What do the "Heddemer Käwern" from 1900 and the consecration memorial for the Dea Candida around 200 AD have to do with each other?

Nothing - or everything.

In any case, you don't see at first glance that they both come from Heddernheim.

One might even believe that the ancient head next door belonged to the goddess torso.

But he once sat on the body of a young Greek athlete who can be seen right next door.

Eva-Maria Magel

Head culture editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The principle of chance brought them together and 37 other objects.

The notation of John Cage's “Museumcircle” from 1991 reads: “To make an exhibition of objects from other museums (in the same city) in the museum (of a certain city), which are hung or placed in randomly determined positions.

To achieve this, each museum provides around a dozen items.

The exhibits actually to be used are selected from these potential sources through random operations. "

In Frankfurt, curator and collection manager Mario Kramer has only applied the cage principle to an exhibition at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) for the third time since the invention of the “Museumcircle”.

After its debut in Munich, the “Museumcircle” was shown only once again in 1993 in Los Angeles.

From the Archaeological Museum to the Zeilsheimer and History Association, Kramer asked 40 Frankfurt museums and collections to submit a list of ten objects each.

Using a two-fold random process, an arbitrary object is then selected and randomly distributed in the room.

This mixture of playful chance fun and the rigor of a musical composition is what makes the process so attractive, which basically runs counter to all museum and curatorial work - and then it doesn't.

Experimented with dice and coins

Cage (1912–1992), whom most people associate first and foremost with his musical compositions, to a certain extent prescribed a composition for a museum, which the MMK has now set up in its second building, the main customs office. A work that is exactly 30 years old, with which the MMK now also discreetly remembers its own opening 30 years ago - with a first-time cooperation between most of Frankfurt's museums.

Cage, who was inspired by Duchamps, who had studied the very popular “I Ching”, the old Chinese “Book of Changes”, and who applied the principle of chance in music, drawing and composition, first came up with dice and coins with movable grids experimented. The MMK has now also used the lot and the grid to furnish the objects - and it is extremely attractive to study the lists of the individual museums in the booklet accompanying the exhibition: everything could have turned out differently. With the composer Andrew Culver, Cage developed a so-called "random generator" in the late 1970s, a computer-generated random protocol. The column of numbers, now shown on the exhibition posters, has been crossed off by the curator Kramer,to set up the exhibits in the room according to the numbers.

That they range from Niko Kovac's suit, worn at the Eintracht Cup final in 2018, to Goethe's Locke from the Goethe Museum or the Falkeisen Bible from the Bible Museum, in between the telephone sheep by Jean-Luc Cornec from the Museum of Communication look like if they have always been there, it creates funny new references, amazement and also the desire to pay a visit to the other places again soon. The fact that Kramer found out about Cage's estate administration that the composer had wished to present the “Museumcircle” with Shaker furniture and lots of green has now resulted in a downright cozy interior with lots of wood, including several chess games at tables and a small Cage library, which invite you to read, play, think further. And there will also be a Cage concert in January.

The exhibition “John Cage Museumcircle” can be seen until March 20, 2022 in the MMK main customs office, Tuesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Wednesday until 8 p.m.