[MUSIC: “The Gray Forest III - Jocker” by Aitua]
MARTIN: I am Martin Muller.
I am currently at the
Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock,
where tonight I will have the
great pleasure to open an exhibition
called "Independent Vision,"
with a selection of works from
my personal art collection.
I am originally from
Geneva, Switzerland,
and I came to the
United States in 1978.
I have since opened an art gallery
called Modernism in San Francisco,
and we are close to
celebrating our 40th anniversary.
I wanted to make a life in the arts one way
or the other.
[Music]
ROBERT FLYNN JOHNSON: Martin Muller.
Martin Muller is an art
dealer by profession, but a
collector and intellectual,
and a collector of friends by inclination.
MARTIN: You might be puzzled by the range of
experiences that you will face in this show.
What I would wish for someone to
take away is that it is okay
to go ahead and have all these experiences.
Too often in the art world
there is a very narrow scope
and a very limited body of ideas
that are addressed:
you know, people collect pop art,
people collect any of the -isms we talked
about,
people collect, you know, kind of on a one-track
mind,
and I think it's okay to hop around like a
little rabbit, [AUDIENCE LAUGHS] you hop around with ideas because
these experiences are appropriate at different
times, in different places.
[MUSIC: “De sal de linguagem feita” by Lovira]
I think that collecting art, well at
least the way I've collected it,
constitutes a collection of ideas,
and ideas trigger all kinds of moods,
all kinds of feelings, all kind of sentiments.
Then you can relate to some pieces with strong
literary, philosophical references --
some works have components of humor,
others are sensual.
Some are outright emotional.
The experience you can be faced with
varies dramatically from work to work.
The range is very broad by design, as one,
just like in life, shifts from different
state of mind, different moods.
This is a collection, overall, a collection
of ideas,
at different times different places.
In history.
In my life
You find a large quantity of collections
nowadays that have similar menus.
I wanted to stay away from such a menu,
from such a recipe,
but target works that speak to me personally:
Artists I have met, artists I have studied,
inviting all kinds of questioning,
and to some extent I find
beauty in the quality of issues raised by
an artwork.
By what it makes me think about what it brings
up to my attention.
This is part of an intellectual and
emotional growth process that is very fulfilling,
and a process that one can
never be fully satisfied with.
There is no end in the world of ideas, and
there
is no end in the possibilities in in the realm
of discoveries.
The type of collection like mine,
is a work that can only remain in progress.
