Nadia Lauro: 'Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man' At Nottingham Contemporary

Nadia Lauro, 'Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man', Gallery Installation, Nottingham Contemporary, 2015

The images shown here relate to an exhibit by Nadia Lauro, related to the musician Sun Ra and currently installed at Nottingham Contemporary.  The room is one quarter of a four-handed exhibition entitled ‘Alien Encounters’, dealing with various issues around the idea of the other.  The overall show also features installations and audio-visual presentations by Ranah Hamedeh, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, and Danai Anesiadou, but sadly, I’d be lying if I said those sections engaged me quite as much when I visited the other day.  I may not have time to revisit in search of greater understanding in the immediate future, so for now I’ll just focus on ‘Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man’, not least because it’s really loads of fun.

Sun Ra

Nadia Lauro, 'Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man', Gallery Installation, Nottingham Contemporary, 2015

For anyone unfamiliar with him, Sun Ra is an intriguing, and pleasingly eccentric figure in the field of mid-twentieth century experimental Jazz, whose cultural significance seems to extend beyond the obvious pigeonhole of ‘alternative’ improvised music.  Born Herman Blount, in segregated Alabama, his music evolved from (relatively) conventional swing and Be-bop modes through to the Free and just plain ‘out-there’.  For many, he sits alongside Coltrane, Coleman, Taylor, et al, when it comes to pushing Jazz to the edges of what was possible at the time.  His own influence extends beyond the confines of the genre, fuelled in part by the innate funkiness of his sound, even at its most atonal.

'Sun Ra:The Cosmo Man' Nottingham Contemporary, November 2015

Surprisingly, for someone whose oeuvre, and overall vision moved so far from mainstream entertainment, Sun Ra maintained a fully functioning and successful big band, (his Arkestra), for decades, - augmenting their often intense, percussion-heavy live performances with synthesizers, assorted dancers, vocalists and a generally extravagant presentation.  This is in part due to the support of a wealthy and sympathetic business partner, Alton Abraham.  His back catalogue is huge; featuring releases and re-releases on various labels, including his own El Saturn imprint.
 

Beyond the field of pure musical form, the other point about Sun Ra is his significance as the originator of Afrofuturism, and involvement with the wider Civil Rights struggle.  It’s not the first time he has featured at Nottingham Contemporary in recent months, and it is in this wider, socio-political context that he cropped up in Glenn Ligon’s excellent ‘Encounters & Collisions’ show there, earlier in the year.  Eschewing the slavery associations of his given name, Blount adopted the Sun Ra identity and re-invented himself as a supposedly alien visitor, (from Saturn, it transpires), also espousing a connection with Ancient Egyptian civilization.  His stated mission was to expand consciousness and lead Black humanity away from Earth-bound oppression.

The best distillation of all this is his 1972 feature film, ‘Space Is The Place’.  Coincidentally, that’s also the title of his best-known album, and probably the ideal place for the uninitiated to start.  The film is a glorious mash-up of period crime thriller and homemade SF fantasy, not unlike those points were the budget ran out before the end of an early Star Trek series.  It plays in one corner of the room in Nottingham, along with stills of the man himself, hanging around slightly less than magical locations, in full costume.  This a definite call-back to Ligon’s earlier show, but also a reminder of Sun Ra’s all-encompassing vision. The film’s low-rent extra-terrestrials and craft-table exploding planet are, in their own way, as enjoyable as any contemporary CGI confection, - but shouldn’t obscure the scholarship and wide-ranging theoretical framework behind it.  This home grown philosophy would, at different points, include: comparative theologies, Freemasonry, Kabbalistic and occult, knowledge, Numerology, psychic phenomena, and Egyptology, alongside more obvious political concerns. 

Sun Ra, 'Space Is The Place', Video Transferred To DVD, 1972/74, (Lent By Jim Newman/
North American Star System.

This idea of exodus and the liberation of a chosen people is hardly new, (or without its dangers), of course, but Sun Ra can certainly be seen as a guiding light in transferring the perceived societal alienness (and consequent alienation), of Afro-Americans, into a more optimistic, future-centric vision of an emancipated life.  He would later expand this, claiming a desire to rescue all Humanity, (from itself, I suppose).  Afrofuturism is a significant tradition, taking in the Jazz Fusion of, amongst others, Herbie Hancock, the P-Funk of George Clinton’s Parliament and Funkadelic ensembles, and not least, many of today’s SF-informed luminaries of electronic Bass Music.

I guess it could be easy to dismiss the general presentation of Sun Ra’s act as so much shonky pantomime, - what with all the dressing up in robes and ostentatious head-dresses, cartoonish rubber alien life-forms, and tiny psychedelic spaceship [1.], were it not for the social and cultural context of the 60s and 70s.  Cheesy glitz and pimp-tastic wardrobes were as much counter-culture signifiers amongst black people of the period as peasant costume and relaxed attitudes to hygiene were to many white kids.  Artists like Miles Davis or Sly Stone were no strangers to the dressing-up box whilst maintaining a distinct strain of Black consciousness in their work and many superficially escapist Blaxploitation flicks of the period mix elements of gritty social comment into their lurid fables of street-hustlin’.

Sun Ra, 'Space Is The Place', Video Transferred To DVD, 1972/74, (Lent By Jim Newman/
North American Star System)

Indeed, Sun Ra’s own predilection for appearing as an inter-galactic Pharaoh figure may actually reflect his interest in the harder-edged Black-Islam movement of the 50s and 60s.  Admittedly, his vision included the ultimate destruction of a corrupt, (White) Earth, but at least the escapees got to start again.  In an era of routine, nihilistic street massacres and quasi-medieval, theocratic death cults, one might wish for a little more of his rather more celebratory approach these days.

As far as the exhibit itself goes, much of this is either taken as read, or simply implied for the curious to investigate themselves, - rather than overly explained.  The two main impressions are of the wealth of Sun Ra’s music, and of being immersed in primary, sunshine yellow.  The walls and floor are saturated with it, as is all the ambient lighting.  It’s an effective (and probably cost-effective) way to create a distinctly alien form of psychedelic minimalism. It creates a form of abstract space one can occupy, but that also seeps into one’s own head, much as do the Arkestra’s hypnotic grooves.

'Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man', Nottingham Contemporary, November 2015

Those cadmium walls are host to miscellaneous documentary and archival items, as are the display case around much of the room’s periphery.  Perhaps most remarkable amongst these are numerous examples of the hand-drawn album sleeves that Arkestra members were apparently pressed into producing when not playing.  Meanwhile, a second screen relays footage of a impressively frenzied Chicago performance from 1981.  The infectious strains of the ‘Space Is The Place’ title track form an overall aural backdrop to everything else.

'Sun Ra & His Arkestra, Chicago Jazz Festival, 2 September 1981', Video Transferred To DVD,
Chicago Educational Television Association, WTTW/Chicago Production

However, the most important visual punctuations in all that yellow are the multiple pairs of black headphones dangling from the ceiling, - including a dense thicket of fifty such, occupying a significant portion of the gallery’s open space.  These effectively form a silent disco, with each relaying a different piece of Sun Ra music.  This kind of thing seems quite popular at the moment, and does create an interesting tension between focussing on a preferred piece in contemplative isolation, and a timeless need for the communal, ritual elements of music and dance.  It’s a typically technological solution to a very contemporary paradox.  Either way, it seems pretty effective here, and it was cheering to witness a steady procession of young families seizing the opportunity for a bit of a dance, whilst lost in the crazy, cosmic sounds of Sun Ra.

'Sun Ra: The Cosmo Man', Nottingham Contemporary, November 2015

It feels appropriate that, for all the attendant paraphernalia and associations surrounding Sun Ra, the main thrust of this exhibit is on the music.  It remains his most important and enduring legacy, and represents a genuine and actually surprisingly disciplined quest for new artistic ground throughout a long career.  On a weekend when all the news was bad, and humanity seemed to have lost none of its appetite for misery and deluded atrocity, I was delighted to sit in a world of glorious yellow, while small children jigged around to properly avant-garde Jazz.  It all seemed to stem from a time when justified struggle and the celebration of life weren’t necessarily could coexist as two sides of the same coin [2.].

[1.]:  How he planned to fit all the chosen people on that, I’ll never know, - but it does have a great paint-job.

[2.]:  For all his radical engagement, and interest in the Black Muslim Movement, Sun Ra's eclecticism and appreciation of ecstatic ritual feel pretty much the opposite of the life-hating, fundamentalist bulshit that now confronts us.