I Like it Strong

Ilya Mashkov Portrait of a Boy in a Painted Shirt1909. Oil on...

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:30:35 +0100

Ilya Mashkov

Portrait of a Boy in a Painted Shirt
1909. Oil on canvas, 119.5 x 80 cm.

State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

Iman RezaiPackman Wedding mixed media on canvas 160 x...

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:30:15 +0100

Iman RezaiPackman Wedding

mixed media on canvas

160 x 200 cm

Some call him the enfant terrible of the Berlin art. And of course the similarities with Basquiat are undeniable.

David Armstrong Six The Solicitor, 2012. Polyethylene foam,...

Wed, 15 May 2013 11:30:41 +0100

David Armstrong Six

The Solicitor, 2012.

Polyethylene foam, plaster, resin, paint, cement, lead, 38 x 209 x 42 cm
(15 x 82 x 16.5 inches).

Working from the tradition of assemblage, David Armstrong Six’s practice denotes a realm of associative abstraction that combines the sculptural and spatial sensibilities of minimalism with a provocative focus on the abject.

Ndidi Dike Lagos Market, 2010 C-print and various acquired...

Tue, 14 May 2013 11:30:22 +0100

Ndidi Dike

Lagos Market, 2010

C-print and various acquired objects from the market, dimensions variable.

“Marker” section, Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Art Dubai, 2013.

Corrie Baldauf Frames for the People: A City of Halos (still),...

Mon, 13 May 2013 11:30:40 +0100

Corrie Baldauf

Frames for the People: A City of Halos (still), 2013.

Film.

Photo: Stephen McGee.

Part of:

Art X Detroit: Kresge Arts Experience

April 10–14, 2013

Midtown Detroit

www.artxdetroit.com

Devin Elijah Will & Walter Brooklyn, New York City...

Sat, 11 May 2013 11:30:17 +0100

Devin Elijah

Will & Walter

Brooklyn, New York City 2011

Devin Elijah is a 27 year old self taught photographer of Jewish and African American descent. The subject range of his portrait work spans the diverse stream of personalities that have populated his life and consciousness and subsequently his art since arriving in New York in 2007.

Carlos Laszlo Fetish Video, 2012. An inventory of some personal...

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:30:14 +0100

Carlos Laszlo

Fetish Video, 2012.

An inventory of some personal fetishes of the Hollywood-based artist.

Tobias PutrihMacula Series B (N°9), 2007Carton200 x ø 95 cm

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:30:24 +0100

Tobias Putrih
Macula Series B (N°9), 2007
Carton
200 x ø 95 cm

Robert & Shana ParkeHarrisonMarks We Make,...

Wed, 08 May 2013 11:30:28 +0100

Robert & Shana ParkeHarrison
Marks We Make, 2005
Photogravure
78 x 68 cm

Gaston Damag & Manuel OcampoCooks in the Kitchen, 2004Huile...

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:30:43 +0100

Gaston Damag & Manuel Ocampo
Cooks in the Kitchen, 2004
Huile et lame de hachoir sur toile
134 x 139 cm

Alain DeclercqAnti-héros, 2000Impression sur bâche PVC205 x...

Mon, 06 May 2013 11:30:29 +0100

Alain Declercq
Anti-héros, 2000
Impression sur bâche PVC
205 x 215 cm

On show at A More Perfect Day: Collection of Mudam Luxembourg.

Beatrice Haenni-JostLand Oil, 155 x 60 cm Exhibited at...

Fri, 03 May 2013 17:46:26 +0100

Beatrice Haenni-Jost
Land

Oil, 155 x 60 cm

Exhibited at Berliner Liste 12

Michael Beutler Halle neben Beeten, 2007 Platz vor Vic...

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:49:19 +0100

Michael Beutler
Halle neben Beeten, 2007
Platz vor Vic Cocktailbar/Friesenstr. 16, 50674 Köln
Installationsansicht

“Modelle für Morgen: Köln”, 2007
Ausstellungsprojekt der European Kunsthalle an 22 Orten der Kölner Innenstadt

M. Lamar - Interview - "Art is not a democracy"

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:29:10 +0100

published in Catch Fire

M. Lamar is a New York based artist whose captivating performances have him singing on fierce piano with a gripping countertenor voice and addressing complex and at times uncomfortable themes such as slavery, the sexual aspect of lynching and their legacy. After being in various punk/goth bands and a church choir, while being classically trained, he dropped out of Yale University years ago to pursue his solo musical project and since then he has released two critically acclaimed LPs.

Speculum Orum – Shackled to the Dead is his new album and to promote it he recently played a show in Berlin. I caught up with M. Lamar at Südblock during the first leg of his tour to discuss the state of America today, black dicks, white supremacy and how he sees art.

How did you come to the decision of dropping out of your art school to pursue music?

I should say that I completed my degree in Fine Art. I went to graduate school, I went to Yale for a year where I did mostly sculpture. And I dropped out because I knew I didn’t want to be part of the bourgeois art world. And I also realised that I didn’t want to make visual art. I was going to New York to do shows and perform music in some way and along the way I was taking private voice lessons and music theory but that was just for me. I am actually part of the same festival in Stockholm as Penny Arcade and it’s funny because she is talking about the things that sort of happened in the mid 70s to 80s, all these professional artists who were determined to make money.. And I realised I really didn’t want to do that. And so I dropped out of Yale and moved back to San Francisco.

Were you trying to rebel against your upbringing or family?

No; if anything I was rebelling against society, in general and I was trying to find my people. I went to school in SF undergraduate and then went to Yale; I dropped out and then returned to SF with my people; I moved in with this sort of punk rock, goth, trans crew. That’s when my life really got going when I rejected the whole professional artist thing. I’m from Alabama originally and my mother, who is a teacher, was the first out of ten children in her family to go to college so the longing within that context was to create these very bourgeois children, who would go on to be doctors or lawyers. My mother was very disappointed because my sister also became an artist. So dropping out of Yale was me completely rejecting that longing and was also me finding my own way.

When did you got into black metal?

I came out of this goth, punk thing. I remember at first there was this boy I had a huge crush on and I don’t know how I ended up in his car and Cradle of Filth was on the stereo. And as horrible and commercial as they are now they were probably my introduction to it around 2001. It was the voice that really got me. He was doing his high singing and it really turned me on, and when I was in bands I wanted to do this high singing with this sort of heavy music.

Did you sing in a choir?

I actually did! I always had a voice, especially the higher range. And I ended in a gospel choir in the last years I was in SF, before moving to NY 6 years ago, and I was a soprano which felt really good and I developed my soprano range much more.

And singing in bands didn’t ruin your voice?

Not really because I sang in a very operatic way but I didn’t growl, I’m wasn’t a growler. My bands could be very heavy at times but they were heavy in a very gothy/punk way. I was very serious about it at the time but I went solo because I wanted to follow where my voice was leading me. There are other cultural and lifestyle aspects of being in a band that were really appeal to me like the wearing certain kinds of clothes or not wearing clothes or like just be in a leather spiked G string or whatever, so it was much more than just the music. Whereas the project I’m doing now is more about my voice and the sounds it can make.

About the themes in your work, the slave trade and its history. Why are you doing it?

Lots of reasons; it’s me trying to grapple with my own history and understand myself better, where I come from. I always talk about the fact that my grandfather grew up in a sharecropping situation; I want to understand his particular trajectory and how that affected my mother psychologically and emotionally and ultimately how it affected me.

How was growing up in Alabama; that’s the proper deep South, right?

That’s properly the deep south – the hot bed of the civil rights movement! Let me tell you this James Baldwin quote which is: ‘History is not something you read about in books; history is not even the past – history is the present.’ So what I’m doing with my work is that quote. If I’m dealing with the slave trade or how they treated the slaves on slave ships, I’m dealing with this moment right now because we are living with that currently. Really if you think about it, it was not that long ago; we’re not talking about ancient history, particularly in the American context. When I come to Europe as an American Negro, psychologically I feel very differently here. I’m working on this new piece called Surveillance, and so much of that piece is about psychological and emotional dimension of what it means to be black in America and the kind of surveillance that I think that blackness is under, black masculinity specifically and also black femininity.

Who from?

From the police, from everyone who is not black and also from black people themselves. There is an internalisation of white supremacy and that’s something that becomes more pronounced to me when I leave the US and there is an urgency for me to address it; mostly for myself and how I have internalised this. I consider myself to be a free black man–

What does it mean to be a free black man?

It means to be free psychologically from the restrains of the white supremacy state. It is a very totalising thing like sexism or patriarchy and to be free means freeing yourself from that mindset, as Malcom X used to say. But even me as free black man still feels its intense psychological weight.

Do you share any values with them?

I’d like to think that I don’t share any values with the white supremacist state or the police state. I mean, the way we understand it most people incarcerated in the US are black – men; the US having the largest prison system in the world. And we also understand that the only way that a person can be enslaved since Lincoln is only if they commit a crime; so isn’t just perfect that most of the people in prisons are primarily black and brown? So this is why I say that the plantation is now, the slaveship is now. We have to understand that there is something systematic going on.

There is something going on in the hearts and minds of the people of colour with regards to white supremacy and how that’s internalisation and also the devaluations of themselves. There also something systematic with regards to education and how the police are concentrated in certain neighbourhoods so they can find crime or invent crime. And these are very serious things. So this is why I’m doing my work, I want to make sense of my body, my being, my spirit in this particular moment and also want to understand the people with whom I’m connected. I met a black person in Europe who asked me where I was from to which I replied ‘Alabama’; and they said they meant before that, to which I replied ‘I have no idea.’ And she said that was very sad and I said ‘I know.’ The thing about being an American Negro is that you don’t know because we were essentially stolen. That level of despair is about an ultimate disconnection from a place.

Ultimately you could also call it the condition of the modern identity or poststructuralism?

Sure, you can use that discourse. It’s funny because a lot of artists colleagues of mine who try very hard not to say anything very specifically. Some ask me why I don’t sing Strange Fruit (because I talk about lynching in my work) so they were just saying that I could say things without saying anything and be more universal so people could deal with the theme better. I always believed that you can be more universal the more specific you are and doing the work I do the more specific I get, the more personal I get and relate to people.

Don’t you think that you could alienate people that do not identify completely with your topics?

Art is not a democracy, art is not a popularity contest. I don’t believe in democracy in that regard and with art is not about getting the most people to like it. I can’t be ruled by these things. We’re only here for a limited amount of time and I feel like I have to say some specific things that will speak to the existence to my grandmother and grandfather and I want to deal with it.

So you think there are not enough artists talking about these issues?

I know this is really tough stuff and it’s even difficult for me so I don’t fault people for having reservations. It’s also the fact that people still have this trauma and there’s always this questions of retraumatising people with this work. And this is definitely a way of me getting over the trauma.

You know some people, who think that using the word n**** ¹ in a song is irresponsible?

What would be irresponsible about that?

Basically, there is a movement online claiming that is a derogatory word and rappers especially shouldn’t use it.

I mean, language is a also a place to struggle, to quote Bell Hooks. I don’t really think that using n**** or not using n**** will do anything to alleviate white supremacy. Of course it would not be OK for a white person to call a black person n****, but I think it’s lots more complicated than just say lets use that word and not use that word. It’s complicated but I think that art is a place for things to be complicated, I think we have to tell the truth in art.

Do you like rap and hip hop?

I do, there is some great hip hop that I love. Some people think I would despise it because I am classically trained but I love black music and culture and expression.

What is black music?

In the American context black music can mean many many things, but mainly the Negro Spirituals, these folk songs that would be sung on the plantations with these melodies that at some level would have come from the slave ships. As we know “Amazing Grace” was written by a white person, but the melody was something the slaves sang in the ships. The Spirituals come from Africa becoming this very displaced thing and blues grew out of that and Jazz and Rock ‘n’ Roll; and popular music in the American context is black music. Ultimately I’m a core rocker but all this categorising in music is marketing and something very political and corporate. When I think about rock ‘n’ roll I think about Little Richard, Ike Turner or Black Sabbath, who really started as a blues cover band and are the root of all metal. And also Led Zep or even the Rolling Stones – initially blues cover band.

Do you think you are bringing different cultures together?

I don’t look at it that way. I certainly created myself, but its been very intuitive, I have calculated my stage persona to some extent, especially the aesthetics but I don’t want to have a huge distinction between real life and the stage, I want them to be connected as much as possible.

What is the real state of race relations in America?

I heard someone say that we have come to this place of equality not when someone like Obama is president, because he is an exceptional Negro; it will be when the equivalent of George W Bush does become, some really average Negro. And I think that’s true. But the state of relations is atrocious. We no longer have a movement like in the 60s raising awareness of inequality, the discourse is happening in academia but is not trickling down.

And do you know why the sexual aspect of lynching is not widely known in America? I had no idea about it until I read about your work.

Interesting. That’s part of the reason I want to talk about it all the time. So after lynching the penis would be cut off, pickled, photographed and put into postcards and mailed as trophies.

Really?

Yeah. There is this obsession with black male genetalia. You’ve surely seen it in porn. We also know that lynching was a punishment to the crime of black men allegedly looking at white women, or sleeping with them or allegedly raping them. There are all these accusation of rape that were usually unfounded. So as a person who has a black penis I am obsessed with the way it exists in society; I just think we can’t move on until we deal with the black penis, and white supremacy’s fear that women are going to be obsessed with a black man’s enormous penis.

Do you think that could also explain the hostility towards black gay men within parts of the black community? Because of the emasculation through the lynching practise.

Yeah; it’s so funny because people don’t see it that way; the way that you just put it so clearly. But there is this anxiety in black men about losing their masculinity. Did you read Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver? One of the things he talks about is raping white women as a revenge for what white men did to black men. And it’s just weird because if you were gonna go with that logic wouldn’t you wanna rape white men instead? It’s just this weird displacement; there are all sorts of displacements with regards to race and sexuality. Black masculinity within the American context is so deeply, deeply wounded. And there is also this anxiety about an entitlement, because according to patriarchy men are entitled a certain amount power and black men want to be able to have this power.

I have this song about my grandfather, who grew up in a sharecropping situation, where he was beaten repeatedly by these white men and then we went on to beat repeatedly his children and wife. So to me, I directly connect that trauma to slavery, because the way that they continued slavery after the Jim Crow laws was that these white men would bail out black men in prison and in exchange for bailing them out they would have to work on their land. So it’s all very, very complicated. And I just wanna deal with how complicated it is; I don’t want to make it easy to people; that’s how art is. It can be a contemplative place rather than entertaining.

How would you like people to listen to your music?

What I really like about the record that I just made is that it’s on vinyl so the listening experience is more ritualised, I want people to feel deeply and think deeply. Hopefully they will have a very complicated relationship with the listening. Generally speaking I don’t like background music, despite loving Erykah Badu being played right now. I think she is a genius of our times; she’s a deep woman.

What are you looking forward to?

I’m very excited about doing more touring with this new record. I’ll be back in Berlin in July!

Dates for M. Lamar’s new Berlin show will be announced soon. His album “Speculum Orum — Shackled to the Dead” can be ordered on his website. Pictures by Michelle Blioux and Amos Mac.

Miguel Ángel Ríos The Ghost of Modernity, 2012 Single chanel...

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 11:30:27 +0100

Miguel Ángel Ríos

The Ghost of Modernity, 2012

Single chanel video

Miguel Ángel Ríos presents Through the Frontier. Ríos, one of the pioneers of the concept of the Latin American as a political strategy and paradoxical question, presents a new production titled The Ghost of Modernity, which takes the viewer through the borders of the peripheral landscapes of Peru, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Originally conceived as a three-screen projection, the piecefeatures a transparent cube, a paradigm of modernity, to anthropologically dissect space in the continent.

Jaimie Warren Untitled (Self Portrait, Faux Nude #2)2005digital...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:30:00 +0100

Jaimie Warren

Untitled (Self Portrait, Faux Nude #2)2005digital c-print8 x 10 inches

Warren’s self-portraits are more a satirical documentary of her own life. Living and working in Kansas City, Missouri, her photographs stand between snapshot crudeness, the seemingly set-up and deadpan portraiture.

Sara LudySwimming, 2012 Californian artist working across video...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 11:30:31 +0100

Sara Ludy
Swimming, 2012

Californian artist working across video and photography including GIFs. Her practice is holistic within the media she employs resulting in dynamic shows and installations.

Paul ChanUNTITLED2006Carboncino su carta39.37 x 56.50 cm

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 11:30:17 +0100

Paul Chan
UNTITLED
2006
Carboncino su carta
39.37 x 56.50 cm

Maurizio CattelanSENZA TITOLO1996Fotografia in b/n100 x...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:30:31 +0100

Maurizio Cattelan
SENZA TITOLO
1996
Fotografia in b/n
100 x 150 cm

Maurizio CattelanUNTITLED2009Gomma poliuretanica51 x 38 x...

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 11:30:41 +0100

Maurizio Cattelan
UNTITLED
2009
Gomma poliuretanica
51 x 38 x 18 cm