Letter from London: Chris Ofili, A Mixtape
Making mixtapes is one of life’s great non-transferable skills; its lack of import in a pragmatic sense is inversely proportional to the amount of time and effort it requires (rewinding, pausing, forwarding, finding the exact moment the fade-out stops, designing the case – not too glib, not too earnest – and gouging out the square flaps at the top of the tape with a biro nib, so its permanence, and the permanence of the tape-maker’s affections in the mind of the listener, is assured). Mixtapes are tiny monuments of personal authority carried out by those usually lacking it in every other sphere. (It’s got to be a cassette, too: none of this CD business, skipping along at will and missing the carefully calibrated theme — usually a guarded and self-deprecatory expression of adoration for the listener.) I’ve often wondered where those specific and hard-won skills end up, whether they’re transmuted into filing techniques or the arrangement of ties in a wardrobe, or if they dwindle and diminish like an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
It seems increasingly obvious, though, that the mixtape maker’s most evident successor is the curator of works of art. Skip a room or walk through in the wrong order and you’re in danger of missing the theme entirely, and the curators will slam their bedroom doors and crank up The Cure so loud you can’t hear them cry. Admire one of the works and they’ll hum with misappropriated pride.
The new Chris Ofili mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain feels like walking through a mixtape of semi-obscure black American music from the last 50 years, created by a middle-aged record shop owner with an encyclopedic knowledge of musical history and a body odor problem. Arranged in a reverent chronology of the artist’s work – despite sidestepping his hilarious caganer-style defecating Rastafarian sculptures from a few years back – the show not only reveals Ofili’s indebtedness to musical history as a resource, but shows how deeply he’s absorbed it, providing visual equivalence for all manner of forms and themes in the musical past. In the interests of elucidation, then, and to provide to amateur mixtape-makers with a set of guidelines in producing their own audio tour of the show, I have put together a rough soundtrack according to the different phases of the artist’s career. Please pay attention.
David Hammons, "Bliz-aard Ball Sale" (1983)
The first room of the exhibition shows Ofili’s early, heavily David Hammons-inspired work (where are the Hammons retrospectives, by the way, Triple Candie Xerox show notwithstanding?), which introduces principle themes the artist returns to, like a tongue to a bad tooth. Shithead – a ball of dried elephant dung from Whipsnade Zoo, with human teeth and the artist’s trimmed dreads set into it – introduces (via its evident ape-ing of then-established Hammons tropes) Ofili’s major ongoing interest in the mutual attrition of the spiritual and the profane. The Rastafarian reference (Ofili was raised Catholic to Nigerian parents in Manchester, and wore dreadlocks as a student) is as lightly held as any other in the first phase of Ofili’s work. It is preoccupied with the collision of visual information, both laterally (information spreads in clusters across the large canvases, propped against the wall) and in the geological layers of their surfaces (glitter, resin, paint, collage; the material descriptions of the wall labels read like an inventory of Elton John’s costume cupboard). The spacey intricacies of these early works – Spaceshit, Popcorn Tits, and the William Blake-referencing 7 Bitches Tossing Their Pussies Before the Divine Dung – recall magic eye posters of the early nineties as much as their purported origin in African cave painting and Aboriginal Australian art. Their intergalactic obsessions, and fascination with scatology and wild sensuality, finds appropriate sonic form in George Clinton’s varied musical oeuvre, and for this room, the show’s first, the track is Funkadelic’s “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad (The Doodoo Chasers).”
Remembering artist and friend Flo McGarrell
Flores McGarrell I lost my voice. Incredibly frustrating because I have a lot I need to say right now. I just make ridiculous squeaking sounds. […] I think I should just shut up for a while, I have a lot to think about right now anyway.
January 12 at 9:43pm · Comment · Like
This is what everybody who cared about Flo McGarrell was confronted with on his Facebook wall, from January 12 onwards. An outpouring of solicitous messages from friends, relatives, and peers filled his wall again and again and again for days. The first hopeful piece of information that was posted informed us that Flo’s good friend Sue Frame, who was visiting him in Haiti, had survived the earthquake and she knew where Flo was trapped.
I will skip everything else in between and take you to a few days ago, when Sue Frame finally made it back to the States with her friend. Flo McGarrell (1974-2010) passed away on Tuesday, January 12, when the Peace of Mind Hotel collapsed while Flo and Sue were inside. They were making a quick stop on their way back to Jacmel from Port-Au-Prince.
It was not so long ago that I worked with Flo on a post for this site, and I absolutely hate that I am now writing a Remembering artist and friend Flo McGarrell piece. You see, when I think of Flo, I instantly think of an enormous inflatable TV, a bright pink installation, beavers, cats, and her passion to turn trash into treasures. I met Flo when he was a young woman – we were both graduate students at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2002. He had intense sky-blue eyes, a memorable hairdo, a huggable frame, and a hospitable home. There was a drive, a force, and a spirit so well entrenched that they made Flo indestructible. He often raised his left eyebrow. I could never tell what that meant.
