Talk:
CePRA presents an online talk and Q&A with Colin Tucker on "musical contemporary art" in the context of racialising frameworks baked into its foundations. Please share widely.
April 25th at 5pm on ZOOM
To attend, please register on Eventbrite, ZOOM link will be sent out on the day.
Abstract:
Recent scholarship in ethnic and Black studies has observed that racism and anti-Blackness are ontologically intrinsic to historically White Disciplines in the Euro-American university, and in turn has called for ambitious and comprehensive dismantling of Disciplines’ racializing frameworks. Yet within the Discipline of music, neither artistic research nor scholarship has answered the implications of these calls with respect to the Discipline’s anchoring in Western Art Music. My paper addresses this gap, by drawing on what G. Douglas Barrett calls musical contemporary art, in order to make manifest institutionally neglected yet decades-long tendencies in artistic research oriented around the dismantling of Western Art Music’s racializing protocols and infrastructures. Specifically, in my paper, I bring past artistic research of Black Audio Film Collective and Yoko Ono into dialogue with recent scholarship in ethnic studies, for purposes of attending to how this research 1) listens to racializations baked into foundational technical principles of Western Art Music (specifically semiotics, practice-structures, and presentation forms), and 2) suggests contours of a broader artistic research program aligned with abolitionist imperatives, specifically towards the abolition of (racializing) Interiority sedimented into legacies of Western Art Music. I argue that the frame of musical contemporary art, by bringing strategies overlooked within the Discipline of music to bear upon the politics of musical technique, opens up artistic research’s capacity to (re)read musical pasts and imagine otherwise futures. In conclusion, this project, by closely examining artistic projects that have historically been illegible within the field of music, catalyzes artistic research’s possibilities for dismantling racializations baked into legacies of Western Art Music.