Project Brief
My project centers around the cultural narrative of jazz procured by Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC), located in the Time Warner Center. JALC fascinates me because its spaces, as well as, the image of jazz that it produces are part of a pastiche of cultural, social, political, and economic influences. From the outside, the Time Warner Center is a skyscraper, a beacon of capitalism and corporatism. When one walks through the main entrance, one is penetrated by the images and visual significations of elite consumerism–armani, boss, dean & deluca, godiva, swarovski, williams sonoma, huge brass statues, expensive artwork, shiny marble and glass. Along with those visual stimuli comes the sound of jazz, always playing in the halls. And then there is Jazz at Lincoln Center, the official institutionalized form of the music we call jazz, an institution of “high art.” Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola is a jazz club, but its not dirty or underground, in fact it is 5 floors high in the sky and overlooks Columbus Circle and Central Park. Rose Hall Auditorium mirrors the venues associated with western classical music and opera, the European tradition. I am interested in exploring what it means for the cultural history of jazz to inhabit this visual space and–the sociopolitical and economic infrastructure with which jazz has become associated.
I am also interested in the broader question of what the experience of jazz at the Time Warner Center signifies in terms of the experience of culture more generally. I will argue that instead of experiencing jazz, we experience something that I call “necrophilic imagination.” That in this imagination, cultural histories collide, shatter, and recombine with each other in chaotic forms; that they only reconstitute themselves as coherent in accordance with a combination of social, political, and economic functions; that these functions enable and require the resurrection of cultural artifacts; and, that there is a cycle of power and pleasure intrinsic to this resurrection.
In order to realize this idea, my project will take the form of an archive of sorts. I will appropriate cultural artifacts and remove them from their respective narrative contexts. I will reconstruct my own cultural narrative of jazz in the form of an archive, removing the culture or content from the cultural artifacts I assemble, or transforming them, in order to emphasize the sociopolitical reality of jazz and the jazz narrative procured by JALC. The Nesuhi Ertegun Jazz Hall of Fame, JALC’s own archive of photographs and audio, will serve as both a model and a source for the construction of my project.
