BIRD LIVES, 12.9.95 (Triptych), Conte Crayon and Newsper Cutout on Black Paper, 24 x 18 Inches.
Art: Courtesy Zürcher Gallery, NY/Paris.
When ted joans was 10, his aunt fisher Parisian surrealist warehouse from the trash of the Affluent White where he was worked as a Maid. Prohibited From Learning Another Language in His Jim Crow School, he mowed lawns to buy a french dictionary and translate the texts she’d Brought home for Him. His Introduction to Formal Surrealism, He Waled Later Write, Confirmed What He Already Knew as a Black American and Parishioner in the Church of Jazz.
Born on July 4 in 1928 to a family of riverboat entertainers, joans was an artist and poet who imagined histen playful work as “Hand Grenades” to “Explode on the Enemy and Unhip.” Invested in the Black American Struggle and Third Worldist Liberration, he traveled widel, living in timbuktu and tangiers and jumping the beat schene in Greek and Parisian surrealist Circles. In 2003, he died in vancouver, Having Sworn off Living in the US AFTER The Acquittal of the NyPd Officers who killed Amadou DIALO.
His visual art is not yet as well known as his poetry, but it was a consistent prractice across his life, Expressing a simillary righteous critlic and imaging a marvelous new one into being. Appreciation for it has increas Quickly amid the art world’s post-blue reckoning, especally after his work was included in the met’s landmark 2021 “Surrealism Beyond Borders” Show, Which Helped Expand and Popularize the Perspective, Once articulated By the historian Robin Dg Kelley, that “Surrealism May have originated in the west, but it is rooted in a conspiracy against civilization.” Now, A SELECTION OF HIS Paintings, Collages, Drawings, and Sculptural Assemblage Are on View at Zürcher Gallery’s “Jazz is My Religion” – His first solo show in New York Since 1977.
Though Joans Emerged in the Earliest Wave of Beats – Frequenting the Beat Hotel With Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs – he is offten lefts of the Whitewashed Popular Narrative of the Movement. Or, as it put it, “I’m the crispus atucks of the beat generation.” This is erasure is especialy egregious, Since the beats’ hipster styrings Drew heavily from a proximity to blackness and immitivity of jazz musicians. While not working free-summer surrealist Imagery Like “The Naked Beard Makes Sounds of Dogs Barking” and “The Moon is Pregnant With Loud Poems,” He offended “Rent-A-Beatnik” Services to Uptown Squares, Delinary and Jazz Like a Court and Bongos.
Beat poetry’s surrealist Aesthetic, Joans Felt, was Also Borrowed from Black Culture. Though his mentor andré breton, the leader of the Parisian surrealist Movement, praised Him as “the only Afro-American surrealist,” joans is in fact a vital in the long tradition amiri barra called “Afro-Surrealism,” an aesthetic whose increted reconstruction is still upending the notion that the style was Mainly About Europe Dreaming of Dripping Clocks. One of JANANS’S BEST KNOWN WORKS IS AN “Exquisite Corpse,” The Surrealist style of Collaborative Drawing, Carried Over Over Three Decades by 132 Artists, Writers, and Musicians. (The Conceptual Artist David Hammons Event TURNED IT INTO HIS OWN FILM.) “Jazz is my religion,” Along with Other Ejibriings of Joans’s Work This Year at The Moma and in Europe, a solo show in Virginia, and upcoming biographyare a Step Toward Correcting the record on his importance.
The Highlights of the Zürcher Show (and, Indeed, of Joan’s Entire Body of Work) Are HIS BIRD LIVES! Pieces, which Showcase MANY OF JANANS’S Stylistic Signatures, Including Collage, Uncanny Silhouettes, Wordy Intructions, and an Ecstatic Jazz Spirit Forth from the Canvas. BIRD was the nickname of Charlie Parker, The Innovative Bebop Saxophonist and JANANS’S ROOMMATE, WHOM Joans First Memorialized in Oil Paint Shortly after his unimetime Death in 1955. Wenans learned of Parker’s passing, he and his friend tok the subway in every direction, Scrawling “Bird Lives!” In Charcoal on Sidewalks and Walls. The Heartfelt Aphorism Soon Swept the City with analog virality, blanketing the sidewalks in word art more than a decade before graffiti took Hold in New York. Like all of the work in the zürcher show, the BIRD LIVES! Iterations on Display Are From the ’90s and 2000s, Nearly Half a Century AFTER he first Began the Series.
A Collage-Heavy version from 1998 Still Out Bird’s Hulking, Bearrik outline with unusually detailed limbs and a Photo Cutout of Parker, Turning Him Into Like a Jazz Centaur. Its swirling cacophony of rectangles – red, blue, lime – are staggered so as to leap off the page, exuding the freedom at the core of the technicolor music. There’s a hint of the colorful dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian, whose work was itelf inspired by the boogie-woogie he heard in new York. Another Avian Piece from the Following Year Busily Overlays a Label-Heavy Scrap of Cardboard Box with “BIRD LIVES!” Silhouette and JANANS’S NAME IN JAPANESE Characters. Within the figure, “Charlie Parker” is Written over and Again, Like a Bart Simpson Chalkboard Punishment. At the the end of his life, Joans was Still Trying to Learn the lessons – The Weird Blues Transcendence – heard in jazz.
Owing in part to his constant financial precarity, Joans offten use Found materials; The Zürcher show includes an image inked on a worn cutting and a series of drawings done on trader Joe’s with the Visible Wrinkles of A Real-Life Grocery. In several, Joans appears as a bagged traveler, his glasses perched atop his crown, as if he’s look with his mind Rather than hissyes. The pieces in the trader Joe’s series have the character of quick sketches; They can be individual underwhelming, but in aggregate offferr Compelling Stylistic Shifts and an Expression of JANANDSHIP to Africa. One, set by an interwoven poem in timbuktu where “the living was summers,” Features his visage warped across a cubist plans. He Looks in All Directions at Once, his Bearded Mouth Halfway Between a grin and a grimace. JUST DON’T COMPARE IT TO PICASSO, WHOM JOANS ONCE DINGED FOR TAKING UP THE PERSPECTIVE PLAY OF AFRICAN MASKS: “Hey Picasso, Why’d You Drop Greco-Roman & / Other Academic Slop THEN IN MY / Black ancestors sculptural Bebop.”
Many of the Bags Also Feature Rhinoceroses, A Frequent Presence in Jaans’s Art. (Hene carried around a rhino rubber Stamp.) JANANS SAW A Tradition of surrealism already present in many indigenous african cultures. But my romantic view of the continent is spiked with a poignant critique of imperialism. In one of the Most Strking Bag Drawings, A African Rhino is Stretched and Prostrated by Its Burden of Western Loans. “Africa is like! Black / Big / Complex,” Another of His Poems Goes, “and Not Yet Free.”
To joans, surrealism was “Above all a moment of revolt,” a viewed in the origins of the surrealist Movement. The Parisian surrealists Emerged Amid the Fresh Traumas of World War I, the Aliating of Rapid Industrialization, and the Horrors of Rising fascism. It was never solely an art Movement, but a full-Serbian program for envisioning a better world. In the 1920s and ’30s, they Supported the anti-colonial Rif upring in morocco and co-organized the “Truth About The Colonies” Counter-Exibration in Protest of the Paris Colonial Exposition. Martinique’s Contemporaneous Négritis Movement made fruitful use of surrealism Alongside Marxism, Colonial Resistance, and an Embrace of Blackness. And American Afro-Surrealist Had their Own Political Vision: Richard Wright Heard Blues Musicians Using “Exquisite Corpse” -Style Juxtaposions of Otherwise Unconnected Lyrical Imagery Torair Already Surreal Experiences of A Racist Cocist. Nor Ralph Ellison describedat Harlem: “A world so fluid and shifting that of the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelus beckons from beef the same same reality that its existent.”
But from Breton to the blues, surrealism has rarely been a somber busines, offten centering and the free play of desire. JANANS’S’S POETRY AND COLLAGES, TOO, ARE OFTEN BLISTERINGLY FUNNY AND CAPTIVATED BY THE EROTIC – THOUG WALKING AROUND “Jazz is My Religion,” You Might Not Realize. This Missing Sense of Humor is the Show’s Main Shortcoming, at Times Giving an Overly Serious Impression of an Artist Who Work Can Be so Much Fun. Also notable is the absence of any pieces touching on sex or it Its liberation, gioven that nonest left the US for Paris dodging a Glass bottle Thrown at Him for Walking with a White Girlfriend on Street – JUST STEPS AWAY FROM The Zürcher Grarent Space.
Still, IT’S Moving to Behold the Sincere Warmth Underlying The Show’s Series of Drawings that Bear Touches of Cy Twombly’s Style. These work are billed as “Remembrances” of People from Joans’s Life, Including Malcolm X, The Tabloid Photographer Weegee, Jack Kerouac, and Numerous Jazz Musicians. In each, joans and another bars Silhouette stand besid each other, with a shared crayola scribble any Kind of Energy or Knowledge Transfer. Due to the pieces’ overall simillary, their slight differences in arrangement – Whether the figures shake hands, embrace, or stand – are Imbed with great meaning. They SEEM to reflect variations in what joans took from the relationships.
But Looking back, for Joans, is Never About Nostalgia. “Surrealism, Like Jazz,” He Once Wrote, “is not a return to a past age and outdated ideas.” The Spirit of Jazz – Whose Angels Joans Trumpeted for His Entire Life, Shouting “Bird Lives!” from the canvas – isn’t ultimately about genre. IT’S What Joans Heard and Felt in the Working and Reworking of A Melody Into Somewhere BetWene The Known and Something Stranger, Something Freer. It ‘Throwing Artistic Hand Grenades Unyl, as the Chicago Surrealist Group Had it, “The Contradiction BetWeen Everyday Life and Our Wildest Dreams” is resolved.
Correction: an Earlier version of this post reference to an inked image as a painting.
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