MOCA curator Bennett Simpson chooses videos for MOCAtv that influenced his 2012 exhibition at the Geffen Contempoary, Blues for Smoke. More than a musical genre, the blues picks out a terrain of aesthetics, styles, moods, and histories, a decidedly American invention with contemporary reach. Blues for Smoke figures the blues as a catalyst for artistic innovation, and the videos presented here, including a performance by the iconic Cecil Taylor, a documentary series on artist and musician Henry Flynt, even contemporary rapper Azealia Bank's career-making music video, work to name certain fugues of the blues, its themes of the everyday, of extravagance, and of memory.

 

Interview directed and edited by Stephen Pagano 

 

 

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