In his installation The Three Philosophers, Michael Blum is referring to an enigmatic painting of the same name by Giorgione and in his reading of it, Blum challenges the conceptions attaching to the painting, historical and philosophical alike. The complexity of this work produced in the early 16th century (and now in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), is why it still stands up to iconographic questioning to this day. The work is shrouded in myths and enigmas which point to the forever widening difference between the artist and his interpreters, leaving room for many a persuasive interpretative proposition. Into this free field ventures Michael Blum, not without irony. He develops the motif in three sequences interlinked by form, and transforms in his video installation the original model into a performance which is shown to the public on three monitors in real time. The action is transposed into the immediate present; anonymous rails and a busy suburban railway station provide the place. A stationary camera captures the dynamics of the urban toing and froing in the thick of which just the central figure is frozen, motionless in the background. Beings with animal heads, dressed rather demurely in skirts, T-shirts or jackets, the philosophers framed head-on by Blum swiftly blur the borderlines between myth and humdrum reality. Instead of the coded message which the Italian master put in his sages' hands, the three thinkers on their solitary mission speak by quoting Marcel Proust, Bertolt Brecht and Bertrand Russell to the passers-by hurrying along in front of them. The sheep's-headed philosopher offers these Brechtian words to muse upon, “Of all things that are certain, the most certain is doubt.” The gorilla and the horse also express their doubts about hasty decisions and judgements. These particular scenes are like some attempt to categorize, or an ordeal in which the philosophical assertions are put to the test of the public. Their interest remains open-ended and their usefulness is being tried. If Giorgione's picture, better than any other work, stimulated the imagination while acting like a mirror of the individual capacity for thought, Michael Blum's
The Three Philosophers prompt critical reflection in their own way. What part does philosophy play in this ever-accelerating present? Who considers the acceptance of scepticism and self-doubt as a good recipe for attaining grand individual aspirations? The Three Philosophers do not come up with an answer, nor has the shift from one medium to another changed anything, either. Michael Blum sets the protagonists at a distance and incorporates them in a silent metropolitan dance that is forever beginning all over again in the exhibition space. This twofold defamiliarization turns out to be an appropriate practice for escaping from the usual humdrum, with the intent, thanks to this distance, of learning more about it.

Katrin Steffen
Translated by Simon Pleasance