McArthur Binion on Visualizing Music

Terence Trouillot: Tell me about your exhibition, ‘DNA:Study/(Visual Ear)’, at Lehmann Maupin’s newly expanded space in Seoul. You’re showing new works alongside some pieces from your series ‘DNA:Work’ [2019–20] and ‘DNA:Study’ [2014–ongoing]. 

McArthur Binion: There are a few pieces from ‘DNA:Work’ in the show – very little, though. Then there’s the new series, ‘Visual:Ear’ [2022], which I’ve been developing over the last year and a half. For the underlayer – or what I call the ‘underconscious’ – of these new works, I used a music score, titled ‘Brown Black X’, that I commissioned this year from the jazz saxophonist Henry Threadgill, which he premiered in June at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. 

In reality, though, I’ve been working on ‘Visual:Ear’ since 1971. It was my first attempt at trying to visualize how I heard music. My first project in graduate school, at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, was a piece titled Drawn Symphony:in:Sane Minor [1971]. It comprised ten pages of music manuscripts that I used as a surface on which to make this drawn symphony. The first time I used the terminology ‘visual ear’ was in my graduate thesis paper that I wrote in 1973 at Cranbrook. In fact, the right-hand side of the painting DNA:Study/(Visual Ear) [2022] draws on that same image I made in 1971, but breaks it up into nine different parts, so it becomes way more complicated and, I think, visually more pleasing.

I should say that I’m not influenced by jazz music, per se, but we come from the same place. All the second-generation Black avant-garde artists moved to New York in the 1970s and early ’80s. I’m not going to call it the Black Arts Movement. This was way broader than that, came a bit after, and really influenced everything that’s happening right now. You had writers such as June Jordan and Ntozake Shange; you had musicians from Julius Hemphill to David Murray; and you had artists like Jules Allen, David Hammons and Kerry James Marshall. We were all hanging out together every night. It was really fun, baby!

TT: It was also around that time you met Threadgill. Can you talk about your friendship and collaboration?

MB: I met him in the mid-to-late 1970s, when he was becoming really well-known. He’s incredibly smart and intuitive, which is a rare combination. Over the years, we never collaborated; we were just friends. Then, we got old and I decided that he hadn’t been honoured the way he should have been, so I asked him if he’d like to make a composition. Out of all the musical artists I’ve known since I first moved to New York in 1973 – from Ornette Coleman to Cecil Taylor – Henry and I had the most in common, in terms of where our work derives from. For me, my work isn’t about art history. I just so happened to have landed there. 

TT: I’m curious to know your thoughts on the art world’s pointed focus on jazz music in the last decade or so. I’m thinking of the pianist Jason Moran, who has had a lot of success in the art world, often collaborating with visual artists and now showing with Luhring Augustine. But there were also these pioneering shows on jazz laureates, such as the Taylor exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2016 and the Milford Graves show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2020. More recently, I saw Roscoe Mitchell perform in London at Theaster Gates’s Black Chapel Serpentine Pavilion in June. It seems, to me, to be part of larger trend within the art world, which is absolutely unavoidable. 

MB: Look, this is how I see this whole thing happening: when you go back to the 1940s, New York painters were basically doing cubist work inspired by Pablo Picasso. How did they get from there to pure abstraction so quickly? By going to clubs and listening to Black bebop musical artists, where they learned improvisation. But no one ever talks or writes about that because, if they said New York abstract expressionism came from bebop music, they’d have to change the priorities of the art world, and that’s not going to happen. For me, that’s where my work starts.

TT: You mentioned this idea earlier, ‘where my work starts’. Can you elaborate on that? 

MB: I just think making a good painting is the hardest fucking thing to do in the world. Practically everything’s already been done. Growing up as a Black man in America, and not coming from an art history background, and not being in love with people like Rembrandt and shit, I wanted to make something that no one had done before, that really came from a rural modernist place. So, I chose oil sticks – a medium that felt like it was coming directly out of my hand – instead of paintbrushes. In the 1970s and ’80s, up into the ’90s, if you weren’t doing acrylic or oil painting, you weren’t going anywhere. So, with me, it was always important to grow abstraction further because it was so narrowly defined.

TT: Another expression you used earlier in this conversation is that you and jazz ‘come from the same place’. Obviously, there’s a clear connection to the jazz scene in terms of your personal history, but can you describe what that means to you exactly?

MB: When I make my work, I don’t listen to anything. A lot of artists, including Sam Gilliam and others, work from and about the music. I don’t do that because, once you start making work about the music, that means the music is leading you. The music is not leading me. We’re in the same heat. We’re at the same gate, but we’re in our own lanes.

McArthur Binion’s ‘DNA:Study/(Visual Ear)’ is on view at Lehmann Maupin, Seoul, until 22 October. 

^{Main image: McArthur Binion and Henry Threadgill, 2022, performance documentation. Courtesy: the artists; photograph: Jules Allen}