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RODNEY McMILLIAN "MOCA's 'Blues for Smoke' riffs on a wider aesthetic" by: Michael Wilson Los Angeles Times October 27, 2012

October 27, 2012 MOCA's 'Blues for Smoke' riffs on a wider aesthetic MOCA's new exhibition goes beyond the blues as musical genre to examine its myriad creative legacies, with artists like Martin Kippenberger and Jean-Michel Basquiat. By Reed Johnson

MOCA exhibition curator Bennett Simpson sits amid the installation by Rodney, McMillian, "From Asterik in Dockery, 2012." (Al Seib, Los Angeles Times / October 19, 2012)

When visitors step into MOCA's new exhibition "Blues for Smoke," they're confronted with a heavenly, hellish vision. It's a screaming-red, life-size room outfitted with stitched-vinyl interiors and pew-like benches facing a giant red-leather cross laced with brass zippers.

Modeled after storefronts and one-room country churches in the Mississippi Delta as if viewed through a pair of bloodshot eyes, Rodney McMillian's mixed-media installation "From Asterisks in Dockery" alludes to the Dockery Plantation, widely regarded as the birthplace of blues music. In the early 1900s the 10,000-acre cotton plantation was home to blues prophets such as Charley Patton, Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson.

But McMillian's artwork evokes something less historically specific: the tension between the sacred and the profane, body and soul, sensual release and spiritual release. It speaks to what the jazz writer Albert Murray described as "that sweaty, troubled space between Saturday night and Sunday morning" that midwifed the blues into existence many decades ago.

"Blues for Smoke" is concerned with that space, MOCA exhibition curator Bennett Simpson says, because the blues, Maccarone New York | Los Angeles

understood fully, signifies not merely a musical genre but a broader, deeper aesthetic sensibility that pervades American culture. And as the blues constantly wavers between Saturday night and Sunday morning, that sensibility is never fixed but always in process of becoming something new.

"I think the blues is a kind of anticipation," Simpson said last week as he guided a visitor through the exhibition (through Jan. 7) of 48 artists and 150 works encompassing sculpture, painting, photography, mixed media, video, installations, wall- mounted poems and strategically placed music -listening stations.

"The blues in some way is about imagining a different place, a place sort of different from your space of trouble or your space of worry or your space of forlorn-ness or whatever it is that gives you the blues. So you have the blues and then to ameliorate the situation you play the blues. You try to get out of the place that you're in."

In planning the exhibition over six years, Simpson steered clear of clichéd representations and narrow definitionse o f th blues. "Blues for Smoke" — the title derives mfr oa p layfully reverent 1960 album by protean jazz pianist — isn't a show about "the blues," Simpson said, "because I don't think that there is 'the blues.'

"Or if there is, then it's a kind of marketing category, or an 'official' culture category," he continued. "This is a more experimental show than that."

"Blues for Smoke" insists on a reading of the blues that can accommodate works by European artists like Martin Kippenberger, whose hard-drinking, bad-boy, Rat Pack-like personal mythos resembles the aura that swirls around musician Robert Johnson, the man who legend has it sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads to learn to play guitar.

Kippenberger's sculptural self-portrait, "Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself" (1992), is a life-size cast-aluminum mannequin that stands contritely facing a gallery wall next to Jutta Koether's cartoonish painting "100% (Portrait Robert Johnson)," a wry commentary on brand-name artists' lucrative Faustian pacts. Next to those works stands David Hammons' "Rocky" (1990), a sculpture consisting of a battered metal stand capped with a brain-shaped stone covered with kinky black human hair.

"Rather than telling some feel-good story about identity or identity politics, my idea of the blues had a lot to do with artists that refused identity, or played games with identity, or stepped sideways from identity. Kippenberger and Hammons do that in a way," Simpson said.

Simpson, 40, was raised in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., where he grew up absorbing hip-hop and also being inspired by "great, free-your-mind" socially active left-leaning punk bands that held anti-apartheid rallies and raised money for battered women's shelters. In his exhibition catalog essay, he dedicates "Blues for Smoke" to his grandfather, a Baptist minister and social worker.

Continually veering between familiar and obscure blues-related artistry, the exhibition enfolds not only Roy DeCarava's iconic 1961 photos of John Coltrane wailing on saxophone but also insider-outsider tricksters like Jean-Michel Basquiat.

A gallery near the Geffen's entrance displays William Eggleston's quietly observant photos of the past's persistence in the modern Deep South: a foggy graveyard, tattered handbills listing gospel singing groups, a kudzu-smothered hillside.

An adjacent wall contains several striking examples of Romare Bearden's collages of painted newspaper and magazine cutouts. Their themes are stasis and movement, entrapment and freedom, a defining blues preoccupation: New York filled with zooming cars and bustling pedestrians of various skin tones, distant steam locomotives racing past rows of barefoot sharecroppers and melancholy musicians.

Basquiat is represented by his five-panel paint and paper collage "Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta" (1983), a mischievous piece that spoofs the pseudo-scientific obsession with mapping out cultural family trees — never mind that the roots of American culture are as hopelessly, exuberantly tangled as the roots of ethnicity or sexuality can be.

"The way people talk about the blues in the United States, there is this kind of fetish for discovery and for origins and for lineage, 'this person begat this person begat this style, begat that style,'" Simpson observes. "Everyone wants to control the blues, which is ironic. White people especially want to control the blues, I think." Maccarone New York | Los Angeles

"Blues for Smoke" suggests that blues sensibility is ever fluid and diaphanous, abstract and figurative, black and white, gay and straight, and much else besides. None of the artists in the show is identified or profiled by ethnicity or nationality.

There's an implicit "kind of queering" in the blues, Simpson said, that surfaces in such works as Beauford Delaney's portraits of writers James Baldwin and Jean Genet, with their faux-naif, vaguely outsider-y quality. It's also present in Mark Morrisroe's lyrical, tender, pathos-laden photos of physically bruised (black and blue?) urban vistas and his own scarred but resilient body.

The blues opens possibilities of aspiring to "a multi-ethnic self, a multi-gendered self or multi-sexed self," Simpson said, a description that might fit Duke Ellington, who is referenced in Jack Whitten's 1974 acrylic painting "Black Table Setting:

Homage to Duke Ellington." Ellington may have harbored similar ideas when he titled a 1927 composition "Black and Tan Fantasy" and a 1943 jazz symphony "Black, Brown and Beige."

"The blues self is an improvised self," Simpson said. "It doesn't shy away from the difficulty that that entails. When you improvise yourself in culture you may get some blowback."

The blues are blue because the salvation of an individual or the liberation of a people may be light-years away. "There may be some kind of contingent release," Simpson said. "It may come in heaven. It may come at death. It may come … who knows when it's going to come?"

In the meantime, we have the blues to console and incite, for yearning and solace.

"The blues is where you find it," Simpson said, "or where it finds you."