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jeremiekroubodagnini · 1 year ago

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THE ROCKET-LIKE RISE OF LEE SCRATCH PERRY INTO THE CONTEMPORARY ART WORLD

Lee Perry: A Pop Artist

Altogether dancer, singer, musician, producer, eccentric, visionary, shaman and genius, Lee “Scratch” Perry is to Jamaican music, some would say, what Sun Ra is to free jazz, George Clinton to funk or Salvador Dali to painting. Born in 1936, in the small town of Kendal in Jamaica, Lee “Scratch” Perry participated in a concrete way in each of the important stages of the history of Jamaican music. A true pillar of reggae and dub, his innovations have left their mark on many other musical genres around the world, including: US rap; UK punk, jungle, ambient and trip-hop; Japanese electronic music; without forgetting European techno and avant-garde music. Today, Lee Perry is no longer of this world, in the flesh at least. He died late August 2021 at the age of 85. Nevertheless, his name unquestionably stays in vogue. It is still on the lips of pop stars like the Rolling Stones, The Orb, The Roots and Major Lazer, and we can also gradually hear it spreading in the contemporary art world.

The Black Ark: Sound and Image

Lee Perry always evolved into a very personal visual universe, starting with his legendary home recording studio, the Black Ark, at the origin of the most innovative sounds of the second half of the 1970s in Jamaica. Originally thought to be a sort of sanctuary for Rastafarians, the Black Ark was a very confusing place, whose walls were covered in cryptic inscriptions and floors served as dumping grounds for installations and other DIY projects, all of them being zanier than the next – a sculpture was even embedded inside one of the walls, says his ex-wife, Pauline Morrison, in People Funny Boy written by David Katz (2000: 324).

This Baroque environment was part of the eccentric personality of the genius producer, embodied in an increasingly extravagant look and outfits over the ages: during his final years, he used to dye his hair and beard yellow, green of even pink, and he was decked out in completely fantastical clothes, personalised with pins and other fanciful objects. And when he was not wearing his famous golden baseball cap, adorned with glittering CDs, badges or religious illustrations, he was wearing a Native American feathered war bonnet or a wizard hat.

It is more than clear Lee “Scratch” Perry was an artist with a capital A, a complete, total, full-time artist who did not switch to Rainford Hugh Perry (his real name) in private and who did not lock himself into a single box: the one of music. He did not play a role, he lived through his art full-time and was attracted as much to sounds as to visuals. Indeed, the latter played a significant role in his galaxy, in his symbolism, in his perception of the world. According to Perry himself, the image was the preferred channel for conveying messages (often subliminal), it was therefore necessary for him to be wary of them and to be able to reappropriate them. In some way, it can enable us to understand his involvement (conscious or unconscious) in the visual arts, which by the way was not recent. Indeed, reading his brilliant biography written by David Katz, we can easily realize that Perry had always been interested in his physical and cultural environment, the objects that surrounded him as well as the pop culture into which he loved to dig.

Even in the late 1950s, long before he began his musical career, when he worked in construction in Negril and drove bulldozers, Perry focused his attention on the noises associated with construction work and the energies of machines as they came into conflict with nature, one can read in People Funny Boy. He even reported an almost supernatural experience, resulting in his departure from this seaside resort located at the far western part of Jamaica to the capital Kingston in the early 1960s: “I get an overload from throwing stones down there for maybe two weeks. I started making positive connection with stones, by throwing stones to stones I start to hear sounds. When the stones clash I hear the thunder clash, and I hear lightening flash, and I hear words, and I don’t know where the words them coming from. These words send me to King-stone: to Kingston” (2000: 8).

Until the end of his life, stones occupied a pre-eminent place in his resolutely mystical universe. He regularly collected them, piled them up, carried them to various places, and even cooked them in a pot on the fire. In the late 1970s, that is precisely what happened, says Pauline Morrison, in their home in Washington Gardens, Kingston, which also housed his legendary recording studio.

“Pauline has claimed she was preparing a meal one afternoon when she noticed an odd smell coming from the kitchen. When she checked the pot, she found that Scratch had emptied the simmering contents into the mud of the yard, substituting a pan full of rocks in their place on the fire” (2000: 324). “If you see our house, this guy write all kind of shit on the wall, on the fence…” (2000: 323). And the Jamaican singer, Vicky Nelson, added, “my foot would be in paint, I would get rocks and all those nature things” (2000: 345).

As Pauline Morrison and Vicky Nelson suggest, Lee Perry also paid a great importance to writing and painting at the time of Black Ark. We must indeed go back very far in time to understand the links he developed with the visual arts and everything encompassed by this generic term: calligraphy, graffiti, assemblages, collages, installations, and painting among others. In short, everything that would make up his artistic inventory alongside his music. Lee “Scratch” Perry had always been a compulsive sketcher and graffiti artist, feeling a certain need to fill, if not to say overload, empty surfaces. From the end of the 1970s onwards, he even seemed to pay as much attention to the decoration of his studio as to musical production at times.

"Jean-Michel Basquiat himself called him a significant source of inspiration for his paintings"

Moreover, it is not surprising that at that time Lee Perry also commissioned art from Rastafarian artist Jah Wise to decorate the Black Ark. Indeed, he had the walls surrounding the studio decorated with huge, multicoloured murals painted by Robert Van Campbell aka Jah Wise. A portrait of Haile Selassie was placed just above the door so that all would have to ‘bow’ to Jah upon entering or leaving; to the left of his head was Selassie in his feline form as the Conquering Lion of Judah. Another wall had a life-size mural of the Super Ape, tree and spliff in hand, while the inside of the studio depicted African ancestors in chains and Rastafarian tri-colour flags. As time passed, such images would be altered and re-cast as Perry sought to express different concepts; like the music that was coming from inside the studio, its illustrated walls would seldom remain static. He also erected a sign with a ‘Management Order’ by the front gate, proclaiming that the premises included the site of a private house where women and children lived; all who sought to enter were to wait for official permission and once inside, were to refrain from using indecent language. (In People Funny Boy, French edition, 2012: 476-477).

© Adrian Boot, 1978. Lee Perry and his son, Mark (aka Omar), at the Black Ark. In the background there is a glimpse of the “Super Ape” painting done by Jah Wise. Part of JKD’s private photo collection.

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Lee “Scratch” Perry outside Black Ark Studios, Jamaica, 1977, premium footage from the Don Letts Archive available on YouTube.

All things considered, Lee Perry’s artistic source of creation originated far away back in time and widely developed during the seething cultural period of the Black Ark. Back in the 1970s, Lee Perry was already considering himself as a multi-disciplinary Artist and was already in contact with avant-garde people not only from Jamaica but also from England (Don Letts, John Lydon from the Sex Pistols, The Clash etc.).

After the Black Ark was destroyed by fire on one morning in the summer of 1983, Lee Perry experienced a very long period of exile, first in England, then in Switzerland where he moved out at the end of the 1980s with his new and last wife, a sultry queen of the Zurich nightlife, born Mireille Ruegg, only daughter of a couple of Swiss restaurateurs, who would become his manager. It was then that he started to show more and more interest in art, in a more professional way shall we say, the collections of four-handed paintings executed with British visual artist, Peter Harris, first between 2007 and 2009, then between 2014 and 2015, constituting a very good illustration of the extent of his pictorial work.

The Meeting with British Visual Artist Peter Harris

“How does a 40-year-old white British artist meet up with a 70-year-old black shaman from Jamaica and make a real connection? I am not a Rastafarian black man from the ghettos of Trench Town, I am a lower middle class Catholic son of an absent submariner father who moved from place to place and, as a consequence, has no ‘roots’ to speak of. This has led to a lifetime of what I suspect will be an unachievable search for home. I have lived through a series of popular culture ‘father figures’ who have been inspirational guides such as Bob Dylan, Francis Bacon, Johnny Rotten and Picasso, and Lee is one I’ve been lucky enough to meet in person. […] Lee’s experience and understanding - or “overstanding” - of Babylon is very different to my version of it. Lee’s version of Babylon might come from the Rasta’s view of western society as being corrupt, a world of ‘politricks’ and oppressors of Rastafarians. My version of Babylon is also about a society that oppresses our lives, but it is more about the unrelenting trajectory of existence. It might go something like this: birth, school, dreams, peer pressure, music, drugs for fun, student loans, love, jobs, depression, pressure, holidays, insecurity, mortgage, drugs for escaping, children, stress, peer pressure, cars, responsibilities, doubts, reality, panic attacks, bills, new clothes. In it but not of it, pets, vet bills, gym, mid-life crisis, new haircuts, hair loss, beer bellies, guilt, cigarettes, alcohol, food, cancer, medicine, pensions, fear, death” (interview conducted with Peter Harris by JKD, 2014).

In February 2005, Lee “Scratch” Perry responded positively to a request from Peter Harris who wanted him to be in a film he was working on, called Higher Powers. “I wanted different sorts of people who represented different kinds of higher powers,” Harris explains, “almost archetypal people. It might be a powerful gangster outside the law or a police chief, to someone with a spiritual higher power, or someone who totally doesn’t believe in higher powers. For the creative higher powers, or the visionary people, I thought of Ken Russell and Lee Perry” (2012: 898).

The concept was an appealing one for Perry, so permission was granted for Harris to film him at home on February 14th. The British visual artist interviewed him on various themes such as: destiny, faith, redemption, luck, love, doubt, etc. He then returned to London to edit the results. Subsequently, Peter Harris planned further filming sessions with Perry for the same film project. On October 1, 2007, Peter Harris' film, Higher Powers, was screened for the first time at the Lüneburg Art Hall in Germany. Perry appeared in the company of such controversial personalities as former gangster Dave Courtney, gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, Conservative politician Boris Johnson, Reverend Joanna Jepson (who has campaigned against the use of abortion for “eugenic reasons”), paranormal spoon-bender Uri Geller, Tibetan Buddhist monk Akong Tulku Rinpoche, and conspiracy theorist David Icke (2012: 910). Some years earlier, Harris had approached performers such as David Bowie, Siouxsie Sioux and members of the Stranglers, for ideas that he could turn into paintings; with a similar concept in mind, Harris returned to Switzerland in November 2007 to make a series of collaborative drawings with Lee Perry, ultimately inducting Perry into the world of fine arts.

“I’d done a Self-Portraits by Proxy series before,” Harris explains, “in which every person who had affected my life and influenced me, I asked for an idea, and then made that idea into a painting, but with Lee, it was a bit different. I called him up and said, ‘I’ve got these themes from the film, and I want you to give me the first image that comes into your head’; I’d say, ‘Luck,’ or whatever, and he would come up with some mad image, and I’d make it a drawing. Then I took all the drawings to his place in Switzerland, and he said we should cut them up; he was remixing them, like a record, taking something from one drawing and placing it with another, and it was more like a ceremony, or an Obeah ritual, so he spent a lot of time trying on different hats and costumes, as if he was getting into character. We started work at seven, and worked right through till four in the morning, and he had one CD that was just on repeat the whole time” (2012: 911).

On September 10th, Perry performed a special live dub set at London’s Tabernacle, with Adrian Sherwood at the mixing desk and live video animation behind him, as the climax of the “Higher Powers” art exhibition arranged by Peter Harris, which showcased the drawings the pair had produced in 2007, as well as a number of collaborative paintings they made together in Switzerland on August 15th 2009. The artwork dealt with typical Perry themes, such as social injustice, religious dogma, the unequal distribution of wealth, sex, and personal vengeance; some of the paintings bore the man’s handprints and footprints as well, while both paintings and drawings were marked by Perry’s declamatory graffiti (2012: 920). Images of the painting sessions carried out jointly by Peter Harris and Lee Perry in 2007 and 2009 as well as footages from the Tabernacle exhibition are viewable in the documentary, Lee Scratch Perry's Vision of Paradise, directed by Volker Schaner in 2015, an excellent film which also retraces the unusual trajectory of Lee Perry and clearly reflects the great part that art played in his daily life.

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Lee Scratch Perry’s Vision of Paradise by Volker Schaner.

And as for the hundred works of art that the two artists made together between 2014 and 2015, they draw their inspiration from the Bible, from the Book of Revelation in particular.“With its tales of evil deeds, redemption and the apocalypse. It is rich in imagery, metaphor and parables. A parable is not a literal thing. It would not make sense to our modern minds, informed by readily available facts, to take it so. Language and visual language are vehicles for getting at some ‘truth’ as truth is often inexpressible” (interview conducted with Peter Harris by JKD, 2014).

This meeting with Peter Harris was clearly a step forward for Lee Perry into the world of contemporary art.

“Ja Pay” © Peter Harris and Lee “Scratch” Perry, biro pen and permanent marker pen on paper, 42 x 42 cm, 2007.

“Zis Is Black Ark” © Peter Harris and Lee “Scratch” Perry, collage, biro and pencil on paper, 42 x 42 cm, 2007.

“Judgement Com Yow” © Peter Harris and Lee “Scratch” Perry, marker pen, oil, acrylic paint on canvas, 123 x 109 cm, 2009.

“Super Ape” © Peter Harris and Lee “Scratch” Perry, biro pen, marker pen, felt tip and gold leaf paint on paper, 30 x 42 cm, 2014-2015.

“Super Man in Space” © Peter Harris and Lee “Scratch” Perry, biro pen, marker pen, felt tip and gold leaf paint on paper, 30 x 42 cm, 2014-2015.

The Rise of Lee Perry into the Contemporary Art World

A contemporary artist status confirmed by his induction into the Pantheon of sculptures made by Xavier Veilhan - using a 3D scanner - and held simultaneously in New York and Paris in the spring of 2015. During this double exhibition organised around music and simply named “Music”, the French visual artist wanted to pay tribute to the great music producers who had been shaping the soundtrack of our time, including Philippe Zdar, Pharrell Williams, Quincy Jones, Daft Punk, Rick Rubin, Brian Eno and Lee “Scratch” Perry. The latter therefore appeared in this impressive list of geniuses (around twenty in total), whose collectors are now snapping up statues made from a range of varied materials (from wood to metal through polyurethane resin).

“Lee Scratch Perry”, © Xavier Veilhan, “Music” exhibition, aluminium-filled polyurethane resin, plywood, acrylic paint, varnish, 122,5 x 62 x 86 cm, 2015.

What followed was a portrait (on paper this time) dedicated to him by the monthly art French magazine, Beaux-Arts, in 2017, on the occasion of the exhibition “Jamaica Jamaica!” held at the Paris Philharmonic (April 4-August 13, 2017), where the above-mentioned statue created by Xavier Veilhan was moreover exhibited.

Lee Perry made the front cover of other art magazines, such as the Italian biannual, Kaleidoscope, in 2020-2021.

Finally, alongside all this, Lee Perry's visual artworks have been the subjects of numerous personal and group exhibitions around the world, starting with his very first solo exhibition held at the Californian gallery Dem Passwords from November 13 to December 11, 2010 under the name “Secret Education”.

Three other solo exhibitions were organised by this same gallery in 2013 (“Repent Americans” from April 20 to June 15), 2014 (“The Death of Baphomet” from August 29 to October 11) and 2016 (“Judgment Repentance God Order” from June 16 to July 30).

"these many art exhibitions around the world have coincided with the new curatorial team responsible for the visual estate of Lee “Scratch” Perry and headed by Lorenzo Bernet (...) this new, fresh and dynamic curatorial team seems to come up with creative and innovative ideas"

In that same year, Lee Perry also did an art show in New York, from June 29 to July 29, 2016 as part of a collective exhibition entitled “A Being in the World” and held at Salon 94 on the lower east side of Manhattan. His pieces of work were thus exhibited alongside those of a very heterogeneous panel of artists, including the African-American self-taught artist and former slave, Bill Traylor (1854-1949), and Maia Ruth Lee (born in 1983 in South Korea).

Then, Lee Perry multiplied international shows: at the Swiss Institute in New York in 2019, at the 2021 São Paulo Bienal, at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome in 2022, and at the Cabinet Gallery in London as well as at the 2023 Art Cologne international art fair, just to name a few. In total, Lee Perry actively took part in no less than fifteen international exhibitions between 2016 and 2023, and almost half of them in the last couple of years, which is the guarantee of a rocket-like rise on the contemporary art scene. Regarding this latter point, it is crucial to emphasize that these many art exhibitions around the world have coincided with the new curatorial team responsible for the visual estate of Lee “Scratch” Perry and headed by Lorenzo Bernet, a Zurich-based gallerist, curator and art dealer who is also the man behind the suns.works gallery. Therefore, it might be no exaggeration to say that this art world rocket rise relates to this new, fresh and dynamic curatorial team that seems to come up with creative and innovative ideas.

“Flood Sun” © Lee Scratch Perry, collage, markers and acrylic on wooden board, 60 x 100 cm, 2020. Courtesy: The Visual Estate of Lee Scratch Perry / suns.works.

“Genesis” © Lee Scratch Perry, collage and acrylic on paper, 70 x 50 cm, 2020. Courtesy: The Visual Estate of Lee Scratch Perry / suns.works.

“Pisces and Aries (Yin Yang)” © Lee Scratch Perry, collage and acrylic on canvas, 170 x 140 cm, 2020. Courtesy: The Visual Estate of Lee Scratch Perry / suns.works.

It is also important to underline the presence of some of his drawings, paintings, collages and other installations in the collections of art aficionados like Sir Raymond Douglas Davies aka Ray Davies (former songwriter and lead vocalist for the legendary British rock band the Kinks), English record producer Adrian Sherwood (Coldcut, Depeche Mode, Primal Scream, Sinéad O'Connor, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Dennis Bovell), Mexican producer, remixer and composer Camilo Lara, and the British artist couple formed by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, as well as prestigious institutions such as the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht (NL). Others should soon be included in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Jamaica as well as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington which currently investigates, along with the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Afrofuturist expression through art, music, and activism among others: an exhibition (March 23, 2023 – August 18, 2024) in which Lee “Scratch” Perry appears next to avant-garde jazz legend Sun Ra and the leader of African American Funkadelic style George Clinton - the threesome being tied to raw, original and pioneering Black aesthetic forms. And again, one owes this real tour de force to the new curatorial team headed by Lorenzo Bernet!

“Blue Ark (studio view)” © Lee Scratch Perry, 2016-2021. Photo: Camille Spiller. Courtesy: The Visual Estate of Lee Scratch Perry / suns.works.

“Blue Ark with TV Sculpture (studio view)” © Lee Scratch Perry, 2016-2021. Photo: Camille Spiller. Courtesy: The Visual Estate of Lee Scratch Perry / suns.works.

“Blue Ark (studio view)” © Lee Scratch Perry, 2016-2021. Photo: Claude Barrault. Courtesy: The Visual Estate of Lee Scratch Perry / suns.works.

Last but not least, the resale of some of his artworks at auctions needs to be mentioned too, let alone the fact that Jean-Michel Basquiat himself called him a significant source of inspiration for his paintings, according to multi-disciplinary artist Lee Jaffe as well as the Gagosian Quarterly (Winter 2021 Issue).

A whole set of signals which suggests a more than bright future for Lee “Scratch” Perry in the modern and contemporary art world.

“Vanity Struck Me in My Tooth”, © Lee Jaffe in collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, acrylic on Cibachrome print, 203 x 122 cm, 1983.

“Avenge” © Peter Harris and Lee “Scratch” Perry, marker pen, oil, acrylic paint on canvas, 124 x 95 cm, 2009. This work of art has been bought by Adrian Sherwood; it can be seen in the video below shot in 2022 in the deck-out living room of the producer.

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Horace Andy : Tiny Desk (Home) Concert.

Books :

People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee “Scratch” Perry, David Katz, 2000, Canongate Books, 538 pages.

Lee “Scratch” Perry: People Funny Boy, David Katz, 2012, Camion Blanc, 990 pages (French edition).

People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee “Scratch” Perry, David Katz, 2021, Orion Publishing Group Limited, 688 pages (revised and expanded English edition).

Lee Scratch Perry: Black Ark, Andreas Koller & Lorenzo Bernet (Ed.), publication expected in July 2024, Edition Patrick Fey, 600 pages (500 illustrations).

Films :

Lee Scratch Perry’s Vision of Paradise, Volker Schaner, 2015, 100 min.

This article is the English, revised and expanded version of my paper published on Reggae.fr on 30 November 2023. © Jérémie Kroubo Dagnini (JKD).

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