The Art of Art of Art Thanks to everybody for coming out. My name is Kerj Wesson, I'm one part of the Ottolith Group. And sitting there is Anjali Kassaga of the Ottolith Group, next to Annie Fletcher, once of Van Abbe and now of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the new director. Thanks to everybody for coming out on a Sunday morning. We appreciate it very much. We're going to begin. Could you please lower the lights? Thank you.
I want to say a few words about the music. Number one is, there are three pieces on the program. The first is called Evil Nigger. And the second is called Gay Gorilla. And the third is called Crazy Nigger. Now these three pieces that can be played by any number of instruments.
The reason I have them for pianos here is for a practical reason. One can play this piece, therefore, with just four people and then four pianos, but if melody instruments were playing, probably a good number would be somewhere in the area of maybe 10 instruments, 10 to 18 instruments, usually on the same family. So therefore, another version could be for, let's say, 18 stringed instruments. These particular pieces, formally, are an attempt to what I call make organic music. That is to say, the third part of any part, or the third measure, or the third section,
the third part has to contain all of the information of the first two parts, and then go on from there. So therefore, unlike romantic music or classical music, where you actually have different sections and you have these sections, which for instance are in great contrast to the first section or some other section in the piece, these pieces, they're not exactly perfect. They're not perfect. But there's an attempt to make every section contain all of the information of the previous sections or else taking out information at a gradual and logical rate. Now, there was a little problem with the titles of the piece.
There were some students and one faculty member who felt that the titles were somehow derogatory in some manner, being that the word nigger is in it. These particular titles, the reason I use them is because, in fact, there's a whole series of these pieces and they're called and they can be called a nigger series now the reason I use that particular word is because for me it has a is what I call a basicness about it that is to say I feel in any case the first niggers were of course feel niggers and And upon that is really the basis of what I call the American economic system.
Without field niggers, you wouldn't really have such a great and grand economy that we have. So that is what I call the first and great nigger, field niggers. And what I mean by niggers is that thing which is fundamental, that person or thing that attains to a basicness, a fundamentalness, and eschews that thing which is superficial or can we say elegant. So that a nigger for me is that kind of thing which attains himself or herself to the ground of anything you see. And that's what I mean by nigger. So there are many niggers. There are many kinds of niggers.
There are, of course, 99 names of Allah, but then there are 52 niggers. And so therefore, we are playing two of those niggers. Now the reason I use gay gorilla, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-L-A, that one, is because these names, let me put a little subsystem here. names either I glorify them or they glorify me and in the case of gorilla that glorifies gay. That's to say there aren't that many gay gorillas. I don't feel that gaydom does have that strength so therefore I use that word in hopes that they will. You see at this
point I don't feel that gay gorillas can really match with Afghani gorillas or PLO gorillas, but let us hope in the future that they might. You see that's why I use that word, gorilla. It means a gorilla is someone who is in any case sacrificing his life for a point of view. for a point of view. And you know, if there is a cause, and if it is a great cause, those who belong to that cause will sacrifice their blood. Because without blood, there is no cause. So therefore, that is the reason I use gay gorilla in hopes that I might be one if called upon to be one.
We're missing one half of the Otleth group, but hopefully she'll... So for those of you who'd like to see the full film, it's on the Stadelic, and I think it's only just for one more day. So we're going to start with a few questions, and then we will open out for questions from
the audience. First of all, so in the Sonic Acts Festival Guide, Julius Eastman is described as an Afrofuturist artist, a genius composer, a minimalist musician. Would you agree with those descriptions and how would you describe Eastman's work and how do you understand his legacy now? I don't know which one of you wants to start there. Anjali. You know, I think the role of the African American new music composer in the 20th century
always arrives to us as a kind of anomaly. that we're used to African American composers in the worlds of jazz, R&B, soul, rock music, folk music. But composition, there always seems to be what Fred Moten calls a kind of an oxymoron at the stake, at the heart of African American composition. So we might be able to name certain names such as Anthony Davis or Donald Fox or Julia Perry or Terry Adkins or Benjamin Patterson. But they are always somehow not at the center of the culture.
They seem to be exceptions to the rule. and Eastman in some way falls into this category but in some way he's an exception even to these exceptions so I think the terms Afrofuturism the terms of genius, the terms of minimal composers they kind of reach towards what Eastman represents but they don't really capture the kind of the uniquely disruptive capacity that Eastman brought to questions of new music, to the coherence of what we think of as the Euro-American avant-garde
and to what we think of as African-American music. He has this kind of transgressive quality. He was both a consummate insider and at the same time a kind of outsider. Maybe Leroy Jones's 1964 poem Black Dada, Nihilismus, that conveys an aspect of Eastman's role, that he was both a consummate virtuosic figure. He was a composer, a vocalist, a pianist, an organist, a composer, a leader of his own ensembles.
At the same time, he was always somehow cutting across any of those categories. So I think, yeah, they begin to touch on Eastman's role, but they don't really capture part of the part of the why Eastman I think has has captured so many people's imagination at this moment in time yes I mean it's difficult to talk I mean to the term Afrofuturism is extremely complex I mean I I don't see Eastman as a Afrofuturist as such I think he's I think I see him as somebody
who kept turning the expectations around and around and around, like the expectations of him as a composer. I mean, there's multiple gazes on him. That also includes kind of like a kind of black conservative gaze as well, in a way. But there was this sense that he was just constantly turning this. I mean you can see that in the introductory speech, the introduction that he gives. The fact that he kind of politicizes his blackness is very interesting in relation to the new music scene which was fine as long as he was composing and just composing.
But bringing blackness into it was created, isolated him in many ways. And he was, you know, he was, and therefore, what does he do with that isolation? He turns it even more. He queers it even more. He keeps, and for me, that is the most interesting aspect of Julius Eastman's work, is this, and then, you know, and I think in the kind of sense that he was always composing, composing not just in terms of writing music, but also in terms of writing text. Can you talk, Anjali, a bit about why this work resonates for you both now?
You made the film in 2017, so how did it speak to that moment and to the now, to the present? I mean, at the time, our good friend Mark Fisher had committed suicide and died. Died. And basically, I think, making this work was like a eulogy to him, in a way. but also there was this sense that, again, like in the introduction that Eastman gives,
there was something in it that was prescient then and is prescient now that continues to be important in relation to the militancy of the speech, but also then of the music. I mean, the new music scene is extremely complex for black musicians and composers to be part of. It's a very exclusive scene and always has been. And I know that because I've been working in... I was working in the world of presenting experimental music in London and working as a musician for many years. So, I mean, it's very interesting to have gone through that
and then to be faced with Eastman and his life and being able to make this work around his work as such. And to, I think, also the challenge of how to make visual his music was, was just a challenge for us that we wanted to explore. So, Julius Eastman died in 1990. He died homeless in New York. And maybe it wasn't until about 2007
when one of his colleagues and friends, a composer called Mary Jane Leach, she assembled all of the existing tape recordings of his music and released an album called Unjust Malaise, which is an anagram, a beautiful anagram of Julius Eastman. So during his life, despite composing a lot of work and appearing in a lot of ensembles, There was no album of his own music. So it's only in 2007 that I heard his music in detail. So Unjust Malaise is on YouTube. You can hear it. You can buy the CD, the triple CD. And so his music immediately haunted me.
I mean, it just, it just, I just thought it was incredible. I couldn't believe it. I also couldn't believe that I'd never heard his music. I thought I knew about new music. I thought I knew about so-called minimalism. And I just never heard anything like that. And I was kind of angry, actually outraged, and also scared that compositions that were so intense and so joyous, and such a kind of ecstatic intensity, could just disappear. It was kind of horrifying to me, and it is horrifying. and in a way we were always thinking about what how to respond to that work but it took a long time to work out a way of approaching it I think I was intimidated by the forcefulness of his music
if you listen to this composition or or the holy presence of Joan of Arc for 10 cellos it's just phenomenal it just comes roaring out i think of this music as horses riding over your head just imagine a fleet of horses galloping towards you and they just don't stop they write right over you and then as they ride over you stand up and start cheering that's part of what eastman makes me feel mixed with this horror so in a way the horror of mark fisher's death and the horror of Trump's election and the accumulating horror of African-American male and female deaths at the hands of police all of that in a way created a
feeling of anger like just continuous anger and and the idea of a work that could respond to that work, respond to those feelings, respond to those events, the continuous drumbeat of death, in a way, at a certain point you realise that maybe an Eastman composition would be a way to do that. So to me Eastman's music now speaks to the kind of what people call the afterlife of slavery. It speaks to that moment that we're in, in which the violence visited on African-American and Hispanic queer people of color, that violence is not contingent
and accidental, it's structural and in some way functional to the system. That kind of permanent exposure to violence and to death, Eastman's militancy spoke to that. So we started thinking of Eastman's as its own protest music, not hip-hop, not grime, but its own form of music. And so the more we thought about it, the more we thought we had to engage with it and so I think that those are the reasons why Eastman's music just started mattering to us it just became the matter at hand a matter of life
and death actually can you talk a bit about um how the work is kind of structured and dramatized because it begins with unfortunately for those who haven't seen the full work they wouldn't know that there's a speeches both at the beginning at the end so be nice to hear about those speeches how they function and how they relate to the the performance in the middle i'll say a bit about that briefly so um at the beginning of the video you see um a poet and a researcher called dante Michel, and he gives a six-minute speech. And at the end of the video, you see a performer and composer called Elaine Michener,
and she gives the same speech in very different styles. And then in the middle, you see the four pianists, Rolf Hines, Zubin Kanga, Siwon Reese, and Eliza McCarthy. You see the four pianists who perform Eastman's 1978 composition, Evil Nigger, for 23 minutes. No, 27 minutes. It's a 23 minute composition, but they play it for 27 minutes because that's take five that you see. So, and the speech that Dante starts with and Elaine finishes with is a speech that Julius Eastman himself gave on 16th January 1980 in Northwestern University in Evanston outside Chicago.
he was invited to present three of his compositions the composition Evil Nigger that you hear here the composition Crazy Nigger which you do not hear and the composition Gay Gorilla that you don't hear so there were four pianos on stage Eastman is playing one of those pianos and so there's been a controversy in the campus of Northwestern University which at the time was a famously racist campus and Eastman had put posters of the concerts around the campus and some of the African-American students had complained because the inflammatory nature of the titles combined with the racist atmosphere on campus and they were outraged by these titles.
So there was a meeting and Eastman agreed to take the posters down. So Eastman steps onto the stage, the Picksteiger Concert Hall or Northwest University and he gives this six minute speech in which he lays out his philosophy of music and then he lays out his concepts of the titles, like why so we understand that he has a kind of economic understanding of the term nigger and he has a militant understanding of the term guerrilla and these feed into a kind of, actually an unprecedented So this is 1980, it's before. Reagan has not yet come into power, but he clearly is on the rise. The Soviet Union have occupied Afghanistan.
The Palestinian Liberation Organization are at war with the Israeli Defense Force. Thatcher has come into power in Britain. So this is the first time we have been able to do this. Britain. So what we now know is neoliberalism is resurgent. Popular authoritarianism is on the rise and it's in this context that Eastman steps onto the stage and gives this six-minute speech and to absolute silence. People are like, what is this? He gives the speech and then he sits down and then plays the performances. So inviting Dante and Elaine to speak those, it brings this
element from the past because the idea of our video is that, you know, when Eastman talks about the gay guerrillas, he's talking about the future. He says gaydom doesn't have the courage yet of Afghani guerrillas or PLO guerrillas, but he hopes that it will and in a way that the idea of the video is that the four pianists they are the gay guerrillas from 37 years into Eastman's future so that the composition calls to the future and we are in his future and they have come not to Eastman but to us because we need courage. The idea is that we ourselves, that's to say you, that's to say us, that's to say
spectators, listeners, audiences, we need courage and fortitude and perseverance for the struggles that we are in right now. So in a way, the idea is that they've come to train us in concentration and focus and a certain kind of intensity. And so this is the idea. They come from Eastman's future to speak to us. So we think, in a way, we think of the video as a kind of training film to bring us up to scratch for the wars that we have to fight. Anjali, perhaps you can talk about how it was staged, like the aesthetic decisions, how you filmed it.
There's a poem by Eastman which I'll just read quickly. He writes, light streams through the darkness opening the caves light sorrow light cannot shine where no light is truth is light and darkness more light more light more light more light light is not darkness from Julius Eastman notes in the score for the moon's silent modulation from 1970 you know one has to remember that Julius Eastman comes from an esoteric Christian background, like a liturgical
background. So this sense of light has a kind of multiple meanings in terms of the idea of enlightenment as such and this idea of wanting to scramble out of the platonic cave cave into the light. But there's also, so for us this sense of light and darkness, yeah we wanted to I suppose highlight these ideas by making the darkness darker and making the light light lighter in the film. The sense that, so we use the
literally the kind of black surface like my shoes like the black shiny surface of the piano and works with this lighting rig that actually the idea of it comes from another film that we made on Don Cherry and the Cadona project where we use this LED light system that would reflect onto the pianos to baby grand and pianos. This, in a way, created like a protective, invisible, not cage, but let's say an invisible aura, or a visible aura of refracted light around the musicians and around Eastman's composition. What is not present in the fact that we have two people,
front-ending and back-ending the work. This also for us was protective, but what isn't present is the fact that more people can say those words. So I think what we wanted to almost do was kind of create this stage, this, all of these ideas, but through these camera angles in a way. So the camera angles capture all these different, as you can see, they capture all these different lines of light in a way, which I kind of think has a quite spiritual, futuristic, spiritual sense to it.
And also, when Glissant, Edward Glissant, talks about opacity. Opacity isn't a state of opaqueness. Opacity shines light back, shines a different light back. So I think to go to this idea of the structure of feeling, as Raymond Williams talks about it, a structure of feeling, I think this was very much what we were trying to create here, to produce strange feelings, to produce a new state, a new sensibility around Eastman's work. I'm gonna bring Annie in here because there's an upcoming exhibition at Van Aave Museum called Xenogenesis, is that right?
Title? So Annie, perhaps you want to say? Sure, I mean, I just loved watching this again this morning. It's for all of those reasons, like this incredible feeling of the call to order, this incredible feeling of energy, of course, discipline, intensity, as you said. And we're going to end the whole exhibition, so it's an exhibition with ten rooms, with this work. And I think we did this really consciously, right, as that moment where you maybe are calling to order the gay guerrilla to come, or the evocation of new possibility. And this, I think, I mean, to me, this piece, of course, brings to mind so much of what you're thinking about in relation to not only how he brilliantly enunciates the kind of racialized regimes of representation already and combats them or refuses them and this kind of disruptive nature I think
that is shot through the whole show in so many ways. It's going to be a show that I think Kojo said so beautifully, it's not a survey, it's not a retrospective, we're calling it a cross-section, a kind of an exploration, what would it be if we put these things together. So I'm kind of very excited by the idea that that intense moment is what sort of throws you out of the exhibition at the end and it will be a project that will pretty much look at the last from 2011 to now very again what's so exciting about what Kojo and Anjali are doing I think is this that there's a sort of refuting of this comprehensiveness of subjectivity and the whole idea of xenogenesis and again I
I think you can both talk much more beautifully about it than I, but is an evocation from, and the title of a trilogy from Octavia Butler. And it's really us trying to think about this idea of a generative alienation, a generative becoming something else. But something that, again, as we said, refuses the old regimes, refuses the toxicity of what we've already produced and tries to search for something new. So I think on that level this project is so evocative and exciting in relation to that. I'm aware of time so I'm thinking it might be good to see if there's any questions in the audience.
I can't see very well. If not I have more. Thank you. Hi. Yeah, thanks for a beautiful session and a beautiful sharing of beautiful material. I want to ask just basic sort of musicological questions, because I'm not at all familiar with new music personally. And I'm interested just to know what perhaps within the context of new music was particular in Julius Eastman's cadence or rhythm, or I don't know even what the terms are. I mean the only thing that I sort of gained from watching this presentation was the sense in which the hands were kind of picked up like claws.
Like it sort of physiognomically did something to the players to kind of claw at the keyboard in this sort of strange way. So I'm just interested to hear more about what was particular about the music itself. I think Dante and Elaine, I just recently had a conversation with them about this and we were talking about the, we did a podcast with them actually which is going to come out, but we were talking a lot about this, Julius Eastman's compositions. I mean I would suggest listening to as many as you can that are on unjust malaise. But I think one, I mean he
is a composer, right, so he's playing with time. He's working with time. He's also setting almost like a challenge to musicians and one, because they're difficult pieces to play and there is a sense that Eastman knows that there won't be that many black musicians maybe that will be able to that will be not that they won't be able to but they won't be main they won't be many that will play his music some people said to us for instance why didn't you have african-american or africa black british musicians playing this and actually it's not that you know pianists don't exist but well number one it was it was hard to find four
pianists that could all play this piece and also who had been working together for enough time so it would have meant finding some some African American or black British pianist or black European pianist and then putting together for a couple of years to play this because that's how challenging it is but I think the Eastman does set this challenge to musicians are you going to be able to play this piece it's a physical test I mean these these musicians are like gymnasts they are like Olympic kind of gymnasts. I mean they played this piece six to seven times
over the over two days and it's a hard piece to play for 27. The composer you can see is it's the hands are just like type right they're always typing you know and they look like these biomorphic forms like stabbing the piano. I mean the militancy is there in the in the in the composition you can hear it. It's It's horses, but it's also like, I don't know, it's also like hailstones or, again, there is something kind of like esoteric in the way that music is written. If you listen to the holy presence of Joan of Arc as well, you're listening to something that comes from beneath, definitely.
I mean, I think you can't avoid a kind of allegory of the chromatic black keys and the diatonic white keys. You can't help but play out that stark opposition between chromatic and diatonic between black and white you can't help but transpose that into a racial allegory and in a certain way once we realized that we would work with these four pianos these four pianists who are the um in the uk they are the greatest living interpreters of eastman's music um zubin
Kanga he said maybe 23 people can play Eastman in the UK. Undoubtedly that's different in the US but we were in the UK specifically in London. So once you realize that then in a way we decided to to press into that that ready the ready-made racial allegory that the piano brings and that allegory is is that allegory is simultaneously an allegory about tonality. So Eastman's music plays on a relation between the racial, the tonal, and the spiritual. And that's continually refigured in his music. And, you know, as the music goes on,
all of the ecstatic intensity drops away. it starts subtracting, it starts diminishing, it becomes more pointillist. And Eastman created a particular kind of notation to describe and to map this kind of arc. And there is a particular kind of tonal challenge that he sets. and when you compare his work to Steve Reich or to Philip Glass or to John Adams or to Meredith Monk, it's clear that Eastman is maybe not necessarily a minimalist at all.
That's what people called him because the term minimalism has a prestige. So in a way people thought they were elevating Eastman by calling him a minimalist, but what if he isn't at all? You might call him a maximalist. There were different terms, but I think of him as a certain kind of ecstatic music. In a way, I think of it as a new sacred music. I think Eastman was trying to elevate what he called black forces. That was his term, black forces, which is a certain kind of spiritual and energetic impulse. and they were being manifested in this movement between the racial, the tonal and the spiritual.
And that's continually playing out from the moon silent modulation that Anjali quoted right through to the end of his life in 1990 where he's, at the end of his life, he's writing works like Hail Mary and Buddha. so then the kind of the pan-spiritualist impulse in his music takes form. So I think those are some of the things at stake. And when you listen to Unjust Malaise, that becomes clear that that's part of the project, to create a kind of new music that enhances black forces, that charges them, and that invites people into them because they are already there inside of America.
You know, in fact, America is nothing but, you know, American music is a kind of continual negation and incorporation of black forces, you know. Okay, there's lots more to say, but I'll stop there. I was wondering whether you could talk, because yesterday in Ramon Amaro's talk, he ended with a kind of looking at abstraction in relation to questions of identity. So I was wondering if one or both of you could,
I know it's something you've talked to me about in the past. So, maybe one of you. I think the question of abstraction relates very well to the project that we've embarked on with Annie. I think I'd like to relate this question of abstraction to the question of xenogenesis. Xenogenesis is a term formulated by the African-American science fiction writer Octavia Estelle Butler. It's the name for the trilogy of books that she wrote at the end of the 1980s. Dawn from 1987, Adulthood Rites from 1988, and Imago from 1989. So these are three novels which rethink
the relation between humans and aliens. So Xenogenesis translates as outside becoming, Xeno outside, Genesis becoming, or becoming outside, but you could also say alien becoming or becoming alien. So if you take these as a diagram of forces and processes, then the question of abstraction relates to this because the question of abstraction relates to the necessity to undo the given, to undo the given image of what the human is and to find a way to get in touch with that which is not human within the human,
that which is inhuman within the human, whether you want to call that the drives. If you're a Freudian or a Locanian, you could call that the drives. But Octavia Butler calls that the xeno. So the xeno is that which is outside the human but inside it. And of course, in kind of philosophical terms, the notion of the black, the negro, is that which is outside the human. So the figure of the black person is that figure which opens the genre of the human. human. That's to say race. What is race? Race is a genre. This is Sylvia Winter's notion.
Race is a genre of the human in which the human generates, continually generates that which is supposed to be outside the human, which then disturbs what we think of as the human. So it's this complex relation in which the question of race opens out onto the question of what it is to be human, what it is to be a being, what it is to become human, and what it is to become a being. So the question of race and the question of human immediately opens out onto the questions of ontology and ontogenesis between being and becoming. And the question of ontogenesis leads us to the question of xenogenesis. An abstraction is a vector, it's a line, it's a way of getting in touch with those
forces, forces which are there all the time but need to be summoned, invoked, nurtured and cared for. So in a way it requires a practice to become outside or to open to the outside that is already you. There is a practice that's required and the sonic practices are as good as any other. I think you could also apply the idea of a practice to kind of the Advidanta Yoga Sutra kind of philosophy around consciousness and all of that, but that's a whole other thing. I think of generative alienation and the practice of generative alienation as also a kind of
a practice of mutation or a practice of becoming mutants, which happens, where does it happen? And I think when one begins to realize that the inner city is a place like London, which was where Kojo and I both born, where one could have time to think and become and practice being alienated as such, you realize that this gives birth to an aesthetic, this gives birth to a series of refusals. You can find a way to protect your refusal through creating a practice. When you begin to realize that one's socialization,
one's political socialization, one's ontology ontology is completely under threat now where you know once it's it starts with Windrush they've revoked the citizenship of this young woman will they revoke our citizenship you know I mean these are scary upsetting depressing times I would never have begun I've never have imagined this would happen in the UK where you know we might we might lose our citizenship or I mean I can't even bear to think about it but you know where this threat exists which is you know this awful Sadiq Khan is kind of like you know propagating so
you would begin to realize that this this history of diasporic aesthetics are are being actually eroded. In some cases, and Britain places like, I mean every place has them, but I would say in the UK there was a definite exposure of those practices. On television, in literature and in music, not so much in art necessarily, in the 70s or 60s, but in the 80s, with the Black Arts Movement, these movements began
to be kind of documented, I suppose, and presented. But certainly one begins to realize that your history is being destroyed. because Kojo and I have always been very interested and always felt that we needed to, this idea of passing on. Dante, again, we had this conversation recently about how does queer black presence get passed on? How does queer black culture get passed on? Because there's no children always, he said we don't give birth to children, so, you know, I mean he said that. So there's this sense that this is a history that could die. How does it get passed on?
Kojo and I have been very determined in our work as curators to present the work of other artists. You know, because there is a sense that also like in the 80s and in the 90s, there was a huge amount of support, or let's say there was a lobby for support, public funding for black art movements. That's all been taken away, more or less. I'm running out of time, but I did want to fit in a last question to Annie. as a as a museum as someone who works in museums in a way this morning is called setting the record straight so I was just wondering since we have you here if you could
give us also a response to that in terms of what's the responsibility and role of the museum what's the challenge, what can a museum do? Big question, I know. Well, it's amazing. One of the things I feel really happy about is as I'm leaving the museum that I'm accompanied by these two amazing artists in the last show I'm doing there and that show is going to come to Emma. And I feel like all of the questions that they're bringing to the table are completely vital to us understanding the potential again of the museum space beyond its classic modernist, violent, strident sort of position as a kind of epistemological gatekeeper
and, as we said, a kind of a very white institution and one that absolutely excluded many, many others. So I think it's all of that potential. And we've had a really great conversation about the idea of the exhibition as a trap, as a set of expectations and behaviours and how one can play with that. So I think the potential of the museum is to understand all of those structures and to think what now, what next? So it's a very propositional project and I really do mean that. I feel like I will take the lessons from Xenogenesis very much on to the next museum because I think it does exactly what Eastman is doing, exactly what we're talking about, understanding the terms and the nature of the call to order and the fight ahead.