This first exhibition of 2016 at Villa Arson is a synthesis between Dada and Jazz. These two artistic disciplines should never have met, at least in principle, and that is the whole achievement of Sonia Boyce, a British artist, who has managed to reconcile these two dissenting movements.
It’s their essence—the contestation of norms and conventions—that brings them closer together to eventually unite them in this exhibition where sound and image are decisive. The students of Villa Arson have joined the game; they have become actors and authors of the event. Gesture, a choreography without a choreographer.
A return to the ’20s with Black Art and the protest against institutions, a tool for political expression, and thus everything becomes possible; one can express oneself. Jazz is above all a means of expression, a way to protest without showing it. How to denounce slavery? This music has its code, and Jazz Scat was born.
Races, classes, and genders are scrupulously classified, and everything needs to be contested, swept away. Cacophony, noise, Hip Hop, Vocal Jazz, two musicians, Jazz, Rap? A cabaret formula where the public becomes actors by giving words to the artists, the audience composes. Choreography, a movement of bodies not danced.
The nonsensical in French means non-being, absurdity, while in English, it is more of a humorous trait. The problems of our society: migrants, crisis, social unease, violence, political context. The world we live in, the assessment of our society.
How to make the audience active and take them out of the passive framework? So many questions and challenges, and Sonia Boyce tries to solve them through Jazz and Dada. To succeed, she needs the audience to play along, to assume their role. The videos are not cinema but the framework of reality, each image being a chapter of the story we are writing.
The Dada movement, born at the end of the First World War, questions the forms of artistic expression. It is a deconstruction, a refusal of norms—the very ones that led to the bloodbath; to the “never again” artists respond with deconstruction, sweeping everything away, rethinking everything.
Jazz arrived in Europe and Paris at the same time, where black artists also deconstructed music, making noise as some would say. A musical nonsense, and it is through the recognition of the similarity between these two movements that Sonia Boyce has set up her exhibition, a permanent performance in which the students were the actors. A great release, freeing oneself from oneself and one’s body, going beyond the framework of one’s own limits.
The artist invites us to revisit our certainties, urging us to question ourselves. It is both psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Wisdom. There is noise; it is already music. One must know how to listen to noise, understand the movements of bodies in their dance, and accept the nonsensical in its Anglo-Saxon meaning of humor where sarcasm and irony allow us self-mockery, a higher form of intelligence.
This exhibition is visible until April 30, 2016, at Villa Arson in Nice, and can be visited every day from 2 PM to 6 PM except on Tuesday.
Thierry Jan
