THE HIP HOP TURN Contemporary Art’S Love Affair with Hip Hop Culture from Manhattan to Dakar

1 Dulcie Abrahams Altass THE HIP HOP TURN Contemporary Art’s Love Affair with Hip Hop Culture from Manhattan to Dakar The Dadaist should be a man who has That” was screened at the Fondation Louis fully understood that one is entitled to Vuitton in Paris and at the Los Angeles County have ideas only if one can transform Museum of Art. Hip hop culture seems to be increasingly present in spaces for contem- them into life – the completely active porary art as key figures from both worlds type, who lives only through action, be- collaborate. Beyond the bombastic improb- cause it holds the possibility of achiev- ability and glamour of their fusion, however, ing knowledge. this recent love affair needs to be understood —Richard Huelsenbeck in a nuanced way. It would be short-sighted to ignore the threat of cultural and financial We are not the PDS, not the democrats, appropriation by a majority white art world of we are the PBS, a new party. a multi-facetted culture that was born within Black and Latino communities of the Bronx, —Positive Black Soul at a gaping distance from the white cubes of Manhattan. In 2013, superstar rapper Jay Z teamed up with performance artist Marina Abramovic to Perhaps the clue to understanding this “hip shoot his music video “Picasso Baby” at Pace hop turn” lays in the fact that more than any Gallery in New York during the run of her “The other musical form or cultural genre of the Artist is Present” retrospective at MoMA. The last century, hip hop has shattered the bar- following year artist Kara Walker guest-curat- riers between art and life, fulfilling the aspi- ed Ruffneck Constructivists at the Institute rations of twentieth century avant-gardism. of Contemporary Art in Pennsylvania, placing As the contemporary art world desperately Notorious B.I.G’s Ten Crack Commandments searches for its soul amidst an increasingly in dialogue with the Futurist Manifesto. intense climate of political and social crises Subsequently, in across the globe, and debates over the rele- 2015 Kanye West’s vance of socially engaged art practice are ex- collaboration with hausted, hip hop culture’s capacity to fuse art renowned director and life make it a productive reference point Steve McQueen “All for this existential turbulence. Day / I Feel Like MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org 2 Dulcie Abrahams Altass THE HIP HOP TURN Lior Shvil, Operation Oz Belev-Yam, 2011. Ruffneck Constructivists, February 12—August 17, 2014, installation view, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. Photo: Constance Mensh GESAMTKUNSTWERK AND to complete what is now known as the ‘five THE FIVE ELEMENTS elements of hip hop’. Similarly, the Dadaists strove to disrupt hierarchies of artistic expres- To make sense of this hip hop turn, we must sion by collapsing separations between body, travel further in time from the Bronx of the sound and the visual in performances that re- late 1970s back to Dada. Drawing parallels be- jected “high art” and the academic imaginary. tween Dada and hip hop culture sets the stage for understanding broader cultural tendencies The very naming of Dada and hip hop is also from the last hundred years, and the role that noteworthy, both being invented words that hip hop plays in this trajectory. One of the escape fixed meanings of existing language. most striking similarities between hip hop and Such a disregard for established norms of lan- Dada is the emphasis on the gesamtkunstwerk guage additionally captures the mobilisation of and interdisciplinarity. In the late 1970s DJ and language as medium in both contexts. As Hugo producer Afrika Bambaataa originally coined Ball stated in the 1916 Dada Manifesto, “The the four aspects of hip hop cultural produc- word, gentlemen, is a public concern of the tion: Rapping, break dancing, graffitiing and first importance”. Hip hop’s investment in the DJing, with “knowledge” arriving afterwards word and the privileging of wordplay as well MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org 3 Dulcie Abrahams Altass THE HIP HOP TURN as marginalised language, gestures to similar “STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE” semantic commitments. The phenomenal Ruffneck Constructivists The way in which hip hop vernacular is present exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary in the mainstream today reveals the success of Art in Pennsylvania (curated by Kara Walker) hip hop in imposing its form within society at is exemplary in capturing the nuances of the large. Most crucially, when looking at the ge- contemporary art world’s hip hop turn, and nealogy of Dada and hip hop, Dada was articu- what critical engagements with the genre’s lating a means of expression that would shake aesthetics can generate. Featuring video artist up the psychology of the status quo gripped by Kahlil Joseph, most famous for his collab- world war. Unafraid to shock, art was supposed oration on the Flying Lotus music video for to barge into the realm of life for Dadaists. Until the Quiet Comes, legendary performance From Black Mountain College to Fluxus, the artist Pope.L and South African Dineo Seshee movements that have become recognized in Bopape, known for her ability to build mystical the canonical history of artistic avant-gardism, micro-universes in poetically messy installa- all grew out of this notion. In parallel, hip hop tions, the exhibition explores the construc- has unapologetically taken on this mantle and tivist tendencies of hip hop and marginalised propelled it to a global scale. Hip hop culture urban culture, asking how “resistant bodies has influenced generations to take up arms, who reshape space” may contribute to the to put them down, to spend dizzying sums on way we make worlds.1 Until the Quiet Comes, cars, clothes and villas, to donate those same Joseph’s cinematic masterpiece, arrests time dizzying sums to community relief projects, and at moments when black bodies are embroiled to both reject and enter into politics. Its fusion in scenes of violence: A pre-teen falls to the of aesthetics and everyday experience place it ground in an empty swimming pool and a long in a unique position to potentially satisfy the shot pans over the dramatic sweep of his ambitions of Dada’s proponents, particularly blood, tracing the curves of the pool. A man, from the perspective of an existentially fragile seemingly immobile and likely dead on the art world. ground, picks himself up in what appears as Stills from Flying Lotus’ Until the Quiet Comes, directed by Kahlil Joseph MAKING & BREAKING ISSUE 01 - 2019 makingandbreaking.org 4 Dulcie Abrahams Altass THE HIP HOP TURN reverse motion, and subsequently transforms THE OTHER WEST COAST into a tenderly figure dancing through the peo- ple and the world around him. He moves, while Away from North America and Europe the case they do not, and the space is moulded by his of Senegal, a former French colony perched gestures, not the other way around. Joseph on the western-most point of Africa, is useful produces a new relationship between the for understanding alternative ways of engaging black body and the three-dimensional world, with, and participating in the hip hop turn. If embedding this choreographic relationship the counter-cultural claims of hip hop are to within “the troubles,” to borrow the expression be truly mobilised, reflection must expand to from Donna Haraway.2 In the exhibition’s cura- other spaces where this culture gains mo- torial statement, Walker ingeniously identifies mentum, else we risk missing the enormous something distinctly Futurist in the proposal potential of hip hop as an organic manifes- not to flee from catastrophe, but to act from tation of the avant-garde. For the last three within it, situating hip hop culture within a decades in Senegal, hip hop has, and remains genealogy of twentieth century war-time a widely popular music style, distinct from avant-garde. The nihilistic streak that runs genres such as mbalax that are closely asso- through the exhibition also serves as a coun- ciated with perpetuating culturally embedded terpoint to the art world’s almost three-de- values and traditions. Amidst a landscape cade long obsession with work that actively steeped in cultural conservatism, hip hop’s rise intervenes in social relations, an impulse that to prominence in Senegal is worthy of investi- evolved from relational aesthetics into socially gation, most significantly because of the way engaged art practice, and which, particularly it has shaped the horizon of both the coun- post-2008 economic crash, is at the forefront try’s imaginary and its political reality. The of conversations on the role of art in society at constructivist tendencies of hip hop’s creative large. While figures such as Suzanne Lacy and praxis, its ability to wed cultural production Paul Chan have gained recognition for their and world-building with an antagonistic edge large-scale “infrastructural aesthetics” that is particularly striking in Senegal. strive to produce social good, other artists like Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschorn have Since its beginnings, Senegalese hip hop has been more invested in producing antagonism been overtly political and constructivist in its in their work.3 The art world ostensibly con- form and claims. The genre took off in the tinues to search for an authentic avant-garde, second half of the 1980s, propelled by the and it is within this landscape that a growing country’s serious social and political crisis that number of artists, critics and curators are now was born of structural adjustment programmes looking to the aesthetics of hip hop to under- and a drastic reduction in state services for stand how form can not only inspire but help the general public.

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