What is “Great Black Music”?: The Social Aesthetics of the AACM in Paris
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Published:March 2017
This chapter situates the performance practices of the AACM in general, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago in particular, within the modernism-postmodernism dichotomy. It shows how the AACM foregrounds the elasticity and overlap of these “movements” and problematizes them. Drawing on characteristics of both traditions, the AACM throws into stark relief the issues at play that follow from positioning oneself as music creator, consumer, or critic from either the modernism or the postmodernism camp. By recognizing that these categories themselves operate as genre terms, the author demonstrates how the AACM aesthetically thickens its works/performances by inviting their analysis from both perspectives while simultaneously critiquing them. This act of genre thickening is then compared with the goal of art as promoted by those who advocate relational aesthetics, revealing a manner in which AACM practices have a social dimension that is internal to their very status as art practices.