ARLES.- The exhibition James Ensor & Alexander Kluge: Dark Centuries consists of an unprecedented convergence of engravings by the Belgian artist James Ensor and a selection of previously unseen films by the German film-maker, media theoretician and writer Alexander Kluge. More than thirty prints by James Ensor, produced between 1886 and 1904, map out a route along which we encounter scenes of crowds, by turns petrified and riotous, and a society in masks, parading in the guise of its demons.

If Ensor castigates, on the altar of the copper plate, a society entirely prey to its inner madness, Kluge seeks to militate, as the inventive heir of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, against the baleful influence of the entertainment industry. Nurturing differing degrees of defiance in the face of mass logic and the upheavals of their centuries, the two artists produce a body of resolutely grotesque works. The ontological grotesque of Ensor has its counterpart in Alexander Kluge’s grotesque of the conscience.

The eleven films which Kluge has chosen for this exhibition, among them Homage to James Ensor (2018), are hallmarked by his thinking, which seeks to introduce into television “some traces of the best we have, that is to say music and literature, without modifying it or adapting it to the needs of television, but in the manner of a foreign body”.2 Kluge’s migration, at the end of the 1980s, into the enemy territory of audio-visual, is not without an affinity to James Ensor’s adoption of printmaking – a genre which allowed him to withdraw, as from 1886, from the circles of artists critical of his painting.

James Ensor & Alexander Kluge: Dark Centuries constitutes the German film-maker’s first exhibition in a museum in France.

Alexander Kluge is a German filmmaker, philosopher and writer, born in 1932 in Halberstadt. He has developed an extensive and powerful body of work over a period of almost sixty years that defies media-specific boundaries and combines words and images to form the core of a narrative method aligned with History, experience and emotion.

Adorno’s advice that led him to become an apprentice of Fritz Lang. He went on to produce his first short films in the early 1960s and signed the Oberhausen Manifesto that marked the beginning of the new German cinema. Championing a form of creation that was scarcely visible within the workings of the entertainment industry, he received the Golden Lion at the 1968 Venice Film Festival for his feature Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed (1967). Fifty years later, he presented his new film at Venice, Happy Lamento (2018). In 1987 he founded his own audio-visual production company, DCTP, broadcasting cultural programming on private networks.

As a writer, Kluge has presented a colossal work in France, a book of oceanic proportions that sheds light on his encyclopaedic thought. The volumes of Chronik der Gefühle (Chronicle of Feelings) that P.O.L. has published in French since 2016 are the result of his labours over a fifty-year period. At the same time, he continued to write, on his own and collaboratively, creating such works as History and Obstinacy (Geschichte und Eigensinn, with Oskar Negt, 1981), The Devil’s Blind Spot (2004), December (Dezember, with Gerhard Richter, 2012) and World-changing Rage: Dispatches from the Antipodeans (Weltverändernder Zorn: Nachricht von den Gegenfüßlern, with Georg Baselitz, 2017). The proliferation of exhibitions over the past few years attests to the acuity of his resolutely contemporary vision that straddles the centuries (The Boat is Leaking, the Captain Lied, Prada Foundation, 2017; Pluriverse, Folkwang Museum, 2018; Pluriverse – The Poetic Power of Theory, Belvedere Museum, Vienna, 2018).

James Ensor is considered one ot the leading representatives of the early twentieth-century Belgian avant-garde, even though he pursued a highly individual path which placed him outside the vanguard.

After living in Bruxelles, his return to Ostend in 1880 marked the beginning of his “sombre” period. From 1885, he kept unwaveringly to his new direction, resorting in particular to etching, a technique that would enable his imagination and wit to reach a wider audience.

Dürer, Grandville, Rembrandt, Rops and Goya were influences, along with Bosch and Bruegel. He made one hundred and thirty-three etchings and drypoints as well as a large number of lithographs.

On the pictorial side, this period saw the emergence of his more fantastical works, such as Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (1887) or Masks Confronting Death (1888), as well as the mask motif, which parodies human society.

Critical reception of Ensor’s later works was unenthusiastic, and some paintings of this period were considered simple copies of earlier examples that had brought him acclaim. At the time of his death he was nevertheless considered the “prince of painters”, whose many self-portraits show the artist interrogating his own place within society.