Welcome back to Edge of Reason.This season, we're shifting from enlightenment-focused ideas to something more personal, exploring the big ideas and forces that shape art and life.
Memory, perception, attachment, and the magic hidden in everyday moments.
These are some of the themes we'll dive into, themes that touch both the individual and the collective, where logic meets creativity, and where art helps us make sense of it all. In today's episode, we begin with memory.
Memory can haunt us, soothe us, or even elude us.It stirs nostalgia, puts us at ease, or reminds us of what we'd rather forget. Some memories we create together, shaped by shared experiences, while others connect us to people we've never even met.
How fluid or fixed must memory be to hold power?What happens when some memories are best left forgotten?And how does memory influence who we are, both individually and collectively?These are the questions we'll explore at the Edge of Reason.
A limited series podcast produced by Atlantic Rethink, the Atlantic's creative marketing studio, in partnership with Hauser & Wirth, a home to visionary modern and contemporary artists.
Joining us today are two visionary artists who explore the complexities of memory.In the late 80s and early 90s, Gary Simmons made a name for himself with his erasure technique, using blurred images to investigate race, history, and cultural memory.
Dream Hampton, a groundbreaking filmmaker and writer, captures both personal and collective memory in her work, shedding light on forgotten stories of survival and justice, highlighting the true power of narrative.
Together, they offer powerful insights into how memory influences art, and how art can shape our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.And I'm lucky to call both of them friends. Gary, I'm so excited to dig into this with you.
Welcome to Edge of Reason.
Jeff, thanks for having me, brother.
Today, we're diving into memory and shared memory.And you and I both came up as hip hop heads around the same time, even though we didn't meet up until much later.And I remember first encountering your work.
It might've been lineup, that piece that you did, the installation with the gilded shoes on a platform in front of a mugshot gallery.
or it could have been your early erasure drawings where you had sketched out cartoon characters that were rooted in blackface, like Mickey Mouse, right?And then you erased them on chalkboards.And all I know is your work gave me chills.
It was like this bolt of recognition where it was like we shared the same memories.But for our listeners, I'd love for you to unpack this.Where did those ideas for those pieces come from?And how do you approach memory in your work?
I think that I'd have to go back a bit to my undergraduate years.I was fortunate enough to go to School of Visual Arts in New York and Cal Arts in LA.
The foundation of my education was really a lot of minimalism, a lot of conceptualism, but most of it was through a white male lens. at that time, and although I was drawn to it, I never felt like there was a me in there.
I didn't feel like my voice was being heard through minimalism and conceptualism. I started drilling into history of education and black kids and public school and where we learned.
And the earliest forms of memory that I can think of where an education combined was cartoons. Those images left a massive impact for me.
But when you start to look back and critically deconstruct what it is that we were looking at, that's where it became very interesting.It was embedded with a lot of very racist imagery. One of the earliest is probably Disney.
I was looking at things like Dumbo and thinking back about, here's this little elephant, has this shortcoming, so to speak, of these gigantic ears, and he gets taught how to take what's perceived as a negative and turn it into a positive.
What's interesting about it is that the characters that teach him to use that shortcoming for his benefit are blackface crows.I started to realize that the memory of that cartoon started breaking down along racial lines.
Thinking about the blackface crows, Black folks remembered those crows completely.And non-Black people were looking at the cartoon and thinking about just the elephant.And so I started to dig deeper and try to find race cartoons.
That's where that started to come about, was how we track our memory, how we break down things that we've seen and recall, and the snatches of information that are lost in between the reality and the perception.
and therein lies that blur that my work sort of hovers.It's sort of between representation and abstraction.
I know that theme has been a continuing through line in your work, and I wanted to ask, what were you hoping to achieve or what are you hoping to achieve with the meaning of these images by blurring them or erasing them as you do?
What happens is when you're a young artist, you're trying to make mark for yourself.You're going to make these big statements.I think there were a lot of things at the time that I could draw on.
It was a really rich time visually and culturally, and hip-hop was starting more or less.I started to pick up on the idea of sampling and cutting back and forth. where you're taking this soundscape and creating something different.
That application went into literature, music, fashion, art, all of that.If you were probably downtown in LA or Detroit or wherever, and you were a young kid in the city, those images, those sounds, those things spoke to you.
That was first time that you're up there and it's like, that's us.There's a strength in that.
There's so much to unpack there, and we'll dive into some of those questions shortly.But first, let's welcome our guest, Dream Hampton.Dream, originally from Detroit, is an acclaimed filmmaker and journalist.
She started out as one of the few women involved in early hip hop journalism, working as a contributor for The Source, where she covered music, culture, and politics.
She's gone on to produce and direct Surviving R. Kelly, which earned her a Peabody Award. Her recent work includes Freshwater and It Was All a Dream.Among her many accolades, she was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People.
Dream, my old friend, welcome to Edge of Reason.
Thank you.I'm so honored to be here with both of you.
Your work from writing and organizing with Black August to your films, your filmmaking, has always focused on uncovering silent stories.I've heard you mention this before, cultural amnesia.How do you define that and what does it mean to you?
So erasure, right, is, um, I often talk about this as a Black feminist praxis, right?It's citation, right?We're constantly having to put ourselves back in a history.
So doing things like putting Cindy Campbell back in the story, and that has since been contested, but whatever.Like, so Cooper's sister, who throws the actual party that we call the beginning of hip-hop, is a perfect example.
Even just the history of women in hip-hop period gets erased.I saw something, Tony Hawk is holding his grandson, and apparently the grandson is his son's kid with Frances Bean Cobain.
And the tweet was saying, Tony Hawk and Kurt Cobain are the grandfathers.And I was like, wow, Kourtney Love can get erased too.And she made herself enormous.So women are always in danger of being erased.It's just how it is.
It's the truth of patriarchy and the insidiousness of it and the everywhere-ness of it.
If I may, I wanted to quote Gary here who talks about memory.You said once, I think of memory as more than what we are willing to tell ourselves.It's also composed of our refusals, our failures to account.
With that in mind, Dream, I wanted to ask you, what responsibility do you feel towards memory, particularly those memories that are silenced or ignored?How does absence or silence play a role in your work?
We're always racing against time and the bandwidth that we have to, like, remember and keep people in our histories, to keep it alive.
And so, you know, I'm thinking about, like, this Black feminist generation that so shaped me, that we've already lost Toni Morrison and Tazaki's still here, but...
you know, I just saw June Jordan and Audre Lorde's notes around Palestine become this huge talking point.And I was thinking about how we're projecting a today's politic onto their moment.But that moment wasn't that far away.It was the 80s.
And sadly, so many of the issues remain static.So I was thinking about how these questions are at once like a history and a present and a future. And sometimes the players are just shifting.So the questions remain the same.
In my last documentary, the questions of misogyny, the questions of erasure of women, the questions of when and where we enter this work and how we criticize it, they all remain the same. So, I mean, I don't know what the work is.
I always say that I want problems worth having.And that usually means new problems, right?Like I, back to hip hop, like Fat Man Scoop dying on stage or Elvin Jones, you know, great drummer. dying in the morning after a gig.
I don't want to spend my last breath arguing with some rapper about misogyny or any man.So there's that work, and then there's that exhaustion from that work.
Some of it is memory, but some of it is still right now, and sadly, the future that we face with the same problems.
Well, let's bring both of you into the conversation now.Gary, as you're listening to Dream, what's coming up for you?
I mean, I agree completely with what Dream's saying.I think to add to it, I think not all memory sits in that glow of amber light.I think that sometimes memories
are painful and create certain traumas in certain people and it's how you deal with that moving forward, right?And so I think colored folks have a long history of a need to reinvent certain histories.
I think that there's, because we're oral historians in a lot of ways historically, Right there wasn't things written down there was things that are passed out.
It's almost like a game of telephone where i tell dream something and then she tells it to jeff and so on and so on.
The basis of the story stays the same but there are little nuances or you know even if you get into something where you translate material from one language to another their slippage is lost between those two.
And I think that our memory works in a similar way.The further we move away from an event, the blurrier it gets.And there's a kind of desperation to complete the gap between the actual and what we've now sort of preserved.
But to use Dream's word, I think it's extremely fluid.It goes back and forth and there's ebbs and flows and things like that that we're forced into completing.I can remember sitting in the kitchen and I idolized my grandmother.She was my everything.
And I would watch even the way that she moved through the kitchen.And she'd be making codfish cakes or something, and nothing is written down.So I'd say, Graham, how much pepper or scotch bonnets do I put in for that?
She's like, oh, sweetie, you'll just know.And you just kind of sprinkle it in. And I'm like, wait a minute, I gotta get this down so that I could make this for my daughter and her kids and so on.She's like, oh yeah, you'll just pass it on.
And I think there's something really beautiful that the meal kind of subtly shifts, but somehow in our memory, our grandparents have that perfection that they always get the meal right.As a boy child in this household full of women,
very strong women, West Indian women.That oral history passed down is essential.There's this photographs that I talk about.It's me and my sister in the backyard.I think my sister's in her diaper or something.
It's late 1960s, early 70s or so, I'm aging myself obviously.I have one of those little tin pedal cars that we all had.My grandmother must have told me what was going on in that photograph probably a hundred times before she passed.
Now, what's interesting about that is I can't really truly recall what happened, but the retelling of that event has become so part of my own history, that her recollection of that photograph has become my memory.
And I think that that's a really fascinating thing to deal with.
And it sort of represents the way all of us have grown up with that way of how we deal with recollection, even if it's once removed, and somebody's retelling you the history that you went through, and you have to respect this, and you have to
Have you ever wondered how the thoughts and ideas of today's most influential artists are captured and shared?Hauser & Wirth Publishers does just that.
From groundbreaking new scholarship to exceptional exhibition catalogs and original artist writings, biographies, and the acclaimed Ursula magazine, they create lasting records that deepen our cultural conversations.
This fall, discover new titles from Glenn Ligon, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, and Phyllida Barlow.Visit their newest location at 443 West 18th Street in New York to explore more. You've touched on so many things here.First, the impossibility of memory.
the need to fill a kind of a vacuum, and then how the artist takes memory and brings it forward.
It actually makes me think of this line from Freshwater Dream, where you have that beautiful, yet devastating line from your grandmother about water never stopping, and I'm getting chills just thinking about it, but this idea of water always moving,
and then you show these powerful images of your family in the flood, and you talk about how the floodwaters consume your memories, and that a flood is water that can't move, that is not allowed to flow.
So as you listen to Gary's reflections on memory, what comes up for you?And maybe for both of you, what role do you think the artist has in shaping memory for the present and even for the future, like for your kids and for your grandkids?
Well, something that struck me that Gary was talking about is actually a lesson, like as I now have adult child and nieces and this idea of the photograph, right?
Which becomes kind of a shared family memory, but really there's someone who's dictating it.Or the photograph, we don't actually remember the birthday party, we remember the photograph of the birthday party.
So I'm also trying not to be too prescriptive when it comes to the past, you know?
The other thing I thought about when he was talking about the opposite of memory being in an amber glow, I was thinking about something I don't talk publicly about often, just because it never feels that safe, but like intimate and love relationships, you know?
And being older and having the distance and sometimes the wisdom to not judge them and cast them in the same ways that I did when they caused me so much heartache or trauma, right?
and in not like judging and casting the relationship in a particular light, I then free that person, that lover, from a memory that I associate with my own suffering and then it becomes a more generous exercise in like
what love is really supposed to be, which isn't just about your own self, like that kind of the ego way that we are constantly processing the world is through our own lens and our own feelings.
I hate that Maya Angelou quote, that it doesn't matter what happens, it matters how you felt about it.I'm like, no, it matters what happened, right?
Although I know that to be true, I know that she's accessing like a fundamental kind of truth about how we process.
But then to give yourself again, not just like your lover the grace or your family member the grace, this also could be like love isn't just our romantic and sexual relationships.
It's like you're giving your parent that grace to know that the time that I actually like really judge my mom and hate her for failing or whatever, she was like 20 years younger than I am now, right?And I still haven't figured it out, right?
And the same, obviously, with our dads, you know, like, like, you know, all of the stuff that like, men are learning and relearning and have been forced to kind of reckon with
like then to try to give some of the, you know, male figures in my life some grace, you know?So that has been an exercise that is connected to like remembering, but is also like a rewrite or a remix.So it's like crate digging, but the remix.
I'd like to pivot here to talk about Greg Tate.And for listeners who might not know of Greg, he was a writer.He began at The Village Voice in the early 1980s.He became a fearless critic.He was also a musician.
He was a dear friend and a mentor to all of us.And I think that we memorialize him in our work, the three of us, each in our own ways. I know that I often think, and I'm sure that two of you think, what would Greg have said about this, right?
About this album or this movie or this record or this event.It raises this larger question actually of how we fill our memories, right?And how we actually pass them on.
Dream in Freshwater, you ask if the memories and the stories that we have right now, if they'll still be around in a thousand years.And Gary, I guess if we knew the answer to that, how would that make us feel?
What does it bring up actually for you thinking about memory on such a long scale and also on this short scale, right?Knowing this person intimately honoring Greg in this particular moment.
Well, first of all, one of my dearest things about Tate was I could bump into him on the corner of Broadway and Astor because he would just hold court there.
If you walk down Broadway, you saw Tate in his Carhartt and his boots and his bag over his thing.Somewhere lurking, if you're lucky, AJ shows up.
For our listeners, AJ is Arthur Jafa, a renowned visual artist, cinematographer, and filmmaker best known for his work with Julie Dash, Solange Knowles, and Jay-Z.And for his piece, Love is the Message, The Message is Death.
He was a longtime friend and intellectual sparring partner of Greg Tate.
If you get in a conversation with Tate and AJ and yourself, that conversation can take hours.I mean, Dream can attest to this.I mean, it's like hours.My wife, Ellen, she's been with me when I bumped into the two of them on the corner.
I live around the corner from there.I still have an apartment.So every time, talk about memory, every time I come out of my apartment in New York and I go to the corner of Astor and Broadway.If she's with me, I instantly go, this is the Tate corner.
This is where it all happens.For me, I used to ask him, why do you stand here and do this?Yes, his office was there, but for him, it was like life comes to you and through you.
You know, those things that he may have said, a lot of them are very poetic and accessible to many people. But each of us had these intimate relationships with Tate that defined how we understand him.
I think there's also, when you start to hear other people tell stories, you click into those things, and there's a kind of unity to it.It's like, oh, you're one of us.It's almost like that movie, Goodfellas, like, oh, yeah, he's a good fellow.
You name it, and it passed through there, even in my studio. That's a very special talent to be that griot and filter that people of all backgrounds and forms of production pass through.
It was one of those moments in New York downtown that you had all of these incredible people,
I can actually still see Dream walking down from Union Square towards Astor Place and dropping in for a minute and seeing us sitting there talking and just being like, you guys, man, I got to get up out of here.
It's too much testosterone here for me.
I felt like I was Elaine in Seinfeld.I don't know who AJ would have been.
We had a 20-year throuple thing happening, and it was all conversations.But, you know, as you were speaking, Gary, I was thinking about place.And I think about this all the time.It's so sweet that you still have your place in New York.
But no place stays the same.Nothing is static about place.And I knew, like, when I landed in New York, people were bemoaning the 80s.They were like, it's over. you just missed Jean-Michel and his stories of what the 80s were like.
Then when I arrived in 1990 to attend NYU, there's a whole another New York.A city like that is constantly resetting itself.I have this sadness of New York without Tate is not New York to me.
I also don't, I'm not a nostalgic person, so I know that there's a New York that's happening that feels like what you were talking about, Gary, where people are still just running into each other.
They're having their queer day parties in Brooklyn, and it's just something we don't have access to.Like, we're not the kids anymore.So we have our memories, and we're standing in front of a Duane Reade like, this used to be Nels.
Totally true. Dream, I wanted to bring up Gary's backdrop photos, especially since you were the subject of one of them.
These were scenes where Gary took portraits of friends and strangers, and they were like real-time snapshots, I guess, in a way, much like what we see on today's social media.
But over time, they've become this collection, something deeper, a self-portrait, maybe, of a community in a specific moment.
How do you see artists, including yourself, activating the process of capturing and preserving collective memory within a community?And how does that process shape the way we as a community make history through shared memories?
I'd love to hear your thoughts.
I don't know that one should be thinking about history when one is in the process of making work, you know?
I think that if you feel the work is important, and I haven't always felt like everything I do is important, but when I am, particularly when I'm holding other people's lives in my hands or stories in my hands, I do always take it as a serious and important work.
And I'm not concerned, you know, this is this question of being present in the moment.But you don't have an idea what's to come.
And when I'm shooting Biggie for my class at NYU, which is really the thing that's in front of me, and then later for a documentary that I was calling in at Don't Stop, I'm shooting him for that.
I have no way of knowing what the fatal standoff that's gonna cost him his life is some rat beef.I have no way of knowing what lies ahead for all of us.
it's important to just be present in that moment and to be, I don't even want to use words like honest, you know?Because maybe honesty isn't always the assignment, but an authenticity definitely isn't always the assignment.
You know, so it doesn't always have to be literal.It doesn't even always have to be honest, you know?I love a good yarn, a good tail.And I think about that with family members who spin these yarns for us, right?Like that,
you know, that is just as important.That becomes its own kind of truth, is the lies you tell to survive something, to, you know, to spruce it up, to spice it up.But either way, the idea of history shouldn't be at our forefront as we're creating.
Dream, you were speaking about the importance of being present as an artist in the moment when you're creating, not thinking necessarily about what the impact is going to be down the line, about making history, so to speak.
And I'm thinking about the ways that that kind of immediacy also connects up with Gary's work.
Gary, could you talk about your Black Ark installation and how that captures memory and history, especially in the context of creating something in the moment that later takes on a deeper kind of historical meaning?
That's interesting. I think something like the arc taps into some of the things that Dream was just talking about.
That's a very personal piece in some ways for me that I leave out of the equation or out of the way it's talked about or defined generally.
Music was very important in my household and my father had a really quick fuse temper and it could get scary sometimes.One of the ways that we chilled it out was with music.
So if I got myself into some problems, I'd look at my sister and she'd be scrambling around for Johnny Nash records.I think about why that piece was called Recapturing the Memories of the Black Art was
It's based on Lee Scratch Perry's studio, which goes to memory to begin with.He burned down his studio, I think two or three times, and that was called the Black Ark.
I always loved the way the Jamaican sound system worked as this center in a community, this booming sound.I thought I want to take some of what was left behind from Katrina, I was invited to do this show in New Orleans.
I drove around the Ninth Ward, collected a lot of wood, and got together with a carpenter who was also a musician.I said, listen, I want to make a Jamaican sound system out of all of this.
this terror really, this thought of destroyed houses and lives.I thought it would be great to put something together that was positive.I invited other artists to come and perform on the ark.
Once it gets turned on by whoever, we record it via video and it's put into a library that just keeps going. But it's fantastic to watch how people see this object interact and mesh into different cultures.It's fantastic.
To me, that's how memory is formed, is almost collectively, to put a cherry on this.
Well, it's been incredible to share memories with both of you today.Any time I can get with either one of you is amazing, but both of you together at the same time, wow.Thank you both for joining us on Edge of Reason.
I'm Jeff Chang, and you've been on a journey to the edge of reason.Join us next week when we speak to Hauser & Wirth artist Charles Gaines and acclaimed fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner to explore how perception versus truth drives their work.
If you've enjoyed what you've just heard, like and review us on Apple Podcasts and help spread the word about our series to other listeners like you.
Sign in
