Tag: Johannesburg

  • Needle on the Record

    Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution with Michael Denning
    Friday, September 4, 2015
    Interference Archive, Brooklyn

    “You might say that a people or a movement must be constituted musically before it can be constituted politically.” This was one argument among many declared by Michael Denning, a professor of American studies and English at Yale University, during a talk for his new Verso book, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution. Denning, however, made it clear that the music culture during the brief period of time studied in his book—from the widespread use of electrical recording in 1925 to the early years of the Great Depression—was not revolutionary politically.

    Denning’s words were well suited for the summer exhibition at Interference Archive, if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance, which explored intersections of music and politics through record covers, song books, and music memorabilia, all with a predilection for insurgency. Most prominent were three walls of record covers, some from popular music, such as Rage Against the Machine’s Evil Empire, Meat Is Murder by the Smiths, and Bikini Kill’s self-titled EP. Revolutionary-minded jazz players Sun Ra and Rahsaan Roland Kirk were represented, as were obscure proletariat titles like They’ll Never Keep Us Down: Women’s Coal Mining Songs.

    Drawing from the first chapter of his book, Denning provided ten instances of early electrical sound recordings from around the world. Before this technology, singers and musician performed live in front of a machine that cut grooves into a platter—the master recording of the session was a record. In the mid-1920s, engineers developed a more advanced method using microphones and amplifiers to electrically inscribe sounds onto a cylinder, disc, or film, which could be taken elsewhere for manufacturing. A son band was recorded in Havana in October 1925, followed by Louis Armstrong’s bands in New Orleans and Chicago a month later. In Cairo the legendary vocalist Umm Kulthūm recorded songs for a set of ten 78 RPM records in May 1926, and the Jakarta singer and dancer Miss Riboet laid down the kroncong classic “Krongtjong Moeritskoe” in November. Other recordings were made in Honolulu, Zanzibar, Accra, and Johannesburg—and Django Reinhardt in Paris. Denning played twenty to thirty seconds of each example to give the audience a taste of the explosion of music from back them. He also created a Spotify playlist for the book.1

    Michael Denning describes the early electrical recordings of Louis Armstrong (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    Denning could not overstress the importance of colonial port cities, connected by steamships. After the invention of electrical recording, companies such as Gramophone in the United Kingdom, Victor in the United States, and Pathé in France, sent engineers around the world, usually twice a year, to port cities—Manila, Honolulu, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Tunis, Bombay—to record the locals in order to sell products back to the local markets. It was a commercial enterprise relatively unconcerned with preservation. One British music reviewer, Denning said, noted that even though England produced the physical records, they were imported quickly and therefore hard to find. In the United States, homegrown music was marketed as “race records” and “hillbilly” music, often become trendy in the metropolitan cities. Though the recordings of the electrical era came from all over the world, they were mislabeled as jazz, a catchall term for syncopated music that might actually be tango, rumba, or rebetika.

    In those port cities lived professional musicians who could read music, as well as those learned by ear. “You see it in Havana, you see it in New Orleans, you see it in Shanghai,” Denning said. “The mix of these two sets of musicians” produced localized—I hesitate to say indigenous—music outside the formal, orchestrated scenes in London, New York, and Berlin. Creating makeshift studios in hotel rooms, engineers would sometimes put up a sign that essentially said “We are recording and need musicians.” Other times they would locate performers on the edge of musical culture—those musicians who were trained but were part of the community—who would become musical directors that recruited from the local scene and even registered (or assigned) a recording’s copyright. In colonialism, he remarked, a class of subordinate elites served as intermediaries between the ruling class and the general population, and musicians could be found there. These musicians, Denning revealed, are the “key protagonists or heroes” of Noise Uprising.

    Installation view of one wall of if a song could be freedom … Organized Sounds of Resistance (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some might see exploitative capitalism at play here, Denning took a deeper look. “These musics are best understood not as an emergence of the music industry,” he said, “nor was it simple popular music.” Instead, “it was a vernacular revolution,” not unlike the effect of the invention of the printing press on language. The author called the emergence of these records a “decolonization of the ear,” sparking a political unconscious in music that later would become conscious. The young intellectuals in port cities, he said, were drawn to their local music. Denning stated, “Political decolonization—the decolonization of territories, of legislatures—depended on a cultural revolution.” The creation and circulation of records from the late 1920s onward supported enfranchisement, he claimed, serving a role that books and newspapers once did. Denning commented that the record covers on the wall of Interference Archive, such as those by the politicized Nigerian bandleader and politician Fela Kuti, exemplify the evolution.

    In Trinidad, a song by the calypsonian Raymond Quevedo, better known as Atilla the Hun, called “Commission’s Report” responded earnestly to the official government report on the Butler riots. After the British cracked down on dissent, he recorded two more songs that were sympathetic to the replaced colonial leaders, and a third, called “The Strike,” that cheekily avoided direct commentary. The knowing wink became powerfully prevalent. “Often the most innocuous songs,” Denning said, “carry anticolonial and nationalist connotations in the eyes of the authorities and in the population.” In Hawaii, “the romantic lyric tribute to the land, built on the simple musicality of place names,” was a form a resistance. “What some understood as tourist picturesque actually signified colonial dispossession.”

    But what about the commercial exploitation and appropriation of the music? Many of the recordings were a mingling of Western and non-Western instruments, a hybrid evolution of styles that differed from music from isolated, rural locations, which relied on the oral tradition. Even though the folklorists find commercialism suspicious, Denning said, leading figures such as Alan Lomax came to realize the cultural and historical significance of the recordings. In a letter to the Library of Congress, Lomax claimed that the commercial companies did more of a service than the folklorists, who sometimes repackaged the old commercial recordings as indigenously authentic. Denning noted that much of Harry Smith’s celebrated collection , Anthology of American Folk Music, was drawn from early electrical records produced for the market.

    The Hungarian composer Béla Bartók sought pure folk music, Denning said, not the popular music played by gypsies for money. The search for authenticity or purity is short sighted, if not misguided, I think, because it fetishizes tradition and allows no room for development and change. In the early phonographic era, Denning said that the song was considered more important than the performance—improvisation was secondary. This attitude reversed. (Reinhardt, for instance, listened to and learned Armstrong’s improvisations.) In addition, a reliance on Western interpretations of exotic music declined. Before 1925, American listeners got Tin Pan Alley renditions of Hawaiian music. Folks no longer needed W. C. Handy’s written notations of the blues because, ten years later, they had the immediate gratification of listening to Armstrong and Bessie Smith. There may have been better trumpet players in New Orleans twenty or thirty years before Armstrong, Denning said, but we don’t have the recordings to prove it.

    Michael Denning gives the thumbs up (photograph by Christopher Howard)

    While some may prize the work of the anonymous collective over the individual or stars, the early electric recordings featured individuals who were stars. Denning argued that the cult of the popular bandleader was not dissimilar to those for charismatic political figures in the decolonization era. The leaders of newly free nations often sponsored the work of musicians to establish not only a national identity but also a national industry. Import substitution is the concept of manufacturing and selling goods within your own country to obviate the need to buy from others. Some musicians were even encouraged to sell their records in New York and London, not just in Lagos.

    Denning pointed out the social and sexual contradiction in music. The division of labor was traditional: men are instrumentalists and women are singers. At the same time, he said, women were able to perform in public for the first time. From 1925 to 1930, Denning told us, musicians were not trying to revolutionize music for politics. Records reinvented daily life, making music regular, not occasional. At the time, he continued, music was associated with vice (drinking, drugs, prostitution), with carnival and military marching bands, and with vaudeville and theater. In the port cities, Denning noted, working-class musicians played for working-class people.

    Denning compared the early electrical period to the dot com boom of the late 1990s: internet companies had no idea how to make money, but investors poured millions into ideas for websites. In the mid- to late 1920s, record companies recorded anything and everything, because the technology to produce and consume music was so new. Ten to fifteen years later, and after the Great Depression, they knew how to market music and make money. Denny, though, reminded us to focus on the music, not on the industry. The energy of labor precedes capitalism’s capture, Denning said. He urged us to transcend the leftist critique of industry and get to the powerful human impulses to make music—and also to have it heard and shared.

    In Terms Of count: 3.


    1 During the audience Q&A, an attendee was curious about Denning’s relationship to archives. “In many ways I feel like my archives have been that world of collectors and discographers on the internet,” citing the blogs Excavated Shellac and Haji Maji. Record collectors are the true archivists, he said. Those who collected Robert Johnson records in the 1960s found that, by the 1980s and 1990s, these became too expensive. The collectors turned elsewhere, to the world music that Denning’s book is about.

  • Personal Branding with Hank Willis Thomas

    Hank Willis Thomas
    Thursday, April 16, 2015
    Art + Design Agency Series
    Krannert Art Museum, Krannert Auditorium, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

    Poster for a lecture by Hank Willis Thomas at the Krannert Art Museum

    “Would you say your biggest source of inspiration is other people?” an audience member asked Hank Willis Thomas, who had just finished giving a presentation on his work in the basement auditorium of the Krannert Art Museum. The artist replied with a smile: “I’d say.” Indeed, early on Thomas stated that art is about people and connections, and he even began his talk by quizzing the audience, asking who was a student, a faculty member, a first-time visitor. He also asked who in the room had tattoos—there were several students with visibly more than a few—and playfully harassed a few latecomers. Thomas also joshed a reticent audience member halfway through the lecture: “This talk can’t go if you don’t talk.”

    If people were the primary inspiration for Thomas’s work, personal biography and American cultural history came a close second and third. He spoke of his mother, Deborah Willis, an accomplished professor, photographer, curator, author, and a specialist in African American photography. “I used to be Deb’s son,” he joked. “Now she’s Hank’s mom.” Thomas said that Willis’s investigation into black photographers, who had been making pictures professionally by the mid-nineteenth century, rewrote his notion of American history, along with the recognition of blacks working in chemistry, physics, and other respected fields. Thomas ran through several images from the twentieth century, from a distinguished photograph of Bert Williams, a Bahamian-born vaudeville star who was “paid to perform blackness” in blackface, to ones of Mike Tyson, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama.

    Thomas showed a range of his own projects, series, and singular images, comprising mostly photography and sculpture. He played the first couple minutes of a video called A person is more important than anything else… (2014), commissioned by New York Live Arts for a citywide program on James Baldwin. The work features an audio recording of the black author speaking on the artist’s struggle with integrity; Thomas supplied the visuals. After listening intently to Baldwin’s first few sentences, I began focusing on the moving images, unconsciously tuning out the words. When quizzed by Thomas to recall the content of the piece, Eli Craven, an MFA student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, said he “got lost in the visual.” I wasn’t alone.

    Hank Willis Thomas, Scarred Chest, 2003, lambda photograph, 40 x 30 in. (artwork © Hank Willis Thomas)

    As an artist, Thomas emerged in the mid-2000s with a provocative series of work, called Branded, which showed Nike’s swoosh logo emblazoned not on clothing but seared directly onto athletic black male bodies. The artist understands corporate logos as hieroglyphs: “You don’t have to use the language to understand the ad.” He also connects them to both slave ownership and consumerism. “Bodies are treated differently at different times,” Thomas said.

    Thomas’s photographs read quickly, like advertisements. One work in particular, Priceless #1 (2004), parodies the phrasing of MasterCard’s “priceless” campaign but with deadly serious intentions. The photograph depicts the artist’s own family at the funeral of his cousin, who was shot to death outside a Philadelphia nightclub. (Thomas was a witness.) The text read: “3-piece suit: $250; new socks: $2; gold chain: $400; 9mm pistol: $79 (changed here to $80); bullet: $.60.” The punch line of “Picking the perfect casket for your son: priceless” highlights the “affordability guilt” of burials. Do higher price points for caskets, Thomas wanted to know, reflect how much you love a loved one? In 2005 he said, “My aunt is not a rich woman…. I don’t know how much she paid for the casket she picked, but I guarantee you it went on a credit card.’”1

    Hank Willis Thomas, Priceless #1, 2004, lambda photograph, 32 x 40 in. (artwork © Hank Willis Thomas)

    The interest of Priceless #1 goes beyond that. The question always asked of Thomas is “How did you family feel about the image, in mourning?” The artist asked himself that, too, as well as questions such as: Why show it? Do I take the logo off? Is this an exploitative situation? “That’s where the question of integrity comes back,” said Thomas, referring back to the Baldwin speech.

    Some viewers find the work offensive to blacks, as one white woman did during the local Fox news story when, in 2007, the photograph was enlarged to billboard size and hung on the exterior wall of the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. The museum faces the jail, so the local crowd read this fact into the image. Though museum curators spoke for him on television, Thomas had to defend the work in the Birmingham newspaper—and then realized how things get dumbed down in public discourse. Was it insensitive to use his grieving family as the subject of his art? “I think I made the right decision,” Thomas said, referencing the same white woman interviewed on television, who understood the artist’s decision to either get revenge or make art.

    Thomas then discussed a Reebok advertising campaign from 2005, called “I Am What I Am. Lacking any reference to sports gear, the image for one ad portrays 50 Cent as survivor, rapper, entrepreneur, actor, and criminal—a white man’s idea of black values that in turn reflect black values. You know the image is an ad, Thomas said, because of the logo. The campaign also featured the tennis player Andy Roddick as a white guy who is a champion but feels guilty, the Chinese basketball player Yao Ming with a slew of Asian visual references (rising sun, the year of the monkey), and the actor Lucy Liu as a docile female. “They’re playing off of some crazy stereotypes,” Thomas remarked, adding that the ads have nothing to do with the products Reebok are trying to sell. “We’re doing the work to make the ads work,” he said as he involved the audience once again in a discussion of the images.

    Hank Willis Thomas, The Mandingo of Sandwiches, 1977/2007, lambda photograph, 36 x 34¾ in. (artwork © Hank Willis Thomas)

    In a work from a series called Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968–2008 (ca. 2006–10), an advertisement with the boxer Joe Frazier isn’t promoting Aunt Jemima syrup but rather margarine—that’s why he is wearing a Blue Bonnet. The Manwich ad, he said, couldn’t have existed ten years earlier, because working-class white and black men wouldn’t be sitting at the same lunch counter—and certainly the white fellow wouldn’t be craving the “dark meat” of the other. A Chevrolet ad depicts the long history of blacks but curiously erases their status as slaves. (Thomas discusses these same examples in his other artist’s lectures, as a quick perusal of YouTube tells us.) The Unbranded series displaces meaning, the artist said, by showing an “undressed image.” His removal and erasure of text and commercial logos reveals the not-so-hidden meaning of the images. It’s a classic John Berger analysis. Thomas strives to present universal ideas through abstraction of historical photographs.

    Thomas talked about some sculptural and mixed-media work, noting that the phrases “I am a man” indicates a collective, and “I am the man” is self-centered. His bronze sculpture Raise Up (2014), based on a historical photograph from apartheid South Africa, depicts a row of male heads turned against the wall, arms raised in the air. The art historian and critic Kerr Houston explained the source: “In Raise Up, Thomas gives us the heads and arms of ten of the thirteen black miners pictured by [Ernest] Cole as they undergo a humiliating medical examination, in the nude.”2 The work was shown at Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg in June 2014. The shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, which spawned the protest phrase “Hands up, don’t shoot,” took place two months later. The piece took on an unanticipated meaning.

    Hank Willis Thomas, Raise Up, 2014, bronze, 25 x 285 x 10 cm (artwork © Hank Willis Thomas)

    Thomas talked about his collaboration with Ryan Alexiev and Jim Ricks on a public-art project called In Search of the Truth (also known as Truth Booth), in which participants enter a structure shaped like a caption balloon and record a two-minute video during which they riff on the phrase “The truth is….” Truth Booth was first presented in Ireland in 2011 and has since traveled to South Africa, the United States, and Afghanistan. This work represents the artist’s interest in what other people think—sometimes being an artist involves listening more than anything else.

    Since many artists are typically excited about their most recent projects, I found it odd that Thomas didn’t present the work in Unbranded: A Century of White Women 1915–2015, his most recent exhibition at Jack Shainmain Gallery in New York. For this new series Thomas removed the copy and logos from one hundred magazine advertisements depicting women, taking the suffrage era as a starting point.

    In Terms Of count: 0.

    Read

    Janpim Wolf, “Artist Lecture #2: Hank Willis Thomas,” Janpim Wolf Senior Portfolio, February 17, 2010.


    1 Meredith Goldsmith, “Artist Parodies Ads to Bring Awareness,” Oakland Tribune, August 1, 2005.

    2 Kerr Houston, “Recasting the Past: Hank Willis Thomas in South Africa,” Bmore Art, July 10, 2014.