Adam Haupt
The University of Cape Town’s Contemporary African Music and Arts Archive (Cama) got its African Alchemy project started with a workshop, which was facilitated by musician, producer and artist Brian Eno.
The obvious connection to be made here is with the forthcoming visit of mega pop group U2’s Popmart tour – Eno produced several of their albums. But Eno’s arrival ahead of the tour was actually made possible by the British Council and is the brainchild of Cama, an “Africa-wide multi-media database for the arts and culture”.
A small number of artists, musicians, producers, journalists and cultural theorists gathered to formulate working proposals for “collaborative creative” acts, which would take place during the course of one year. Eno facilitated this process and provided some of his perspectives on art and culture for discussion. On this note, the programme listed two questions as “ABSOLUTELY FORBIDDEN”: “What’s it like to work with U2?” and “What’s David Bowie really like?”
This is pretty much where the fantasy of getting to meet Bono or The Edge receded into airy nothingness and we prepared grudgingly to engage with Eno, the self- reflexive cultural theorist and practitioner, not the larger-than-life musician/producer.
His perspectives are coloured by the experience he has gained in a number of media. He was a founder member of Roxy Music, he has produced and/or collaborated with Bowie, U2, Talking Heads, Geoffrey Oreyema, James and Laurie Anderson, and has released several solo albums. Back in 1975 he also discovered the now-popular ambient music and was a pioneer of tape looping.
But Eno is a visual artist as well: his video installations have been exhibited at galleries such as the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Austria’s Swarovski Museum and the Venice Biennale.
Eno feels that we should forget about art and start thinking about culture. He likes cultural forms which are not passed off as art explicitly and which blur boundaries between what was once considered high culture and what was considered to be mere entertainment. A mindset which is geared toward thinking about culture as opposed to art allows one to engage with cultural practices, such as women’s knitting, which were previously not worthy of the esteemed art critic’s attention.
The nebulous definition of culture as “everything you don’t have to do” broadens the scope of this understanding and is, no doubt, utter gibberish to your average proponent of the high/low dichotomy. But this understanding is empowering and allows for an interactive spirit, which sets the tone for the African Alchemy project.
Eno’s own sentiments on the project are that, regardless of what the participants do, anyone should feel that they “could have done that”. But this workshop wasn’t all plotting and planning. A bit of creative fun was to be had with Eno the producer as, on the second day of the workshop, he took musicians into the world of generative music, which had musicians producing music to selected video clips.
Added to this was the use of role playing, where a musician is given a specific part and produces music within the confines of this part. Eno feels that this sort of situation is far more productive than jamming and, yet, it seems to maintain the positive aspects of improvisation.
It’s not hard to see why Eno still is a bit of a cult figure and the genius behind of some of the sexiest and smartest acts on the globe.