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 dragonpoker.
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 dragonpoker.
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.
