The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibit, Blues for Smoke, features an exciting array of works by a wide range of contemporary black artists. But it offers so much more. A journey back in time, the combination of works, inspired by African-American music, slips you, with a heady mix of anticipation and foreboding, into a dark, back alley jazz club that would be easily at home in the ruins of Potsdam, Berlin, or along the steamy backwater canals of New Orleans. The mood of the show captures the feeling of folks gathered at smatterings of café tables as you enter, where you sit and listen to live jazz vocals in an atmosphere tinged with the bite of a gin cocktail and the halo of cigarette smoke.
This dynamic exhibit examines the pervasive and interdisciplinary influence of blues music and jazz aesthetics on American art and culture. Drawing together various art forms (video, sculpture, painting, and live performance) across the lines of race, multiple generations and interdisciplinary canons, Blues for Smoke places the idioms of blues, and other distinctly African-American traditions, at the center of the American tableau of creativity.
In a pique of innovation, live, pop-up performances occur along with the exhibit, in which spectators migrate from room to room in a parallel dialogue with the themes of rootlessness, travel, and transience that are integral to blues and jazz aesthetics, the blues as a way of life, and the lives of blues musicians. The day I attended, there were such pleasures as listening to the stylings of Brooklyn-based band, King Holiday, which boasts a range of musical inspirations from blues to rock to reggae. Their sound was a perfect complement to the exhibit’s argument for the wide-reaching influence of the blues on contemporary music and pop culture.
Apart from the hot, sweaty live music den, the main exhibit rests on the third floor. There one is confronted by an overwhelming collection of works. At this stage it becomes important to understand the blues’ beginnings in places like the Mississippi Delta and New Orleans, around the turn of the century, in African-American communities where life was still very much defined by the sociopolitical landscape wrought by slavery. In this way, the blues came to represent hardship, struggle and oppression – a lifelong feeling of being short changed. While the Whitney, somewhat naively, endeavors to transfigure this experience in its program literature, to broaden it and render it as diffuse as a screen of smoke (“a lens through which to look at certain topics in contemporary art”), don’t be fooled. This exhibit accurately chronicles the collective, tormented, and triumphant experience of being black in America.
We see the yoke of slavery represented by twisted manacles of welded steel in the work of Melvin Edwards, progressing to the migration of black people away from the South in the mournful collages of Romare Bearden. Kara Walker also offers an unforgettable and disturbing comment on the horrors of slavery in an animated piece that portrays the rape of a black woman by a white man using her signature paper cut outs in the work “Ms. Pipi’s Blue Tale.”
Simultaneously you have artists such as Lorraine O’Grady, whose serene video projection features a close up of curly textured hair windswept to a soundtrack of wooded wilderness, suggesting in its own way the relationship of the black experience to all — particularly natural — things.
While there are racially diverse artists featured in the exhibit, and works that stray from the primary subject (black people, black culture, and black history), ultimately these renderings – like Martin Kippenbeger’s sculpture of a man with his back turned to the viewer – feel tangential to the core narrative, and in some instances only serve to underscore the commodification of the black experience, the dark side of our musical legacy.
However, where these attempts to make meaningful cross-cultural connections yield the richest and most interesting results is in the finely drawn link between the blues and contemporary queer culture, as evidenced in the well-chosen photographs by Mark Morrisroe.
Known for his images of young sex workers, street youth, and other marginalized figures (it is one of Morrisroe’s prints that graces the alluring advertisements for the show), these portraits manage to tap into what seems key to understanding the blues and jazz, a concurrent feeling of profound dispossession paired with a deep, counterintuitive sense of ownership and pride in that marginalized experience. For both blacks and many gay subcultures, there is also the shared capacity for distinct cultural vernaculars that emerge from these fringe communities.
There is an interesting interplay that happens when you look at these various works. It becomes very clear that the exchange of cultural idioms represented in Blues for Smoke is a two-way transaction, and that many of the artists featured are quick to implicate black people as complicit in their own exploitation. This point is adroitly made by Renee Greene, whose audio installation features a range of African-American texts and cultural references, including a series of definitions of slang terms, presented like words in a dictionary. Does this formalize an alternate language? It begs the question of whether representing slang in this institutional format lends it legitimacy — or only serves to commercialize its usage. William Pope accents a similar tension with his provocative text drawings of phrases such as, “Black people are the last white colonists,” also featured in Blues for Smoke.
Tied to both the queer affinity of the exhibit, and shedding light on the complicit role black people play in the commodification of our culture, rap artist Le1f’s dynamic song and video “Wut” feels surprisingly at home, depicting the black rapper seductively posed on the lap of a half-naked white man whose face is covered by a Pokemon mask. This video installation points, again, to the question of, “Who in this scenario is actually being fetishized whom?”
While Blues for Smoke is definitely on the pulse of the hottest ideas in culture and society, one of the drawbacks of the show is its sheer abundance. There are perhaps too many impressions to absorb, making it feel distended, reaching beyond the exhibit’s capacity to express its big ideas. When dealing with themes of such great intensity and nuance, having enough time and space becomes important to processing it all. Blues for Smoke leans toward the over-saturated. The way the exhibit is organized also feels somewhat disjointed at times, lacking the flow that might lend what seems like disparate parts of black cultural history a sense of continuity.
The Whitney draws the title for the exhibit from a 1960 solo album by jazz pianist Jaki Byard. The museum insists in its curatorial summary of the show that the title is meant to suggest that the influence of the blues is pervasive, but also diffuse and difficult to pin down. Based on the tensions that surface in the show, one can’t help but wonder if there is an alternate interpretation at work. Perhaps Blues for Smoke describes yet another transaction – blues literally for smoke; an exchange of rich cultural idioms that find their roots in the blues and black art, offered (or taken) for cultural currency as impermanent and malleable as a cloud of smoke.
Certainly not to be missed, you can catch this thought provoking exhibit until April 28 in New York City. What you take away might be as overwhelming, and diffuse, as the “smoke” in its title.
Chase Quinn is a freelance writer, art critic, and budding novelist, who has worked with several leading human rights organizations in the U.S. and the U.K., promoting social and economic justice. Follow Chase on Twitter at @chasebquinn.