Arielle Julia Brown: What is your name? Give us a bit of an overview of your work.

Dr. Omi Osun Joni L. Jones: I am Omi Osun Joni L. Jones and I am an artist scholar.  My work has focused on several areas that overlap. I am interested in Black performance, more specifically Black Diasporic performance. I’ve been most interested in Yoruba-based areas so, of course, Southwestern Nigeria, but in addition to that, spaces where Yoruba aesthetic and Yoruba spirituality are prominent, so places like Cuba and certain regions of the United States.

My work as an artist has often been connected to the ways that art can prod us to think, feel, and know more deeply, and create contestation even amongst the audience witnesses.

The scholarly work that I do attempts to make the scholarship itself embodied on the page so that I encourage a different reading practice rather than a linear reading practice. That kind of scholarship is made most clear in my book, Theatrical Jazz, Performance, Àṣẹ, and the Power of the Present Moment.

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Jean-Michel Basquiat. Hollywood Africans in Front of the Chinese Theater with Footprints of Movie Stars, 1983; acrylic and oil paintstick on canvas mounted on wood supports; 35½ x 81½ in. Courtesy of the Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, New York © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The mythology around Jean-Michel Basquiat continues to proliferate in the twenty-six years since his death. The standard-issue biography of his life reads like a cautionary tale on the perils of success: the early years in the graffiti movement; the street art produced with classmate Al Diaz under the tag SAMO; the sudden media attention on the East Village art scene; the transition into formal painting and the overnight success of shows with Annina Nosei and Mary Boone; the highly publicized friendship with Andy Warhol; the meteoric rise of auction and gallery sales; the heroin addiction; the self-destruction at a preternaturally young age. It’s a story that owes much to clichés of the artist as tragic hero, reduced in equal parts through simplification and fabrication. It is also a story that sells art, and at record prices.

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Radcliffe Bailey. On Your Way Up, 2013; tarp, crocodile, and steel; 120 x 106 x 10 in. Courtesy of the Contemporary Arts Center of New Orleans.

Bailey grounds his practice in a playfully subversive and anachronistic field of visual and art histories and traditions, and finds freedom in the deconstruction of a vocabulary of signs and images culled from early African art and the turbulent history of the Black Atlantic experience. This is most robustly felt in works where textual fragments, graffiti, and African ideograms feature prominently within the pictorial field and intersect with objects that embody the physical and psychological rupture of the Middle Passage and the colonization of Africa. The gargantuan mixed-media work Black Night Falling (2014) is the most complex of these in its presentation of the representational, gestural, and performative features of markmaking associated with so-called “primitive” art; African cosmograms such as the dikenga (a spiritual map of cross and circle used by tribes from the kingdom of Kongo to mark the space between the mystical and earthly realms and channel communication between mystical forces and religious practitioners) and Haitian vévé drawings of gods and the heavens interrupt the indexical marks left by Bailey’s shoes and bare feet, turning the canvas into an empty stage of leftover symbols and movements co-choreographed by artist and history. Meanwhile, cutouts of circles puncture the rough textures undulating across the deep black of the picture space, desperately hinting at the sun that cannot shine over the seas where so many lives were cruelly lost. It is Bailey’s unique, dialectical expression of black experience as something collectively felt, infinitely diverse, and personally political that invests his creations with a powerfully unresolved symbolic space where the historical consciousness of trauma and the potentiality of healing are allowed to confront and embrace one another.[1]

Radcliffe Bailey. Black Night Falling, 2014; mixed media; 168 x 240 x 14 in. Courtesy of CACNO.

However, it is the artist’s deep investment in music and sound that remains the most powerful aspect of his practice, connecting him not just to a “black tradition…but a black mode of creativity” where ceaseless improvisation and experimentation accumulate and intensify.[2] In statements about his work, Bailey continually pays debt to the technical innovations and artistic ethics of American jazz masters Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Charles Mingus, and Thelonious Monk, and his interest in capturing the historical and political impact of music on American culture.[3] In many ways, his works operate like a jazz riff where profound simplicity and repetition take on the spontaneous fireworks of individual style—what Amiri Baraka calls “the changing same.”[4] Motifs reappear in new forms and contexts, their moods and identities changed and deterritorialized through changes in scale and compositional organization. This musical materiality is presented diametrically in the two installations created for the New Orleans show: Windward Coast, a three-dimensional work of disassembled oak and walnut-wood piano keys emanating from the corner of the gallery, interrupted by a haunting plaster head covered in black glitter rising out the undulating sea of driftwood; and If Bells Could Talk, a sculptural bouquet that includes brass instruments exploding from an antique birdcage sitting atop an oversize 19th-century wooden music stand and a recording of a solo horn riff reverberating across the gallery—its sound complicated by a pink conch shell suspended on the opposing wall.[5] While Windward Coast re-presents the lost or unheard songs and sounds of slaves transported across the Atlantic, and the overwhelming physical and psychological violence associated with “lost-ness” in African American culture, If Bells Could Talk acknowledges the incredible contribution slave artisans made to the history of decorative arts, the repressed voices of an enslaved people, the liberating force of jazz, and the specificity of New Orleans to those narratives.[6] Music, for Bailey, is like history—a human attempt to acknowledge, honor, and move forward through time.

Radcliffe Bailey. Winward Coast, 2015; piano keys, plaster bust, and glitter; dimensions variable—approx. 27 square feet. Courtesy of CACNO.

[1] See Christine Mullen Kreamer, Mary Nooter Roberts, and Elizabeth Harney, Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (Washington, DC: The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, 2007), 166.

[2] See Carole Thompson’s “Preface” in the exhibition catalog for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, entitled Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2012), 16. Thompson quotes John Vlach’s essay on the Charleston-based blacksmith Philip Simmons, and compares Bailey’s unique individualism to the black artisan–artist.

[3] “I love music and music is a very important part of the work that I do. Imagine all the pianos and all the different songs that each piano has played. I am relating to that. I am also interested in connecting the different time periods—a piano from a church to pianos from a high school to people’s personal pianos. I am thinking about how music has been connected to spirituality.” — Radcliffe Bailey in a 2010 interview with art historian Edward S. Spriggs, quoted in “Radcliffe Bailey’s Cerebral Universe,” in Radcliffe Bailey: Memory as Medicine, pg. 106.

[4] Baraka is quoted in William J. Harris’s “How You Sound?: Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz,” in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, eds. Robert O’Mealley and Brent Edwards (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 312.

[5] The first iteration of Winward Coast appeared in Looking for Light, Traveling By Night at Solomon Projects in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2009, and then appeared again in 2010 at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The new 2015 installation at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans is placed in a corner window facing the street as if it were spilling out of the gallery and into the world—a decision similar to the candy-floor work of the late conceptual sculptor Félix González-Torres.

[6] Dr. Andrea Andersson, Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, mentioned that the instruments used in this installation were requested by Bailey while the install was in process—another instance of the artist’s dependence on spontaneity in his aesthetic practice (telephone interview conducted on April 2, 2015). Thanks to Dr. Andersson for her insightful commentary on the exhibition and Bailey’s work at the CACNO.

We must be in downtown Guadalajara, but all I can see is the glisten on the streets as I bail out.  I run through the torrential rain across the pavement, dodging granizo and landing on the dry doorstep of an airy, modern restaurant called Café Benito. Having just escaped the rain and hailstones, I am now immediately bombarded by something else. Blasts of an unexpected kind of music: vintage, improvisational jazz pulsates from the DJ booth with astonishing force. Music you usually imagine softly breathing from a record player booms against the cement walls like a dubstep concert. Shaking out my hair, I quickly realize this isn’t just a restaurant – but a uniquely hybridized and multi-disciplinary space. The back of the bar is connected to a theatre of sorts and I can catch a clean white glimmer of an adjoining gallery space. Naturally we head for the bar and order a round of cervezas. My friend advises that, despite being 2 hours late, we are right on time for the performance, a thing I’m liking more and more about Mexico.

Cafe Benito in Guadalajara

Meandering through the modern décor scattered throughout the hard-edged cement space towards the gallery, I meet a number of Guadalajara’s tight knit crew of contemporary artists, who, in addition to all being good friends, seem to have matching mustaches and tattoos. (I discover that these ‘homemade’ tattoos were the handiwork of visiting artist Thomas Jeppe’s recent residence and assumingly, a night full of escalating dares and mezcal.) Guadalajara’s art scene is personal and friendly – after a few days, these guys all know my name. Thankfully, I missed tattoo night. The curator, Antoine Thelamon, shouts his hellos over the music, reluctant to clarify what I am about to see, except for teasing about a little surprise in store. The artist on show is a locally based artist, Adrian S. Bara, who walks me towards the installation.

Adrian S. Bara sculpture installation, Cafe Benito, 2012

Beyond the bar, and still reverberating with loud jazz, is a pristine gallery space scattered with minimal sculpture objects. A low steel platform with a golden yellow top humbly blushes in the centre of the floor, a hint of colour in the cool space. Roughly polished with hints of iridescent circular marks, a grey steel bar juts from a high corner, sloping 45 degrees and before being mechanically bolted directly to the concrete floor. Across the cavernous space is a curious scene: a blank section of wall seems taped off, as if to signify an invisible, white painting that once was there. Below either side of the black perimeter, two spotless concave wooden objects hug the lower corner of the wall. In the typical fashion, since Minimalist sculpture encourages the viewer to walk around the space, I pace around and under, along and through….but soon Bara curiously encourages me to stay close to the walls as the a hip crowd gathers to watch the performance.

Adrian S. Bara sculpture installation and performance, Cafe Benito, 2012

I am slowly piecing together the work when two teenagers roll in on skateboards battering through the space. Uh, is that allowed? It takes the sound of a skateboard deck smashing and scraping along the yellow sculpture at the centre of the gallery for me to realize exactly what’s happening here. The steel bar becomes a rail and the two wooden sculptures across the space now so obviously become ramps. Artworks turn into obstacles, as gallery becomes skate park – and all the usual rules of either arena go right out the ventana. The world where artwork is precious, jealously guarded and forbidden to touch is shattered with the loud slap of wood, metal and wheels.

The skaters recoil and then paw at the floor like charging bulls, flinging themselves down to the end of the gleaming gallery where the wooden ramp pilots them up the wall and across the blank taped off space. Between the perimeters of the black square, a gray arch appears on the white wall, the first stroke in an unusual action painting. This action is repeated at intervals by the two skaters, who soon start to compete for the longest and highest mark. We lap it up.

Broadway Boogie Woogie, Piet Mondrian, 1942-1943

The untitled performance by Bara, the first in a series and loosely described to as ‘abstract skating’, is inspired by Piet Mondrian, and specifically his late painting from 1942-3 called Broadway Boogie Woogie. Famously Mondrian painted it after moving to New York after the onset of WWII, and, in discovering American jazz, redefined his painterly style as more staccato and rhythmic, echoing the beats of the new music and of the bustling city of New York itself. The yellow platform in Bara’s installation echoes the gold hues of the piece, and Mondrian’s famous black thick lines is repeated in the steel rail bar.

It is at this point when I realize how macho the whole amalgamation is – it’s the string that ties all these seemingly disparate elements together: Minimalism, skateboarding, jazz and Action Painting. The machismo historically intertwined with Minimalism and sculptors like Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Donald Judd and Robert Morris is legendary. Indeed the artist group I fell into is also a bit of a boy’s club. Contemporary comparisons to the likes of Aaron Young also come to mind, who combines daredevil antics and action painting. Working as the ‘artist as bad ass’, Young’s works are executed with motorcycles doing doughnuts instead of a paintbrush, and, like the original crash and burner, Pollock, places the painterly surface on the floor. Using athleticism in much the same way, Bara in turn keeps the painting surface vertical. The skateboard scrapes index and chart the escalating skills and masculine prowess of the skaters. Of course the typically masculine-dominated street art also comes to mind, as graffiti ridden skate parks are the usual host to such activities.

Adrian S. Bara Installation (in series), Cafe Benito, 2012

The evening progresses with continued enthusiasm as the skaters re-arrange the sculptures in to more and more difficult and complex jumping obstacles. As the rain subsides, passer-bys wander in to see what all the noise is about while the sculptures endue further and more creative abuse. A few onlookers grab their skateboards and join in. The white painting on the wall becomes s a scribbled arch of repetitive grey marks, and the sculptures have all acquired a healthy peppering of injuries, from scrapes and gauges to heavy cracks and collapsed walls. The violence done to the sculptures record this creative act of destruction, which serves as the sole element that admittedly brings to mind some of my favorite female artists including Niki de Saint Phalle and Angela de la Cruz. Whether purposefully testosterone charged or not, Bara leaves us all with something very complex and interesting to absorb. As I crack open another beer, the skaters exhaust themselves and also head to the bar. A gestured record of the night’s festivities, I realize most of the action’s evidence remains behind in the gallery… but not all of it. A few marks are taken out of the gallery and back onto the streets: the bruises and scrapes on the performer’s skin. Worn like trophies, a few drops of blood make for an interesting confirmation that some of Bara’s artwork bites back – perhaps a sculpture’s revenge for decades of abuse by generations of artists.

http://www.adrianbara.com/