While house grew out of Chicago in the early 80s, synth-based electronic music was already evolving in Europe. During the next decades, musical hybrids and sub-genres of house developed — detached from the social and cultural origins specific for the genre, most importantly Afro-American traditions. Perhaps similar issues apply to any hybrid form, uprooted, spread, adopted — whether it is House, Techno, Hip Hop, or Dub Step for that matter — a genre borrowing from raggae, transforming into a somewhat ‘UK invention’. Herein lies an essential question: When displaced (and in some instances even indolently consumed) from its context and deployed somewhere else, what exactly lies within this exchange?
For more than three decades the American artist Tony Cokes has made video works which confront sociopolitical power structures and pop cultural critique, often by using different sources of found/appropriated text, footage and music.
This exhibition displays a full video installation of Mikrohaus, or the black atlantic? (2006–2008) as well as a selection of related works on monitors. Accompanied by 1!+ draft3 (a dubstep primer) (2014) as well as Headphones and 1! (both from 2004) it gives an entrance into the politics of appropriation and sampling, but also into how technology is an essential element in music as well as any cultural form of circulation.
‘[E]dited, circulated, studied, preserved, sampled, decomposed, and remade […]; What are the social, political, economic, and historical implications[?]’
Through decades of appropriation, borrowing (some may say stealing), and sampling — back-and-forth — elements with a cultural specificity has traveled and switched places. Perhaps lost track of its origins on its way.
‘[Things] are never simple and solid [but] continually shifting. [T]he “ghost in the machine,” the “error,” the “accident” […]. By mutating its repetitions of previously used material [it] adds something new.’
House music has many offsprings and siblings. As with Detroit Techno — by some described as ‘George Clinton meeting Kraftwerk in an elevator’ — house music stands as a prime example of a music genre that has gathered people around the world, across ethnic and social backgrounds, gender and sexual orientation. It is a genre that through its travel has managed to create hybrid social spaces, and somehow altered, dissoluted, and even deconstructed segregating mechanisms and boundaries. It still does.
‘Me racist (misogynist, or homophobic)? But some of my best friends (and all my favourite musics) are black (queer, female, or all of the above)! Which, come to think of it, says something about the subtle distinctions of race, gender and sexual orientation that remain embedded in the very term ‘House’ to this day.’
Besides uncritical ‘theft’, one can argue that so-called universal phenomena, such as music, possess a potential and power to unite. Perhaps the question is rather about awareness of history, context, and circulation.
Thought and pleasure.