Don and Moki Cherry: Organic Music Societies / Alexander Kluge: Minutenfilme #3

argos is excited to present two new exhibitions: Organic Music Societies, which focuses on the collaborative work of Don and Moki Cherry, and Minutenfilme #3, the third installment of a year-long exhibition project with Alexander Kluge.

Don and Moki Cherry: Organic Music Societies
Organic Music Societies highlights the singular artistic collaboration between the American avant-garde jazz trumpet player and composer Don Cherry (1936–1995) and the Swedish visual artist and designer Moki Cherry (1943–2009), who were also life partners. 

From the late 1960’s onward, Don and Moki Cherry formed a decade-long alliance that brought together music, performance, and art in unprecedented ways. Together, they created hybrid audiovisual spectacles brimming with life and social consciousness that were greatly informed by Don’s African American/Chocktaw and Moki’s Scandinavian heritage, among other influences.

Along with their two young children Neneh and Eagle-Eye, as well as a circle of close collaborators, Don and Moki Cherry explored domestic, creative, and spiritual planes to model novel, alternative ways of being. The couple organised happening-like concerts in unusual, non-commercial contexts, coining the terms “Movement Incorporated” and, later, “Organic Music” to go beyond orthodox “mixed media” presentations. In so doing, they created a visionary confluence of global folk musics, environmental paintings and tapestries, slide and film projection, and living theatre.

This exhibition, which brings together music, artworks, and archival materials, also features Piff, Paff, Puff, a six-episode children’s programme made for Swedish national television in the early 1970s. Filmed at the former school in the Swedish countryside which Don and Moki Cherry called their home, this rarely seen TV series offers an unstaged view into the couple’s pedagogical vision and the ways in which they transformed their everyday environment into a site of continuous wonder and experiment.

Don and Moki Cherry developed their projects according to the belief that societal change must start with the self and the home, an idea that crucially underpins the exhibition as well. They also believed in the vibrations set into motion by their artistic collaboration: the holistic amalgamation of visual, cultural, and sonic materials, the intertwining of private and public spheres, and the anticipation of a then-nascent “world music” long before the term was co-opted by the music industry at large. 

All of these aspects continue to radiate outwards today, their combined energies providing a model for artistic renewal and inspiration, as well as an engaging sense of healing through communal creative expression. 

Don and Moki Cherry: Organic Music Societies was first shown at Blank Forms in New York. This expanded version is curated by Lawrence Kumpf, Naima Karlsson, and Niels Van Tomme. 

Alexander Kluge: Minutenfilme #3
Minutenfilme #3 is the third episode of a year-long, rotating exhibition presenting five sequential constellations of eight films each by Alexander Kluge. Compiled by the eminent German filmmaker especially for this occasion, this presentation features selections of recent Minutenfilme—short, hybrid films that typically run from one to eight minutes.

Ranging from the theoretical to the operatic, from the cosmic to the mathematical, these short films spring from the filmmaker’s ever-curious and critical mind to enter into dialogue with contemporary and historical events. Kluge’s idiosyncratic editing technique—influenced by both the classic editing style of Hollywood and the dialectic editing theories of Soviet cinema—allows him to condense complex, and oftentimes highly absurd, ideas into a few minutes. 

The result is ironic, sharply biting social commentary that imagines an active role for the viewer: “The viewers are the medium, what they cannot imagine neither can exist in the medium.”

Alexander Kluge: Minutenfilme is organised in cooperation with Literaturhaus Berlin and Goethe-Institut Brüssel and is curated by Niels Van Tomme.