{"id":3776,"date":"2014-03-31T14:50:50","date_gmt":"2014-03-31T14:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.artinfo.com\/blunotes\/?p=3776"},"modified":"2014-03-31T14:50:50","modified_gmt":"2014-03-31T14:50:50","slug":"luhrig-augustine-gallery-now-represents-jason-moran-urban-performance-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/larryblumenfeld.com\/index.php\/2014\/03\/31\/luhrig-augustine-gallery-now-represents-jason-moran-urban-performance-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"Luhring Augustine Gallery Now Represents Jason Moran, Urban Performance Artist"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
Jason Moran, wearing a papier mache mask created by Didier Civil during the Fats Waller Dance Party at Harlem Stage, New York City, 2011 Photo: \u00a9 John Rogers<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nNearly a decade ago, I ended a feature story about Jason Moran<\/strong> with this comment from him:
\n\u201cI\u2019m a straight-up jazz musician, no doubt. But I also like to think of myself as an urban performance artist who happens to play piano.\u201d
\nMuch of my work since then and all of Moran’s\u2014which has earned him, among other honors, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and artistic directorships at The Kennedy Center and SFJazz\u2014has been in some way an attempt to understand and celebrate the tensions within such duality.
\nSo it made perfect sense when I learned on Friday that the Manhattan-based Luhring Augustine<\/a><\/strong> gallery had signed Moran among the artists it represents.
\n“The new works I’m creating have started to bear objects for the gallery,” Moran explained. “It’s a natural progression.”\u00a0The papier-mache Fats Waller mask, above,\u00a0created by Didier Civil<\/strong>, is owned by the gallery. “I actually sold it in a gala auction for Harlem Stage three years ago, and Roland Augustine purchased it,” said Moran. “He’s a big Fats Waller fan.”
\nAccording to gallery representative Lauren Wittels, co-owners Lawrence R. Luhring<\/strong> and Roland J. Augustine<\/strong> met Moran quite some time ago through his relationship with another gallery artist, Glenn Ligon<\/strong>. \u00a0“The gallery will represent Jason in all matters relating to both his collaborations with visual artists and his own autonomous performance projects, whatever form they take,” Wittels wrote via email. “The gallery works with a number of other artists whose practice is collaborative in nature (Charles Atlas, Ragnar Kjartansson<\/strong>), as well as other artists who sometimes pair with creative forces in a variety of areas (Janine Antoni, Roger Hiorns<\/strong>), so this relationship with Jason feels very natural to us.”
\nThe gallery’s press announcement gave a fair summary of Moran’s stature and its connections to the visual-arts world:<\/p>\n

Moran’s rich and varied body of work is actively shaping the current and future landscape of jazz. His activity stretches beyond the many recordings and performances with masters of the form including Charles Lloyd, Bill Frisell, and the late Sam Rivers, and his work with his trio The Bandwagon (with drummer Nasheet Waits and bassist Tarus Mateen) has resulted in a profound discography for Blue Note Records.
\nThe scope of Moran\u2019s partnerships and music-making with venerated and iconic visual artists is extensive. He has collaborated with such major figures as Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Glenn Ligon, Stan Douglas, Adam Pendleton, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker; commissioning institutions of Moran\u2019s work include the Walker Art Center, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Dia Art Foundation, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
\nMoran has a long-standing collaborative practice with his wife, the singer and Broadway actress Alicia Hall Moran; as named artists in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, they together constructed BLEED, a five-day series of live music. BLEED explored the power of performance to cross barriers and challenge assumptions, and it was widely hailed as groundbreaking in the music and performance realm.
\nMoran\u2019s upcoming ventures include the world premiere of Looks of a Lot, a site-specific performance at Chicago Symphony Center with Theaster Gates in May 2014, and an appearance with The Bandwagon at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in April in conjunction with the museum\u2019s Carrie Mae Weems exhibition.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Moran’s father is an avid art collector, and my experiences with Moran suggest that he shares that passion. Here are two joined excerpts from that magazine feature I did on him: the first is set at a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit; the second, the ending, explores his connection with Adrian Piper among other things. And though this story is from 2005, it still rings as relevant to me:
\n\u201cAs a jazz musician, you\u2019re an artist trying to make a statement,\u201d Moran says. \u201cBut you\u2019re also a performer who is hired to entertain.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019re standing in front of Jean-Michel Basquiat\u2019s painting \u201cHollywood Africans\u201d in the midst of a sprawling retrospective of Basquiat\u2019s work at the Brooklyn Museum. It\u2019s a quiet, cloudy mid-week morning outside, but the museum bubbles with the chatter of grade-school kids on a field trip. Basquiat\u2019s paintings, densely filled with random-seeming images, bold with splashes of color, and often including scrawled names, numbers, and phrases, suggests a lot about Moran\u2019s music in both its sensory cues and its references to African-American history. \u201cHollywood Africans\u201d has a special connection for Moran.
\n\u201cAny black artist is a Hollywood African, I suppose,\u201d he continues. \u201cSome get caught up in the Hollywood part of it, in being a popular entertainer.\u00a0 But how do you entertain and push the limit? That\u2019s a hard balance, and it\u2019s something I\u2019m really trying to accomplish. One way I\u2019ve approached this question is by trying to separate the walls between me and the other members of my band,\u201d he says. \u201cI want to create a sound that draws listeners in but without leaning on their preconceptions about the role of the piano or the drums\u2026.
\n….Moran created another commissioned piece, \u201cMilestone,\u201d for The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In preparation, he visited the center and spent days rooting around in its archives. As an admirer of visual art and design (he has a passion for modernist architecture), Moran saw the task as a labor of love. But it was also a search for new inspiration, which he found in the work of artist Adrian Piper.
\nPiper is an African-American woman whose work has spanned photography, video, performance art, and written discourses on the philosophy of art. Much of her art wrestles with issues concerning race and gender, often in both playful and hard-hitting ways. Moran visited Piper at her Massachusetts studio. \u201cI\u2019d heard Jason\u2019s music,\u201d Piper says, \u201cand I recognized how accomplished a musician he is already at a young age. And I can sense that he wants to question how listeners frame what they hear, how they think of a piano player in the first place.\u201d
\nMoran based much of \u201cMilestone\u201d on a statement that Piper made in one of her videos. \u201cArtists ought to be writing about what they do, and what types of procedures they go through to realize a work,” she said. “If artists\u2019 intentions and ideas were more accessible to the general public, I think it might break down some of the barriers between the artists, the art world, and the general public.\u201d
\nAt the Walker, Moran presented more than just a piece of music; he crafted a set piece that entirely recast the experience of listening to his quartet. At one point, he had one of Piper\u2019s visual images projected onto a screen behind the musicians, and he made use of her voice, through audiotapes he\u2019d made during discussions with her. He had the musicians sit under harsh lighting and face the crowd while their pre-recorded conversations about repertoire, band mechanics, and audience responses played through the sound system. And, in addition to playing both familiar and newly composed material with his group, he performed in duet with his wife, the opera singer Alicia Hall, who sang at one point about the separation caused by a jazz musician\u2019s touring schedule.
\nBased on his Blue Note recordings to date, there can be no doubt that Moran sits proudly within the legacy of a storied jazz label. Yet he sits differently in that context than have others. Most clearly, there\u2019s the red-lacquered, straight-backed chair made by Danish designer Susanne Forsgreen that he\u00a0favors over a standard piano bench (it offers added support, he explained, and it possesses a natural springiness that aids his lunges toward the keys.) But in a less obvious way, Moran seems intent on some existential examination of his place in that lineage, and of the lineage itself. Maybe he\u2019s taken Piper\u2019s directive as one more warning to avoid becoming a \u201cHollywood African\u201d or just another jazzman shuffling through sheet music after taking the stage.
\n\u201cI\u2019m a straight-up jazz musician, no doubt,\u201d Moran said the last time we spoke. \u201cBut I also like to think of myself as an urban performance artist who happens to play piano.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly a decade ago, I ended a feature story about Jason Moran with this comment from him: \u201cI\u2019m a straight-up jazz musician, no doubt. But I also like to think of myself as an urban performance artist who happens to play piano.\u201d Much of my work since then and all of Moran’s\u2014which has earned him, … <\/p>\n

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