THE ARTS AND POLITICS OF THE JAZZ ENSEMBLE (2015)
Introduction | liquid blackness in Conversation with Larry Clark | Special Guests | Event Schedules | The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble Research Project | About the Artist
Introduction
Larry Clark’s 1977 film Passing Through follows a jazz musician’s struggle against the recording industry while in search of a “sound” that would reconcile his personal artistic vision with the sensibility of his community and the political urgencies of his highly repressive historical moment. It is a film that reflects on the political potential of the forms of sociality that coalesce around the jazz ensemble and on free jazz as a form of political praxis. The film never received a theatrical release; as a result, screenings of the film become an intentional opportunity for collective engagement with Black artistic expression. Thus, it is not surprising that the film is often cited as a source of inspiration by contemporary black filmmakers like Arthur Jafa, who explore similar themes, visual styles, and collaborative modes of production.
In an attempt to enact the capacious praxis modeled by the film, that have become foundational to the liquid blackness research project, the events coinciding with this research project are sprawling, experimental, multimedia, and above all, ensemblic. Our year-long public engagement with Clark’s film includes presentations, workshops, screenings, and a symposium.
Passing Through CURVE Research Presentation - February 20, 2015
liquid blackness research project founder Dr. Alessandra Raengo and members Lauren McLeod Cramer and Kristin Juarez present their ongoing research on the history and aesthetics of Passing Through. Using the interactWall in Georgia State’s Collaborative University Research and Visualization Environment (CURVE), this presentation includes visual models that maps the international exhibition history of Passing Through, a visual dossier of art and archival material related to the film, and a close reading of one of the film’s experimental sequences.
Public Conversation at The Sound Table - March 19, 2015
A community event with drinks and discussion about Passing Through and the influential role that radical politics, jazz, and modern painting had on the filmmaker.
Public Screening + Q&A with the Filmmaker – April 9, 2015
This screening of a Passing Through includes a digital presentation courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and a conversation with the filmmaker. The screening is a collaboration with the Atlanta Film Festival and the Plaza Theater Foundation, CENCIA, the Creative Media Industries Institute, and the School of Music at GSU, and Emory’s Department of Film and Media Studies and Film Love.
Drawing Through Workshop – April 11, 2015
Drawing Throughis a project designed by Craig Dongoski, Professor of Art and Design, as a workshop/collaboration between filmmaker Larry Clark and emerging Atlanta-based artists and musicians, following the screening of Clark’s 1977 film Passing Through. It is a spinoff of the experimental collective research initiated by liquid blackness (with liquid blackness research project member Kristin Juarez acting as liaison).Bringing together painters and musicians, Drawing Throughunfolded as a study in group meditation, sound visualization, and improvised creation that produced an album. The workshop featured six current GSU undergraduate students including Timothy Short whose artwork appears on the album cover. Two of the four musicians were GSU alumni: Claire Paul (MFA) and Dan Bailey (BFA). Drawing Throughfocuses on young Atlanta artists developing their artistic intentions and seizing control of the channels of distribution of their art. Collaboration, detail, legacy, and community are the substance of this presentation.
The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble Symposium – September 18 – 19, 2015
The Symposium on “The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble” brings together a variety of perspectives on the Passing Through and the surrounding art scene with particular focus on the figure of Horace Tapscott. It will feature talks from two scholars of sound/image relations: James Tobias (UC Riverside), author of Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time (Temple University Press, 2010) and Chip Linscott (Ohio University) who focuses specifically on the visual and sonic rendering of blackness; Daniel Widener (UC San Diego), historian of black arts in LA, author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2010); Matthew Duerstan, freelance writer working on L.A.’s underground jazz scene; and two celebrated experimental filmmakers: Kevin Jerome Everson (University of Virginia) who will be sharing a short film made in response to Passing Through and L.A. Rebellion filmmaker Barbara McCullough (SCAD) who will be showing clips from her current project, Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot .
Drawing Through Exhibition and Album Release Party – September 19, 2015
This exhibition features work by local artists responding to Larry Clark’s film, it includes the original art on the Drawing Through album cover painted by Timothy Short. Short’s “Sunwalkers” portrays a choice between an ego-centered, individualistic worldview of domination and a more inclusive perspective of collective liberation. The LP is a limited pressing of 500 copies and is aimed at a dedicated listening experience. The sounds are the result of two meditations and a video-graphic score used to direct the sounds and visuals of the participants. The project was inspired by the dynamics of group creation inherent in the jazz ensemble, which is at the core of Clark’s film. Following its prompt, the workshop endeavored to both explore relationships and passages between different art forms and to allow for group dynamics to produce something greater than the sum of its parts. The result is a unique layered experience of the creative interaction between visual arts, music, and film. The LP was realized with the support of CENCIA, the Center for Collaborative Scholarship in the Humanities, the Creative Media Industries Institute, and the Welch School of Art and Design.
The event will include: an exhibition of artwork produced by GSU students in response to Passing Through, a gallery talk, a recreation of the meditation exercise first conducted with Larry Clark, and a performance of Free Jazz by local musicians, with music inspired by the film.
Light food and drinks will be served. Catering provided by All Island Café.
liquid blackness in Conversation with Larry Clark
Special Guests
The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble Symposium
Matthew Duerstan is a Wisconsin-born freelance writer now based in Los Angeles. His pieces have been included in the anthologies Da Capo Best Music Writing and L.A. Now. He first entered the blogosphere in 2006 with the music site Downbeast, an offshoot of the L.A. indie-jazz label Cryptogramophone. He was also a senior editor of Glue magazine and has written for numerous publications including L.A. Weekly, No Depression, All About Jazz, Variety, Los Angeles magazine, Time Out-New York, Flaunt, Oxford-American, Black Book, New Times, Extraordinary, and more. Currently, he is working on a book for Asahina & Wallace publishers on L.A.’s underground jazz scene.
Kevin Jerome Everson is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Mansfield Ohio. He has an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Virginia. He has made eight feature length films and over one-hundred and twenty short films, including such award winning films as Park Lanes (2015) The Island of Saint Matthews (2013), Erie (2010), Quality Control (2011), Ten Five in the Grass (2012), Cinnamon (2006), Spicebush (2005), Stone, Pictures From Dorothy (2004), Century (2013), Fe26 (2014), Sound That (2014), Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) with Claudrena Harold and Emergency Needs (2007). Everson’s films and artwork have been widely shown, at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Whitechapel Gallery in London, National Gallery in Washington DC and Centre Pompidou in Paris. The work has also been recognized through awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert Award, a Creative Capital Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, NEH Fellowships, Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, and an American Academy in Rome Prize.
Charles P. (“Chip”) Linscott teaches at Ohio University, where he recently completed his PhD. His dissertation, Sonic Overlook: Blackness between Sound and Image, deals with sonicity as it intervenes in black visuality. Chip’s writing has appeared in liquid blackness, the anthology At the Crossroads, and is forthcoming in Black Cinema Aesthetics Revisited. His piece for In Media Res, entitled “Southern Reconstruction,” was an Editor’s Pick for 2014.
Barbara McCullough is a native of New Orleans who has spent most of her life in the Los Angeles area. Experimental film and video were her first love as she strove to “tap the spirit and richness of her community by exposing its magic, touching its textures and trampling old stereotypes while revealing the untold stories reflective of African American life.” Her film and video projects include: Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification, Shopping Bag Spirits and Freeway Fetishes: Reflection on Ritual Space, Fragments, and The World Saxophone Quartet. Currently, she is completing a film project, Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot, a documentary on the musical genius, community activist and mentor to a generation of accomplished jazz musicians. A twenty-year-plus veteran of the visual effects industry, Professor McCullough is currently Chair of the Visual Effects Department at Savannah College of Art and Design – SCAD.
James Tobias is an Associate Professor of cinema and digital media studies in the English Department of the University California, Riverside. He is the author of Sync: Stylistics of Hieroglyphic Time (Temple University Press, 2010), a study of musicality at work in the synchronization of streaming sound, image, and gesture from Eisenstein to contemporary digital media art. His research interests include music and musicality in audiovisual media, theories, representations, and affects of gender and sexuality, digital art, and histories and theories of avant-garde time-based media. Recent publications include “Musicianship and Data Virtuosity” (in Sound Musicianship: Understanding the Crafts of Music, ed. Andrew Brown, Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2012), “Essays Without Words or Writing: Motion Painting #1 and the Ornament” (in Oskar Fischinger 1900-1967: Experiments in Cinematic Abstraction, Cindy Keefer and Jaap Guldemond, eds., EYE Film Institute/CVM/Thames and Hudson 2012), and “Digital Arts and Hypertext” in the Oxford Handbook to Science Fiction (2014). He lives in Los Angeles.
Danny Widener is Associate Professor of History at UC San Diego and teaches African American history, cultural studies, and twentieth-century political radicalism. He began his educational career at the Echo Park-Silverlake Peoples’ Childcare Center. He studied at Berkeley and New York University. He has written on the politics of black culture in postwar Los Angeles, black-Latino and Afro-Asian issues, and the Korean War. He is the author of Black Arts West: Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles (Duke University Press, 2010), a co-editor of Black California Dreamin’, with Ingrid Banks, George Lipsitz, Gaye Johnson, and Ula Taylor. (Santa Barbara: Center for Black Studies Research, 2012).
Event Schedules
Passing Through CURVEResearch Presentation - February 20, 2015 – 4pm
interactWall
Collaborative University Research and Visualization Environment (CURVE)
Georgia State University Library
RSVP is required to liquidblackness@gsu.edu
Public Conversation at The Sound Table - March 19, 2015 – 7:30pm
Space 2, The Sound Table
483 Edgewood Avenue Southeast, Atlanta, GA 30312
Free and open to the public
Public Screening + Q&A with the Filmmaker – April 9, 2015 – 7:30pm
The Plaza Theatre
1049 Ponce De Leon Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30306
The free screening and filmmaker’s visit are made possible by the generous support of:
Creative Media Industries Institute, GSU
CENCIA (Center for Collaborative and International Arts)
Emory’s Department of Film and Media Studies
School of Music, GSU
Visual Scholarship Initiative, Emory
The Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design
Organized in cooperation with the Atlanta Film Festival and Film Love.
Digital presentation courtesy of the UCLA Film & Television Archive
The Arts and Politics of the Jazz Ensemble Symposium – September 18 – 19, 2015
Screening
Friday, September 18, 2015, 6pm
Kopleff Recital Hall
10 Peachtree Center Ave NE, Atlanta, GA 30303
The doors open at 6, screening begins promptly at 6:30.
The screening will be followed by a brief roundtable discussion with symposium participants
Symposium
Saturday, September 19, 2015, 9:30–5 p.m.
Department of Communication
25 Park Place, Room 830, Atlanta, GA, 30302
9:30am – Welcome and Coffee
10:00 – 10:15am – Opening Remarks – Alessandra Raengo (GSU) and liquid blackness
10:15 – 12:00 pm – Free Jazz and Community Politics: The Work and Vision of Horace Tapscott
Matthew Duersten, “‘Passing it on’: The Cultural Prerogatives of Horace Tapscott & The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra”
Barbara McCullough, exhibition and discussion of clips from her documentary in progress, Horace Tapscott: Musical Griot
12:00 – 1:15pm – lunch
1:15 – 3:00 pm - Action, Location, Creation: Thinking the Art of Political Praxis
Danny Widener (UC San Diego), “The Art of Creative Struggle”
James Tobias (UC Riverside), “Composing (Media) Memory: A Montage of Displacement and Belonging, from Angelou’s Blacks, Blues, Black! (1968) to Clark’s Passing Through (1977), and Beyond”
3:15 – 5:00pm – Ensembling: Creative Insights/Creative Responses
Chip Linscott (Ohio University), “Jazz Is … Jazz Ain’t: Blackness and Improvisation in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm”
Kevin Jerome Everson (University of Virginia), Screening and Discussion of Auditioning for Nathaniel (2016)
Drawing Through Exhibition and Album Release Party – September 19, 2015
Mammal Gallery
680 Murphy Ave SW #3064, Atlanta, GA 30310
Reception/Gallery Talk –7:30pm (Upstairs)
Group Meditation and Performances –8:30pm (Downstairs)
Set One: Drawing Through:a study in group meditation, sound visualization, and improvised creation. This set will be made up of three parts. The audience is requested to be quiet and attentive.
Part One: Artists and musicians will be following instructions to meditate, and when a concrete thought enters their mind, they will make a mark on paper or make responsive contact with their respective musical instrument.
Part Two: Musicians and artists will be instructed to do the opposite of part one and meander either their playing or drawing and stop once they have a concrete thought.
Part Three: The final part features the sounds created by the artists’ and musicians’ response to projected images of both Craig Dongoski’s and Larry Clark’s hand movements.
Set Two: Another dedicated listening set featuring local musicians performing Free Jazz—music inspired by the film.