Alain
Kirili
March 11 to April 24, 2004
Essays
- Paul Audi
- Sarah Lewis
- William Jeffett
Kirili and Jazz
By William Jeffett
For the last ten years Alain Kirili has explored a space between sculpture and jazz through a series of collaborative projects with some of the most prominent of contemporary jazz artists. Kirili's own formation derives in part from a consideration of the great modern tradition of formal sculpture, notably an engagement with the contemporary implications of the sculpture of Picasso, González and David Smith (recently he curated an exhibition of David Smith drawings in the école des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Kirili approaches this language of sculpture from the point of view of the statue and an attempt to reinvest form with spiritual content. This recovery of content is not anecdotal, and represents a rejection of the example of the sculptural Minimalism of Donald Judd and Sol Lewitt. Against Minimalism, Kirili proposed the monument and the statue, especially a concern with the vertical structure of sculpture as a bearer of meaning. His 2002 project 'an artist, a monument', presented in the abbey of Montmajour, represented both an exploration of spirituality and an homage to John Coltrane through engaging with a sacred architectural setting. The essence of the project was the visual weightlessness of the sculpture, architecture and music (all qualities of the gothic).
Kirili is not a nostalgic modernist. He emerged in the Paris of 1970 with a conceptual practice expressed both in sculpture and theoretically in a series of important articles in the review Artpress. In 1976 he participated in the inaugural exhibition at PS1, where his work was presented alongside that of the ground-breaking generation of conceptual and post-minimal artists, including Baldessari, Daniel Buren, Walter De Maria, Joseph Kosuth, Gordon Matta-Clark, Antoni Miralda, Bruce Nauman, Robert Ryman, Richard Serra, Eve Sonneman, and Lawrence Weiner. During 1975-1976, Kirili apprenticed with the master blacksmith Florian Unterrainer, and the following year he moved definitively to New York. Kirili's engagement with the forge fundamentally altered his manner of working; it introduced the shift from conceptualism to sculpture understood as statuary.
Kirili's engagement with jazz, beginning around 1994, opened up a new performative dimension to his approach to sculpture. The density of vertical form was opened up, and a stronger dialogue with space was established (for example in works such as Spirit of Mingus). Kirili further entered into collaborations with jazz musicians, notably with Roy Haynes, where Kirili improvised a sculpture made in clay while Haynes improvised with the drums in an action documented as a 'video jam session'. Since then, Kirili has engaged with a multitude of similar collaborations. Often a musician or a dancer jams to a sculptural installation, as in performances at the Knitting factory. In others a musician will literally play the sculptures, as in the case of Sunny Murray drumming the sculptures in 1995. Or a work by Kirili will provide the inspiration for the composition of a new piece of music as in Billy Bang's 1997 solo piece for violin Commandment (For the sculpture of Alain Kirili), which was performed and recorded in Kirili's studio. Kirili's jazz/sculpture collaborations include projects with Cecil Taylor, Steve Lacy, and Archie Shepp among many others, and these collaborations are documented in the book Célébrations (Christian Bourgeois, 1997).
Kirili's reflections on jazz, together with an anthology of related articles by other writers, are gathered in his book Sculpture et jazz: autoportrait (Stock, 1997). For Kirili, jazz offered a model which was an alternative to the established artworld. It was about life and the urgency of life, and his interest for this reason was autobiographical. Sculpture was about the hand, but in needed to be invested with the vitality of jazz. In the end, for Kirili, jazz and sculpture converged: 'Jazz and sculpture are created in urgency. Extreme risk is the minimum condition, this is the absolute criterion of the musician and the sculptor. Our confrontation with the material, this is the risk of every creator. Paradoxically the unforseen moment of improvisation is a premeditated and meticulously calculated attack. Creation is the perfect crime'.
Expressed as sculpture Kirili's engagement with Jazz can be defined in terms of what he calls 'Open Form Sculpture'. On the one hand, he refers to the open tradition of direct-welded sculpture as practised by Picasso and González; this is what Kahnweiler called 'open-work sculpture' for its ability to create spaces beyond the physical form of the sculpture. As Picasso was interested in African sculpture in the project, so Kirili is engaged with the cutting edge of one of the most inventive forms of African-American music. On the other hand, Kirili makes reference to the 'free-form' jazz of musicians such as Anthony Braxton and John Coltrane. Finally, whether expressed as sculpture or music, such concerns are anchored in the human body. Both music and sculpture are performed. As Kirili notes, 'Jazz invents the body. Jazz is the science of the body... Sculpture is the creation of living bodies made up of sounds'. Here we are not so much faced with the dematerialisaton of the body, but its materialisation and embodiment not in form but as quivering flesh.
Dr William Jeffett
is Curator, Exhibitions at the Salvador Dalí Museum, St Petersburg,
Florida.
photography by Christian Carone unless otherwise indicated