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

Art in America, Dec, 1996 by Raphael Rubinstein

The Smithian accents in these sculptures remind me of the first conversation I ever had with Kirili about art and jazz. It was a few years before his jazz collaborations began. Kirili had just made a visit to David Smith's former studio at Bolton Landing, New York. While visiting the studio of one of his idols, still preserved by Smith's children as it was when the sculptor was alive, Kirili made a point of looking through Smith's records. l recall Kirili listing the jazz recordings Smith owned and expressing his certainty that they had been important for Smith's art. On that occasion, I also recall, Kirili lamented the fact that no American art historians seemed to have picked up on the importance of jazz for Smith and others of that generation.[4] Kirili joins a long line of French champions of black American culture when, in Sculpture et Jazz, he writes, "I am deeply convinced that it's a great time to repay African-American culture and music for its immense contribution to the art of this century. I am not an art historian, but I feel it as a deep necesessity in my everyday life."

Another necessity Kirili feels is to wage a struggle against what he sees as the great enemy of art in the United States--puritanism. Here again the genius of Bolton Landing turns up; as Kirili puts it in Sculpture et Jazz: "North America is David Smith. As early as 1965 1 knew it was necessary to understand the obstacles he had to overcome: American Puritanism." (Kirili obviously has in mind Smith's 1946 sculpture, Puritan Landscape.) Repeatedly in Sculpture et Jazz, Kirili promotes jazz as an antidote to this perceived American puritanism, which he holds partly responsible for the "tragic lives of great American artists." For him, musicians such as Cecil Taylor are not only great creators, they also offer a distinctly anti-puritan approach to art and life. These adventurous jazz musicians embody the same unity of sensuality and formal rigor, the same insistence of individual freedom from convention,that he seeks in his own art. From this point of view, it is possible to understand Kirili's jazz collaborations as a logical outgrowth of his sculpture. Along with the sculptural heritage of Smith, Newman and Carpeaux, as well as Beat poetry and erotic Indian art (Kirili has written about Indian sculpture [see A.i.A., May '82] and made a film called 100,000 lingams), jazz is part of Kirili's recipe for bringing together, in his own promiscuously various sculpture, "north" and "south," geometric volumes and modeled forms, the cultivated sensuality of Paris and the relentless force of New York. In the process, he also seems to have invented a new genre of performance art and, Last but not least, provided occasions for a lot of great music.

[1.] Quoted by Francis Davis in "The Cantos of Cecil Taylor," Outcats, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 42. [2.] Alain Kirili, Sculpture et Jazz, Autoportrait, Paris, Editions Stock, 1996, p. 161. (All translations in this article by the author.) [3.] Ibid., p. 29. [4.] He returns to the subject in Sculpture et Jazz (p. 206), linking it to racism.