Prior to seeing “Meredith Monk. Calling,” I’d cried in an exhibition twice in my life. This show at Haus der Kunst in Munich—Monk’s largest survey to date and her first solo in Europe (with a concurrent related exhibition at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam)—marked the third time. Here, tears fell due to a combination of the art, a recent familial loss, and an emotionally vulnerable conversation with one of the show’s curators about death but also, importantly, life—particularly Monk’s celebration thereof. Though the 81-year-old artist’s interdisciplinary works form an oeuvre largely about cycles of life, only two of her earliest pieces concern death. Everything else circles around growth and renewal.
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One work addressing death on view in the first of the exhibition’s three rooms, Quarry (1976), exemplifies Monk’s ability to collapse boundaries and intertwine mediums. Throughout her six decades as an artist, she has consistently worked in different disciplines and mediums, exploring links between the traditions of theater, dance, and music alongside video, sound, installation, and performance art. She initially conceived Quarry as a nonnarrative opera, performed in 1976 with her company, The House. In 1998 she reimagined it as an all-encompassing installation (for a retrospective at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis) that she reproduced in Munich, with large limestone rocks outlining what could be seen as a stage set. On stage left is a pile of smaller stones as well as a black-and-white video of workers in a quarry. In the center, a quilt and pillow lay on the floor next to an antique radio playing “Gotham Lullaby,” a 1981 song by Monk in collaboration with Collin Walcott. Stage right, an ensemble of suitcases sits beneath three white hats and five miniature fighter planes suspended midair. The piece’s video element, particularly when seen in Germany, feels like an homage to the heroic Trümmerfrauen, or “rubble women,” who cleared the many tons of debris blanketing Germany after World War II.
Monk intended Quarry to evoke WWII as myth, fantasy, imagination, memory, and atmosphere. “For my generation,” she once said, “World War II exists only as one or more of these things—something in the mind. The challenge was to find a new and non-linear way of dealing with a historical phenomenon.” In 2019 Monk released a video of Quarry’s original performance that plays in a corner near the installation: visitors watch as Monk plays a sick American child, tucked under a quilt, her illness becoming a metaphor for the darkening world around her.
Bloodshed is not related exclusively to mortality, however: it rests at the center of women’s life stages so predominantly defined by the reproductive cycle. For Monk, a self-proclaimed feminist and practicing Buddhist for more than 40 years, it seems that the recurring color red signifies life, femininity, and protection. In her installation Juice (1969/1998), a pile of shiny red combat boots appears in front of a photographic triptych: on the left, performers stand at different points along the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s spiraling ramp; in the center, three performers are covered in red liquid; and at right, costumes hang backstage. These photos are from original site-specific performances that took place in 1969 at the Guggenheim (the first performance ever to happen in the iconic rotunda), as well as a playhouse at Barnard College and Monk’s Manhattan loft. Painted performers moved about like cells in veins, blood as the juice of life. Opposite the installation in Munich hangs a framed, bright-red program cover alongside Monk’s typed plan and spatial line drawing for the Guggenheim performance.
The way such archival documentation and objects are presented in relation to the fully realized installations of Quarry and Juice makes the show’s second act, “Archive Dream Room,” feel overwhelming and slightly disconnected. Here, the walls are lined with plans, notes, posters, watercolor sketches, personal photographs, and other ephemera never necessarily intended for public viewing, among which one sees a smattering of finished artworks, such as three white-painted vintage suitcases on plinths that play one of Monk’s solo musical compositions when opened (Singing Suitcase, 1998/2023). In the same room, three listening stations invite visitors to immerse themselves in Monk’s entire discography. Three additional iPads are filled with 40-plus hours of recorded interviews. And three quasi-sets aim to re-create elements of Monk’s studio, including her kitchen table, recording space with a grand piano, and lounge area. While the videos and sketches near Juice and Quarry provide historical context and a glimpse into Monk’s working process, this room is a testament to the notion that, in fact, there can be too much of a good thing.
Moving on, though, reveals a powerful final chapter, “Shrines and Other Offerings,” that showcases a tightly curated selection of six multimedia works made since 1981. Silver Lake with Dolmen Music (1981) features six silver chairs placed on an oval piece of silver flooring that looks like a lake frozen over, a meditative landscape in which to experience Monk’s 1981 album Dolmen Music, which plays from pairs of headphones hanging from the ceiling above each chair. In The Politics of Quiet Shrine (1996), two humanoid sculptures of beekeepers have video screens showing swarms of bees in place of faces; bees work together all their lives toward a greater good, to leave their hive in the best possible condition for the next generation—an approach to existence from which humanity could learn. Opposite these figures is Volcano Songs Shrine (1994), a shrine to life itself with eight video monitors stacked in a pyramid like a volcano playing montages of plant shoots breaking through mineral-rich volcanic soil, strawberries ripening from green to juicy red, and lava flowing, which could represent blood pumping through veins.
In the back of this room is the show-closer: Songs of Ascension Shrine (2023), an impressive culmination of sound, performance, and moving image. The three-channel video and eight-channel sound installation documents a live performance in an 80-foot-high concrete tower in California designed by artist Ann Hamilton. A camera looks down the cylindrical structure as Monk, dressed in red, and her ensemble play instruments and sing in time with the tower’s echoes. Although they pause at times, the performers always walk up—never down—the tower’s double-helical staircase, which serves as a sort of moving, living monument to rituals of ascension and circumambulation.
In this final room, Monk’s shrines struck me as powerful reminders that any one life cycle is in fact a reflection of many, for all beings are intertwined. I may have cried tears of grief, but they began to feel more like tears of thankfulness, of togetherness, Monk’s works reminding me of the importance to act with and for everyone and everything around me—and to look up and celebrate life.