Review
The rooms of the Munich Kunstverein are known to be rather idyllically situated above a long arcaded walkway in the Hofgarten. Even the young Giorgio de Chirico, as every art-minded Münchner knows, was impressed by this setting. One need only squint a little, and suddenly one feels transported to Italy. This has worked—despite all architectural changes—ever since 1565, when the first arcades were built, and it still works today. Anyone visiting the Kunstverein, which has been housed here for over 130 years, is also, in a way, always going a little to Italy.
This phenomenon forms the basis of American artist Fareed Armaly’s exhibition. Titled Parts, it explores the piecemeal construction of reality. This reality may “come from somewhere else,” but it exists in its present form in its present location. Armaly’s theme is the conscious transfer of atmospheres—the transposition of the sensibility of an original source into other contexts: in architecture, television, film, and music.
Although the rooms of the Kunstverein appear empty, the project operates on multiple levels. The most accessible gesture is the transfer of the dark red exterior color of the arcades onto the lower interior walls of the exhibition spaces. The narrow entrance area—usually used as a café—has been cleared out and now resembles the backdrop of an arcade walkway.
A video monitor presents, on one hand, the architectural history of the Hofgarten, and on the other, the history of the Kunstverein since 1985, when a radical shift restructured the institution along more professional and international lines. The directors who have served since then can be heard but not seen. One learns where they came from and what motivated them to come to Munich. As their voices speak, a pencil drawing is slowly erased across a narrow strip at the bottom of the screen. Suddenly, the strip runs in reverse, and the eraser redraws the image. All three directors came from elsewhere and brought with them very specific ideas about how an art institution should function. This allowed a kind of art-reality to be constructed here—one that gained significance beyond the local context, but which never truly took root in Munich.
Climbing the stairs to the large exhibition rooms, one encounters a massive arcade arch—reconstructed from hundreds of differently folded cardboard boxes. The structure doesn’t rest on the floor but hangs suspended in the space, held by a system of ropes. Here, it’s not compression that stabilizes the architecture, but tension. A red rope leads into the next room, where old panels from the famous roof of Munich’s 1972 Olympic Stadium lean against the wall. Two images support each other: the beloved picture of an Italianate Munich and that of a modern city already undergoing restoration.
In the third room, the Arcade TV program is shown—somewhat tucked away, but still the core of the project. A small stylized arcade arch appears in the upper-left corner of the monitor as an identifying mark. The broadcasts address topics such as film dubbing, the electronic synthesizer sound in music, and the beginnings of public television in Germany.
In both 1951, at the launch of the first television program, and again in 1963, for the second channel, Goethe’s Prelude on the Stage (Vorspiel auf dem Theater) was broadcast. In 1951, the play was still filmed faithfully as a stage production, but by 1963, it had been turned into a television play, set in the corridors and production rooms of a broadcasting house. By today’s standards, it was an attempt to transplant the high culture of the stage into a media-appropriate modernity for the masses. No one could have yet predicted the rise of the soap opera. And yet, with Goethe’s stiffly delivered maxims, the production unintentionally brushed up against the very genre that would, three decades later, reach its peak—far removed from high cultural aspirations, but perfectly suited to mass appeal.
The two other programs consist of edited interview responses, often so skillfully cut that the content flows seamlessly from one speaker to the next. The result is two long-form narratives, each about an hour in length. One tells the story of film dubbing—from its early days to present practices—and explains that those who lend their voices to foreign films in German are not simply voice actors but actors in their own right.
The second narrative revolves around the so-called “Korg synthesizer,” the first affordable electronic sound-generating device produced in the early 1980s. Like an ungainly but beloved piece of architecture, the device repeatedly appears on screen as a uniform fixture of the music scene. With the Korg synthesizer, it became possible to produce sounds that were audibly synthetic—sounds that, while once perceived as disturbances, have since evolved into a dominant musical technique.
A second thematic strand in this segment explores the use of German lyrics in music. Again, the focus is on a kind of transfer—one whose artificiality could be critiqued, just as it could be with the arcades of the Hofgarten, Goethe on television, or the German voices in James Bond films. Yet all of these have long since been integrated into a new reality. These Parts have become identities of their own—more or less original. The longer one stays in the exhibition, the more clearly one begins to understand how culture is formed.
The solitary victor in all of this is the Korg synthesizer.