Casey Kaplan
Close-Up: Breaking Point
Jace Clayton on Kevin Beasley’s A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012-18
March 2019
In 1969, drummer G. C. Coleman played a seven-second solo on “Amen, Brother,” an instrumental gospel tune by the Winstons sold as the B side to “Color Him Father.” The track’s brief percussion “break” was mostly overlooked until 1986, when two DJs from the Bronx presented Coleman’s work on the first LP of their enormously influential compilation series Ultimate Breaks and Beats, from which it scattered far and wide, via sampling, across music history. The Amen break, as it became known, was first used to create hip-hop beats, then went on to grace everything from TV jingles to David Bowie’s 1997 song “Little Wonder.” The drummer’s grit and swing also formed the core rhythmic unit for drum and bass, a genre that continues to loop and rearrange him endlessly. As the most sampled piece of music to date, the Amen break—played by a black American who died homeless and received no money for feeding the machine—has become a quintessential example of musical displacement.
Sonic displacement is the operative procedure in Kevin Beasley’s installation A view of a landscape: A cotton gin motor, 2012–18, installed as part of the artist’s solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A view features the titular piece of machinery spinning so fast it initially appears to be still. Encased in a gigantic soundproof glass box, the motor is attended by swooping cables and a dozen microphones, many of them hanging there, swinging in the breeze; a dedicated listening space in an adjacent gallery hosts a live feed of the displaced audio. Beasley’s one-ton gesture takes what museums are good at—dampening cacophonous narratives, assuring provenance, stabilizing vibrant objects—and incorporates these actions into the work itself, nullifying the possibility for actual audio feedback while at the same time creating a museological feedback loop. G. C. Coleman, like composer Julius Eastman and countless others, serves as a cautionary tale; Beasley’s work owns its displacement for a change.
Click here to continue reading