Alexander Kluge – The Power of Music

Alexander Kluge – The Power of Music
The Opera – Temple of Earnestness

until 19. April 2020

In the kunsthalle weishaupt and the Museum Ulm, Alexander Kluge, a connoisseur of music, presents a sensual and rich firework display of texts, pictures and artistic interventions full of different impressions. Here THE OPERA – that great historical stage of earnestness, of drama, poetry and introspection, fanciful overstatements and hallucinatory narratives, desire and monstrosity – becomes an intoxicating chronicle of the emotions in the major and minor keys.

As in a modern chamber of curiosities, we are both curious and astonished when art, science, and music merge. Like an archaeologist, Alexander Kluge brings forth and explores the emotional, social and psychological potential of opera as a resonant and stirring swell in an age determined by rationality and strategy. The algorithms of our time lack feeling, while the themes of the opera draw on the sensitivities of our souls, expressed in the over- whelming power of music, which can be ardent, eccentric, passionate, or sad and melancholic.

This exhibition by Alexander Kluge, who together with Edgar Reitz founded the Institute for Film Design at the Ulm School of Design in 1961, is a daring and insightful combination of music and sobriety – the latter reflected in the stringency and clarity of the kunsthalle weishaupt building. The exhibition section at the Museum Ulm adds a focus on the Ulm Theatre, with which Alexander Kluge has worked closely for many years.

In direct dialogue with works by contemporary artists such as Georg Baselitz, Thomas Demand, Katharina Grosse, Anselm Kiefer, Sarah Morris, Thomas Thiede or Anna Viebrock and also selected works from the Collection Siegfried and Jutta Weishaupt, the many ingredients of this exhibition make for an illuminative and exuberant artistic alchemist’s workshop.

 

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