum amplifiers), they are, at the highest and most sophisticated level, vehicles Miller uses to create the very moment when he too was looking over Courbet’s shoulder: the setting of the lines that allow the space to become a picture.
Miller’s reference to Courbet’s L’Atelier du peintre allows for another interpretation: For some time now, Miller has exhibited formerly wall-bound objects – made of aluminum or stainless steel – in so-called “crates”, the wooden containers that hold works of art when stowed away in public collections or during transport. Miller elevates such crates, usually intended as a necessary form of protection, to aesthetic objects in their own right, and turns them into an exhibition architecture. This reads as another reference to Minimal Art and Arte Povera, and not least to Donald Judd’s containers and his rhythmization of space. Occasionally, Miller would publish pictures of his Berlin studio. Such images likewise allude to Courbet. A photo published in 2017, which Miller captioned Atelier, shows seven open crates holding works like set 356 from 2016. The rest of the photo is full of crates: cropped on the picture’s margins, as stafage in the background and as repoussoir in the foreground. Like Courbet’s work, which has often simply been referred to as The Artist’s Studio, Miller’s photo creates a layer of different works: those currently in production and those from past or even future. Both in Miller’s case and in Courbet’s, the studio itself becomes the image of a container for the creation of an image. Wouldn’t that be a bold discovery?
