Kirili in Dialogue with
VISION FESTIVAL
Visions Festival 24 celebrates Alain Kirili - A Lifetime of Achievement in 2019
"Jazz and Sculpture are created urgently. Extreme risk is the minimum condition of this creation, the absolute measure of the musician and sculptor. Revival of verticality in my sculpture is linked to statuary, music and dance." - Alain Kirili
William Parker_David S Ware and Matthew Shipp
with the sculptures of Alain Kirili, at the Vision Festival, 1997
( photos © Ariane Lopez-Huici )
Tom Buckner and Roscoe Mitchell, with the sculpture of Alain Kirili, at the Vision Festival, 1998
( photo © Ariane Lopez-Huici )
The Eye Listens
ALAIN KIRILI
New York, 2005
Translated by Philip Barnard
I never separate the eye from the ear, or sex from the spirit. I create in “the name of the unconscious.” I protect desire and the drives. I know that spirit and sexuality are at the origin of jazz and of my creative work.
Jazz, for me, is something that has survived the puritanism of the Anglo-saxon and now global culture. This music is a “cracking” and “trembling” in the glaciation brought about by this society’s cult of purity, the glaciation of a morbid society of simulacra that reflects itself in an art that it celebrates under the name “kitsch.”
This Puritanism is something I feel more strongly than ever and something that, as I have said, is becoming internationalized. It constitutes a dominant of moral and hypocritical bigotry. Official forms of art celebrate the negation or ridiculousness of the body and its expression. Everything is made smooth and academic.
Yet the modernity of jazz and of art alike was born in brothels. The word jazz and Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon both remind of this. This painting is the icon of modernity. Modernity is a shout of revolt against bourgeois prudery. Modernity is always a revolt that makes no concessions. For me the ethics of creation must continue to be intolerable, excessive, and unfathomable for the eye, the ear, for the entire body and the entire spirit.
As a teenager I saw Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor with Miro, Calder, and Chillida at the Nights of the Fondation Maeght at St. Paul de Vence, in France.
I soon left for New York, where I met my generation of painters, sculptors, poets, dancers and, of course, musicians. All of them worked to perpetuate these prayers and insurrections. In my search for insolent or meditative rhythms, I met all of the musicians, poets and dancers who take part in the Vision Festival. For me these are the heirs of magical works like Charles Mingus’ PITHECANTHROPUS ERECTUS. I have never separated the painter Barnett Newman and his STATIONS OF THE CROSS from John Coltrane’s LOVE SUPREME. These are extraordinarily contemporaneous creations.
Surrounded by today’s musical creations, protected and made light by their rhythm, my sculpture defies gravity, weight, heaviness, and idiocy.
Improvisation is something I share with musicians as an ethics and an aesthetic.
Improvisation is political, spiritual, and libidinal gesture.
My sculptures often create spaces of multiplied signs because these are “open forms” like this music.
My sculpture is conceived very directly, in urgency and without sketches. It is created through a “direct attack” on the materials.
This music that I listen to every day is celebrated in this transversality of the arts: a communion each year at the Vision Festival.
Mat Maneri, Joe Maneri and JoeMorris
with the sculptures of Alain Kirili, at the Vision Festival, 1997
( photos © Ariane Lopez-Huici )
Joelle Léandre with the sculptures Plastiras of Alain Kirili, at the Vision Festival, 2005
( photo © Ariane Lopez-Huici )
Lifetime of Achievement
for ALAIN KIRILI
at the 2019 Vision Festival
“Visual artist Alain Kirili was honored for his Lifetime of Achievement at the 2019 Vision Festival, marking the occasion with a conversation with bassist William Parker.
Alain Kirili is known for both his sculptures and his decades long record of collaborating with legendary jazz musicians. He has held dozens of concerts at his Tribeca loft over the past twenty-five years, often featuring musicians performing in conversation with his artwork.”
Arts for Art | Vision
Alain Kirili
Vision Festival, NYC, 2019
By David Cohen
There is something especially fitting in acknowledging Alain Kirili at the vision festival.
While there is too much talk of so-called “artist’s artists,” the world can always use a musician’s artist. Understand that Kirili is 100% a sculptor. But his work is, at this stage, almost impossible to conceive divorced from music, so intimately connected is music with his modus operandi in the plastic arts. Music is no mere “violon d’Ingres” in Kirili’s case. First thing to state: Kirili himself is not a musician, unless one counts the now silent rhythmic hammering of metal evident along the surfaces of his sculpted lines and forms as some kind of frozen music. But one can “make” music by invitation, and Kirili and his wife and fellow artist Ariane Lopez-Huici have turned their Tribeca loft into a legendary venue for new music over the last four decades. Predominantly devoted to free improvisation, the musical idiom of Vision Festival, Kirili’s guests are not just performers but truly collaborators. Music is made in direct response to the visual art with which it is juxtaposed.
For years this was Kirili’s own work, but true to the ever-expanding field of his artistic generosity, more recently guest artists have been invited to install a work for the occasion. Fellow visual artists showcased in this way with newfound musical peers have included Christopher Wool, Laura Newman, Jeanne Silverthorn, and Thomas Nozkowski. Whenever he has been given a museum exhibition – which is often, especially in Europe – Kirili has made sure that music and dance play a crucial role in programing. But the kinship to music runs more deeply than any of this could suggest. The lesson of free jazz for Kirili the sculptor (or, perhaps, not so much lesson as enduring point of commonality) is the example, ubiquitous amongst music makers but in recent centuries an increasing rarity among painters and sculptors, of symbiosis. That collaborations and dialogues and interchanges are greater than the sum of the individual artists participating. Whether it is his interactions with traditional smiths and forgers in rural settings away from the usual artistic centers of New York or Paris, or his dialogues across time with historic figures like Auguste Rodin, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, David Smith and Julio Gonzalez, each of whom has been the shared focus of a museum exhibition, or indeed his collaborations with musicians and dancers, the outcomes are by their nature open ended.