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Guido Münch
18th January-23rd February 2025
In 1993 it was through a process of triangulation that Guido Münch, enrolling as a Painting student in Kunstakademie Karlsruhe, commenced an overarching aesthetic project that took as its basis:
- A history of reductive abstraction, particularly that produced by a preceding generation of German artists
- Subcultural affiliations with recent music and film
- The semiotic environment of everyday, consumer items
These are elements that Münch sought to place on an equal footing, presenting visual fragments drawn from each of these domains as part of a single, horizontal continuum. It is a template from which his practice has proceeded from that point onwards.
Brought together as installations over the span of thirty years these various points of reference constitute an oblique self-portrait, one continually reconfiguring itself according to stimulus received. In this instance, the artist is less an individuated subject than cultural litmus paper: a sensitised receptor upon which societal cues imprint themselves. Here, the self is an aggregate consolidation of that which is experienced. One might leaf through a Blinky Palermo monograph chewing on a strip of Orbit gum, while an album by Neurosis plays in the background. That moment in time is a juncture, a point where a number of competing worldviews converge. The strange affinities arising from the overlapping of these worldviews become representative of another, deeper level of reality. A reality that is only accessible through attuning oneself to the vagaries of personal experience. The expression of subjecthood in this instance an exercise in branding, a mutable identity created from a combination of existing brands.
At the same time as Münch attempted to locate his own position within an art historical lineage, he was equally conscious of the more mundane patterns of consumption he was engaged with on a daily basis. Acting to bridge these apparently hermetic fields – intellectual debates concerning the formal purity of painting; the more practical but no less consequential choices made while shopping– were a series of more bespoke forms of identification with alternative music. Artefacts obtained in a local record shop stood for a groundswell of activity that was understood, at least in the 1990s, as operating outside of mainstream culture. This too was a form of consumption, but one with a greater perception of ownership attached to it. As Minutemen frontman Mike Watt put it, ‘our band could be your life’, a symbiotic contract between fan and performer so intimate as to constitute an fully functioning belief structure.*
Often, these categories bleed into one another, each becoming a lens through which the others might be interpreted. The invocation of 1980s and 1990s subculture served as a point of ingress: a method to personalise officially sanctioned art history using an attitude oppositional to that of the academy. In turn, the obsessive connoisseurship required to remain abreast of underground music was deployed on a pantheon of art as it then stood. Münch’s nigh unparalleled knowledge of the most obscure passages of 20th century abstraction continues to provide him with a stock of information upon which to base his own practice. At the same time, periodic reference to banal commercial imagery served to ground the project, keeping in check an over-intellectualised sophistry into which his project might otherwise lapse. As much as taste is treated in these works as something to be carefully cultivated and performed, it remained something that had to be tested or even at points wilfully transgressed.
Encountered three decades later, Münch’s student output appears to be positioned at a watershed in how culture is produced and disseminated. Many of the music groups referred to in the work Bands have receded from view, their graphics consigned to a farrago of 1990s design yet to be meaningfully historicised. Others have gone on to achieve a notoriety that has undone any subversive potency they once held. The Nirvana logo, memorialised on canvas the year following the suicide of Kurt Cobain, has since been reproduced to the extent that its initial legitimacy becomes difficult to countenance. Both fates –obscurity, mass appeal– are unseemly in their own, distinct ways.
The source material surrounding Münch at that time is still available to us, but our encounters with it are mediated altogether differently. It is quite possible that we have enjoyed the freedoms he once revelled in for too long. What would before have been plucked from a sea of signifiers and honed into uncannily distilled motifs are now isolated and atemporal as a matter of course. Information is less of a commodity these days than it is a burden. Apprehending this distinction might the first step in dispelling our collective fatigue. So that signs could once more, to borrow an expression from another era, ‘be taken for wonders.’**
*Appearing as the opening lyric on the 1984 Minutemen song ‘History Lesson Part II’, Watt’s observation would be popularised by music journalist Michael Azzerad in his appraisal of the 1980s underground scene. See Our Band Could Be Your Life (New York: Little Brown, 2001)
**This phrase was employed, with a degree of ambivalence, by Hal Foster in his account of the recycling of existing styles in 1980s abstract painting, working principles Münch actively sought to engage with and extend. See ‘Signs Taken For Wonders’, Art in America (June 1986): pp.80-91, 139
Photography: Patrick Jameson