So we're going to have a conversation. We'll talk for about 30 minutes. And then of course we want to open it up to questions and comments and thoughts from everybody. And actually, if people have burning thoughts, they can actually interrupt. Why not? There's a lot to say about this work. There's a lot to say about the turn towards Eastman in the last few years. years here in New York, the recent festival of the kitchen, before that in Philadelphia, over the last two years in Berlin, a couple of years back in London, then the previous
event in London and also in Oslo, maybe in other places as well. Documenta. Yeah, Documenta. How could I forget that? Venice as well. Yeah, Venice as well. So, you know, so the uptake, so the turn towards Eastman is an ongoing phenomenon, and there are many kind of critical reasons why Eastman's music matters now. And so as a way to open up that question of why Eastman's music means so much to people now and why so many people from different moments and different points within the world of so-called new music and within the world of art are turning towards his work, his legacy.
Maybe one way of starting is just to ask you, Jace, how you came into contact with Eastman, and just to recreate for us that sense of encounter with the work, and then we can do that as well, just to set the scene. Yeah, sure. So it was actually way back in 2011, and I, actually, the performer had commissioned a little radio play, And I knew, and for space I had a piano in it. And so I knew I wanted, I said, oh, this is a really interesting opportunity to kind of dive into piano sounds. To think about, I knew I wanted to do live processing, pull the piano into the laptop and so forth. And I knew I wasn't going to write the music. So I started thinking, well, who, what could I use that would somehow be conducive to this?
So in a sense it was this very kind of formal investigation. And then I was talking to my friend, Sharifa Rhodes Pitts, who's in the house. And she was telling her about this project and she said, well hey, you should check out the music of this guy, Julius Eastman. And so, and the first time, and this was 2011, I went, I heard it, I was blown away. It's muscular, it's romantic, it's dense, it's epic, it's funny. It does all these things. And then I was like, you know, New York in the 70s and 80s, such a fertile time, I know so much about music, I've read so much about it, much about it and I had not encountered him anywhere in the written record. Of course I'd heard him on Meredith Monk and looking back he was very very present. But from that moment thinking okay this, as these scores he left us, they are such powerful things they continue to communicate and the sphere,
this affective sphere around these things seems so rich. So I said, okay, this is what it's gonna be. This is something I wanna work with and sort of engage and revive his antagonisms. Actually, I think when we first came across Eastman was about 10 years ago, something like that. Was it the Gajiners precisely at the moment? I think for me it was with the release of the album Unjust the Lays, which is an anagram of genius Eastman. And I think in making this project, you're working from the, I mean your work is also very much based on interpretation of Eastman's scores.
and I was wondering because in relation to the way we approached this we had camera cameras and lights and we were filming people you know these four this ensemble but before we get into that we could talk about that but I was interested in your relationship to interpretation in terms of It's funny. To me, it was important not to respect the work of Julius Eastman. That was kind of a core consideration. And so I said, okay, I'm going to work with these two amazing pianists, David Frandin and Emily Manzo, and they are going to play in quote-unquote
faithful renditions of Evil Digger and G-Gorilla. And the scores will have marked things down to the second. There are moments where you get loose, but it's also very specific. And So there being very faithful, but on top, I'm pulling up all this taking sound from the piano, but then always improvising, always kind of messing things around. And in the middle of the Jewish Eastman Memorial Dinner, there's this whole section where the music stops, and suddenly I'm having a Skype interview, being interviewed for a job as a Jewish Eastman impersonator. And it's a lot of human resource language, and it just shifts into another way of thinking about it. But so there I was like, okay, this person who is existing on the edges of these various archives, how can I engage with that? And so I said, okay, well, reverence can be a form of forgetting, so I don't want to do that.
And thinking of Eastman as a problematic figure, you can even get it in the text here, sort of imperious, kind of demanding. He was purposely putting these titles that would limit his entree to the historical record, that would limit who could say them when they could be performed, so on and so forth. And I was like, this is amazing. And it's not to me to just sort of re-present this music. I need to both interrupt it and implicate myself and present a kind of double-blistic space where people can hear the pianos, but they're going to get the sort of messiness of my interference or a rough and tumble collaboration on top of that. I like your point about the revival of antagonisms.
I first heard about Julius Eastman, I was online at some moment in 2007 and I came across this playlist by the American artist Sam Durant. We had a show in London which I'd missed, but there was a playlist of 20 compositions, and I knew 18 of them. Two of them I didn't remember. One was by the African American composer Donald Fox, a composition called Dialectics for Two Grand Pianos, which is an amazing composition and an amazing title. And the other was Julius Eastman, Evil Nigger. And I was like, how come I don't know Dungle Fox or Julius Easton? I was kind of irritated.
So I Googled them both straight away. And on YouTube, there was Unjust Malaise. Mary Jane Leach, the composer, had worked on it for a decade. And somebody posted it all on YouTube. So I listened to it all. and I was so shocked by the ecstatic intensity, the mixture of militancy, joy and anger, which seemed to far surpass whatever it was I thought minimalist music was. It seemed to it seemed to move far beyond the minimalism that I knew and loved. I mean, I was just shocked. And then I realised I'd heard J.B.C. Smith.
There he is in Dinosaur L, in Arthur Russell's Go Bang. That's him singing I want to go bang. Bang, bang, go bang, go. That's him. I'd heard it years ago, I just didn't realise. That's him with that incredible baritone. That's him playing the organ on Corn Belt. So there he is, he's an ally of Arthur Russell, he's playing with Meredith Monk, he's playing with Frederick Chesky, he's playing with Hans-Peter Hentzer, but none of his own music is recorded and released properly in his own lifetime. So with Eastman I always have this, on one hand, a kind of zealotry. I become a missionary.
I think maybe a lot of people have this. I become a missionary, I press it on people, I become a pusher. Look, it's Eastman. Just stop what you're doing and pay attention. First of all, you should know it. If you think you are invested in music, you should know Eastman. You just should. So I just become really zealous. But also, and I've said this before, but it hasn't gone away, the zealotry and the kind of impassioned, permanent persuasion is inseparable and indivisible from a kind of fear and a kind of horror.
a horror that Eastman's music was forgotten to the extent that it took me until 2007 to discover it, and a kind of fear that an avant-garde figure of such brilliance could be erased, and then a kind of anger that that erasure somehow persisted from his death in 1990 right the way through to 2007 for me. And then a horror that if Eastman could disappear, could be disappeared. Naively enough, neither me nor anybody I know is safe from the forces of erasure.
The forces that work steadily and tire and kind of ceaselessly tend to erase black avant-garde brilliance. So this mixture of fear, anger, dread and joy always accompanied with Eastman. So, you know, years go by, I push Eastman on everybody. I see, you know, different people working with Eastman, but nobody's made a video yet. You know, so we talk a lot about how to make a video in which music is not the soundtrack to a video, music is the matter of the video.
Because you know, when you have music with a video, there is a tendency to make the music the soundtrack of it. So the music is in a certain sense of structured subordination to the image. But the idea was how can we make a music in which the image, the montage, the camera, the lighting, everything, is informed by and at the service of the music. This was the question. How would we do that? And this is a question we really kind of turned over for years and years until one day there was this invitation to make a work in Sharjah and somehow we just said, hey, you know what? Philadelphia and Sharjah. And there was this opportunity because the money was there.
The money came from Shadrach, the publishing was from Israel. So then it became a question of, okay now we can put these ideas into action. Now we can actually go ahead and make this work. So that's kind of my encounter with Islam. I was interested in what you said about Eastman in relation to this kind of question of him being a problematic figure. I mean, I like that. You were just talking outside. I think the thing that is very, kind of, the first thing you notice when you come to America is how polite people are in this kind of way.
way and you're kind of seduced by it kind of have a nice day how are you this kind of thing and everybody is very sort of polite and nice and it's nice it's genuinely a nice feeling because people are just you know you know um the face is nice um and um you know and then you kind of realize oh it's because everyone's just training there's no health care and it's all awful and Everyone has to be nice so they can impress other people who can help them get a market behind them. Especially in the art world, it's just so much about that. So in Britain, because we had a really good welfare system, which the fascists, the Tories are trying to get rid of and are slowly getting rid of,
you know, it meant that a lot of people could make music and be poor and live safely and go to university and have healthcare and not give a damn about being visible to a kind of global audience. They could just get on with it and be weird and be angry and be critical and create arguments and throw things around and you know, I mean that to me is life. I understand what else is like if you cannot have a good argument, if you cannot be as strange as possible and as angry as possible, as well as being happy and have a nice day. So in a world where trained as the kind of social motivator, somebody like Eastman was
obviously wanting to kind of, you know, fight this in his own way and he used every single sort of encounter with people in a way to kind of almost create this antagonism. The fact that it was art, new music, was a way to kind of make the antagonism convivial. But it still upset people. And the term, the N-word, because in Britain it's not so polite to use that with so much ease, you know. You know, that term, when it was spoken by him in this way, it was much more uncomfortable than it is now. I don't think it could be even more uncomfortable than it is now.
No, but I mean in terms of hip-hop hadn't sort of, you know, let's say, exported it in the way it has now. now but yeah it's obviously very uncomfortable now. But this speech that, not speech, but this introduction that Julius Eastman gives, I mean you know this one, Minister of State, but it was in 1980 in Northwestern. So when Kojo and I thought about making this work, we were thinking, well, we have to include that. And we have to also include it by, in a way, with two people.
Because they are, because it is, and turn it into a performance in itself. So Elaine Michener, who you see performing, is a vocalist, an experimental musician, a vocalist in the new music scene. And so the way she's performing, I don't know if anybody noticed, is as if it is a score in itself. She is actually performing the idea of the third part, of the third measure if you like. And she's performing it with rage, you know, because, and this was her first take, and she did it so, So, I've seen this obviously hundreds of times now, but each time I see it, I learn something from it.
And the first person was Dante Misho, who's a poet and a theorist, and he's studying in London at Birkbeck. And it was actually the night before I thought, we really need to find a queer African-American to read out this part. and the night before we were at dinner with a friend and I said, we need someone tomorrow, we're shooting. And she happened to have this gay African-American there who was in law at Birkbeck and he said, I know about you, which was a surprise. But then he said, I have a friend who loves his work and that's how we found Stantea. turned up the next day so excited to kind of perform this because he obviously knew about it
for us the uh the the talks about the um filming aspect of it um and we were also discussing outside with jace about this how the camera extends um the uh the piece in terms of its performance. We are used to hearing, you know, Isla. Music is, it has a, this was quite a challenge to us, because obviously we've been brought up with great music video, being the age we are, or whatever. But, you know, it was, it was, we studied like all kinds of images in terms of photography and also films of where pianists had been filmed.
and I realized that nobody had actually focused that much on the hands. And when you begin to focus on the hands, you get a whole other kind of relationship to the performance of the piece. Because it's so physically difficult to play. The hands then doubled on the kind of mirror of the piano, increase the kind of militancy. It's almost like they're typing, right? And the other thing was light because Cojo mentioned that because light played a huge role because there's this famous quote by Eastman on light which I can't remember right now but it's something like more light more light. and I think it's kind of referencing this idea of the Enlightenment as a kind of provocation to the Enlightenment.
But then Edouard Glissant, a poet and theorist, he writes a lot about this idea of opacity. But opacity for him isn't a space of absorption, it's also a space of refraction. So the black mirror of the piano and the light fitting that we created allowed us to use the black mirror of the piano to refract light and to use the camera to catch that refraction in many different angles. I'm sorry if that's all too much information but I decided to go through those. But I was interested if we could just talk a little bit more about this idea of the problematic connection with Eastman.
Yeah, in a way, for me, you're kind of riffing off the nice American thing. Like there's something nice nowadays about programming Eastman. You say, okay, like our classical music series is very old and dead white men everywhere, you know, run by older... And then you put Eastman on the thing and it's like, okay, it's cool, it's inclusive, we love it. And so on the one hand, I'm torn, I think to me the exciting thing is the challenges and opportunities Eastman presents to thinking of what a sort of radical, clear, black historiography could be. So there's the impulse of we need to, he has been disappeared, as you say, let's proliferate in many different ways,
mutate and spread. But then also think of what are the sort of the ontological challenges that Eastman presents to even thinking of what does it mean to meet an icon? Or someone like Lee Lozano, your conceptualist in the 70s, who did the dropout piece and dropped out in the art world. What are these moments of saying, what can we subtract? Is this a loss? How does the sort of the damage, you know, often the story of Eastman losing his scores at Hopkins Square Park and all these things, various types of self-destruction, thinking of these as intentional decisions in many cases, both the decision to write this epic piece and then to be careless with it. So how can Love Interested in that strange and pressured play?
I think there's a really good point because there's a kind of martyrology around Eastland. And part of the return to Eastland is a kind of penitence. It's the new music world apologising for its structural racism and apologising for its treatment of Eastman. And in a way there's a trace element of that in the video. The way the pianists who have effectively been, you know, on one hand they interpret Eastman, on the other hand they have been put to work by Eastman. But you know, when Elaine is talking, they look like penitents.
that they are kind of sitting in a state of attention and they're very calm. So on one hand there is this element of kind of mea culpa around the resurgence of Eastman. And that speaks to questions of legacy and questions of aesthetic reparation. Part of what we wanted to do was return to Eastman via Édouard Glissant's notion of a prophetic vision of the past. So that, you know, the speech that Anjali referred to, the speech that Dante Michaud and Elaine Michaud speak, that's from 16th January 1980 in the Pig Steiner Concert Hall in Northwestern University, which is in Evanston, of course.
So Julius Eastman steps up onto the stage. He's wearing camouflage. He was a kind of a leather guy. Normally he wore leather trousers, motorbike boots, leather jacket and a big keychain. This time he was wearing camera, military camera. And he gives this speech and then he sits down and he's one of the four pianists. And they play this music. And part of the kind of informing idea of our video is that, you know, remember the last sentence where he says, you know, I don't yet feel that Gagum has the courage of Afghani guerrillas and gay guerrillas, but I hope that it might.
and he hopes that he might have the courage to be a gay gorilla. The informing idea of our video is that the pianists themselves, that's Zubin Kanga, the Indian Australian performer who does the count up, the older man is Rolf Hines, the woman with black hair, we call her the Vermeer Lady, that's Eliza McCarthy, And the blonde woman is Siwan Rees. So when we do the installations we always have these names printed. The idea is that they are the gay gorillas. Like 37 years after Eastman looks forward to them, they've arrived. So they've arrived not for Eastman, not for his
music but for us, us here now, all of us, spectators, listeners, because the idea is that effectively the idea is that they are training us, they're training us in vigilance, in resilience, in steadfastness, in concentration, in courage, in what Eastman calls boundless courage. That was the working title for the video, boundless courage, which we needed to actually do the, to dare ourselves to make the video in the first place. So the idea is that we, that's to say, you know, people who consider themselves to be freaks, maladjusted people, people who consider themselves, you know, people who have a hard
time adjusting to capitalism, all of these people are facing all kinds of wars, all kinds of battles, whichever field they're in, and these are real battles, and frankly we need all the weapons we can get, we need all the training we can get. I feel like I need training. I feel like I need to be better equipped for the wars and battles, small and small and large and that's how we that's kind of that's how we saw this video um it's a training film um and so these and so the the the pianists are you know they have an esprit de corps you know they have a togetherness they they're communicating continually they're signaling
to each other, they are bound together, so they are warriors on the spiritual plane of music. And for us Eastman is protest music. It's not hip hop, it's not grime, it's not rock, but it's protest music. It's ecstatically angry music. It's beautiful, it has a beautiful rage. It has a necessary rage. When they start, within about two minutes, you can see those fingers racing and it's like horses galloping over your head, kicking you in the head, pounding you into the mud. And the horses are just racing over your head for 27 minutes. And it's ecstatic. But it's also like a sustained escape. There's a sustained run. It feels
I love this idea of being sort of hailed by Eastman's work in the future, calling us to action, because it kind of plays with something about these ideas of historiography, what that might look like if time is non-linear. And so it happens at all different scales. You get us being trained and activated by this thing that happened in 1980. But then within these piano pieces themselves, as he explains very carefully, he's like, they're proceeding organic. It's not some sort of aero or a sequencer or hierarchical thing. It's a very distinct way of thinking about the way music organizes time. And then clicking out even further, his whole quote, you know, he's on this sort of proto-Afro-pessimist tip. He's like, okay, socially determined, nigger, it's the birth of the Enlightenment,
birth of American capitalism, but now it's this sort of atemporal problem. It's ontological, it's messy, and it spreads backwards and forwards in time. And he's gathering the gay gorillas. Decades past, decades present, John Bark has been called upon, we're being called upon. That's a brilliant way of putting it. Maybe now it's time to go to some questions, because of course we can just talk forever and just ignore you. But since you've come out to see this and come out to hear us, then maybe it's a good time to go to some thoughts from everybody gathered here. So if anybody wants to say anything, now's your chance. Please speak up. And we do have a hand-pour in the glass.
We can just carry on. Oh, is that Sharifa? Great, good. Hello everyone. I was interested in the figures, and I was thinking of them as figures, and curious about The story you've just given us of them as the Gangarillas, was it one that you gave them, or did you depend on the music to give that to them? Because looking at their faces, I was wondering what the operation was. Was it music working on their faces, or was it also part of the direction?
And then it was very moving in general, and I'm really happy to have the chance to do this. wanting to see it since last spring. And I'm interested in what you said about that they've been put to work by Eastman, and the relationship of those musicians, those particular musicians to the music. My ongoing, James Leno, I've known as Hey, desire to see this music perform by all-black musicians at the same time, and what that would mean, just as the idea of calling forward these gay gorillas, like would anybody be able to handle the four evil niggers at the same time? I haven't seen it for him, I've seen it for him a few different times in three different places.
I wonder about that call that's as yet unanswered. Okay, so we can take different thoughts of that. Do you want to start? Well, the intention was to find four African American African American pianist to play this piece by Julius Eastman, but it was not as easy as it might appear, not because, of course there are not that many African American pianists coming out of the music schools in the UK, especially now because of the fact that we are charged to go to university. So, but you know, even when it was free, it was, it was, you know, there's just structural racism which prevented people from joining those courses.
Then, there is the issue of the fact that actually to play, even if we found poor people, we would have needed one year or two of them actually becoming an ensemble, or something like an ensemble, as people who play music know, and you know isn't easy. So for them to all, for us to find those people, to rehearse them, to work with them, we didn't simply have the money and we just couldn't do it. There was a kind of event that happened in London based around Eastman's music and we saw this ensemble play.
And I think that when we met them it was so clear that they were so enraptured by Eastman's music and so good at playing it and have really got a yeah this kind of esplédical amongst them and the question of raciality for us then became more complicated because they are being you know they are performing this piece by Eastman and when you see them performing there is a labour in that there is a labour you know you can see any way to do this they to make this film, they performed it six times over two days. That's hard work.
But it was almost like the spirit of Eastman, I think George Lewis talks about it in the book by Mary Jane Leach, the spirit of Eastman is kind of alive, so it kind of helps that he, there's a quote by George in that book, there's a sense that he was there, sort of putting them to work. And it was almost like there is a kind of other... I mean, this wasn't intentional, but in the end of it, and now we've made it, there is a sense that this labour is present in the work, the labour of playing this Eastman piece. For us, Eastland queers the idea of being black with the idea of being gay, and we have
interpreted it also to queer the idea of political blackness. I am of South Asian descent, Kojo is of African descent, we're both born in London, but in a British context, the idea of political blackness was not based purely just on one's heritage, but one wants politics and labor movements and unions and factory movements. One forgets that Indians were also called by the N-word by the British. Or coons, all these terms were used by the British against Indians that they were colonizing. So I think the British context around these things is slightly different to the American. Yeah, I'm really aware of that context.
I wasn't even requiring her to defend her story of white women. I'm just interested in this obviously continuously to expand this call and I really appreciate the way that you expressed it. I think that would be great. I mean, of course it would be so wonderful to, if there was an ensemble, maybe there will be in the future. Maybe one existing address, I'm not sure. Is there an all black orchestra in London? The kids, the kids is waiting. Yes. Are you sure? Yeah.
Yeah, I think there were many black classically trained musicians. Zubin, Zubin Kanda, Zubin said there were 20 musicians who could play at UDC in the UK. This ensemble had been playing for the longest time. So in a way we adopted their expertise and parasitized it for our purposes. So that means taking the conditions of the actual conditions in the new music world and in a way kind of diverting them towards our purposes.
So in a way, the kind of structural racism that existed in Eastman's time has not advanced so much in the UK. In the US, it may be different, but the UK has these specific conditions. So in a way this was our first touch with the new music world, which is, as you might imagine, its own habitus. But to answer your other point, we did kind of give the musicians this notion of the gay gorillas, this notion of being kind of assassins on the plane of music. And so they did two takes on the first day and four takes on the second day.
And that meant when they went home they already had the nail polish. So they sat on the train with their silver nails and they said people would stare at them as if they were a cult. So in that sense it was working. So they were an ensemble but they felt even more marked out. out. So their set faces, their demeanor, their kind of mask-like serenity, all of that was instructional. Like that's kind of what we wanted them to be. No, but they didn't, sorry, they were like that we didn't have to do very much. They They had a beautiful elegance that we didn't say sit up straight and look very peaceful when you finish or anything like that.
They actually did that. They have incredible poise. That's true, but the first time we saw them was at the London Contemporary Music Festival. And they had a kind of, they were more casual. You know, they were focused but they were kind of relaxed. Here they were like militant. That's what we wanted. Cameras change things. Yeah, but there's three huge cameras with telephoto lenses. You can't get too close to them. So this is a recording studio in St. John's Wood. There's two massive cameras, but not too close. And then there's one camera which is kind of moving around. And then there's the recording engineer as well.
And then there are gaffers. There's a lot of people and it's kind of pressured. It's a pressured environment. And these people clearly, these full musicians clearly can perform under that kind of pressure. They just enter into a zone and then move through it and stay in it until the performance ends. and then they have to go and ride down, like athletes, or horses, or dancers, or politicians, or soldiers. Thank you. Anyone else? Lady in front. The previous question was a part of my question because I have been trying to think all through
this film, what should I do about this because you mentioned earlier that motivation for when making this is partially trying to figure out how to visually service into the body of sound work. Is that correct? And then now here I am looking at this thing and obviously I try not to put in my mind this kind of disturbing idea of 50 Shares of Grey kind of a skin tone thing.
Even though I am aware, obviously paler looking people playing this music and things like that. But besides the part, I was thinking also that, you know, how the contemporary classical music, you know, sort of way being presented. And, you know, how it is socially speaking, like, you know, situation in Britain, obviously a little bit different in the US. probably you can have who you initially wanted to seek out. But even that, it is partially there and here, even in contemporary time.
And then I was looking at this face painting you just mentioned, almost make me think like, okay, this is really trying to put them in a state of futuristic summer, timeless, like some kind of mask kind of thing. And then it partially worked, but still I just thought like, well, this reflected against blackness of piano and it's really is it like a kind of cliche and taking it and this how this frustration it was disturbing in a sense interesting for me but i i have been really some
like still digesting through this uh what irritates me what is the basis of you know what i'm believing in about this social structure in general. So that was a problem. It's not the question, it's just my impression from this work. Well, the face makeup was actually nothing to do with trying to look futuristic as such it was more about trying to extend or expand the unification of the sense of unity amongst them as an ensemble firstly secondly it was about this idea of refraction of light the nails and the
silver makeup and the lighting was about extending the sense of reflection there was nothing to do with reflecting out of a black or I mean it was not known in I'm trying to pretend that black does it. It's a black space with these lights. Of course the film, when it's graded, you get a much greater sense of the darkness, and you don't see the curtains. This is an ungraded version actually. We didn't have the money to grade the spit-screen version. In fact, the makeup idea came from thinking about how to disturb facial recognition patterns in the internet surveillance of faces. So it was an issue we were trying all kinds of things out on their faces like circles
and you know if you want to kind of defeat the internet facial recognition the way the surveillance system works to watch your face which is now in places like China just normal and probably will be here soon. There are ways, we learned about this, and there was another artist working with this, Zach Blass, who we found very interesting, and so we started to attempt to do all these black circles and do all these different things on their faces. It didn't really work. And then I thought, let's just take the light fitting itself and use that as a symbol on their faces.
on their faces. The light-fitting being this object above them which in some moments you see, which acts as a kind of almost device for refraction. So that was that part of it. But I can speak to the other part. I mean I haven't seen Fifty Shades of Grey, nor have I really worked. You don't need to... But, you know, once we decided to work with this ensemble, after spending several months trying to find this other ensemble of upper-diasporic musicians, once we decided to work with these four brilliant musicians, then we realised that there would be this immediate high contrast
between the black of the piano, the white of the three performers, the black of the keys and the white of the keys. We realized this was there and we decided to intensify it. So there is an aesthetic decision to exaggerate the contrasts of black and white to as great a degree as we can. So part of the irritation might be the insistence, the way the video insists on blackness and whiteness and continually aestheticizes it. So Paul Feinfeld, the artist, talked about the Finnish fetish of the piano itself.
He related the polish and the veneer and the lacquer of the piano to Eastman's kind of leather fetish, his kind of motorbike fetish which is also a kind of queering of a policeman's black uniform so he had a very elaborate notion of the kind of the exaggeration of a kind of digital blackness which comes through even more in the installation and then three of the pianists we pushed the whites of the pianists so they are white, they really are as white as we could make them And the idea is that it's not especially natural. There's an element of exaggeration and denaturalization, which you could call a cliché, but I prefer to call an archetype, or I would actually much prefer to call it an avatar.
I think they are avatars. I think the speakers are avatars, and I think the pianists are avatars. They are something like figures who incarnate, intensities, and then we have to make the video itself participate in these forces. So the video is not a document of a performance. The video is... The idea is that we're trying to make video music. We're trying to make music with shots. We're trying to make music with montage. That means we're trying to make music with colour.
And so the kinds of irritation you feel are because of the insistent nature of this. The video never really stops making its point over and over and over, just like the music itself doesn't. Part of the pleasure and irritation of Eastman's music, Part of what I love about Eastman's music is the way in which it involuntarily plays you back. So you will leave, you will be walking down the road, and parts of the music will return. Not because you summoned them, but they summoned you. Tomorrow you will be somewhere doing something totally random, and large parts of the music will just start playing back.
They will play you back. and in a way when the music plays you back part of what you do is then you start humming it and then you pass it on, you find someone to pass it on to so you become a vector for the music, this is what we plan and in a way what we want to do is in that vector that vector of transmission when the music starts travelling in a way we also want to fill that vector with many other things as well things which in a way are disturbing and should be disturbing. You know, the hyper-naturalization, the hyper-contrast, all of those things are part of the vector. Sorry, because I just want to add just to say one thing.
I think this might seem very provocative, but I'll try to talk about it personally rather than find both in many ways, actually. The problem is with representation. I mean, would it actually make anyone feel, what would it do if everybody was black in that film? Or, you know, what would it do? You know, the art world gets away with a lot through representation, right? I remember growing up in the UK and there being a whole kind of scene around Asian music, South Asians, called the Asian Underground. It was awful, right? It was awful. And I knew that it would live and it would die, right?
It's like Greg Tate says, when there's trouble on the street, the music theorist and critic and brilliant writer Greg Tate said to us when he met us in Philadelphia, we've just made this, he said, when there's trouble on the streets, the white avant-garde come calling on our avant-garde, meaning the black avant-garde. And it just makes you want to disturb that, you know. I am tired of the way that the art market uses blackness and the way the art market uses race. This at least allows us to talk about political blackness, right? Or agro-pessimism. or the differences, say, socially in terms of race between Britain and the US, or the fact that we are all facing black people in the world,
but not just black people, all of us who are on the left, let's say, and are determining and are maybe trying to rebuild what that means, are under threat. For me, blackness is a space, as an Indian growing up in Britain, to disidentify not with being Indian but with whiteness. It was a way to understand the ergonomics of freedom. Black writing in Britain has been there for a long time. And black theorists and black thinkers, for me, were the most inspirational figures in my life. I didn't see a difference between them and me. I saw that they were extending and thinking around pop culture. People like Stuart Hall. I mean, he changed our lives. He was on television at two in the morning deconstructing newspapers, according to their racist headlines and whatever else.
you know, when Stuart Hall says, people say, Stuart Hall said, when people ask me where I'm from, when I ask somebody where they're from, I expect to be told a very long story. Stuart Hall was from the Caribbean, you know, there was Indian, he had Indian blood, Portuguese blood, African blood, and all kinds of things were circulating in him. So he really understood that sort of, the question of race and so I think you know you have to be more clever when it comes to subverting what representation is now. I think it's, I, briefly I'm gonna say that I, hop in and it's, for me it's important to remember that Eastman was in fact a weather queen. You know he was into going to the bondage and S&M clubs, which is to say the
relationships of power were always erotic. They were never naturalized and he was really interested in getting productive pleasures out of all those layers of control and permission and denial and that is utterly compatible with his work as a composer where he's putting together these very complicated texts that demands lots of training and lots of rigor and yet because of all the you know because of the titles, because of who he is, because of the positioning, that each step is, you know, eroticized or problematized or generates these discussions where we're suddenly talking about representation. Two people at least.
Yeah, I just had a kind of going back to what Jason mentioned about the kind of the resistance and kind of this notion of the positioning and use of terminology that kind of was an act of self-erasure, which maybe kind of, as you say, was kind of deliberate. I'm actually curious about this notion of the re-corporation of that act and in fact given the whole theoretical infrastructure that you guys talked about, this notion of critique of representation. So while actually I know there seems to be like a competition of who discovers Eastman first,
I'm definitely one of the most recent ones, and I saw your performance of Red Man a few years ago. And that kind of contract, that kind of tension is very productive, and it makes you confused and makes you want to know more. So I'm actually curious about this notion of visibility and if that's something that actually Eastman would, how he would think about that, this notion of representation. and kind of like this, especially in like art world, there's no historical determinacy, determinacy in this like, supposedly, and everything goes and there is actually no resistance. I mean, we can establish the fact that there is,
but I don't think there's a problem with this work in particular that's circling in different moments right now, for instance. So I'm curious, is this notion of tension and this critique of visibility, and how you guys thought about it and it worked. I'm just going to say there's no competition. It's more like, yay, you just discovered it. It's not competition, it's more enthusiasm. Do we have the other point as well? And then we can work with both questions. Does somebody else have a point? Somebody else wanted to speak? Yes. Yeah. I'm just really interested in how we're positioning East Pittsburgh and your piece specifically
and within the context of apropessimism and particularly how would they belittleize lives that theoretical framework and framework that specifically states that blackness is kind of not really black but black identity and it's impossible to build a social movement outside of that So how does the gay gorilla actually survive that certain framework, especially if it concerns the blackness and queerness, and we know that when blackness and queerness come together there's like an arc to failure, so there's a general work that is coming out of this supposed nothingness that is not devoid of meaning, which I would say that African-Americans would agree with, but it's actually the foundation, the ground, as he said, for actually articulating
what our great government could be. why she then became Nina Simone. So just ten years later Eastman entered into the conservatory and really travels through a kind of rarefied world and is really at the heart of it, teaching
in the music department at Buffalo. And he comes to New York and he's really at the intersection of many scenes. But clearly at the same time he has what Jace has described, which I've as an ascesis, as a kind of capacity for ascesis, a capacity to work on the self. So what people call self-destruction, I would call a work on the self. So that he undoves all of his success and all of his fame, actually. At one point he was a really famous performer. So I think it's not so much a question of visibility or non-visibility, it's a question
of continuous work on the self, which is running through all his music. I would say Eastman is a certain kind of spiritual ecstasy. You know, you can see running through his work there's references to Joan of Arc, at at the end of his life there's references to Buddha and to Hail Mary, there's references to Johann Sebastian Bach. I would say he was making a certain kind of spiritual music, a certain kind of, you know, atheological spiritual music. That's, and I think that's the threads more than the question of visibility and non-visibility. And then the question of AP, I mean, to me, one of the key things that Eastman is working before the AIDS crisis, which is 1980. These compositions are written 78, 79.
So the relation to the global structure of anti-blackness is just differently situated. So you would probably have to do some work to situate in a more precise way exactly how these figures, the figure of the gay guerrilla, he writes an essay called The Composer as Weakling, the figure of the weakling. you probably have to do a bit more work. I mean, we're very influenced by, there's a great musicologist called Sumant Gopena, who gave a great presentation in Berlin a few months ago, and he was talking about the role of piecemen in relation to Janais.
He was saying that the historical role of the queer black figure in the world of nationalism, So the way in which the queer black figure is a kind of rejected figure of animosity and antipathy in revolutionary nationalism meant that Eastman effectively adopted a kind of... the inverted spirituality of Jeunet, in which the criminal is the saint. and that Eastman transposed that notion, the inverted morality of the Genet-esque figure from the blacks and the balcony and the screen, the maids, he just transposed that into music
and then intensified it and proliferated it. And so I think the question of AP and the question of the global structure of the slave who stands outside of the subaltern and who does not have access to labor, that these generalized points have to be brought into contact with the actual conjuncture that Eastman was in. And in a way, we're only just beginning to have a vocabulary, the vocabulary of AP, the vocabulary formulated by Wilson, Frankie Wilson III, and Jared Sexton, David Marriott,
the vocabulary formulated by Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe. These vocabularies, I think it's taken a long time for us to think through Eastman. Eastman, in a certain sense, was ahead of the discourse. He was ahead of theorisation. He was ahead of the conceptual vocabulary. Even when you read musicology, it still hasn't really integrated these ideas of AP and of Ben Moten's notion of what he used to call black optimism. It hasn't really integrated it, these notions of parathletology. None of them have really arrived in musicology. But part of the pleasure of Eastman is the
way it's not possible not to think with these thoughts. I don't know if I have to add to that. I was entranced by so many things. Okay, it's like so if Eastman is kind of centrifugal force, pulling me further afield, decentering me, I'm just going to recommend you all to read Fran Ross's for you if you haven't yet. It's It's such a, and I mentioned it wrong, it's another one of these figures. It's a New York, black, New York novel, 1984. Hilarious, anti-centralist, filled with games. And it's this point, moments who failed to enter into the historical record.
Came close, they published in 1984. It failed. No one paid attention to it. She went to write for Richard Pryor in LA. Amazing, for a TV serial, which never made it. It was reprinted in the 90s and it was reprinted again by New Directions like two or three years ago. And I'm like, where's the auditory book? People talk about Fran Ross and what her book does to the American canon. So that's my Eastman-esque contribution to the end of this discussion. And if you haven't heard J.S. Clayton's book on Eastman, his interpretation, I'd really recommend you do it. Absolutely. So maybe that's a good point to close the evening. Okay, so I'd like to thank Sally, Roderick and all the team at IB Assembly for inviting us out here to Bushwick to present our work.
And Beth, Beth of course, all the team, all the supporting staff, and most of all you for coming out to see the third part of the Bermudger. Thank you very much. Thank you.