This episode is sponsored by audible.
We are in Houston, Texas outside of Inman Gallery
which is currently hosting an exhibition of the work of Jamal Cyrus
who were going to be meeting with today.
Cyrus synthesises a wide range of materials
and disciplines in his practice,
which is recent years has included:
a marquee that resuscitates and repeats a vintage concert billboard
featuring Houston blues legend Sam Lightnin' Hopkins,
a series of papyrus sheets, from which are cut four differing newspaper covers
each addressing Houston police' 1970 shooting of Carl Hampton
the founder of the city's chapter of the Black Panther party,
as well as a performance that involved Cyrus carefully breading and deep frying a saxophone,
amplifying the sound it makes, amid a series of recitations and movements.
He is also a member of the artists' collective Otabenga Jones and Associates
who's mission is to preserve and promote the core principles of the black radical tradition
and underscore the complications of black representation
through actions, writings and installations.
Sound and musical traditions are threads that run throughout Cyrus' practice,
which fuses unlikely materials and draws connections across cultures and time and space.
Today we're going to talk with him about his work
and see if we might find our own way to draw from existing histories to create new ones.
I'm Jamal Cyrus, and this is your art assignment.
I started making these records in the mid 2000's
and they mainly started off as small 45 jackets
I later went on to making, like, 8 track covers
and then, like, LP covers.
What I was initially trying to do was to make present something I was looking for in the music but wasn't finding,
which was this kind of expression of black militancy.
What I could see kind of happening in the politics, I wasn't always seeing that in the music
right, so I started creating fictional examples of this
and that's how the pride series mainly started with that.
Eventually, when I had enough of them, I said,
'Oh, I should make this into, um, like a consistent piece.'
Cuz I was just kind of doing different labels and doing different, kind of, jumping around a little bit
um, but when I made the decision to make it a consistent piece
I came up with a name
um, and then just kind of a backstory to fuel the making of the works.
and the backstory is like the works come out of, um, the Detroit, uh, rebellion.
and, uh, Detroit is the Mo-Town and this really important musical place
the label was making this music which was supposed to
be marketed at urban youth
but they're supposed to politicise urban youth.
but, you know, creatively do this.
and because of how successful they are at doing it
they come under the surveillance of the FBI
and part of this programme called Quintelpro
and, what happens in the story is that eventually
they're bought out
basically and, kind of, their direction's changed
to produce more, kind of you know, what I call
like, hedonistic, like disco music basically.
So, it's supposed to tell the, you know, the rise and fall of this small, um, independent label.
I'm almost finished, um, it takes place in, um, like I said, 45 covers, um, LP covers and also some posters.
The art assignment I have for you is called brain sounds
and it takes as it's inspiration the desire to hear a sound you have never heard before.
This could be an impossible sound, or simply a sound which has not occurred yet.
Once you decide on what the sound will be,
then think about how to represent it visually
and what form it will take.
In my work, I have used album covers, cassette inserts, concert posters etc.
but yours can take any form you'd like.
good luck and we look forward to seeing your work
So what I really find intriguing about this assignment is this
question of whether we take images at
their word
do we trust what they're telling us and
the short answer is no, we haven't been
for a while and I pretty much avoided in
57 art assignment episodes talking about
post-modernism because i think it's
confusing but I think that it's time.
In super-wide terms, post-modernism applies
across lots of different fields and it's
the acceptance that meaning is not
something that exists within an object
or a text or a movie or whatever but
that meaning is constructed in your own
mind around those things as you try to
understand whatever they are. Nothing is
fixed everything, is relative and we have
to be sceptical of everything.
And it's relevant here because in this postmodern
age, which emerged in art and culture and
full force in the 1970's,
artist showed how skeptical they were of
the onslaught of images and mass culture
that have proliferated since the Second
World War. The image became unmoored from
it's signifier, and cultural material (like
records and their covers) are no longer
these whole unified things with fixed
content and meaning, but are completely
open to interpretation and also open to
be played around with and remixed.
Yeah, and we're still living in that remix
culture, if you think about it, where we
all feel free to pull from and sample
what we see and hear and buy around us
using whatever parts of it we like and
putting it into new contexts to create
new meaning. Exactly, and there were a
number of artists in the late 1970's
early 1980's who are often
called the pictures artists or pictures
generation, who established this new kind
of remixing an image or picture skepticism
in the world of art. In 1981, Barbara
Bloom made a series she called 'Travel
Posters that, upon initial glance, look
like ones you might have seen in a
travel agency or consulate at the time,
but on closer inspection you realize
that, while the images are what you might
expect, (airplanes and travelers and
beaches) the text complicates matters
considerably. An unremarkable image of a
beach is paired with the warning, "No
Journalists" in English and below in
Arabic. Is this a forewarning for
journalists? A draw for camera-shy celebs?
Where is this? Where are we? Gradually, you
realize that these aren't so much stock-
photo, perfect vacation shots but are
unusual, askew and charged. While cryptic,
these text-image pairings have to be read
through the lens of US/Middle East
relations at that time. But we don't have
a guide for how to parse them, really. Who
is the author? Who is the audience? Like
Bloom's posters, Jamal's collaged and
invented album covers are fictions made
from bits of reality. They are close
enough to what we know to be jarring and
to encourage us to probe deeper. The
artifice of picture-making has been
exposed, and we are now free to play in a
magical world of cultural material, to
rethink old narratives and forge new ones.
I usually really do not try to represent
the sound.
Right, I don't like trying to say, "Oh, this
is this kind of jazz-funk thing, so I'm gonna
try to put that in and have that
represented through the line/shape/colour
and texture of the piece, I usually try
to, I guess, pick things that could be
related to could be connected to that
thing, in terms of imagery in the end
language that is a little bit more
specific but it still like has
movement in it. [I] just recently heard about
this thing on the edge of interstellar
space there's this cau- there's supposed to be this wind
that occurs, right, this wind
of gases or whatever that occurs, so I-
I know you can't hear sounds in
space, but like what does that sound like. So
it could be things like that or it could
be things which are a little more closer
to us - pairing two musicians together. So
if I pair together, for instance, I used to
always think about the song "Raspberry
Beret" as being a great song for Jimi
Hendrix to sing, right, so you know it could
be a little bit closer, so it could be
pairing two different musicians I used to also
play with this idea of James Brown in
the Temple of Apollo, right, so like
thinking of all these, these, these kinds
of different ways to approach the assignment.
So you can think about locations, you can
think about couplings, you can think
about
yeah, instruments that had never of
[I wouldn't] say never but you that you hadn't
heard paired before, I think those are
ways you can start.
I think it does- it gives you the
opportunity to- to play
in this just kind of way, to perhaps
think of the juxtapositions or
arrangements, like, you have maybe have
never thought of before, but also I think
it's a good experiment to see
like what that effect will have on
other people to see your work,
in how they'll perceive it and if
there's any of that communication that you
originally intended, like if any of that
is coming through. This episode is
sponsored by audible. Right now, audible
is offering art assignment viewers a
30-day trial period. Checkout audible.com
/ art assignment to access their audio
programmes and titles. One book you might
enjoy if you're interested in
post-modernism is Ulysses by James Joyce,
which is available at audible and, in my
opinion, is the first post-modern
novel. Go to audible.com / art assignment
and make sure you use that link to help
us out and to get a membership trial.