At ICA, musicians' art creates a fascinating show

What happens when musicians make a sculpture?

It clicks, it bangs, it scratches. Bamboo poles go up and down, whirligigs twirl and seem to generate a noise of their own. Its sounds and movements seem to be following a pattern. Then something happens you don't expect. The rhythm changes. You keep paying attention. You understand that this artwork needs more than a look. Like music, it takes time.

The piece, Rio Negro II (2007/15) by Douglas R. Ewart, George Lewis, and Douglas Repetto, is a turning point in the Institute of Contemporary Art's new exhibition "The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now." It helps mark the spot where a historical survey of movements in music and art that arose in Chicago nearly 50 years ago gives way to a selection of more or less contemporary works that extend or reflect on themes that arose in that earlier work. It functions as a kind of garden, a place where you can stop and get your thoughts in order.

I needed that moment to stop and slow down. I had been seeing and dismissing works in this uneven but ultimately fascinating show at the blink of an eye. I needed a listener's patience.

The exhibition, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where it was first shown, considers two groups that arose on that city's South Side in the late 1960s. One, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), became world famous as a center for the development of free jazz. It is still active, with new generations participating. Many of its founders and key figures, such as the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams and instrumentalist-composer Roscoe Mitchell of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, AACM's most famous offshoot, are also painters.

The other, AfriCOBRA, the African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists, was organized to give identity to people who were completely ignored by the city's art establishment. The two organizations arose at the same time and in the same place, and for a while they even shared a headquarters. Both reflected the revival of interest in black nationalism and black power. Both offered community programs to get the public engaged in their arts.

But their works seem very different. AACM was relentlessly experimental, eschewing song forms and other conventional musical structures. As a video in the exhibition notes, its members were outraged that the work of African Americans was never seen to be serious or innovative by establishment culture. (In 1965, Duke Ellington was chosen to receive the Pulitzer Prize, but the jury that made the recommendation was notoriously overruled.) AACM music tended to be difficult, uncompromising, and little concerned with being understood on first hearing.

By contrast, AfriCOBRA, despite its somewhat threatening name, was associated with bright, accessible work. Barbara Jones-Hogu, artist and author of the group's manifesto, called for positive images featuring "Pure vivid colors of the sun and nature. Colors that shine on black people." Her advocacy of "use of syncopated, rhythmic repetition that constantly changes in color, pattern, movement, [and] feature," is a good description not only of the work produced by members of her group, but also of the musicians on display here when they turned to visual art. She said the work should "mark the spot where the real and the unreal, the objective and the nonobjective, the plus and the minus meet."

The 1988 canvas JamPact/JelliTite (for Jamila) by Jeff Donaldson (1932-2004) can be seen as a fusion of these two strains. Donaldson, a founder of AfriCOBRA, uses a wildly complex mosaiclike technique to evoke a bassist, a pianist, and a singer. The shards of color, the circles and zigzags seem to be their music. And the pianist is Muhal Abrams, cofounder of AACM.

This work has an ebullience I don't usually hear in music associated with AACM, but there are connections. Like the music, the mixed-media painting is an accretion of small elements, patterns that almost cohere, then split apart. The whole picture is elusive; the eye is drawn to contrasts and the way in which irregular shapes somehow fit together.

The Third Decade (1970) by Roscoe Mitchell uses a similarly bright palette and collagelike aesthetic. It has elements of pop and psychedelia, though the picture is dominated by a horned figure with blank eyes, a face that recalls an African mask and a step-pyramid hat. To the side, getting pushed out of the picture perhaps, is half of a distinctly Louis Armstrong smile. Though it is a virtual catalog of the cultural preoccupations of the time when it was made, Mitchell used it on a record album cover 14 years later.

For me, the most exciting fusions of art and music in the exhibition are the musical scores of composer-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton for Falling River Music (2004-present). These appear at first glance to be bold, painterly brushstrokes. But these figural elements are tied, like Gulliver, by a network of lines, symbols, and numbers that Braxton has explained in notes shown nearby.

I don't pretend to understand them fully, but they were nevertheless a revelation. These big colorful gestures on the page are a reedman's view of music. It does not start with specific notes and rhythms but rather with the tone that comes out of the horn. You look closely, and you see that the green score has a bit of red in it and the blue one has some brown, and you need to play the nuance. The shape of the color suggests a progression of mood.

Many of the smaller symbols are about articulation. Should the notes explode, ooze, or emerge gently, one by one? Braxton notates the elements of performance that are found peripherally, if at all, on most musical scores. We usually say these are part of a performer's interpretation. Braxton begins with the interpretation and lets the performer find the notes.

Braxton is someone I have always been more ready to respect than listen to. But looking at his scores opened my eyes, and perhaps eventually, my mind and ears as well.

tom@thomashine.com

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The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now

Through March 19 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, 118 S. 36th St.

Hours: Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Thursday and Friday, 11-6; Saturday and Sunday, 11-5.

Admission: Free. Information: 215-898-7108 or icaphila.org

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