Pervasive as he may be, you could argue that Kanye West’s most
impactful cultural footprint in Los Angeles has up until now been in the
pages of tabloids. That might soon change, thanks to West’s film
collaboration with Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen, All Day/I Feel Like That,
set up as a pop-up installation at LACMA, which premiered last night.
In conversation with the museum’s CEO, Michael Govan, West and McQueen
touched on the fight to bend genres, art as experimentation, and the
bold vulnerability of the video, which plays on the relationship between
the camera and the subject.Maybe the wall text before the installation says it best: “As in the
meeting between the bull and the matador, it remains unclear who chases
whom in the arena.
The roles of the pursuer and pursued are at times
inverted.” In the video, those two roles are played by the camera and
West. Shot in an empty room, the single nine-minute take delves into
emotional and mental spaces. Capturing West’s wide range of emotions—“I
think it’s just being a Gemini,” West confessed—allowed McQueen to “put
vulnerability into that kind of scale.” “When you’re dealing with an
artist like Kanye, there’s always collaboration,” McQueen confessed. The conversation then turned to genre-bending, a phenomenon in the
art world that Govan credited the pair for helping to drive. “The word
is experiment. If you want to be an artist, you experiment,”
McQueen said of their perhaps unlikely collaboration that came about
after they ran into each other at Dover Street Market in London. “He was
able to bend genres, and that’s one of our biggest challenges now,”
West added of McQueen and his work 12 Years a Slave. “It’s
amazing we met in an apparel place because that’s one of the genres I’m
trying to bend,” West continued, discussing his dogged determination for
credibility and acceptance in the fashion world.
Perhaps a not-so-subtle commentary on his life through a lens,
McQueen inverted the focus on West in the film, as if “having binoculars
one way and turning them around the other way,” he explained of the
approach he took as director. “The microscope becomes the telescope.”
That blurred perception was representative of what West called the
current war of perception, both in life and as an artist. “I’m a bad
celebrity, but a pretty good artist,” he clarified, crediting, among
other things, his time at art school. Asked Govan, “Do we even need a
distinction?” When it came to dropping a new rap for the intimate crowd,
West hesitated just a moment, then began singing the refrain from “Four
Five Seconds.”
But West’s pursuit of art is unrelenting. “So many great artists are
able to reach into your soul and pull your heart out,” he said,
lamenting that there are few actual artists in music left. “I will die
for the truth and that’s what’s closest to art,” he continued. “Every
time I get in trouble, I’m fighting for truth.”
