Bklyn Sounds: 3/21/2023 - 3/27/2023 + Kevin Beasley's 'A View of a Landscape'

Interview with Kevin Beasley + Shows: Combo Chimbita + Xenia Rubinos + Monk-One / B. Cool-Aid / "The Octogenarian Women of Jazz” / Ben Neill + Gavilán Rayna Russom / “Open Sets” + more

At first, Kevin Beasley’s “A View of a Landscape” was a solo exhibit that opened at New York’s Whitney Museum in December of 2018. It rearranged a lot in my head about art and music inside art institutions, about engaging the work of music-based artists (as opposed to musicians — but why “opposed”?), and to the possibilities of stories that use these elements.

Beasley was then only 33 years-old, yet he’d already established himself as a rising figure in the art world, with work included in the Whitney Biennial, and in shows at Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum and the Guggenheim. Beasley did sculptures, some readymade objects and aging machinery, some of clothing cast in resin. He showed photos of what looked like the rural South, maybe even the Lynchburg, Virginia land on which he grew up. And he worked with sound, invoking electronic textures into performance, employing DJ tropes for sonic storytelling, activating some of those found objects (an old piano) via new technology. It all seemed intriguing but familiar. Yet about six weeks before “Landscape” opened, a brand new context for Beasley’s work arrived in the form of an invitation to a talk: Beasley would be moderating a conversation with some visiting members of Detroit’s Underground Resistance crew, to discuss techno, history and Blackness. The talk was great, and Beasley’s deep knowledge of the subject — he had gone to design school in Detroit — instantly reframed his own work. 

But “Landscape” went much further. Though it included a few of Beasley’s resin sculptures, its centerpiece was a three-ton motor from a used cotton gin that had worked in Maplesville, Alabama from 1940 through the early 70s, and which he installed on the Whitney’s top floor in a glass case. Beasley outfitted the glass case with microphones that would record the motor while it ran, and connected some of those microphones to a modular synthesizer in an adjacent room, which staged occasional “performances” of the synth using the sounds of the motor as source. On a few occasions, other artists joined Beasley or performed with those sounds alone, including the footwork producer/composer JLIN, drummer Eli Keszler, and multi-instrumentalist Taja Cheek (aka L’Rain). Nothing I heard coming out of those sessions was akin to UR or Detroit techno, but the strategy was sympathetic: using sounds and history to tell stories of communities, primarily Black American communities, via improvisation and rhythm. And it did so at an art museum. 

And Beasley had an encore: Three months after “Landscape” closed, he took the musical-curation aspects of that show, and staged “Assembly” at The Kitchen. It was a three-weekend “festival” that took over the beloved Chelsea performance space, and featured an incredible conglomeration of  contemporary musicians, running the creative throughline from techno to jazz, hip-hop to experimental art music. It felt triumphant.

Now, “A View of a Landscape” is a book, full of photos of Beasley’s work, and writing by artists, poets, curators and art critics. “A View of a Landscape” is also an album, featuring new music by Beasley’s collaborators for “Landscape” and “Assembly,” as well as previous projects, all made using the recorded sounds of that motor. And this Thursday (March 23rd), “A View of a Landscape” will be a “concert” at Performance Space in the East Village, featuring Beasley and  artists on the album Keszler, Cheek and Ben Chapoteau-Katz (of L’Rain), and the mighty Moor Mother.    

On the occasion of the event, I got on a Zoom with Kevin Beasley to talk about all the interlocking projects, about venues and audiences, and about one of our favorite subjects, the importance of Detroit. The interview was edited for length and clarity.   

I wanna start by asking you about Detroit. You've previously touched upon the importance of the city, its culture and its civic knowledge, that informs a lot of your art practice. Can you speak a little bit about your experience in Detroit, and how its music and culture affected how you did, what you did? 

It's funny because what brought me to Detroit initially wasn't the music, it was the automotive industry. I was studying automotive design as a student. I think there's a lot to dig into cuz obviously with Detroit music, and Detroit techno in particular, there's always been a relationship with the auto industry and manufacturing and the factories and the plants — this kind of blue-collar, working-class relationship. And in a lot of ways too, there's a lot of poverty, because Detroit's gone through so much. 

My entryway was thinking about automotive design because I was interested in cars.

My dad was a mechanic. And I felt like being a designer was going to be a way that bridged both my interest in visual art-making and automobiles. The sort of nugget, the jewel was that when I got there, there was a plethora of music, musical experiences, and history there. This is where Hitsville is located. This is where Detroit techno started. You know, Diana Ross used to live here. A lot of famous jazz clubs are there. I used to go to this club called Bert's Warehouse really late at night, and I would sit back and watch musicians just roll in off the street and play. Eastern Market [where Bert’s was located] is a bit gentrified now, but  when I was there, around 2003, that felt early enough to be able to catch the dwindling kind of embers of, of some of these things that had been happening. (It was basically when the market totally bottomed out — [before] everyone came back and Dan Gilbert came in and bought everything up.)

My time in Detroit was really explorative and exciting. I was so young, basically just out of high school, no longer a teenager but couldn't drink yet. I had this city to explore and get to know. I was kind of let loose into these scenes. I went to DEMF [the founding Detroit Electronic Music Festival…] before it became a bit more corporate — because it really needed to sustain itself since the relatively free model just wasn't really working towards the end — and I went to Movement [...the festival that it became]. I felt the influence there, even if I didn't really know how [it would influence me]. I remember having conversations with people, debating the variations in music, in an almost-basic way, the merits of musical ability, like “what's an instrument?” or “how do you qualify what an instrument is/” 

Detroit's an amazing place for that because you can have people on the far ends of that spectrum. You have the punk scene that's really intense. Obviously you have classic R&B, Berry Gordy, and just the whole gamut there. And then you have techno. So it really cultivated something that I'm still drawing from now. It wasn't until I came back to Detroit that I was actually able to meet some of these people, develop my relationship with Cornelius Harris from Underground Resistance and a few other guys that are part of that [techno] movement. When you're not from Detroit, you don't really know how close in proximity you are to them, because they're just around all the time. I remember when I came back, I had a buddy who lived in a loft that was basically above the Transmat shop, and Derrick May was just kind of chilling on just a random off-day. And it was really odd. Like, “OH, he's right there, that's HIM.” It was something that you have to really be kind of tuned into. When I was there: I was listening to a lot of stuff, kind of growing and opening my mind about what kind of music is out there, where it comes from, and better understanding its history. But some of the stories of raves and warehouse parties — I wasn't really going to a lot of those. There were some clubs that I would go to periodically, but a lot of it was just about who you were linked up with, and in my time there, I wasn't necessarily linked up with people who were frequenting those things.

One of the things you just said that is kind of where I want to take this, is related to that proximity. On the one hand, these people are really approachable people, part of the community. On the other hand, they are incredible artists and historical figures, elevated in many people's minds, which is as it should be because of the importance of the culture they make. What's interesting is this sense of what for some people is the daily work, is for others rarified culture. I find similarities when I see you bring a motor from Alabama into a New York museum. It was Detroit that taught me this idea that the everyday work is actually the culture, in the long run. Can you maybe talk about that aspect as part of your practice? 

I mean, that's kind of like ground zero for me in a lot of ways. Because in one respect, it's like: What are we not looking at? What's the residue? What are the kind of small (maybe insignificant) particles that are actually building up the atmosphere? How do you then give some sort of space for that, so that you can better understand what your context is, develop meaning and build relationships with people in the long run, right? So it's not just the most obvious, most apparent thing that becomes of utmost significance or importance. Sometimes you have to use your peripheral vision. I think a lot about the working class, how every day they are in the periphery because they kind of hold the thing up. 

Like, I think about my dad every day going to fix mail trucks. Everyday people go and get their mail, their checks, their letters, their packages. And you know, my pops is in to work at 4 AM every day fixing these trucks so they can make their deliveries. He's also in the position to see when mail people are not doing the right thing — he knows all the routes, and how the mailmen and women handle the vehicle, and how it reflects the way they handle the mail, right? So he's uncovered floorboards with letters and packages stuffed underneath. And he's kind of like, “Okay, this, this is an issue.” (He's retired now.) It's a job that we don't necessarily consider, but it's a driver for so much of what we experience on a daily basis, what builds up a certain aesthetic, or a certain way of moving in the world, the way we speak our language. All of these things are imbued by what you're doing on a daily basis. What are we engaging with, and can we value that?

Part of the balance is — and this maybe harkens back to Underground Resistance a bit — how do you maintain some of that for where it is? Often-times, we take certain aspects of our culture, and we elevate it so much that we lose sight of the ground, we lose scope of where it's coming from, and suddenly it's no longer ours, it's no longer a part of the driver anymore. It becomes a facade and it kind of dissipates regardless of if people are still engaging in that thing, because someone else is able to monetize it in a way that could be very problematic for its sustenance,  or for its continued texture, or the value that really keeps it moving forward without stripping it away from communities and people. That balance is also a thing. So when I'm looking at objects, or I'm looking at things, I am thinking about how they're already present. And how do we find these points of engagement that maintain its integrity as what it is? And that's a really complex conversation to have about anything. 

This makes me think a bit about venues and audiences, their appropriateness, or juxtaposing that into meaning. Places like museums and art spaces, and what you can within them. It was interesting to me that right after your Whitney Museum exhibit “A View of a Landscape” closed in March 2019, there was only a couple of months before you put on a “Assembly,” a series of curated shows at The Kitchen. Some of it felt like a continuation — experimental music — but it was different due to venue and intention. And even though the Whitney has a long, storied history of performance, The Kitchen is this nebulous, historically thriving multi-disciplinary space. They were of-a-piece, but apart. How much do you think of the venue and the audience in terms of what you are producing and where? How much does it affect the work you're doing and how you're presenting it?

It's paramount <laughs>. I was on a call yesterday about a potential project in the Fall, and that was one of my first questions: how does the institution that's staging these kinds of art events or exhibitions or festivals or whatever-you-want-to-call-it, how are they picking venues and what is that process? Because the process of doing a site visit, understanding the space and the context before we even talk about ideas, is so crucial to understanding how you wanna address it. I did a project for the Guggenheim in 2013-14, and one of the first things that one of the curators said to me was that the Guggenheim is terrible for sound. We all kind of know the shape of it — like if you imagine doing any kind of sound-related thing in there, your instinct would be, “Yeah, that would sound terrible.” What was interesting in my conversation with him was me thinking: you know, we haven't made the thing yet, and because we haven't, and we know what the space is like, it doesn't have to sound terrible. It can actually sound quite appropriate for that space because we're taking its architecture, its audience and the context of being on the Upper East Side as part of the work, as part of the thing to address. So for me, there's the technical addressing of the actual sound itself in these institutions, but also in trying to understand historically what these spaces have been meant for. I've been doing that for a long time because they weren't intended for, like, Black folks to be showing the kind of work that we're showing. So everything about the space is kind of antithetical to what you are trying to do anyway. And everyone that you're working with is assembling and trying to work those ideas into these spaces, so you're constantly rubbing up against limitations. 

When I did ‘A View of a Landscape,’ one of the first things that came to mind was like, “Oh, it's the the Whitney Museum of American Art and Eli Whitney is one of the most American symbols of a century of industrialization: there's a descendant of his family that helped fund and found that museum. So you're looking at the relationship between these individuals, these histories. It's appropriate that [the exhibit] is there. And the museum kind of dug into it a little bit more. So there's interesting conversations in terms of trying to use performance and art to develop meaning, as ways to uncover histories and to be very transparent and clear about what those are. So yeah, I think a lot about venues. 

When I did [‘Assembly,’ the show at] The Kitchen, Lumi Tan and I had been having conversations since 2014 or 2013, and it just turned out, after all those years of conversation, that we should do this really amazing program where we bring a bunch of folks in to perform and kind of take over all three floors of the building. So it was very appropriate for the venue, regardless of what else was happening. For me, it was also exciting to think about mounting this major exhibition at a major museum in the city, and then to almost immediately do this series of performances with a more experimental and historically rich institution — which became an institution, just by the amount of people that have congregated and activated that space. So it was like, “Yeah, I'm gonna like bring Jason Moran and <laughs> Wetware on the same night, so you could hear these disparate worlds.” Kara Walker came to see Jason Moran, and Genesis P-Orridge came to see Wetware, and they were there on the same evening, in the same room. I think it was also greatly compounded by the fact that [The Kitchen and the Whitney] were like five blocks away from one another. 

And because the sonic frequencies in The Kitchen program and in the Whitney performances around “Landscape” also seemed related. It sounds like you're saying  that the pairing was a calendar happenstance. But it's interesting how fluid it felt in terms of its transition from one institution to another, related and un-. Almost like the cherry on top of whatever the big museum exhibition was.

Yeah. In the moment there was some of that realization that there are just things you cannot do in an institution like the Whitney. No matter how hard you try. It's almost as if you could have the entire staff and the entire board ready to do it, and some way, somehow, it's not possible. Like, there's some force embedded there, an aura, something that will always be in your way. I think moments when something really profound happens in these spaces are few and far between. When the impossible becomes possible, some other force is happening you have almost no control over. One day I'll have language for it, but I don't.

So tell me about the book and the record. Both share the title of the Whitney show, which is maybe why they feel like the end of a chapter for work that you've been doing. Though maybe that’s my own take — maybe it's just a transition? What’s your intention with these objects, and with using popular mediums to put them out into the world?

It's definitely a culmination of a lot of years. I feel like I finally get to realize some things that have been brewing for a really long time, to go through and select certain images, or to invite certain people to use them. To put something on wax feels like I'm not just experimenting all the time, like there is some intention behind really packaging something that someone can actually take home. One of the biggest takeaways was to be able to have something widely distributed that I felt I had my hand in, in the way that you would an edition. The project is a deeply collaborative process with so many people. You can take that thing, you can put it up and listen to it. You can read through it, you can look at the images, you can share it with other people, you can travel with it. There's a thing about being able to really distribute some of these ideas — or maybe not distribute, but disseminate. I'm grateful to be able to be in a position where I could do something like that on what I think is a massive scale, just bringing all of these folks together.

The real thing is it's one part of many journeys, many things that I'm doing. I feel like it's almost a commencement in a way. <laughs> We can celebrate the thing. But there is also a lot more that it can produce, or allows other things to happen. Just the idea of having both the LP and the publication, which everyone's like, “You know, we haven't done this before.” I was like, “No one's done this before. Okay, so then that means that we should do it this way. <laughs>. If no one knows what it's supposed to be, then we can steer that a little bit.” And everyone was game. I gave everyone pieces of things: there was a big image bank that I provided and said, “Here, there's PDFs upon PDFs of stuff that you can pull from.” For the musicians, there were stems, 24-track recordings that each person got. And they just kind of ran with it, and made what they wanted to. So it feels like this is actually the beginning of being able to do even more things that vary, which leads to this book launch/performance thing, another excuse to bring a bunch of people together. Like, how many of the contributors could I actually get in the room for a live impromptu improvised set? 

<laughs> Right on. So what can people expect at Performance Space on Thursday?

There will be some remarks in the beginning. Karsten Lund, who is a curator at the Renaissance Society [which produced the book and the album, and who wrote the introduction to the book] will give some remarks, some framing for the publication. And then there's a performance. And the performance will be…we've never done it before. You know, everyone's a good improviser, so we're just gonna see what happens.

(Kevin Beasley, A View of a Landscape, Thurs 3/23, 7p @ Performance Space 150 1st Ave. 4th fl. Manhattan - $16.75)

THIS WEEK’s OTHER SHOWS: