Lee 'Scratch' Perry: a Sonic Maverick's Studio Legacy
Jamaican musician and artist Lee 'Scratch' Perry's untimely passing in August 2021 left an unrivalled legacy in the world of dub and reggae music—not to mention an unrealised show at Cabinet Gallery in South London.
Exhibition view: Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Ark Work, Cabinet Gallery, London (9 March–6 May 2023). Courtesy Cabinet Gallery.
Planned while the artist was still alive, the show was postponed due to his untimely death in 2021 and opened in March 2023 (9 March–6 May).
Spread across the ground-floor gallery, Ark Work collates scribbled drawings, scrapbook-style collages, totemic sculptures, and ephemera amassed in Perry's famous Black Ark recording studio in Kingston, Jamaica, and its successor, the Blue Ark studio, in the Swiss mountains of Einsiedeln.
'The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself,' he once said. 'The machine must be live and intelligent.'
Despite Perry having shown his artwork globally, this show is especially pivotal, marking his first solo commercial exhibition in the United Kingdom—and among his first posthumous shows. More broadly, it adds his name to a stable of Cabinet contemporaries that includes Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey and installation-art pioneer Marc Camille Chaimowicz.
Considered by many as the most prolific music producer yet, Perry played a key role in igniting Bob Marley's career and collaborated with everyone from Paul McCartney to The Clash and streetwear brand Supreme. Recognition in the art world, however, only arrived in later years, sparked by Secret Education (2010), a solo show at Dem Passwords gallery in L.A. and continued with solo exhibitions at Corbett vs. Dempsey in Chicago and the Swiss Institute in New York (both 2019).
An eccentric in the truest sense, Perry was often dismissed as 'mad', a title he embraced. Speaking a cryptic blend of Jamaican patois and poetic ramblings, he used visual arts to celebrate his Rastafarianism, while confronting Christianity's missionary history in repressing obeah, a West African-derived spiritual practice popular in the former British colonies.
As such, the exhibition begins outside the gallery with a cloistered display of mirrors, a laptop balanced on its side that has been patched with felt jungle animals, and a sheet of paper below that reads, 'I AM MADMAN / BLACK ARK VAMPIRES / DREAD LION'. Unlisted in the exhibition raisonné, this Easter egg made an apt introduction to the self-proclaimed prophet.
Entering the gallery, one faces a white dividing wall with vitrines of Perry's notebooks lining the left-hand side. This hallway opens into a small corner on the far right, where choice readings by academic writers such as Kodwo Eshun, Paul Gilroy, and the late Mark Fisher fill a ring-binder file in lieu of a traditional press release. Next to them is untitled (2020), a work of a marker-drawn penis with the words '£$P Kill It', framed above three rocks on the floor.
The white walls lead into the main body of the exhibition, centred with sculptural assemblages on a plinth and the floor, collages girding the perimeter. For these collages, cut-outs from superhero comic books, American software magazines, and astronomical, astrological, and ufologist literature from the 1990s cover MDF boards or white canvas, forming a sci-fi-inflected patchwork of Perry, who often described himself as an alien.
These visual motifs chime with observations by writer, theorist, and filmmaker Kodwo Eshun for whom Perry was an Afrofuturist channelling the alienation Black people experience under white oppression through his music—to such an extent of becoming extra-terrestrial himself.1
This sci-fi aesthetic contrasts much of the accompanying imagery in his collage, which largely comes from the natural world. Whether the ape-to-man evolutionary diagram in Good Over Evil Death (2020) or the freshwater fish posters from his red spray-paint collage Untitled (2020), under Perry's bejewelled hands beings from our universe collide with beings from another, breaking the time-space continuum as the supernatural and terrene come face-to-face.
It's an experience Perry knows well, having witnessed the visit of Haile Selassie—believed by Rastafarians to be god incarnate—to Jamaica in 1966. This feeling of imminence and temporal distortion was integral to his music, achieved through reverb, echo, and cut-up samples that add a spectral aftertaste to his sounds.
The same can be said of his sculpture. Laptop (Black Ark) (c. 2009) features a rudimentary laptop with dusty cassette tapes fixed on top. Harking back to a bygone era in his studio, the work includes an image of the artist's obscured face adjacent to bird wings.
Bringing the sentient in contact with the technological, the work speaks to Perry's wider objective to enliven the mute or inanimate. While his art practice was too short-lived to be duly explained, Perry's words on his sonic practice do the heavy lifting.
'The studio must be like a living thing, a life itself,' he once said. 'The machine must be live and intelligent. Invisible thought waves—you put them into the machine by sending them through the controls.' Therein lies the genius of Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the wizardly maverick whose talismans only come alive when you 'scratch' beneath the surface. —[O]
1 Kodwo Eshun, 'Further Considerations on Afrofuturism', The New Centennial Review, 2003, 3 (2): 287-302.
