Obviously an landslide, maybe an earthquake or even the lava crusts of a volcanic eruption that erases all traces of a civilization – John Miller’s Topology for a museum (1994) seems to be a model of a postmodern Pompeii, the six-part sculptural strategy for a landscaped park in which the remains of urban life are stirred into brown clumps in plaster, latex and acrylic. A little patty-cake with the old forbidden excrement, a little bit of the miniature toy train topography, in which towering traffic signs, classic columns and other scrap announce the naive power demands of a nursery-room designer.

Yet the situation is more complicated. It’s downright tricky, because each of the installed aggregate clumpy terrains follows the same highly formal recipe. The same elements are always worked into the brown mass, whose implementations, on closer look, reveal themselves as very deliberate sculptures in both material and historical terms. The sculptures are solidly anchored in conceptual postwar art, with a reference to Robert Smithson, and are clearly set into a geometrically minimalist pattern as a declination of geographical and geological reference. Where old masters like Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy or feminist neologists like Cindy Sherman and Carolee Schneemann understand “abject art” – the artistic game with suppressed bodily functions and excretions – as political therapy for societal obsessions, Miller plays with the museum as an institution as well as with his viewers’ belief in art. High and low, beautiful and disgusting, handmade and messy, Miller more exposes the art business’ subconscious than he thrusts empirical psychology on his audience. In a brave new world of fun art, 14 years after the work was created, Miller’s topology seems to be a clairvoyant warning of an ever more naive pop culture.

John Miller was born in 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio, and lives in Berlin and New York. He is known not only an influential representative of art-institutional criticism, but also as a brilliant theoretician and critic.