Chopped & Screwed

Dates

3 – 28 October 2023

Location

White Cube New York

1002 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10075

‘Chopped & Screwed’, the inaugural exhibition at White Cube New York, considers how artists use sourcing and distortion in contemporary practice to resist established systems of power and value.

October 2023

Curated by Courtney Willis Blair

‘Chopped & Screwed’, the inaugural exhibition at White Cube New York, considers the use of sourcing and distortion in contemporary art to resist established systems of power and value.

The exhibition’s title makes oblique reference to the technique of the same name, popularised by the late Houston musician DJ Screw in the early 1990s. The selection of artists for the show apply similar approaches to medium, form and aesthetic inheritances, each challenging, undermining or malforming existing hegemonic conditions and prevailing narratives.

With a focus on authoritarian governance, patriarchy and religion, the artists interrogate the power inherent to archetypes, whether material, structural or symbolic. It is a deliberate application of clandestine methods, both subtle and exacting, to establish new visual language. Often starting from familiar motifs and objects, the use of sampling becomes a transgressive act that implicates the conflicts of contemporary life. In turn, their reconfigurations constitute alternative readings to both conditions of power and realities of living.

Courtney Willis Blair is US Senior Director of White Cube and holds a seat on the gallery’s global board of directors. She was formerly a Partner and Senior Director at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, where she led artist canonical strategy and institutional engagement in the US and internationally, from projects at documenta and the São Paulo Biennial, to exhibitions at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas; the Jewish Museum, New York; MoMA, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Speed Art Museum, Kentucky. As a writer and journalist, she has profiled some of the world’s leading artists, architects and curators, as well as edited a number of artist books. She is the founder of Entre Nous, an international body of Black women art dealers established in 2016 and serves on the boards of The Kitchen, Triple Canopy, and the International Studio & Curatorial Program.

Exhibiting artists:

David Altmejd, Michael Armitage, Georg Baselitz, Mark Bradford, Theaster Gates, General Idea, Robert Gober, David Hammons, Mona Hatoum, Christian Marclay, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Julie Mehretu, Adrian Piper, Pope.L, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Carol Rama, Ilana Savdieand Danh Vo.

Installation Views

The following text by writer, critic and editor Sasha Bonét is specially commissioned to accompany the group exhibition ‘Chopped & Screwed’, curated by Courtney Willis Blair, at White Cube New York. Bonét’s essay provides an intimate meditation on the eponymous music genre, tracing its resonances through moments of sensuous embodiment and personal history. Occasioned by both the works on view and the genre’s use of sound as material, Bonét reflects on the affective force and poetic possibilities of distortion.

Sasha Bonét is a writer, critic and editor living in New York City. Her book The Waterbearers: A Story of Black Motherhood in America, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf.

The first time I heard a screw tape my older brother had brought it back from King’s Flea Market on Griggs Road. He walked over a mile from our grandmother’s house in South Park where we spent our long summer days. The heavy Texas sun riding his back all the way.

‘Listen to this,’ a command.

‘This go hard,’ a coercion.

But to me it felt smooth. The sounds seemed to crawl out of the stereo that we listened to in the yard under the magnolia tree. Kids weren’t allowed to go in and out of the house, else the humid heat swallowed the cool air. Slamming the screen door. We chose the outside. With the cicadas singing and the groaning of the air condition unit that slouched from the front room of the little blue house, threatening the porch. When we weren’t playing basketball across the yard’s hardened dirt, shooting anything round that we could find into a milk crate that we’d tied to the trunk of the tree, or picking and peeling switches from her limbs for Granny to welt our own, should we transgress, we were being held by her shade.

Screw music originated on the Southside of Houston where we, kin, gathered under that tree in the summer, telling lies and sharing our dreams. Screw music was an embodiment of our surroundings. It told the story of our environment when we couldn’t quite see value in it, nor ourselves. The slow-motion rhythm of the heat waves we saw in the distance. The broad glossy leaves and white blossoms that shrouded us from the sun shifted subtly, without haste. And the deep-throated, paternal drawl of Robert Earl Davis Jr. made me feel like I was floating. DJ Screw had taken the songs we memorized and moved our bodies to in our living rooms, and reimagined them in alignment with Houston’s urban landscape, creating a sonic meditation on slowing up, on savoring. And a terrible beauty was born, a sound that distilled the mantra of the Black southern cultural experience.

A chopped and screwed mixtape is but a collage. A slicing and a stirring. Creeping through a melody so that the listener can linger a bit on the edges of the implicit. Innuendos made visible that may otherwise be missed if you’re speeding by, looking in the opposite direction. A journey of repetition and reversing to encourage the details to reveal themselves. It is said that Robert Earl Davis Jr. was given his DJ name by his closest childhood friend when he saw him scratching his mother’s records with a screw, using the bolt to manipulate the sound. To take what is and distort it to the point that it is experienced as a wholly different form. Work that reframes and transforms and allows the receiver a different perspective. An alternative way of seeing. And naturally, what one sees is merely a reflection of the looker.

The role of the artist lies largely in their ability to capture the mundane, but nonetheless brutal, and render it poetic. Like when you slice your finger on the edge of a page or a blade, it burns, but the blood falls gracefully. And even through the pain, one cannot help but admire the beauty of the drip.

When the artist makes the incision into the ordinary, to break it open and investigate its insides, they invite the light in. A kind of aperture happens, exposing the beauty and the bruises. This is, of course, our deepest fear and our greatest hope as human beings, to be fully seen. To be explored. When you love something, you want to learn every part of it. Screwed and chopped, as both a genre and a form, means one must first carefully study the complexities of the norms before subverting and reimagining them.

And isn’t this what love is in its most elemental form? Taking the time to patiently bear witness paired with the generous offering of space for reshaping without fear of judgement. To see the beauty in a tree as it blooms sweet southern magnolias and adore it all the same while holding the weight of a bottomless milk crate around its waist.

R.I.P. DJ Screw