CURATION
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from this page:
by Augmented Matrix
Network Node
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Name:
Charles Munka
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City/Place:
Hong Kong
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Country:
China
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Hometown:
Lyon, France
Life & Work
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Bio:
Not every artist thinks of a painting as a place. For many artists—I would venture to guess the vast majority—a painting can be anything from a discrete object or a window into a fantasy to an object out of time or a representation of an ongoing practice.
Some painters, though, think of painting in architectonic terms, imagining how future viewers somewhere down the long temporality of art history might approach the work, wondering what kind of spaces paintings might one day be displayed within, considering how paintings themselves might evoke or even create spaces for meditation, conflict, romance, salvation. This is, in some important ways, the more classical approach to painting, in that it is beholden to a religious sensibility. Every painter of a medieval altarpiece, for instance, knew exactly where that painting would reside for the duration of its worldly existence; removal would be tantamount to cataclysm.
Through modernism, the artist wrests control of the siting of the work away from the commissioning institution—the image slinks from the church to the museum, freed from something spiritual and bonded instead to systems of circulation.
Museums are, all of them, tomb raiders. In the twentieth century, artists who have built homes for their prized works have been subject to ambiguous admiration and derision, the accusation of arrogance and egoism no doubt stemming from a lingering religious aura that has, despite it all, never been entirely stripped away from painting: in creating paintings for particular spaces the artist is seen as rejecting the invisible hand of circulation, and in creating spaces for particular paintings the he builds a temple to his own hand.
The Rothko Chapel, which technically functions as a place of worship; Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin, often oddly described as an atheist temple; Monet’s Water Lilies, suspended in the air against a wall of their own; Mark Bradford’s Pickett’s Charge, and its immediate predecessor in the Gettysburg Cyclorama. These are all grand, masculine gestures that stake their claims into the frontier like so many flagpoles thrust into the surface of the moon, or the wastelands west of the Mississippi.
Charles Munka, forever a guest on the island of Sado, treads more softly. Working on the site of an old Noh stage, his paintings make place by being born of a place, as he suggests in the title: Riken no Ken, to see a detached seeing, to understand at a distance, to grasp formalized beauty and its referent—real, past, or imagined—all in the same instant.
On the exterior of the Haguro Shrine’s stage, he constructs five dark panels, five paintings of negative space that derive their graphic forms from the abstract choreographic manuals of the Noh tradition. The same pattern is repeated topographically, in Adrift, by stacked cairns of scavenged buoys, an object that washes up locally on the tides after being loosened, by nature or by accident or by villainy, from grids engaged in the aquaculture of oysters. They are nautical navigational aids, sculptural reinventions of the diagrams, street signs, and informational graffiti that Munka has lifted from the surfaces of walls, streets, and roadmaps time and time again, from rural France to the dense heart of Hong Kong. One imagines the criss-crossing wakes of the ships that have brought him here. His choreography appears again, a third time, inside of the shrine, but here reversed: crisp black lines on a light canvas, a confusion of routes that may once have traversed this very space, sucking all of the air and all of the history out of a room that nearly collapses under its own weight. Every mark, from beginning to end, is revealed to be intentional.
In making a place for these paintings, in making a place out of these paintings, Munka maps paths that do not move forward but rather pull us backward, spin us around, and deliver us right back to where we started. As viewers we stand at an altar without a specific purpose, other than to remind us that we can see what we are seeking only by stepping back from what is in front of us, to see our own detachment, and to allow the world to wash over us in waves.
by Robin Peckham
More
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Quotes, Notes & Etc.
Charles Munka is art director for BTS Radio/Records and for Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder label.
Clips (more may be added)
We use the mathematics of the small world phenomenon to transform the creative universe into a creative village wherein all are connected by short pathways to all... (Wolfram explains how above)
This Integrated Global Creative Economy uncoils from a sprawling Indigenous, African, Sephardic and then Ashkenazic, Arabic, European, Asian cultural matrix...
Great culture is great power.
"Thanks, this is a brilliant idea!!"
—Alicia Svigals (NEW YORK CITY): Apotheosis of klezmer violinists
"Dear Sparrow: I am thrilled to receive your email! Thank you for including me in this wonderful matrix."
—Susan Rogers (BOSTON): Director of the Berklee Music Perception and Cognition Laboratory ... Former personal recording engineer for Prince; "Purple Rain", "Sign o' the Times", "Around the World in a Day"
"Dear Sparrow, Many thanks for this – I am touched!"
—Julian Lloyd Webber (LONDON): Premier cellist in UK; brother of Andrew (Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Phantom of the Opera...)
"This is super impressive work ! Congratulations ! Thanks for including me :)))"
—Clarice Assad (RIO DE JANEIRO/CHICAGO): Pianist and composer with works performed by Yo Yo Ma and orchestras around the world
"We appreciate you including Kamasi in the matrix, Sparrow."
—Banch Abegaze (LOS ANGELES): manager, Kamasi Washington
"Thanks! It looks great!....I didn't write 'Cantaloupe Island' though...Herbie Hancock did! Great Page though, well done! best, Randy"
Our Matrix was conceived under a Spiritus Mundi ranging from the quilombos and senzalas of Cachoeira and Santo Amaro to Havana and the provinces of Cuba to the wards of New Orleans to the South Side of Chicago to the sidewalks of Harlem to the townships of South Africa to the villages of Ireland to the Roma camps of France and Belgium to the Vienna of Beethoven to the shtetls of Eastern Europe...*
Sodré
*...in conversation with Raymundo Sodré, who summed up the irony in this sequence by opining for the ages: "Where there's misery, there's music!" Hence A Massa, anthem for the trod-upon folk of Brazil, which blasted from every radio between the Amazon and Brazil's industrial south until...
And hence a platform whereupon all creators tend to accessible proximity to all other creators, irrespective of degree of fame, location, or the censor.
Matrix Ground Zero is the Recôncavo, bewitching and bewitched, contouring the resplendent Bay of All Saints (end of clip below, before credits), absolute center of terrestrial gravity for the disembarkation of enslaved human beings (and for the sublimity these people created), the bay presided over by Brazil's ineffable Black Rome (where Bule Bule is seated below, around the corner from where we built this matrix as an extension of our record shop).
Assis Valente's (of Santo Amaro, Bahia) "Brasil Pandeiro" filmed by Betão Aguiar
Betão Aguiar
("Black Rome" is an appellation per Caetano, via Mãe Aninha of Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá.)
Replete with Brazilian greatness, but we listened to Miles Davis and Jimmy Cliff in there too; visitors are David Dye & Kim Junod for NPR/WXPN
I opened the shop in Salvador, Bahia in 2005 in order to create an outlet to the wider world for magnificent Brazilian musicians.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar found us (he's a huge jazz fan), David Byrne, Oscar Castro-Neves... Spike Lee walked past the place while I was sitting on the stoop across the street drinking beer and listening to samba from the speaker in the window...
But we weren't exactly easy for the world-at-large to get to. So in order to extend the place's ethos I transformed the site associated with it into a network wherein Brazilian musicians I knew would recommend other Brazilian musicians, who would recommend others...
And as I anticipated, the chalky hand of God-as-mathematician intervened: In human society — per the small-world phenomenon — most of the billions of us on earth are within some 6 or fewer degrees of each other. Likewise, within a network of interlinked artists as I've described above, most of these artists will in the same manner be at most a handful of steps away from each other.
So then, all that's necessary to put the Brazilians within possible purview of the wide wide world is to include them among a wide wide range of artists around that world.
If, for example, Quincy Jones is inside the matrix, then anybody on his page — whether they be accessing from a campus in L.A., a pub in Dublin, a shebeen in Cape Town, a tent in Mongolia — will be close, transitable steps away from Raymundo Sodré, even if they know nothing of Brazil and are unaware that Sodré sings/dances upon this planet. Sodré, having been knocked from the perch of fame and ground into anonymity by Brazil's dictatorship, has now the alternative of access to the world-at-large via recourse to the vast potential of network theory.
...to the degree that other artists et al — writers, researchers, filmmakers, painters, choreographers...everywhere — do also. Artificial intelligence not required. Real intelligence, yes.
The deep roots of this project are in Manhattan, where Allen Klein (managed the Beatles and The Rolling Stones) called me about royalties for the estate of Sam Cooke... where Jerry Ragovoy (co-wrote Time is On My Side, sung by the Stones; Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin of course; and Pata Pata, sung by the great Miriam Makeba) called me looking for unpaid royalties... where I did contract and licensing for Carlinhos Brown's participation on Bahia Black with Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock...
...where I rescued unpaid royalties for Aretha Franklin (from Atlantic Records), Barbra Streisand (from CBS Records), Led Zeppelin, Mongo Santamaria, Gilberto Gil, Astrud Gilberto, Airto Moreira, Jim Hall, Wah Wah Watson (Melvin Ragin), Ray Barretto, Philip Glass, Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd for his interest in Bob Marley compositions, Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam and others...
...where I worked with Earl "Speedo" Carroll of the Cadillacs (who went from doo-wopping as a kid on Harlem streetcorners to top of the charts to working as a janitor at P.S. 87 in Manhattan without ever losing what it was that made him special in the first place), and with Jake and Zeke Carey of The Flamingos (I Only Have Eyes for You)... stuff like that.
Yeah this is Bob's first record contract, made with Clement "Sir Coxsone" Dodd of Studio One and co-signed by his aunt because he was under 21. I took it to Black Rock to argue with CBS' lawyers about the royalties they didn't want to pay (they paid).
Matrix founding creators are behind "one of 10 of the best (radios) around the world", per The Guardian.
Salvador is our base. If you plan to visit Bahia, there are some things you should probably know and you should first visit:
www.salvadorbahiabrazil.comAcross the creative universe... For another list, reload page.
This list is random, and incomplete. Reload the page for another list.
Wolfram MathWorld
Ex Terra Brasilis
Alicia Svigals
Susan Rogers
Julian Lloyd Webber
Clarice Assad
Kamasi Washington
Randy Brecker
Roberto Mendes
Luciano Calazans
Gustavo Caribé
J Velloso
Lázaro Ramos
Fernando Guerreiro
Maria Marighella
Russell Okung
Bule Bule
Caetano Veloso
RÁDIO MATRIX