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September 5, 2012 marks the 100th birthday of John Cage. Like hardly anyone before him, Cage consistently posed anew the question of the connection of music with other fields of art and everyday life. He stands alongside Satie, Duchamp, Paik and Beuys as one of the great strategists and crossover artists who straddled the boundaries of music and art in the 20th century. Coinciding with documenta 13 in Kassel, the major interdisciplinary exhibition A House Full of Music. Strategies in Music and Art at the Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, with a focus on these five key artists, presents twelve fundamental strategies of music and art since 1900. The exhibition features fascinating as well as enlightening soundscapes, projections, objects, scores, paintings and installations by 110 visual artists, musicians and composers – from Laurie Anderson to Robert Filliou, Anri Sala, Dieter Roth, Iannis Xenakis and Frank Zappa. A House Full of Music uses a very different approach than those of previous Music and Art exhibitions of the last decades, most of which were concerned with synesthetic questions like “How do picture sound?” or “What color do sounds have?” For the first time, at the Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, the internal connections between music and art are brought to light with epoch-transcending presentations of twelve powerful strategies in music and art: to record, to collage, to be silent, to destroy, to calculate, to roll the dice, to feel, to think, to believe, to furnish, to repeat and to play. These strategies shaped and continue to shape the music as well as the art of the 20th and 21st centuries. The composer Heiner Goebbels has created a John Cage and Gertrude Stein inspired sound and video installation especially for the Water Reservoir underneath the Exhibition Hall. Furthermore, for the duration of the exhibition, the Sculpture Studios in the Artists’ Colony Museum are home to a Cage movie theatre with a diverse program featuring music in CinemaScope!

The exhibition is a collaboration between the Institute Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt and the International Institute of Music Darmstadt (IMD).

This exhibition was made possible by the generous support of the Kulturfonds Frankfurt RheinMain.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Nevin Aladag, Laurie Anderson, John Armleder, Charles Atlas, John Baldessari, Béla Bartók, The Beatles, Samuel Beckett, Sonja Bender, Cathy Berberian, Luciano Berio, Joseph Beuys, Peter Blake, Pierre Boulez, George Brecht, Peter Brötzmann, Earle Brown, John Cage, Francesco Cangiullo, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Franco Casavola & Sebastiano Arturo Luciani, Henning Christiansen, René Clair, The Clash, John Coltrane, Bruce Conner, martin Creed, Miles Davis, Fortunato Depero, Marcel Duchamp, Einstürzende Neubauten, Brian Eno, Max Ernst, Faithless, Morton Feldman, Robert Filliou, Dick Fontaine, Terry Fox, Valeska Gert, Heiner Goebbels, Hubertus Gojowczyk, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Jimi Hendrix, Dick Higgins, Gregor Hildebrandt, Karl Horst Hödicke, Jasper Johns, Joe Jones, Mauricio Kagel, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Idris Khan, Ragnar Kjartansson, Paul Klee, Yves Klein, Milan Knizak, Takehisa Kosugi, Johannes Kreidler, Kutiman, Bernhard Leitner, Henning Lohner & Van Carlson, Jorge Macchi, George Maciunas, Bruno Maderna, Christian Marclay, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Peter Moore, Robert Morris, Harald Muenz, Bruce Nauman, Carsten Nicolai, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Francis Picabia, Anne-Julie Raccoursier, Robert Rauschenberg, Steve Reich, Hans Richter, Rainer Maria Rilke, Terry Riley, Petr Roehr, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Anri Sala, Erik Satie, Dieter Schnebel, Arnold Schönberg, Erwin Schulhoff, Lillian Schwartz, Kurt Schwitters, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Oliver Sturm, Su-Mei Tse, Benjamin Vautier, Jorinde Voigt, Wolf Vostell, Andy Warhol, Jürgen von der Wense, The Who, Emmett Williams, Iannis Xenakis, Otomo Yoshihide, Frank Zappa