Toward Fewer Images

In ‘Toward Fewer Images’, Philipp Ekardt offers both close analyses of Alexander Kluge’s individual works and sustained investigations of his overarching (and perpetual) production. Ekardt discusses Kluge’s image theory and practice as developed across different media, and considers how, in relation to this theory, Kluge returns to, varies, expands, and modifies the practice of montage, including its recent manifestations in digital media—noting Kluge’s counterintuitive claim that creating montages results in fewer images. Kluge’s production, Ekardt argues, allows us to imagine a model of authorship and artistic production that does not rely on an accumulation of individual works over time but rather on a permanent activity of (temporalized) reworking and redifferentiation.