Blues for Smoke
21 Oct 2012 - 07 Jan 2013
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta, 1983
Acrylic, oil paintstick, and paper collage on canvas, five panels
48 x 184 inches
The Brant Foundation Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut
© 2012 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society, New York
Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta, 1983
Acrylic, oil paintstick, and paper collage on canvas, five panels
48 x 184 inches
The Brant Foundation Inc., Greenwich, Connecticut
© 2012 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society, New York
BLUES FOR SMOKE
21 October 2012 - 7 January 2013
The Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to present Blues for Smoke, a major interdisciplinary exhibition exploring a wide range of contemporary art, music, literature, and film through the lens of the blues and “blues aesthetics.” Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category, but as a web of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by more than 50 artists from the 1950s to the present, including many commissioned specifically for this occasion and others never before shown in Los Angeles, as well as a range of musical, filmic, and cultural materials. Blues for Smoke was developed over several years by MOCA Curator Bennett Simpson, in close consultation with artist Glenn Ligon.
Throughout the past century, writers and thinkers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, and Cornel West have asserted the fundamental importance of the blues not just to American music (in its course from the blues proper through jazz, R&B, rock, and hip-hop), but to developments in literature, film, and visual art. In all its diversity, the blues has been called one of the greatest cultural inventions to emerge from American modernism. Along with jazz, its close relation, it has even been called America's classical music. In some sense, everyone gets the blues. But what could the blues mean for contemporary art? What ideas, forms, and feelings could it direct us to? How is the blues more than music? Where might it be found today? And why would we look for it?
“Blues for Smoke continues MOCA’s history of examining major social and cultural developments and their impact on artistic production,” says Director Jeffrey Deitch, “building upon such celebrated examples as Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, and Art in the Streets.”
Ambitious, cross-cultural, and sensitive to history’s influence on the present, Blues for Smoke positions the blues as an imaginative terrain perfectly suited to questions of identity and expression in this Age of Obama. Though our moment is often called “post-identity” or “post-black,” this exhibition argues for the vitality and innovation at the core of the blues tradition, and for the forms and aesthetics of African-American culture more generally, as major catalysts of experiment within modern and contemporary art. Presenting an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation, and canon. The exhibition resists telling a single story based on the assumed self-evidence of a category or culture, but maintains the urgency for a multiple-meter of ostensibly divergent narratives.
“Though it takes up ideas from the past, this exhibition is pitched at the present moment,” says Curator Bennett Simpson. “The questions and topics the blues makes us think about, from ambivalent feelings to form as cultural expression, are fundamental to recent art. As I see it, the blues is about anticipation.”
21 October 2012 - 7 January 2013
The Museum of Contemporary Art is proud to present Blues for Smoke, a major interdisciplinary exhibition exploring a wide range of contemporary art, music, literature, and film through the lens of the blues and “blues aesthetics.” Turning to the blues not simply as a musical category, but as a web of artistic sensibilities and cultural idioms, the exhibition features works by more than 50 artists from the 1950s to the present, including many commissioned specifically for this occasion and others never before shown in Los Angeles, as well as a range of musical, filmic, and cultural materials. Blues for Smoke was developed over several years by MOCA Curator Bennett Simpson, in close consultation with artist Glenn Ligon.
Throughout the past century, writers and thinkers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray, Amiri Baraka, and Cornel West have asserted the fundamental importance of the blues not just to American music (in its course from the blues proper through jazz, R&B, rock, and hip-hop), but to developments in literature, film, and visual art. In all its diversity, the blues has been called one of the greatest cultural inventions to emerge from American modernism. Along with jazz, its close relation, it has even been called America's classical music. In some sense, everyone gets the blues. But what could the blues mean for contemporary art? What ideas, forms, and feelings could it direct us to? How is the blues more than music? Where might it be found today? And why would we look for it?
“Blues for Smoke continues MOCA’s history of examining major social and cultural developments and their impact on artistic production,” says Director Jeffrey Deitch, “building upon such celebrated examples as Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, and Art in the Streets.”
Ambitious, cross-cultural, and sensitive to history’s influence on the present, Blues for Smoke positions the blues as an imaginative terrain perfectly suited to questions of identity and expression in this Age of Obama. Though our moment is often called “post-identity” or “post-black,” this exhibition argues for the vitality and innovation at the core of the blues tradition, and for the forms and aesthetics of African-American culture more generally, as major catalysts of experiment within modern and contemporary art. Presenting an uncommon heterogeneity of subject matter, art historical contexts, formal and conceptual inclinations, genres and disciplines, Blues for Smoke holds artists and art worlds together that are often kept apart, within and across lines of race, generation, and canon. The exhibition resists telling a single story based on the assumed self-evidence of a category or culture, but maintains the urgency for a multiple-meter of ostensibly divergent narratives.
“Though it takes up ideas from the past, this exhibition is pitched at the present moment,” says Curator Bennett Simpson. “The questions and topics the blues makes us think about, from ambivalent feelings to form as cultural expression, are fundamental to recent art. As I see it, the blues is about anticipation.”