An excerpt from an interview I did recently with spoken word artist/musician Sekou Sundiata for an upcoming feature on art and patriotism appearing in the March issue of Walker (mentioned here):
PS: I interviewed curator Hou Hanru awhile ago, and he told me his favorite “political” artwork was a piece/performance by David Hammons, where the artist was selling snowballs of different sizes for different prices in Brooklyn in the winter. The absurdity of it, Hanru says, says more about race and commodity culture than a thematically overt work might’ve.
SS: I think that’s a debatable assumption that comes out of some useless, leftover hierarchical thinking from the 20th century. Overt versus covert, etcetera… is a waste of time unless we are talking about specific works. By the way, I was a part of the founding meeting of the Black Rock Coalition (15-20 years ago). The meeting took place in an art space called Just Above Midtown, founded by Linda Bryant. There was a refrigerator in the place that was connected to the most available electric outlet, which we needed for AC power. So, someone disconnected the refrigerator. We found out later that one of David’s famous snowballs was being preserved in the freezer. Talk about time-based Art! It was a brief moment in time when rock n roll was restored to its rebel roots.
Sundiata performs The 51st (dream) state, a work including poems, song cycles, and moving images that “ponders America’s definition of itself in an era of unprecedented global power and asks what it means to be both a citizen and an individual in our complex society,” March 31–April 1
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