by Alex Wells
If you were in power at the Hammer, how could you resist? An idealistic young curator comes to you—“You’ve heard of John Coltrane?” she says. Of course you have—curators, like record producers, still listen to jazz. ”Well this is about his wife Alice Coltrane, a powerful cultural and spiritual force in her own right, who deserves just as much recognition! And she did it right here in California! Her Ashram was destroyed by fire in 2018!” You could not possibly not do it.
Which is not to say that, once commissioned, some minor problems with the project might emerge, like—Alice Coltrane’s complicated and extensive legacy was not actually based on things anyone can look at. She made music and told people about God.
The Hammer is neither a museum of music nor an historical society, so works by artists who liked Alice Coltrane’s music have been dotted about the place to spice things up. Not all of them are bad—a deconstructed keyboard holds some interest—but they simply leave the viewer wondering why exactly the Hammer couldn’t have simply had a group show about the extensive overlap of art and jazz (Saul Bass and Basquiat are right there, along with a trove of overlooked black mid-century expressionists).
Coltrane herself is represented in a variety of ways—there are big photos of her on the walls, for one. There is a listening station which—no matter how cleverly designed by GeoVanna Gonzalez—cannot help being a worse place to listen to music than a theater (which the Hammer has) or literally anyone’s house. There is desperate-sounding wall text: in room two the first sentence reads “This section features ephemera and artworks that relate and respond to musical virtuoso Alice Coltrane’s sonic output”. The entire show is about Alice Coltrane, did we need to insert the phrase ‘musical virtuoso’ to re-orient visitors in room two? Do the words “sonic output” (repeated again later in the final paragraph of the same wall text) and sentences like “She applied to the prestigious Juilliard School of Music but ultimately had to rescind her application due to maternal duties and financial obligations” suggest the curators are afraid to call anything (music, motherhood, poverty, an art show about a cosmic jazz musician that they like) what it is?
Perhaps most indicative of the tenor of the show is the amount of space given over to typewritten letters from the ashram—“What edification it is to one’s mind and spirit when one can acknowledge before God the many defects and flaws that interfere with the soul’s evolution through this earthly plane of existence…In response to the inquiry concerning the person you mentioned: The reply was that he and other persons cannot come to land for therapy.” It is one thing to be asked to look at art objects which consist of no more than typewritten paper from the 1970’s (Sol LeWitt comes to mind) and quite another to be asked to look at simple correspondence—after waiting in line and paying for parking. Or perhaps it isn’t another thing—the point of the art object may be so dematerialized that viewers no longer wonder why they’re being asked to look at anything.
Image: Portrait of Alice Coltrane, 1970. Photo: Chuck Stewart. © Chuck Stewart Photography, LLC/Fireball Entertainment Group