Alexander Kluge’s Installations

Abstract Analysis of recent exhibitions featuring Alexander Kluge’s earlier films and televisual work in dialogue with work by other artists demonstrates how the aesthetics of installation art and modes of exhibiting moving images in art museums and galleries have allowed Kluge to continue developing but also revise practices he first engaged in other media. The so-called white-cube exhibition space presents Kluge’s earlier works in terms of remediation and provides him with an opportunity to employ and reconceptualize his approach to montage techniques and reception aesthetics. With their deployment in the white cube, his earlier works become emphatically transmedial, their content and forms no longer bound to one primary medium. This article proposes that the white cube might be better suited for actively and collectively engaging with Kluge’s work in the twenty-first century than the black box of the cinema, the late-night television screen, or the internet.