The photographs show men and women masturbating—sometimes only body parts and genitals, sometimes bodies and faces as well. Most of the works are composed of two frames hung next to each other, encouraging a comparison of similarities and differences. A photographic motif from the left-hand panel is taken up again, defamiliarized, on the right; a nonobjective, painterly form is varied on the adjacent panel. Not only painting and photography but also the painted and the printed, glass and aluminum, enter into dialogue. The juxtaposition of panels also results in a complex visual exchange that leads photography to abstraction and painting to repetition. The term “autogamy” is borrowed from the technical language of biologists; it describes various forms of self-pollination and self-fertilization (for example, the pollination of a flower with its own pollen). Müller relates this term directly to masturbation, in which the separation of subject and object, ego and body, is broken down or made complicated. At the same time, he connects it in a suggestive way to abstract painting, which with its forms is about its forms, which seem to refer to themselves. Precisely in the combination, juxtaposition, and contrasting of abstract and figurative elements, of painting and reproduction technology, of the repeated and varied, is the unique quality of nonobjective painting metaphorically taken to its limits: its self-reflexive basic structure, its broken l’art pour l’art, which only by confronting the foreign ultimately finds its way back to its own realm.
