Nothing Comes Out of a Void: Watch Artist Stan Douglas Remix Miles Davis With Afrobeat to Create His Genre-Bending Multimedia Art – artnet News

Vancouver artist Stan Douglashas based his career around the idea of remixingusing kernels of music, history, and memory to invent new and unique works of art that often defy easy explanation.

One of Douglass most personal and ambitious works,Luanda-Kinshasa, is currently on view as part of artist Jason Morans show at the Whitney Museum in New York. The six-hour work casts a contemporary set of musicians inside a replica of the famed Columbia Records 30th Street Studio in New York, where Miles Davis recorded his last studio album,On the Corner, in 1971.

In an exclusive interview with Art21 in 2017, Douglas explains that he was inspired by Daviss experimentation on that record, incorporating funk, rock, jazz, and even Indian classical music. Then,Douglas thought, What if you brought in Afrobeat as part of that mix he was doing?

Stan Douglas, Luanda-Kinshasa(2013). Video, color, sound; 6:01 hours. Stan Douglas; Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York.

Of course, Davis himself never did, but for Douglas, its the possibility thats most exciting, the utopian ideal that drives him to make art.

I want to go back to these possibilities of What if theres another way of considering history?'

For Douglas, that means finding inspiration everywhere. Nothing comes out of a void, he says, citing his own early experiences as a DJ and encountering Miles Daviss music as influences on this work.

Utopia means no place,' he says in the Extended Playvideo. Its a place that you may strive to get to, but you cant necessarily get there. That wont stop him from trying though.

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of Art21sExtended Playseries,below. Stan Douglass work is on view as part of the Jason Moran show at the Whitney, through January 5, 2020.

This is an installment of Art on Video, a collaboration between artnet News and Art21 that brings you clips of newsmaking artists. A new season of the nonprofit Art21s flagshipArt in the Twenty-First Centurytelevision series is available now on PBS. Catch all episodes ofNew York Close UpandExtended Playand learnabout the organizations education programs atArt21.org.

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Nothing Comes Out of a Void: Watch Artist Stan Douglas Remix Miles Davis With Afrobeat to Create His Genre-Bending Multimedia Art - artnet News