#000598
A House Full of Music: Strategies in Music and Art
Ralf Beil & Peter Kraut (eds.)
The catalog of a landmark 2012 exhibition at the Institut Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, mapping the deep, tangled connections between visual art and music across the twentieth century and beyond. Rather than a chronology, the show and book are organized around twelve cross-epochal "strategies" shared by artists and composers — storing, collaging, silence, destroying, calculating, dicing, feeling, thinking, believing, furnishing, repeating, and playing. Across more than four hundred pages and hundreds of illustrations, it ranges from Erik Satie and Marcel Duchamp to John Cage, Nam June Paik, Laurie Anderson, and Frank Zappa, interleaving artworks with source texts by figures from Beckett and Beuys to Stockhausen and Brian Eno. Edited by Ralf Beil and Peter Kraut, it's an ambitious, richly documented argument that sound and image have been in constant dialogue.
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The editors
Ralf Beil, an art historian and curator who directed the Institut Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, and Peter Kraut, a curator and writer specializing in music and sound, assembled both the exhibition and this catalog. Their premise is that the boundary between the visual arts and music has been repeatedly crossed by twentieth-century avant-gardes.
The book
Published by Hatje Cantz in 2012 to accompany the exhibition (13 May–9 September 2012), A House Full of Music runs to roughly 416 pages with some 468 illustrations. It is structured around twelve conceptual "strategies" and includes essays plus source texts by Beckett, Beuys, Burroughs, Boulez, Cage, Duchamp, Eno, Mondrian, Paik, Rilke, Russolo, Satie, Stockhausen, and Bill Viola, among others.
How it reads
As a serious scholarly catalog rather than a light survey: thematic, essayistic, and generously illustrated. The strategy-based structure is genuinely illuminating but demands engagement; casual browsers will still enjoy the imagery, while readers who follow the arguments get a rich intellectual history of art-and-music crossover.
For more context
The museum's and publisher's pages document the exhibition and its participants.
Sources - A House Full of Music — Institut Mathildenhöhe - A House Full of Music — Hatje Cantz
- Type
- Exhibition catalog
- Author / Maker
- Ralf Beil & Peter Kraut (eds.)
- Publisher
- Hatje Cantz
- Place of publication
- Ostfildern, Germany
- Year
- 2012
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Colorado