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

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

One of Douglas’s most personal
and ambitious works, Luanda-Kinshasa, is currently on view
as part of artist Jason Moran’s 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 Davis’s 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?” 

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

“I want to go back to these possibilities of ‘What if there’s
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 Davis’s music as influences on this
work.

“Utopia means ‘no place,’” he says in the Extended Play video. “It’s a
place that you may strive to get to, but you can’t necessarily get
there.” That won’t stop him from trying though.

Watch the video, which originally appeared as part of
Art21’s Extended
Play series, below. Stan Douglas’s 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 Art21’s
flagship Art in the Twenty-First
Century television series is available now on PBS. Catch
all episodes of New York Close
Up and Extended Play and
learn about the organization’s education programs
at Art21.org.

The post ‘Nothing Comes Out of a Void’: Watch Artist Stan
Douglas Remix Miles Davis With Afrobeat to Create His Genre-Bending
Multimedia Art appeared first on artnet News.