Performance in the Museum: Art for a World at War

The theater of the future takes place in Munich, a city with several city theaters, a state theater and a state opera, on a small screen in the darkest corner of a room. In grainy film sequences we see a petite woman with pigtails lying under a patchwork blanket in the middle of a huge, empty hall. She twists and turns as if she were tormented by a nightmare, while a man with an Albert Einstein hairstyle looks at her perplexed. A cook enters and bangs her ladle on the parquet. A radio cracklesly chops up the news until a bomber squadron, as innocently white as the clouds, appears from offstage.

“Quarry” – a “souvenir for a world at war” is what the American composer, vocal performer, choreographer and filmmaker Meredith Monk called this 1976 work dealing with the Second World War. It is currently part of a large Monk retrospective at Haus der Kunst can be seen as a film version in Munich. According to curators Anna Schneider and Teresa Retzer, this is the most comprehensive exhibition of the 81-year-old New York artist’s work to date at this location and brings together works from six decades. During this period, the world was repeatedly shaken by events for which there was supposedly neither language nor forms to translate them into any kind of “theater” without seeming presumptuous or obscene in the face of reality.

Monk, however, found this form beyond classical schemes and languages ​​in an art that was as diverse, surprising and fragmented as our perception itself. She created a singing style that operated primarily with noise, created spatial choreographies whose movements and images do not create a consistent narrative. Her art remained highly associative, overwhelming, disturbing – but also strangely approachable thanks to the performers. An energetic ritual beyond esoteric connotations, led by a delicate shaman with long braids – Meredith Monk herself.

Anyone who explores the three rooms of the north gallery of the Haus der Kunst will walk through the electrifying years when the art and theater scene, spurred on by the spirit of optimism on the American East Coast, broke with all conventions. It was the heyday of downtown New York, spontaneous galleries and underground clubs; Styles and aesthetics changed quickly; It was quoted, copied, sprayed, there was a wild amalgamation of the arts. Everything mixed with everything else: film with dance, music with visual art, Fluxus with opera, high with low. “I work between the cracks, where the voice begins to dance, where the body begins to sing, where theater becomes cinema,” says Meredith Monk – the birth of what we today, with academic coldness, call interdisciplinarity.

According to the program notes, the retrospective “Calling”, a collaboration with the Amsterdam Oude Kerk and the Hartwig Art Foundation, was created in close consultation with the artist herself. The curators’ aim was to bring Monk’s performative work in particular to a larger audience. The exhibition succeeds in this only to a limited extent if one looks at the dramaturgy of spaces and objects from the perspective of performance art.

Research and analysis are terms that appear suspiciously frequently in curatorial texts. The retrospective is more like an art-scientific course than a sensual communication of Monk’s works. We see installations, here called “time capsules,” which consist fragmentarily of iconographic props from their performances. We see the red wig, the white table, the artificial flames, the film fire and the oval cage from Monk’s early work “16 Millimeter Earrings” (1966); Video excerpts and a mountain of red-painted work boots behind a fence made of tree trunks from “Juice” (1969/1998); the patchwork blanket, the radio, the papier-mâché bombers and clouds from “Quarry.” The actual performances to which these objects refer are only shown on small screens, some with only a pair of headphones, which leads to waiting times even with normal crowds of visitors.

This exhibition about performance art inevitably has to do without performance, the retrospective on Meredith Monk without Meredith Monk, which is not unproblematic for art that is supported by the physical aura of such a charismatic artist. The “immersive shrines” in the third room, which essentially consist of a combination of listening station, video and props, covered with tent-like curtains, do not make up for this void.

This leaves you with reading, listening and browsing through a huge treasure trove of individual parts. Anyone who gets involved will make discoveries that make the current theater look quite sickly. Meredith Monk’s work is associated with the breakthrough of feminist performance art, which is all the more interesting because her work contains elements that were later attributed to the great theater geniuses. The fine inner-musical irony, for example, as practiced by Christoph Marthaler, or the wide-open scenic landscapes that were characteristic of Bert Neumann’s stages for Frank Castorf evenings – well, who invented it?

Above all, however, the retrospective shows what would be desirable for the theater scene now and in the future, especially that of the Bavarian capital: to create art that does not dwarf the conflicts of the present, but – like Monk in “Quarry” – in their incomprehensibility seeks to negotiate. There would be enough reasons. Maybe you should just give Florentina Holzinger the Königsplatz. But as long as the city and the press are discussing whether the large theaters, such as the Kammerspiele, are not intended exclusively for classical drama, the people of Munich will be denied this experience.

“Meredith Monk. Calling”, until March 3, 2024, Haus der Kunst, Munich.