Beverly Glenn-Copeland bares his heart and soul in Guggenheim installation Anthem (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
RE/PROJECTIONS: VIDEO, FILM, AND PERFORMANCE FOR THE ROTUNDA
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1071 Fifth Ave. at 89th St.
Thursday – Monday through September 6, $18 – $25 (pay-what-you-wish Saturday 5:45-7:45)
212-423-3587
www.guggenheim.org
anthem online slideshow
Philly-born Canadian composer and Black trans activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland has had quite a wild ride the last few years. In 2017, his 1986 cassette, Keyboard Fantasies, melding ambient, jazz, classical, folk, world, and New Age sounds, was rediscovered and rereleased, followed by his 2004 album, Primal Prayer, originally recorded under the name Phynix. In 2019, Posy Dixon’s documentary Keyboard Fantasies: The Beverly Glenn-Copeland Story came out, followed by a brief tour that brought Glenn-Copeland and his band, Indigo Rising, to MoMA PS1 that December. Despite the newfound popularity, in 2020, shortly after the pandemic lockdown began, Glenn-Copeland — the musician added the last part of his name in honor of American composer Aaron Copland, and he prefers to go by Glenn — and his wife, artist Elizabeth Paddon, were nearly homeless, resorting to a GoFundMe page to raise nearly $100,000.
This year, a projection of the seventy-seven-year-old musician is appearing on an eighty-four-foot diaphanous curtain hanging from the top of the Guggenheim Museum to nearly the base of the rotunda, like an enormous living tapestry. Glenn-Copeland, a Buddhist, performs the century-old spiritual “Deep River” along with additional a cappella vocalizations; he also plays percussion and keyboards in the film-portrait, titled Anthem. A live version of the song appears on his 2020 compilation, Transmissions; it has previously been sung by Marian Anderson, Paul Robeson, Johnny Mathis, Bobby Womack, and many others — Chevy Chase delivered an excerpt in the first Vacation movie, and Denyce Graves sang an operatic version at the Capitol memorial service for Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Anthem is one of several projects in the Guggenheim series “Re/Projections: Video, Film, and Performance for the Rotunda,” which has also featured works by Ragnar Kjartansson, Christian Nyampeta, and others as the institution reconsiders how to present shows to the public during the coronavirus crisis and beyond.
Tsang bathes Glenn-Copeland in a warm blue light as she depicts the performer in full view as well as in close-up, singing into an old-fashioned microphone, playing the piano, and holding out his hands as if trying to embrace us. The Guggenheim’s bays are empty except for occasional small vertical speakers, which broadcast different sections of the music, and in a few places the projection passes through the translucent curtain and can be seen against the back wall. (Musician Kelsey Lu and DJ, producer, and composer Asma Maroof collaborated on the piece, with assistant curator X Zhu-Nowell.) Thus, as you make your way up and down the Guggenheim’s twisting path, you get different audio and visual perspectives, like Glenn-Copeland is wrapping his arms around you with a spiritual lullaby: “Deep River / My home is over Jordan / Deep River, Lord / I want to cross over into campground,” he sings.
“When I first heard Glenn’s music, I remember thinking to myself, it sounded like an anthem. And then I was — I immediately corrected myself,” Tsang, who calls the installation a “sonic sculptural space,” says in a Guggenheim video. “Like, oh, what kind of — it’s not that I’m so patriotic. It’s just his voice was sort of conjuring a place I wish I lived. It was giving me this tonal quality of, like, I wish that there was an anthem of a place that we could all exist in. And that, for me, is the world that Glenn kind of puts out there as a possibility.”
Continuing through September 6, Anthem is accompanied by a documentary that concentrates on the intimate personal relationship between Glenn and Elizabeth, but it doesn’t feel organic in conjunction with the installation. Also on view at the Guggenheim are “Off the Record,” consisting of works by Sarah Charlesworth, Glenn Ligon, Lisa Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, Hank Willis Thomas, Carrie Mae Weems, and others inspired by official documentation; “The Hugo Boss Prize 2020: Deana Lawson, Centropy,” featuring the Rochester native’s sculpture, holograms, and photography exploring the African diaspora; and “Away from the Easel: Jackson Pollock’s Mural,” anchored by Pollock’s 1943 Mural, his largest painting ever, commissioned for Peggy Guggenheim for her East Sixty-First St. townhouse.