Last year I attended a talk between a visual artist and a film professor held at a nonprofit in Brooklyn. The ostensible topic meant to be discussed escapes me because the two middle-aged men knew each other well, and the evening’s structure became loose. Onstage, they riffed about their favorite movies and exhibitions, welcoming input from the audience. A younger academic obtained the microphone. He would go on to document the evening in detail and wanted to ask the two dons of art and cinema something serious. If they had to say, which medium had most affected their intellectual growth overall? “Music,” both replied simultaneously.
A new show at the Hammer Museum, “Alice Coltrane: Monument Eternal,” seeks to probe her music’s profound effect on culture by telling the story of the jazz musician with the help of nineteen American artists, including Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus), Star Feliz, Jasper Marsalis, Cauleen Smith, Martine Syms and more. Among them is Rashid Johnson, who moonlights as a lounge singer these days. Curated by Erin Christovale, the exhibition creates a rich constellation of music-adjacent works to twinkle in the sky alongside Coltrane’s cool blue world.
Coltrane’s gravity affects everything. I’d encountered Bethany Collins’ The Battle Hymn of the Republic (2024) before. This largely conceptual piece offers Civil War sheet music stained by violent-seeming charcoal and graphite. The musical bars are bent into a circle, for the battle was never ended and seemingly never will be. In this exhibition, however, it’s been turned cosmic. The specks are bursts of creativity, and the work becomes about the nature of performance, especially as it’s been reproduced in multiples.
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