The Kitchen Announces Full Line-Up for JULIUS EASTMAN: THAT WHICH IS FUNDAMENTAL

By: Julie Musbach Dec. 22, 2017

The Kitchen presents "Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental," an interdisciplinary project of performances and a two-part exhibition, curated by artist Tiona Nekkia McCloden and Bowerbird founder Dustin Hurt, that comprises the most expansive demonstration yet of Julius Eastman's rousing creative output, January 19 - February 10, 2018. The Kitchen was both an artistic testing ground and a refuge for the composer, five-octave-spanning baritone singer, jazz pianist, and choreographer whose work was a series of torrid contributions to-and bold, black gay identity-asserting digressions from-the norms of the musical avant-garde of the 1970s and '80s. "Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental"was first presented in Spring 2017 in Philadelphia; this new and significantly expanded iteration at The Kitchen (executed with curatorial contributions from Katy Dammers, Tim Griffin, Matthew Lyons, and Christopher McIntyre) examines Eastman's life, work, and resurgent influence through four concerts of his compositions, a two-part exhibition, and commissioned performances. The festival aims to reassemble an artistic legacy fragmented by Eastman's early death in 1990, and by years of homelessness leading up to it.

"Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental" begins with Evil Nigger: A Five-Part Performance for Julius Eastman, from ISSUE Project Room artist in residence Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste and his collaborator LaMont Hamilton. In this performance Toussaint-Baptiste ruminates on Eastman's 1979 composition in conjunction with Stacy Hardy's 52 Niggers, together probing Eastman's role as a trickster through performance, sound, and the creation of 52 sculptural works over the course of 24 hours. Sequential public iterations take place from 8pm on January 19 to 8pm the following day. Eastman conceived Geologic Moments with choreographer Molissa Fenley, and performed the work in 1986. Fenley and five other dancers revive it, accompanied by a remastered recording of Eastman's live performance, January 30 at 8pm.

The S.E.M. Ensemble, of which Eastman was a founding member (with Artistic Director Petr Kotik), performs the 1974 compositions Femenine and Joy Boy, January 25 at 8pm.Feminine, which had its New York City premiere at The Kitchen in 1975, was recently reissued in Fall 2016 to vast acclaim, with Pitchfork noting in a "Best New Music" review that in Femenine "listeners can get a sense of how Eastman fused jazz-informed improvisation with the rigors of early, pulse-based minimalism." On January 27, Arcana New Music Ensemble plays the New York City debut of Eastman's Thruway, preceded by a performance by Julius' brother, guitarist/bass player Gerry Eastman, and a spoken word performance by Afrofuturist experimental musician, and The Kitchen's inaugural Emerging Artist Award-winner, Moor Mother. The holy trinity of Eastman's new-music-stiffness-challenging, late-'70s works-Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla-comes to the Knockdown Center on January 28 at 8pm. Of these, particularly Crazy Nigger, Alex Ross writes in The New Yorker, "We are thrown into a world that is as much Romantic as minimalist: the harmony thickens incrementally; quiet episodes are juxtaposed with thunderous fortissimos; pentatonic interludes add an angelic sweetness. There is a sense of worlds forming, of forces gathering." The festival's final concert, on February 3, pairs Eastman's vocal work, Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, with its exquisite 10-cello companion piece, The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc, and also includes Macle, a vocal ensemble piece, and Trumpet, the premiere of a transcription by Christopher MacIntyre performed by TILT Brass.

Throughout the program of performances, The Kitchen presents an exhibition in two parts, curated by McClodden, and organized by Katy Dammers and Matthew Lyons of The Kitchen, with archival research by Hurt. One part of the exhibition, Predicated., sees 14 contemporary artists-Ash Arder, Chloë Bass, Courtney Bryan, Jonathan Gardenhire, Yulan Grant, Shawné Michaelain Holloway, Texas Isaiah, Wayson Jones, Carolyn Lazard, James Maurelle, Sondra Perry, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Beau Rhee, and Raúl Romero-working in conversation with Eastman's beguiling yet evasive presence. In Eastman's minimal composition, as in the reconsidering of a life led by a wry and evasive outsider, absence itself becomes an evocative means of expression. McClodden told Hyperallergic, "[Predicated.] is Eastman in my mind, my nightmares, my biggest dreams of what this cat looks like, feels like."

The other component of the exhibition is A Recollection., examining Eastman's mercurial identities, and how they commingle within a legacy that seems to be deliberately elusive and mischievous. "I don't know if he wants to be fully revealed," McClodden continues in Hyperallergic. "The more you read a little bit about the way he moved, he was very ephemeral. He didn't really care." Did Julius want us to have a hold on his life, or did he want the residue of his life and work to remain as cunning as he was? This part of the exhibit is filled with artifacts and ephemera from his life, and celebrates him as a master of artifice-someone embracing the immediacy, and therefore the transience, of improvisational performance. His is a legacy that could never be fully recovered-and perhaps a more totalizing form of remembrance, without those absences, wouldn't be a remembrance of who this person was at all. Keeping in mind Eastman's own interplay of absence and presence, the exhibition includes considerable material from The Kitchen's archive, much of it being shown publicly for the first time, as well as extensive oral history interviews, recently conducted, that provide additional context for Eastman's relationship with The Kitchen.

Eastman's complicated involvement with the world of revered musicianship began early. He trained in piano, then switched to composition, at the hallowed and exclusive Curtis Institute of Music, though the conservatory gave him neither sponsorship nor housing, and he lived at a YMCA during his time studying there. Following his graduation in 1963, he moved to New York, and debuted on the piano at Town Hall in 1966. He found his way to the heart of the American musical avant-garde at the close of the 1960s, when he joined SUNY Buffalo's Creative Associates program.

He became involved at the Kitchen in 1972, first presenting his own work and performing with the SEM Ensemble. Over the course of a decade, he collaborated here with Arthur Russell, Meredith Monk, and Jeffrey Lohn, toured Europe with The Kitchen, and premiered and gave early performances of some of his most important compositions from Femenine (1974) to Crazy Nigger (1979) to The Holy Presence of Joan d'Arc (1981) at the space. Using the language of augmented rhythmic repetition fundamental to minimal music, and frequently limiting compositions to mass groupings of one instrument, Eastman's titles-Gay Guerilla, Feminine, Nigger Faggot, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, to name a few-layered confrontational language and implicit commentary atop the otherwise predominantly structural-subversion focused drive of the minimalist movement. His work asserted identity politics well before the AIDS epidemic would lead critics and the mainstream art world to take issues of marginalization, or the positive expression of anything besides heterosexual whiteness, at all seriously.

Minimal music was a radical, even incendiary movement that in its beginnings infuriated some critics with its skeletal instrumentation, its hypnotic repetitions and disassociation from narrative musical structures, i.e. the fundamentals by which music had been understood. Yet the soft revolution of less was steeped in its own norms and social patterns of access. Eastman once performed a version of John Cage's Song Books, but unprecedentedly sexualized it; Cage's sour reaction was typical of the hegemonic minimalist artistic discourse of the times. Though Eastman continuously made complex contributions to what minimal music meant and could achieve, the discretely queer Cage said, "I don't approve, because the ego of Julius Eastman is closed in on the subject of homosexuality. And we know this because he has no other idea to express." Cage was a vehement proponent of minimalism as ego-less, the antithesis of art that declares identity. Such was an artistic position easily afforded a white male artist who, albeit queer himself, saw the expression of said sexuality musically as an affront to a neutrality that would let the listener determine their own experience.

Eastman battled addiction, and was evicted from his apartment in the mid-1980s, at which point many of his scores became lost as he slipped into homelessness, leaving an incomplete but compelling collection of pieces and recordings. Eastman was thought to have lived for a while in Tompkins Square Park before his death at 49. The last time he was written about publicly prior to his death was in a wholly separate context from his music. A Newsday article described a 48-year-old man named Julius Eastman standing "among his fellow homeless men and [talking] about" the news story of a recent rape and murder of a white woman at a nearby hospital-how 50 homicide detectives and a large financial reward were attached to the case, and how that reflected the socioeconomic status of the victim of the terrible crime. Accompanying his quote was a condescending reference to him as a "highly articulate black man," noting that, in the evening, this man plays piano at the men's shelter across the street where he often crashes. When Eastman died a year later, an obituary by Kyle Gann didn't appear until eight months following his death.

From the precarious position of a gay, black artist in the 1980s, recognition and obscurity seemed unsettlingly adjacent. Some have speculated that this switch from avant-garde darling to anonymized drifter was self-determined: another exploration of a different lifestyle by an artist fascinated by shape-shifting and transience. Others have suggested that he had a less controlled streak for self-destruction. Others cite rampant societal racism. Regardless of the cause- deliberation or victimization or any combination-the question of whomight be able to so easily fall through the cracks, and what artists with similar streaks might have had the visibility and privilege not to disappear with so few people paying notice, is perhaps most fundamental. Like an Eastman composition, this question continues to insinuate, in repetition, as Eastman's work is reconsidered more and more.

Few composers of the 1970s and 1980s have been so influential among artists-or have been at such risk of having their legacy lost-as Julius Eastman. A multitalented figure, Eastman collaborated with luminaries including Peter Maxwell Davies, Meredith Monk, Arthur Russell, Jeffrey Lohn, Andy de Groat, Molissa Fenley, and many others-achieving great renown in his time for the many facets of his artistry-until, for a seeming tragic collision of potential reasons, he fell into obscurity. "Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental"contributes to a recent mass-revival (between the reissuing of recordings of old performances, the glowing critical reconsideration of those works, and Mary Jane Leach's book Gay Guerilla) of this potent composer, who, from the 1990s until recently, was just as obscenely overlooked as he was obscenely talented.

"Julius Eastman: That Which Is Fundamental" - Schedule of Performances

Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste: Evil Nigger: A Five-Part Performance for Julius Eastman

24-Hour Interpretive Cycle, January 19-20, 2018

January 19, 8pm; January 20, 12am, 11:30am, 3pm, 6:30pm at The Kitchen

Co-Presented with ISSUE Project Room

A $5 RSVP commitment is asked to ensure seating for each public viewing.

Artist, designer, and composer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste completes his 2017 ISSUE Project Room artist residency in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist LaMont Hamilton. The performance features the duo sequentially performing all five of their previously staged "parts" of Julius Eastman's 1979 composition Evil Nigger as a 24-hour interpretive cycle.

Feminine + Joy Boy

With the S.E.M. Ensemble

Thursday, January 25, 2018

8pm at The Kitchen