STUDIO MIXEDMEDIA BERLIN
words by Carson Chan

When UBS, the largest Swiss bank, begrudgingly agreed to comply with international banking regulations this past February, effectively compromising the well-known, unspoken financial privacy it had offered to clients since the Middle Ages, it sank the hearts of financiers across the world who had entrusted their off-shore accounts to the bank’s discretion. Faces drained at the thought of next year’s auditing. Secrets—even open ones—play a crucial role in the construction of trust-based bonds, especially those that keenly advertise the closed nature of the pact. Luxury retailers have long understood the desire evoked by heavy doors and private bespoke service, the cool hush that effectively deters the intimidated while feeding their desire for entry. It is a simple trick, so simple, in fact, that its unveiling is enough to collapse the house of business, credit and membership cards.

A similar delicateness surrounds the business of art production, a lucrative niche industry that has redefined what is meant when artists say they “make” art. Few would imagine Jeff Koons ever exerting much physical labor on his oversized metal “Celebration” sculptures; their flawless chrome sheen reflects a world so perfectly distorted, so wondrously warped that we are bewildered at the difference between what is and what it can be. The apparent magic, the illusion of the invisible hand that supplies these works with an otherworldly luster, is a glow that commands similarly unearthly sums of money from those who wish to possess it. In Koons’ art, perfection and its unattainable form have become available for purchase, as commodities for the transcendentally wealthy.

Much is at stake, and therefore much is protected in the world of high art. For that reason, I was met with a polite but maddeningly mum reception when I chatted with Uwe Schwarzer at MixedMedia Berlin, an “artwork development and artwork production” company in Berlin founded by Schwarzer a decade ago. Schwarzer is of average height, dirty-blond and has the carriage of a busy man; he is 41. Having finished his fine arts studies under John Armleder at the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst Braunschweig in 1997, he worked for a year as an assistant at Galleria Massimo de Carlo in Milan, where he met one of the gallery’s artists, Carsten Höller. After moving to Berlin the following year, he settled into an apartment on Auguststraße, right above Judy Lybke’s gallery Eigen + Art, and across the street from Klaus Biesenbach’s young but internationally prominent Kunst-Werke contemporary art museum. During this time, Berlin was bubbling with the energy that gave rise to the active art scene we know today, when Auguststraße was the most vital of its throughways. In 1998, Kunst-Werke initiated the Berlin Biennial of Contemporary Art, curated by Biesenbach, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Nancy Spector. Höller’s contribution was a twisting metal slide that, not unlike those found at a children’s playground, brought visitors swooping from the first floor gallery into the lobby. In 2006, commissioned by curator Jessica Morgan, Höller installed a number of these slides in the Tate Modern’s turbine hall. It was also Höller who lead Schwarzer to the career he now dominates in Europe—if not in profit, then in reputation. “Höller gave me my first job making work for him,” Schwarzer told me, “and back then I made everything in my apartment.”

A young artist—who preferred to go unnamed—recently told me that “visiting Mixed Media is like visiting a spa.” They serve coffee upon arrival, give an in-depth tour of the grounds and conduct thoughtful consultation on the proposed collaboration. The artist, who was introduced to MixedMedia Berlin by a leading Berlin gallery (who is also a trusted client), raved about their metal plating facilities. On my visit, however, I saw no such machinery. Of MixedMedia Berlin’s five levels in their Kreuzberg headquarters, excluding the office, I was given access to only two—the archive on the fifth floor and the ground level crating area. Storage space was packed with raw materials: yards of laminates, great spools of tubing, wires of various gages, Perspex hued and frosted, and boxes filled with studio jetsam that I imagined artists fashioning into art. Amidst shelves of stock material, I caught a glimpse of Mai-Thu Perret’s brass-colored aluminum cones (Echo Canyon, 2006) sitting behind some jars, and curls of barbed wire ready to be transformed into editions of Mona Hatoum sculptures (Cube (9 x 9 x 9), 2008). Is Mixed Media in fact Willy Wonka’s factory, or its antithesis? A workshop of dreams or its sobering wake-up call? MixedMedia Berlin embodies a particular matter-of-fact, unromantic attitude towards art; a page on their website categorizes artworks they have constructed by material. Olaf Nicolai’s Big Sneaker (2001), Matt Saunder’s Udo, Twenty Takes (2004) and Angela Bulloch’s Devil Bag (2000) are featured together because all are made of fabric.

It is the dust from the ideological explosions that were Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, Warhol’s “production” Factory and the hyper-intensification of the art market of the past decades that settles on everything we have come to see as art today (Duchamp bought his ready-made sculptures off the rack, Warhol had an assembly line at The Factory, and all the while the market propelled the demand for work beyond the productive capabilities of a single person). Which raises the question as to why out-sourcing the production of art, for both out-sourcer and out-sourcee, remains such a sensitive, unspoken matter. It has long been known (or rumored) in elite circles that a certain famed exhibition photographer is the eye behind several of Roni Horn and Vanessa Beecroft’s most celebrated photographs. Kehinde Wiley runs a studio in Beijing where a small army of painters produce his sought-after canvases. The fact that artists employed others to produce their work is neither new nor scandalous. Hundreds of years ago, Leonardo da Vinci, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and countless other Renaissance masters managed fully staffed ateliers to produce their art. Rodin’s foundries continued to cast his sculptures even after his death.Glancing into the metal fabrication area as we made our way to the office, I saw workers assembling a table, a new Rirkrit Tiravanija piece. “Normally he sends sketches but sometimes Rirkrit just calls and describes what he wants over the phone,” Schwarzer explained. “He’s always happy with how we produce his work.” With Tiravanija, it seems to make sense. His is a practice shaped over several years into one that systematically and explicitly calls for the participation of others for an artwork’s realization. But whereas the dissipation of the author is a theme in Tiravanija’s work, in some of MixedMedia Berlin’s other collaborations there is a potential, and possibly misleading confusion of paternity. Art after Conceptualism has already distanced itself from the endlessly debated, salvaged and re-salvaged crucible of authorship—an issue that novelists and poets, but few other cultural practitioners, still hold in metaphysically high esteem. In art, the question reemerges when out-sourced work produced by a workshop is seemingly disguised to bear the hand of a single artist. Mixed Media Berlin’s website dryly provides a list of artists and institutions that have paid for their services. On a long list of museum luminaries, we learn that Arturo Herrera had a painting made (a monochrome), and Bernhard Martin a number of sculptures in 2005; Martin’s idiosyncratic branches and twigs attached to shards of glass, the semi-precious stones applied to marble, the bits of coral adorning MDF cutouts and the bulges of polished and rusted brass were all, apparently, out-sourced eccentricities. Schwarzer sees himself as a service provider, no more and no less. “I’ve also made drawings,” he said, twirling his hand to mime drawing. “I made the drawings and the artist signed them.”

To lack a degree of cynicism is to withhold the full generative powers of critique, but I wonder if by granting a moment’s complicity, a level of abstraction could be approached in which art would be stripped completely of material contingency. A popular reading of Aloïs Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen, the “will to art” or “artistic intent,” seems to be at play here. Art is, not when it is made, but the moment it is willed. In 1971, John Baldessari made a black and white video entitled I am making art, a continuation of sorts of Bruce Nauman’s 1960s performances in which Nauman bounced around continuously in the corner of his studio. For about eighteen minutes, we see Baldessari standing in front of a white wall, posing in various postures: right arm out, shoulders dropped, left arm hung low, torso folded. After each gesture, lasting for about a second, Baldessari would repeat: “I am making art.” The making in this case was condensed to the artists’ momentary decision to pose in one way or another —a whim of little intrinsic significance for either artist or viewer, but representing a mode of creation in which the impulse to make, and the final product, are separated by nothing more than the simple declaration that something is, and has become, art.