In concert - sculptor Alain Kirili invites jazz musicians to collaborate with him

Art in America, Dec, 1996 by Raphael Rubinstein

Since 1992, sculptor slain Kirili has been inviting prominent jazz musicians such as Cecil Taylor and Archie Shepp to interact with his art. The resulting collaborative events--in Paris, New York and elsewhere--combine challenging musical improvisation with sculptures of wide formal variety.

In recent years, Alain Kirili's sculptural vision has led him to develop several different bodies of work, more or less simultaneously. Depending on mood and occasion, he moves among dramatically vertical sculptures of forged iron or aluminum, vigorously modeled terra-cotta forms and more architectonic structures made from bent and welded sheet metal that has been painted white or black. In addition, he often presents sculptures in groupings where pieces of marble, painted stones, irregularly shaped scrap iron or twists of modeled terra-cotta are placed on low pedestals of wood or metal.

A French-born artist who divides his time between New York and Paris, the 50-year-old Kirili has progressed from the thin, filamentlike forms of his 1970s work to a generally more robust and expressive style. He likes to describe the contrasting geometric and organic elements in his work as an interplay between northern restraint and southern sensuality. Embracing contradictions, he is proud to draw equal inspiration from Barnett Newman, whose Broken Obelisk is at the origin of Kirili's forged-iron sculptures, and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, the 19th-century French sculptor known for his exuberantly modeled figures. Such concerns are explicitly evoked in Nord/Sud "North/South) a 1992 work in which each of nine upright iron beams is crowned with a chunk of granite painted rust orange.

While the title Nord/Sud is easily readable in terms of the sculpture's juxtaposition of cold rectilinear iron and warm organic rock, there is another interpretation which points to a completely new aspect of Kirili's artistic career. In an essay for the catalogue of "Open Form Sculpture," an exhibition of Kirili's work that traveled around the United Kingdom in 1994, British critic William Jeffet pointed out that the French avantgarde journal Nord-Sud, for which the piece was named, was itself a reference to a Paris Metro line. As Jeffet observed, the North-South line was the one which "the poets and writers living in the quarter of Montmartre took to the cafes of Montparnasse, where they could see performances of American jazz music and could visit the famed Bal Negre cabaret." The "underground" connection Jeffet uncovers between the jazzophile Parisian avant-garde of the Teens and Twenties and a 1992 sculpture by Kirili is hardly accidental: for the past four years Kirili has spent much of his time on collaborative projects with American jazz musicians, among them some of the most respected composers and performers of recent decades.

A longtime jazz fan whose childhood memories include hearing the great reed man Sidney Bechet playing in his parents' kitchen, Kirili first became involved with jazz as a sculptor in 1992 when he began a series of exchanges with the American saxophonist Steve Lacy. (Before moving to Paris in 1970, Lacy had played with Thelonius Monk, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor; he also has a long-standing interest in transmedium collaborations, having frequently worked with Swiss singer Irene Aebei in creating musical settings for texts by Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs and Robert Creeley.) When Lacy and Kirili met in a Parsian jazz club, Kirili, gratified to learn that the musician knew his work, invited Lacy to perform at an upcoming vernissage. In June 1992, at the opening of an exhibition of Kirili's sculptures at Daniel Templan Gallery in Paris, Lacy walked among the sculptures while playing his soprano saxophone (a straight, clarinetlike instrument which is rarely favored by jazz musicians). Seeking to translate the works' physical presence into melodic lines, he also elicited their unexpected acoustic properties by placing the mouth of his horn inside the volumes of the metal sculptures and letting the tones reverberate. Both artist and musician were excited by this unorthodox concert for saxophone and sculptures, and have since repeated the event in New York and elsewhere.

Kirili's next jazz collaboration, in October 1992, involved a shift of instrumentation. Kirili invited legendary drummer Roy Haynes to set up his drum kit in the sculptor's New York studio. As Haynes played, Kirili, standing at a nearby table, began to rapidly model a series of abstract forms in clay, using his hands to shape three-dimensional responses to Haynes's percussive rhythms. The videotape documenting this encounter, Jam Session (1992), shows 16 minutes of the two men trading riffs across the boundaries that divide their two mediums. Part of the excitement of Jam Session is in seeing the juxtaposition of two art forms that, in the normal course of things, one would never have associated. I'm willing to bet that the Haynes-Kirili encounter is the fIrst time in modern history that a drummer and a sculptor have worked side by side, though a similar combination must surely have occured during earlier epochs of human existence. Yet while it is fascinating to watch a consummate musician exercise his art and equally illuminating to see the surprising speed and near violence that goes into the making of Kirili's modeled sculptures, the experiment is ultimately unsuccessful because it pits a seasoned performer, Haynes, against a visual artist whose creative process is essentially private. Kirili seems to have understood this, for his subsequent projects have been structured differently.