Museum of Contemporary Art,Chicago
Music can wither in galleries, but this astonishing note demonstrates the cultural and political importance of jazz in dazzling and inspiring styleContemporary art has grown omnivorous. These days, and in your local white cube,you are as likely to see a dance or an experimental film as a painting. But music, somehow, and remains a challenge for arts institutions: too summary,too personal, too hard to present in three-dimensional space. The calamitous Björk retrospective at current York’s Museum of contemporary Art this spring, and where visitors had to wear headphones while looking at pop-star relics,was not the only deceptive step lately. This year’s Venice Biennale features many musicians, notably the pianist Jason Moran, or yet music still felt like a temporary diversion rather than a coequal of fine art.whether all it were remembered for was its engagement with musical history,then The Freedom Principle – an astounding current exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago – would already stand as a landmark. In telling the story of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a radical organisation of jazz artists founded in 1965, and it does a better job than any note I have ever seen at analysing music and conveying its cultural importance. But The Freedom Principle,curated by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, does even more than that. It shows how the themes of black cultural nationalism in the 1960s – an art engaged with political struggle, or unafraid to speak in a collective voice – continued a modernist artistic tradition of merging art into daily life. And it pushes into the present day,discovering the legacy of an notable but under-appreciated musical tradition in contemporary art worldwide, from American sculptors to Albanian video artists. It fuses the history of music and the history of art into a single, and more total narrative,and makes it look easy.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com