Meredith Monk in Oude Kerk
An ambitious and overdue retrospective seeks to bring the work of a legend to life. How do you do justice to decades of performance and teaching in an exhibition?
‘Meredith Monk: Calling,’ co-presented by Oude Kerk and Hartwig Art Foundation, through 17 March 2024, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, www.oudekerk.nl, and through 3 March 2024, Haus der Kunst, Munich, www.hausderkunst.de
As the generation that pioneered performance in the 60s and 70s approaches (or passes) the octogenarian stage of life, a series of retrospectives has swept across Europe to honour their lifelong achievements or give (over)due recognition.1 The latest is ‘Meredith Monk: Calling,’ which opened this fall to great fanfare at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, the city’s oldest building and, since 2016, a major hub for contemporary art.
The show is a co-production between the Hartwig Art Foundation and Oude Kerk, curated by Hartwig Art Foundation director Beatrix Ruf in close collaboration with Monk herself and the House Foundation for the Arts, the organisation she founded to ‘develop, disseminate, promote and preserve’ her work and that of her legendary Vocal Ensemble. It is the first part of an ‘exhibition in two acts’ (a designation that recalls Monk’s own titles for her multi-act works). The second part opened in Haus der Kunst in Munich in November.
Advertised as the first European retrospective of Monk’s work, the exhibition in Oude Kerk can legitimately be called the first proper Monk retrospective ever — the last time Monk’s oeuvre was the subject of serious curatorial activity in a museum context was in 1998, for the exhibition ‘Art Performs Life’ in the Walker Art Center, a group show that placed her alongside contemporaries Merce Cunningham and Bill T. Jones.
As such, ‘Calling’ is by far the most ambitious survey of her work to date. The show spans the entirety of her almost six-decade long career, from 1966 to the present, presenting new adaptations and documentation of some of her most important pieces — including 16 Millimeter Earrings (1966), Juice (1969), ATLAS (1991) and Songs of Ascension (2008) — as well as a wealth of archival and unreleased material (notations, sketchbooks, scores and objects from the sets of original performances), which it deploys to varying degrees of success.
Swept in by the rain, an early visitor on the opening night, I imagined myself a thirteenth-century worshipper, a prodigal Catholic seeking solace in the diffuse murmur of voices and rhythmic sounds emanating from the installations in the church. The Oude Kerk is a somewhat unique setting for blockbuster contemporary art exhibitions. A bustling tourist landmark and piece of living history — visitors to the church can still browse Rembrandt’s marriage records — it is bound on one side by the canal, its other flank girded by pubs and windows emanating from one of the city’s oldest red-light districts. The juxtaposition can be jarring at first, but it’s fitting for the way Monk approaches everything in her work with a holistic sensibility, where the sacred and the profane are always two sides of the same coin. It is also in keeping with her penchant for performing in non-traditional locations, like parking lots, parks and private buildings.
The exhibition itself structured as a ‘living body’, albeit one modulated by sonic rather than visual cues. In a rather ingenious solution to the problem of showing multiple films in open proximity to each other, the soundtracks for the larger installations in the central volume of the church alternate on an hourly cycle, a sonic choreography that informs visitors’ navigation of the space. Alcoves and small side rooms allow for intimate viewings of works from all stages of Monk’s career — including an impressive multi-screen adaptation of the music-theatre work Songs of Ascension — while the nave and side aisles are reserved for large hanging screens and more elaborate installations, such as Amsterdam Archeology (2023), a pagoda-shaped shrine displaying beeswax-dipped objects from members of the local community, and Silver Lake with Dolmen Music (1981). The latter piece allows visitors to position themselves in the same physical configuration as six performers of Monk’s Vocal Ensemble while listening to a performance of Dolmen Music (1979) through a pair of headphones. The effect is both spine-tinglingly uncanny (in a pleasant way) and unexpectedly moving: seated in a circle next to random visitors in the dim light of the chancel, I felt a sense of spiritual communion that other parts of the exhibition seemed to promise but seldom delivered.
Scattered along the side aisles — and in other adjoining rooms — are the exhibition’s set pieces: dark, monolith-like chambers, where visitors are invited to experience key works in the form of immersive installations, some especially designed for the exhibition by Monk and a close team of designers. It’s a fresh approach to adapting Monk’s works for an exhibition setting, a challenge she told me she embraces: ‘I’ve always worked with objects. In that sense, the installations [in the exhibition] aren’t static “translations” of live performances, but something completely new. They hold their own as artworks.’
Presumably, the installations are aimed at viewers who are either too young or who for other reasons weren’t able to experience Monk’s live performances. They seem partly designed to evoke the ‘atmosphere’ or ‘feeling’ of the events, which they do by building new environments based on the sets of major works and reconstructing iconic objects, like the flickering paper flames and headdress-dome of 16 Millimeter Earrings. The results are mixed, at best. In the installation for Juice, the core ‘zoom-lens’ or stacking effect of the original piece, which took place across three locations in Manhattan (the Guggenheim Museum, Barnard College’s Minor Latham Playhouse, and Monk’s own flat), dissolves into a slightly claustrophobic evocation of the pungent wood chips, logs and paint from the performance’s second and third instalments. The installation for ATLAS, dominated by the large silhouette of a horse based on imagery from the opera, perhaps most exacerbates the inconvenient awareness of Monk’s absence.
Another vexing feature of the show is that many of the films incorporated into the installations consist of looped fragments of five minutes or less. In the adaptation for 16 Millimeter Earrings, Monk’s first breakthrough experiment with multimedia performance, the film version of the work is broken up into two looped segments of 27 seconds and around 2 minutes, respectively. Linger too long, and you’ll be left with the disheartening feeling that your attention span has been underestimated. Admittedly, much of Monk’s archive, including videos of live music-theatre and concert works, interviews, documentaries and unreleased material, is accessible in the Rooms for listening and looking, located along the entrance side of the church. Visitors are free to spend as much time there as they like. Still, a few more comfortably furnished screening rooms for full-length films, though less of a curatorial ‘risk’, might have been more welcome in this exhibition than the hit-or-miss immersive installations, by turns delightful and tacky.
A more focused presentation of physical documentation (logistics allowing) would similarly have gone a long way, for example around Monk’s early years in Manhattan. Monk is a lifelong New Yorker, and her development as an artist has everything to do with the explosive crucible of mid-60s New York City, with its intermingling avant-garde factions. It’s a minor pity that the exhibition downplays the role of her influences, the Minimalist- and Fluxus-infused firmament out of which she emerged and against which she sometimes defined herself.
But no retrospective is complete, and this one is better enjoyed as something that exists alongside the lived experiences of thousands of listeners and viewers of Monk’s live performances. On the opening night of ‘Calling’, Monk herself took the stage with veteran members of her Vocal Ensemble Katie Geissinger and Allison Sniffin, both of whom have been performing with her since the 90s. Their voices blended in delicate counterpoint as they performed the eponymous vocal piece Calling, amplified by the magnificent acoustics of the church’s ancient vaulted wooden ceiling. The performers followed with a broad selection from Monk’s oeuvre, from the alternatingly plangent and ominous tones of Gotham Lullaby to the frightening and timely Scared Song. No matter how many times Monk performs them, her vocal pieces convey the same sense of emotional immediacy and depth, as if she is drawing from a universal source; as the critic Alex Ross wrote, hers is a voice that could ‘evoke an elderly sage, a wide-eyed child, a shaman, or a dying saint’.
Ultimately, the exhibition ‘Calling’ treads a fine line between popular appeal and depth — a dangerous gambit. Die-hard Monk fans, perhaps having undertaken a pilgrimage to Amsterdam for the occasion, might come away feeling unsatisfied; on the other hand, those unfamiliar with Monk’s work might also be put off by the show’s apparent readiness to follow the trend of the ‘immersive’ art exhibition, spectacular or not.
And yet — the fact that this retrospective is finally here, and that it will soon be supplemented by an extensive catalogue, is cause for joy among those involved in Monk’s world. We always want more Monk. The greatest feat of ‘Calling’ lies in the overview it gives of Monk’s entire trajectory up to now, the new connections it allows both the viewer and Monk herself to make within her still-expanding oeuvre. And Monk, at 81, isn’t stopping. For her, it’s still a matter of ‘always starting from “beginner’s mind”.’ This exhibition is just another chapter in that cycle of creation.
- 1 See, for example, Marina Abramović’s retrospective at the Royal Academy in London, through 1 January 2024, www.royalacademy.org.uk.
