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Monastic Residency:
Torkwase Dyson in Theaster Gates’s
Cosmology of Yard
April 7 – April 18, 2010.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE WHITNEY MUSEUM
Torkwase asked me her question at a Whitney Biennial
exhibit of her installation work — an exhibition where many
of her own friends asked me what the hell was going on here.
Even Black musicians as given to abstraction and dissonance
as Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and Butch Morris tend
to have no problem being understood by unknowledgeable
audiences when they’re encountered in life. This forces us
to consider that Black Music is also a form of Black Visual art
in performance and that what Torkwase will have to compete
against is not only the music of, say, Miles Davis, but Miles’
face, fashion sense and body language too. As we talked,
I also asked Torkwase to consider that the number one problem
Black Visual Artists faced in this esthetic footrace of hers
was that the validation of their productivity and careers largely
depended on being exhibited in places like The Whitney
Museum. Several generations of the most obscure Black music
ever made — the Mississippi Delta blues, Chicago House,
Detroit Techno — have changed the sound of the world
several times over without ever leaving the dirt they were born
on, some without ever becoming popular fare among their
next door neighbors, let alone say chosen for a program by the
The Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra.
All this being the case, I would caution Torkwase to be careful
of what she asks for. Perhaps her art-making brethren and
sistren are better off not achieving what Black musicians have
come to at such great cost over the past three hundred years
or so. Of course it has also proven difficult for Visual Artists
since the guilds of the Renaissance to come together and
do great things collectively or even as individuals to speak to
massive clusters of booty clapping dark energy.
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There is also the fact that game changing revolutions in music
can happen anywhere and often by accident or providence.
A guy named Berry Duck walks with a guitar across a stage in
St Louis, another guy walks into a one room studio in Memphis
to record a birthday song for Mom by Elvis, another guy
comes to New York from Seattle and nearly starves to death
on the chitlin’ circuit, but then gets taken to England where
Jimmy James becomes Jimi Hendrix, and so on.
There is also the risk-taking factor to consider — musicians
give themselves the right to fail horribly in public in pursuit
of the next note, visual artists like Torkwase agreed to hate
to fail in public, and given the stakes in today’s art world can’t
afford to put failure on display. The music we call Black,
though, has also largely been an enterprise where people have
risked and spilled blood to play it — the people taking
their best shots at musicians have not only been art critics, but
club patrons, cops, Klan members, Black Panthers,
fellow bandmembers, mobsters, managers, drug dealers, angry
husbands, wives and girlfriends, hotel managers, hot
microphones, lightning storms, sleeping pills, heroin, cocaine
crashing cars, planes, buses, trains, helicopters, motorcycles,
mental asylums, lynch mobs, and ski slopes. All the great
male rhythm and blues singers have especially been the victims
of tragedies so freakish as to be worthy of the Greeks. Hot
grits, Lake Tahoe, Russian roulette? By comparison, most visual
artists of any ethnicity seem to be able to make the trip from
the studio to the gallery and back again without attracting the
hounds of Hades, the grim reaper or the wrath of their
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