music clip of the day

alone

Lonnie Holley, “Looking for All (All Rendered Truth)” (2012)

*****

For 18 years, the Atlanta-based documentary filmmaker George King has been shooting [artist and musician] Lonnie Holley . . . King has mined the footage to make a video for “Looking for All (All Rendered Truth),” a song from Holley’s 2012 debut album, “Just Before Music.” . . . [The footage] offer[s] glimpses of the artist as a young man: showing off his intricate sandstone sculptures or wandering amid the scavenged materials — a baby doll, a “Dead End” sign, a lawn jockey, a wrecked car, a child’s dress — in his Alabama yard-art environment. (There are also shots of a bulldozer tearing the place down, after it was condemned by the airport authority.)

“Lonnie is kind of a person without a country: he creates art that’s extremely sophisticated but that most people don’t know a thing about,” says the art collector and historian Bill Arnett, Holley’s longtime friend and patron. “Abstract art didn’t appear in Western easel painting, which is still the standard by which everything is measured, really until modernism. But black people were making abstract art in the the South for hundreds of years. It just wasn’t being recognized as art. Black people understood that to survive, they could not let their intentions and skills as artists be seen, so the art was done in cemeteries, or like Lonnie’s art it was hidden from view.”

—Mark Binelli, New York Times blog, 1/25/14