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IPFS News Link • Events: America

The Freedom Principle review - an astounding fusion of jazz and art

• http://www.theguardian.com

Contemporary art has grown omnivorous. These days, in your local white cube, you are as likely to see a dance or an experimental film as a painting. But music, somehow, remains a challenge for arts institutions: too abstract, too personal, too hard to present in three-dimensional space. The calamitous Björk retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art this spring, where visitors had to wear headphones while looking at pop-star relics, was not the only false step lately. This year's Venice Biennale features numerous musicians, notably the pianist Jason Moran, and yet music still felt like a temporary diversion rather than a coequal of fine art.

If all it were remembered for was its engagement with musical history, then The Freedom Principle – an astounding new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago – would already stand as a landmark. In telling the story of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a radical organisation of jazz artists founded in 1965, it does a better job than any show I have ever seen at analysing music and conveying its cultural importance. But The Freedom Principle, curated by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete, does even more than that. It shows how the themes of black cultural nationalism in the 1960s – an art engaged with political struggle, and unafraid to speak in a collective voice – continued a modernist artistic tradition of merging art into daily life. And it pushes into the present day, discovering the legacy of an important but under-appreciated musical tradition in contemporary art worldwide, from American sculptors to Albanian video artists. It fuses the history of music and the history of art into a single, more complete narrative, and makes it look easy.


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