Clint Roenisch Presents: ABSOLUTELY (A Radical Free Jazz Improvisation[collaborative work by Liam Crockard & Hugh Scott-Douglas])
On a cold day, perhaps a little too soon to be on the patio, Liam Crockard and Hugh Scott-Douglas found their ambitions confronted at the same point of termination: The desire to work without achieving an absolute. To express a period of working as artists, in whatever capacity that may exist today, without producing a reified object. Or, were this not possible, to achieve an approximation of the idea. Like a Sufi working for years to slow his heartbeat so he may be buried headfirst in the sand, it had to be an incredible amount of work for such a fleeting gesture.
Their girlfriends laughed at the idea and a second meeting over coffee yielded more complicated metaphors and feelings of disillusionment. Who would want to see that? What would it even be?
A lament for a simpler time and a profound sense of defeat yielded a regressive, knee-jerk solution inspired at best, by a street busker: A radical free jazz performance. What other option remained but to adapt an outmoded, clichéd form of expression for an outmoded, clichéd problem? The result is a sort of highly invested satire, in which Crockard and Scott-Douglas appear as caricatures of themselves in the midst of a typical young-male-artist crisis. A resolve that finds itself working towards the unspectacular through pure spectacle. Armed with saxophone and drums as the most typical arrangement for a jazz duo, Crockard and Scott-Douglas delve deep into the world of free improvisation. A process of call and response between the untrained and unskilled kept afloat by sheer conviction.
In a smoke-filled jazz club, Crockard and Scott-Douglas would face certain rejection. In a gallery, the virtuoso performance incites radical academic discourse fueled by reefers and strong tea.
In a gallery, it looks like art and it sounds like jazz.
Necessarily accompanying the performance are what may best be described as a series of “props” in the form of abstract music staff paintings, (engaging a relationship of tension and relief, acting both as composition and as residue) show posters (drenched in shameless self-promotion), and the all the tropes of a typical (boho) practice space, including soundproofed wall panels (built from available materials), influential recordings, and the expected detritus of a lived-in space. This visual support simultaneously reifies and exaggerates the performance as a whole.
Considering Nabokov’s bold proclamation “the future is but the obsolete in reverse,” Crockard and Scott-Douglas find themselves gleaning an inactive history as a means of critically engaging our expectations of the vanguard.