Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) by Stan Douglas
Single-channel video projection, 6 hours 1 min (loop), color, sound.
Overall dimensions vary with installation
Showing at the Bourse de Commerce—Pinault Collection until May 30, 2022
With a running time of six hours projected as a loop, Stan Douglas’s magnificent Luanda-Kinshasa is obviously concerned with the experience of time and history. Yet, this is a complex time that opens up multiple points of entry and dimensions of experience for each spectator.
Before entering The Studio, the projection space of the Bourse de Commerce, visitors hear pulsing jazz-funk rhythms that recall the pan-African syntheses of funk and Afrobeat epitomized on albums like Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, LIVE/EVIL, and On the Corner. What one sees projected in the installation space is a precise reconstruction of “The Church,” a former Columbia Records studio on East Thirtieth Street in New York, decommissioned in the 1980s, where many of the greatest jazz musicians of the postwar period recorded their masterpieces.
The style of the music seems at once contemporary yet rooted to an indefinable yet recognizable moment in the 1970s. The title of the work, Luanda-Kinshasa, suggests the interweaving of two important political and cultural moments in the history of post-colonial Africa. Portuguese troops left Luanda, the capital city of Angola, in November 1975 after a protracted war of independence. Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has long been a major center for modern west African music. In 1975, the city also hosted one of the most legendary sporting events in Africa—the “Rumble in the Jungle” boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali.
Within the work, a group of ten international musicians are rehearsing extended improvisions on two compositions, “Luanda” and “Kinshasa,” created by the contemporary keyboardist, Jason Moran.[1] The eclectic mix of styles and instrumentation, which are European, African, African American, and South Asian, project the utopian aspirations of those decades when hopes for revolutionary cultural and racial unity were strong, especially in the wake of post-colonial movements sweeping from India across Africa and into Latin America.
The dress of the musicians equally recalls the early 1970s, as do their vintage instruments. The visual style of the image, with its precise camera movements and patterns of repetition, mark the work as contemporary, yet its contemporaneity is suffused with what Douglas calls “speculative history.” Luanda-Kinshasa is neither a fiction nor a document—the precisely reconstructed mise-en-scène never suggests a fetishistic recreation of history (for this group never existed) nor is the work intended as a document of their performance. Here, present and past do not collapse into one another, but rather are sustained in a tension that never ceases throwing off dialectical sparks between two poles of historical imagination. The intensely danceable and pleasurable music expresses a utopianism that is as much about a lost past as it is an ever-possible future, both of which inhabit the present. This is the kind of intensity that only music can produce.
The six-hour duration must surely seem like a challenge to contemporary museum visitors. Yet those attending a Fela Kuti concert in Nigeria would expect nothing less. Moreover, Luanda-Kinshasa is anything but slow cinema—its rhythms are much too funky for that—and the expertly improvised variations on the two compositions are a constant source of fascination for committed listeners.
Like many moving image installations, spectators can move into and out of the projection space at will; however, it takes at least ninety minutes of viewing or more for the work to begin to reveal its complexity. Although the music seems to run as if a continuous jam, careful observation reveals that the performances are organized as “tracks” or sections that last anywhere from five to seven minutes. Within each section, the framings tend to sweep the space, often with languid pans or traveling shots, with occasional cuts in to draw attention to a specific performer. There are no obvious breaks or marks of punctuation between sections, which are nonetheless bracketed by two devices. Towards the end of a “movement,” off-screen characters may be gradually revealed: a photographer and a blond woman keeping notes; two women, one white, one black, seated on a couch, girl friends or groupies; male engineers in blue coveralls fussing with cables and other equipment; and on the far right of the stage, the recording booth. The second device is both structural and musical: a new segment begins with the initiation or return of a new musical improvisation as well as the camera recommencing its progress, usually from left to right. As described in the note that accompanies the installation at the Pinault Collection, Jonathan Pouthier, assistant curator at the Musée national d’art moderne – Centre Pompidou, writes that
Stan Douglas . . . favors a principle of observation and recording that appears to be linear and continuous. However, this effect of continuity of the performance on the screen turns out to be pure artifice: like a multi-track arrangement, the musicians’ contributions, recorded separately, were assembled at the time of editing. Composed of eleven sequences of similar length, the initial structure of the film is re-sequenced for the screen at the moment of the projection according to a system of permutations. Like a sound mix, this logic of reassembly exhausts the various possible combinations and converts the film into a series of uninterrupted variations, shifting the experience of the film to that of listening. The artist borrows an operating principle from music that allows him to expand the framework of representation. Faced with the repetition of visual and sonic motifs, the viewer is invited to experience a subjective temporality that opens the work to different degrees of attention and interpretation.
Herein lies the sophisticated internal time structure of the work, which is continually interacting with the external rhythms and motifs of the musical performances. The recorded musical material is not derived from a six-hour performance, then. Rather, the six-hour set is constructed from edited clips of much shorter recording sessions, which Douglas mixes into a near seamless musical assembly that develops complex patterns trough highly controlled post-production processes. This method is perhaps inspired by the practice of Teo Macero, a producer at the Columbia studio, who also “created” many of Miles Davis’s great albums by subtly cutting and rearranging extended studio jams. Although the work gives the impression of a continuous performance, it is in practice comprised of loops and repetitions wherein Douglas displays his own virtuosity as a mixer and editor, and as a composer of speculative history.
[1] The musicians include Kahlil Kwame Bell: Percussion; Liberty Ellman: Lead Guitar; Jason Lindner: Moog Whirlitzer; Abdou Mboup: Congas; Nitin Mitta: Tablas; Jason Moran: Rhodes, B3 & Band Leader; Antoine Roney: Alto Saxophone; Marvin Swewell: Rhythm Guitar; Kimberly Thompson: Drums; Burniss Earl Travis: Bass
