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At home in Tallahassee, Florida, George Clinton – legendary funk musician and lead singer-songwriter for Parliament / Funkadelic since the 1960s – has adopted new rituals. He wakes up with the sun to paint birdcages, large canvases, shoes: everything that calls him, he answers in clay paint. He is rhythmically flowing but color-blind and, as a visual artist, has an impeccable sense of how to manipulate textures in order to move a beam of light against the void. His first solo show “Free Your Mind” – the title is reminiscent of his 1970 album Free your mind … and your ass will follow – opened at Spillman Blackwell Fine Art in New Orleans at the end of September.
For entertainers, the calm and relaxation of the lockdown was both refreshing and confrontational. Life on tour doesn’t leave much time to reevaluate what inspires you, although the muse inevitably changes over the course of an artist’s life. To be a legend often means to be at the mercy of the fans’ taste, even if Clinton himself shies away from success and according to this Zen concept of. lives shoshin – or the “beginner’s mind”. Hobbies, sideline hobbies, behind-the-scenes love, and the intimacy of private life are left in the balance as performances strut forward to monopolize the days. After a while, the spectacle only feeds the viewer, and the performer becomes an idea or relic subject to the whims of consumers. Clinton’s love of painting had probably simmered for years amid his constant array of duties and appointments – he’d been preoccupied with this prior to this renaissance and deeper engagement – but the time he was not performing to be home gave him cause to notice how loudly the painting called to breathe life into him and through the practice to try something new – to fall in love again, to become more of who he is.
Clinton jumps out of bed in the morning and rushes to his pool house, which has been converted into an art studio, to begin work between there and in the open air. He turns the gaze that has been on him throughout his music career back into his own vision. His wife Carlon sometimes reminds him to wear a mask to protect himself from the fumes. “I’m 80 years old,†he laughs. ‘You have waited a long time to save my life.’ His family pranks him and confuses the names of the colors on the paint bottles because he cannot tell the difference just by looking at the color. His friend and colleague painter Overton Lloyd (known for designing Funkadelic LP covers) gives him tips on technology.
Music may be one of the loves in Clinton’s life, but it also caused him pain and confusion, forcing him to take the business side of things by regaining the rights to songs he signed when he didn’t realize how stubborn the industry might be. In painting, Clinton begins with a look at agency by exploring NFTs. As taboo as the art world wants the blockchain to appear, the real problem with the prospect of NFTs is that it steals the veil of prestige from those who have held them and benefited from them for so long. It is disorienting when artists are not at the mercy of the art bureaucracy in a recognizable way, when the trope of the starving, tormented or in love artist is replaced by well-fed, well-adjusted and equally passionate practitioners. It’s like we want to punish artists for being happy and confident. Clinton responds with a dizzying energy that I couldn’t be and a sense of renewal and discovery.
As a man who has allowed so many to freely express sound and thoughts and who refuses to reinvent himself and listen to new music, Clinton now fuses a radio sensitivity in sound with the same sensitivity in light. On the canvas (or birdcage or streetwear) he also deals with notions of space and access to dimensions that we feel and interpret, but do not touch. Many botch them up Cosmic slope by collapsing George Clinton and Sun Ra into an “afrofuturistic” slush and oversimplifying their work because they both loved space. The message of these black polymaths diverges in many places, but unites on the axis of one eternal present. The black future is now.
Harmony vacation: Seems like you are painting by texture?
George Clinton: It’s like making music when you see it that way. I used to be a hairdresser, you know. I had my hair in the 60s, shaved with moons and stars … chiseled in my head.
Soon I can just feel which color is which. It is actually tones that I associate with. It becomes linguistic. The rhythm of your stroke that becomes your writing – especially with spray paint.
HH: Braiding is a form of sampling and looping, hair making is, so that makes sense: a visual, tonal language.
GK: When I started thinking about what the pictures mean, it was like real language. Like chants.
HH: And gospel and work songs – a way to affirm one’s will in time, perhaps like when praying?
GK: Jimi Hendrix made feedback sound like church. When you get really good, like Bernie Worrell, he was classically trained, Juilliard and Berkeley, and we’ve known him for about 15 years, all his life. And all jazz musicians wanted to play with him when he came into town. And then, when he came out of school, he came to us.
HH: There are so many things I want to talk about but one is your interest in NFTs for your visual art as it relates to your experience in the music industry …
GK: We are preparing to jump across the planet, to leave the planet. They’re going to make whole new rules about what is worth. There used to be a gold standard. With the digital world, we have to change all of that. Everything is now 0s and 1s, even except for our biology. Art does that with NFTs; it’s just the beginning of a new path. It started with Bitcoin.
HH: Yes, they call them tokens. Like when you go to the arcade, like video game currency. It changes what people think of an object to own, making the physical world less dense.
GK: Virtual reality is real.
HH: Like deep fakes. Speaking of which, did you enjoy being sampled by hip hop artists?
GK: Yes, this will help you stay in the game. I tried it myself. I tried them and sampled myself. You have to be a part of it – if you sit back and wish they didn’t, you will really be old. That’s the reality, that’s how they make music now. I’m glad I just got mine Master back at the right time. Just won the case after 30 years.
HH: Congratulations!
GK: The stories are preparing to be told of how the mothership flown. The mothership is in the Smithsonian. And these people are going to have those copyrights in their hands when the stories come out. The proceeds from the art exhibition will go to our foundation to help other people regain the rights to their music.
HH: And it was so easy to steal people’s work all at once …
GK: I’m not saying I won’t do it again: you sometimes have to choose whether to support your family or hold on to these rights.
HH: And drugs and lifestyle can flow into the creative process and business …
GK: Between drugs and computers, you can create your own reality. You will now also start remixing paintings.
HH: I don’t really believe in genres in art and that might be because of not limiting our reality. My favorite black artists ignored it: Miles Davis, Abbey Lincoln, Lee Perry, all painted. Perry said when he was painting the fumes got him high and it gave him super powers.
GK: [Laughter] I am currently painting. I like how I like music now. I don’t really know where it’s going, I’m now in the vicinity of space and the atmosphere, gases and plasma and things that they were thinking about in the ancient pyramids that were brought to earth by these concepts. There is also a certain amount of sarcasm.
HH: Sincerity of commitment leads to humor, and sometimes even sarcasm, makes it rounded.
GK: Like in jazz, they sometimes play a riff on ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ that is so beautiful you forget what it is.
We spoke of Pedro Bell, the artist /Banker, who worked with Overton Lloyd to paint several of Clinton’s album covers during Funkadelic’s heyday. And we talked about contemporary artist Lauren Halsey who is now working with Clinton and is one of his current inspirations. We talked about Woodstock and psychedelics, how the drug of choice in a certain era influences the look and texture of all that time, and we discussed where the esoteric and the mundane meet and diverge: space-earth relationships in the spirit, the mysticism of the the Dogon tribe, the mystics of the everyday. Where they meet is a conscious creative practice that finds ways to get around stalemates through more market-oriented work.
There are people who follow trends and those who establish or uproot them: Clinton is the latter. For most of his 80 years on this planet, he has saved us from learned limitations and limits. Only now does he transform the most seductive and throaty and elegant elements of his sound into interstellar landscapes and invent new ways of introduction.
Main picture: George Clinton visits Prince’s Paisley Park in Celebration of 2017 on April 20, 2017 in Chanhassen, Minnesota. Courtesy: Paisley Park Studios and Getty Images; Photo: Steve Parke
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