Radiowaves

In the exhibition pavilion of the Brandenburgischer Kunstverein in Potsdam, Michael Anthony Müller seeks to make radio waves visible through the medium of painting. A good fifteen kilometers from the former Observatory for Solar Radio Astronomy, signal patterns are depicted on large-format, abstract canvases.

But who is the receiver in this exhibition? Where does the invisible signal come from? Does the painter play the role of the oscilloscope, depicting how the wave oscillates? And what significance does it hold that, by definition, radio waves have no specific recipient but are undirected—meaning we could all receive them if we had a receiving device? The radio wave, whether of natural origin or technically transmitted, is democratic. Is that why a modified radio receiver stands in the room, playing an audio piece titled “Ich-Oper” on an endless loop—because while we can all listen to the radio or perceive the Milky Way’s radio waves, none of us would be capable of Michael Anthony Müller’s visualizations? We know the broadcast in this exhibition only through his translation.

In this project, then, radio waves are hearsay. In other words: painting appears as a secondhand message. We are like amateurs looking at astrophysical visualizations. We can admire depictions of the Milky Way as if they were landscape paintings, but we are indulging in an illusion. For the radio telescopes used to measure stars transmit abstract structural information. The beauty of the barred spiral galaxy is mathematics; the core of each of its images is nothing but a data series. We fall in love with a model whose plausibility we can only speculate about.

Is the uncomfortable message, then, that viewing paintings works much like astrophysics on science television? We understand half of it and are happy because it seems like more than nothing? Unless, of course, we had painted the work ourselves?

The situation isn’t that simple. In Radiowaves, Michael Anthony Müller presents himself as a thoroughly functional receiver. For each work, he reveals its source. The titles contain the frequency, broadcast time, and circumstances of various pieces of music that the artist heard and that now take shape on the canvases as the result of time and tension. We are, in a sense, observing a series circuit. Music—transmitted via radio and filtered through the artist’s ear—informs the painting hand after cognitive signal amplification. The artist as a relay. The result of the circuit is made accessible to us with impeccable transparency. With the exhibition, we enter a life-size model.

This brings us very close to astrophysics, without having to delve into advanced mathematics. As with any painting, the translation process leading to the painted surface remains hidden from us. We pick up signals that originated years ago—a sound from a car radio while crossing the Alps or the background noise of a moment in the studio—and which have finally materialized on the canvases as twitching, oscillating gestures. It is left to the audience to make the signals sent years ago audible again. Wasn’t there something there? While the art world and communication within it are becoming ever faster and more impulsive, the operation of an observatory demands a different conception of time and concentrated patience in dealing with the signal that is easily overlooked.