Last week I watched a TEDx Talk with the host of DISSECT, Cole Cuchna. If you’re unfamiliar, DISSECT is a podcast that breaks down hip hop albums over the course of a season, one episode per track with the occasional bonus content. So far, Cole has analyzed albums that have pushed the cultural zeitgeist to new levels of creativity, intimacy, social commentary, and storytelling, some of which include To Pimp a Butterfly, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Blonde, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Flower Boy, and Lemonade.
In this TEDx Talk, Cole chronicles his nontraditional path towards a formal music education and how he learned to appreciate classical music through a parallel understanding of its history. He uses Kanye West, Dimitri Shostakovich, and Ariana Grande as examples to underscore the importance of context in building connection to music. I loved this talk, and recommend DISSECT as well, both for his in-depth research and ability to weave different kinds of contexts together.
I watched this TEDx Talk in between visiting two exhibitions in NYC last month: Jean-Michel Basquiat: King Pleasure at Starrett-Lehigh and Henri Matisse: The Red Studio at the Museum of Modern Art. I enjoyed and recommend both of these exhibits. Since I saw them within a two-week span of each other, I kept reflecting on how their approaches to context building differed in thought-provoking ways.
Curated by Basquiat’s family, King Pleasure shows 200 works previously unseen to the general public and features their brother, friend, and cousin Jean-Michel through intimate, happy memories. Generally, the show takes the “let the art speak for itself” approach. In the gallery space, they recreated rooms of his childhood home, his studio, and the often-frequented nightclub Palladium in precise detail. His recreated studio in my opinion, is the strongest part of the entire exhibition, as it activates his art and personal artifacts by returning them to an “in-process” state. The exhibit also pumps the music he often listened to while creating and offers the soundtrack as a Spotify playlist.
Outside of this, I still wanted to learn more about Basquiat, specifically these newly presented works, than I actually did. While some paintings are grouped by theme, many of them lack dates and titles, with no additional explanation. It felt disorienting not to know how to ground this compelling and exciting work more deeply into the context his life and stylistic evolution. I left wondering how these previously unseen works contribute to the overall scholarship and oeurve of Basquiat. I wanted more context, but the lack of information also piqued my curiosity, raised many questions, and inspired me to do my own research.
On the other side of the spectrum, The Red Studio exhibit at MoMA built a specific and vast world of information around a single painting. In 1911, Henri Matisse painted The Red Studio, as part of a commissioned set of three paintings for his patron Sergei Shchukin. (He ended up rejecting it.) What makes this exhibit so thrilling is that it shows the surviving six paintings, three sculptures, and one ceramic found within this painting, all in the same room, reuniting all of the artwork for the first time since Matisse first painted them. The act of viewing feels playful, like participating in a visual scavenger hunt.
The curators split this exhibit into two parts: “The Studio” and “The Story.” Viewers experience all the artwork at once in The Story section. The Studio section tells the history of the studio itself, through architectural plans, its utilitarian life as a workspace, as the inspiration for the painting, and finally as the painting becomes a cultural artifact over time. We also follow the “unusual afterlife” of The Red Studio, in context of the places it has been exhibited around the world and its lasting influence within art history. The exhibit ends with an interview of the conservators who enthusiastically share their discoveries from chemically tracing back Matisse’s painting process. There is a lot of context here—maybe too much—but it enhanced the experience for me in deep and enriching ways.
Both exhibitions made me reflect on the effect of context on an interpretive experience—what is the Goldilocks sweet spot of just the right amount?
Volume 04 is about hip hop in museums and the context built around it.
Last month, I wrote about Kanye West, JAY-Z, and Marina Abramović and the ways they created art out of ending rituals. I want to keep discussing their work this month, this time as collaborators, while also including Beyoncé and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Context here also explores the relationship between inspiration, muses, and creative partnership.
Before I continue, I need to air out my own bias here. Thinking about context brings me back to a conversation I had with a friend a few months ago, when she told me that I am a “high context person.” I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant, but I felt seen. I now self-identify as such—it replaces words like “wordy,” “overthinker,” and “girl, can you wrap this up?”
What my friend meant was neither a compliment nor a critique, but a comment on how I like to give and receive information. I like a lot of context! At the time, we had been talking about creating curriculums, and how to build off lessons from each other in order to make the information feel “sticky.” When I was teaching last year, I thought a lot about what I remembered from high school and college, and why certain lessons, in particular, stuck with me.
I’d argue that a key way of making information memorable is to provide the right amount of context—enough to spark connection while also inspiring curiosity. It’s an interesting thought puzzle, figuring out how much background to paint and how much space to leave for other ideas to fill in the rest of the picture. I think about this a lot when writing these posts—balancing assumptions with introductions and leaving enough breathing room for you, dear reader, to fill in the gaps with your own reflections and research. There’s always more to discover.
Context is not truth however, it’s a relative concept, a frame, a lens, a filter.
I did some internet research on visual art curriculums and found the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority for K-12 schools in Australia. This syllabus addresses context in four ways: contemporary, personal, cultural, and formal, and asks how they “challenge engagement, communication and meaning.”
They are further defined as:
Contemporary: analysis and interpretation of past and present artwork through a lens of 21st century art ideas and issues
Personal: analysis and interpretation of emotions, sensory experiences, personal philosophy, beliefs and ideas that are reflected in artworks
Cultural: analysis and interpretation of the social influences and representations of time, place, politics, purpose, ethnicity, gender and spiritual and secular beliefs on artworkFormal: analysis and interpretation of formal visual art elements and principles, the application of materials and techniques, the stylistic qualities relative to historical periods or iconology seen in artworks
I understand this to be a common Western framework to analyze art. There are definitely alternative methods, but this is a solid jumping-off point. Here, in an academic setting, personal context considers that of the artist’s life. I’d also raise the significance of the personal context of those experiencing the art. Don’t our individual, personal experiences with music and visual art also give meaning to context?
Building off of that, with the semi-permanence, access, and speed of the internet, we now capture the collective experience in real time, outside of formal frameworks of critique. Case in point, two weeks ago I watched the Omarion and Mario VERZUZ and formed my own opinions, but the experience meant nothing without the amazing commentary on Twitter. (The internet and I agree: Mario won.)
Without going too much into the weeds, within contemporary analysis, there is a meta-context to consider with regard to the shifting criticism, scholarship, and reception around certain artists and works within their lifetimes, but especially, into their legacies. How do we think about the way art used to be thought about, when current society reflects different values and critical practices from the time said art was created? The history of criticism around Jean-Michel Basquiat is an important example of this, and we’ll get into that more later on this month.
You can also expect some variations on a theme…
As always, thanks for reading. I set a goal this summer to hit up as many gallery shows and museum exhibits as possible, so if you have any recommendations (it doesn’t matter where), let me know below!
This is so cool Elspeth!! Love your brain!!!
Thank you for your newsletter. I love it. As a former art museum professional and lover of hip hop, I am already impatient for the next volume. Thank you!