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Abstract
Ari Benjamin Meyers's Kunsthalle for Music is simultaneously an institution, an exhibition, a concert, a music collection, a process, and an ensemble. In this essay, I take readers on a tour of the show's first presentation, followed by reflections on questions that it posed. In particular, the project troubles the issue of art's mediums, their relation to art as a singular concept and its institutional form(s), and art's mode of cultural transmission through time. The philosopher Peter Osborne, who has written on and presented at the Kunsthalle, provides my theoretical foil alongside Theodor Adorno and Rosalind Krauss. I add musings by Jean-Luc Nancy to consider how the project exhibits liveness and its musical significance. Mediums of art are neither essences nor concepts for deconstruction, I conclude; rather, they insist and persist as modalities of action.
Contributor Notes
Ed McKeon is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Birmingham City University concerned with curatorial theory and musicality, untangling relations between gallery arts and post-experimental musics. As a curatorial producer, he operates at the points where music indisciplines others—theater, book, installation, or performance—collaborating with artists from Pauline Oliveros to Jennifer Walshe, and Shiva Feshareki to Brian Eno. His book Heiner Goebbels and Curatorial Composing after Cage was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.