Forever, a tape circles along the neck of a whiskey bottle. Forever, an unknown voice says: « You don’t love me »

Sing! How to sing people together ‘is the promising title of an exhibition about 500 years of Lutheran songs in the Luther Museum in Amsterdam. But anyone who comes to the exciting description on their website is still orphaned to look at the list of six tables with some old books with prints and songs from Luther. You can listen to one song on your phone via a QR code, but it is just not opened.

Anyone who already knew that Luther also composed and that songs in the vernacular can also be protest songs do not learn much. Who did not know that yet only knows that. Almost half of the exhibition is about the ‘bodily song of the Reformation’, ‘Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott’, that you will be played in the original and four operations on tablets (including one hysterically played piece from the Fifth symphony ‘Reformation’ of Mendelssohn) and that the feeling of 500 years must convey; What it doesn’t. You will be through within fifteen minutes. In the hallway you can still listen to some fragments of singing people worldwide; sympathetic, but not enough. No, you don’t get around for this exhibition.

So rather disappointed you are outside again, were it not for a friendly volunteer to point you to a door on the other side of the corridor. You can continue there. Further? There appears to be another exhibition that is on the poster as a subordinate: « I wish this was a song. » Through the actual museum, ticking, singing, voices, very incongruent suddenly sound everywhere with the old design of the rooms. Eleven contemporary artworks appear to be placed between the paintings and old books and objects. Here it can be done!

Moving tire recorder

For example, the singing appears to come from 1937: it is the song ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’ from Disneys Snow Whitebut then edited by Laurent Fiévet into the video Water bucket (2015). In it, Snow White constantly sings forward and back: two measurements forward, one backwards, three sizes forward, four backwards, half a size forward, two backwards, and so on. An inimitable sequence that does not even sound so annoying, but remains unsatisfactory and ultimately leads to a kind of trance.

The votes come out Speeches from the Factory Floor (2020) by artist Becket MWN: a mini sculpture with a candle, from which critical VMA speeches sound from Nirvana, Fiona Apple and Kanye West with industrial sounds mounted behind it. But also from a strange moving band recorder from Pavel Büchler: a barrel of a tape sands two places: the reading head and the neck of a whiskey bottle. Between a lot of squeaking and crackling in the silence, the same sentence sounds every twelve seconds, pronounced in the 70s by an unknown artist who announces a song with a weak voice: « This one eh … Called: You don’t love me. »

For example, there are a few more things, including a painting with the text ‘I wish this was a song’ (2024) by Tim Ayres, where you can continue to chew longer than at the entire ‘main exhibition’ together. Do you have to go to Amsterdam for it? No not. But if you happen to be there, then this clause on the poster is worth a turning.

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