Lee Scratch Perry Claims the Dada Crown

‘I’m a miracle man. Things happen which I don’t plan,’ Lee Scratch Perry told frieze D/E in 2014. It’s a statement which holds true for his life as much as it does for his manifold practice. Born Rainford Hugh Perry in 1936, to a family of labourers in Kendal, Jamaica, Perry’s biography is the stuff of legend: a school dropout, seller of vinyl records, a sound prodigy who built a studio in his yard to later set it ablaze, cleansing it of what he called ‘unruly spirits’. (Although, according to other sources, the incident was much less poetic and the Black Ark, as he named it, caught fire by accident.) Widely acknowledged as a pioneer of reggae and dub, he was instrumental in the careers of Bob Marley, The Clash, Beastie Boys and many others.

Beyond his experiments in sound, Perry, who lived in Switzerland for the last three decades of his life, was also a visual artist, and his work has been included in several group exhibitions since his death in 2021. Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire is the latest institution to honour Perry’s idiosyncratic vision in what is his first institutional presentation in Europe. It brings together an array of Perry’s works made from everyday objects such as jewellery, mirrors and rocks, with collages featuring neon-bright spray paint and pages from books and newspapers in a setting historically charged with a different type of unfettered creativity, that of Dada artists who founded and performed in the original Cabaret Voltaire in 1916.

The artist created a visual vocabulary in which the Rastafarian belief in the presence of the divine in every individual went hand in hand with a sense of self-importance and self-derision. In Untitled Painting (Super Ape) (2019/20), for instance, a mind-map like constellation of images includes flyers advertising Perry’s music next to a leaflet on animal welfare, a black and white photograph of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie and a reproduction of The Transfiguration (1516–20), Raphael’s last painting. In the centre, against a brown background, a grinning face in broad white strokes; in the lower-right corner, where one would expect the artist’s signature, is one word: ‘shit’.

References to religion and nature abound in Perry’s works, which tap into a practice shared by a number of self-taught Jamaican artists, such as William ‘Woody’ Joseph and Leonard Daley, who used symbolic objects to create sacred spaces to engage spirits. There are layers upon layers in Perry’s works that frequently obscure one another, but legibility is secondary to an artist who cherished rhythm and remix. To the contrary, for Perry, the more a work becomes a palimpsest the more energy it carries.

Many objects in this exhibition, such as Various Segments Blue Ark, East Wall (2016–21), hail from the Blue Ark, the studio he started in Switzerland’s Einsiedeln district in the 1990s, and consist of fused together fragments of texts and images referencing different, often faraway and ostensibly disconnected places across the world.

After seeing the exhibition, I rewatched The Upsetter, a 2008 documentary on Perry’s life and work based on an eight-day long monologue he delivered to the directors in Einsiedeln. In one striking scene Perry proclaims: ‘Paint am I, I am paint. Painted Africa. Painted Ethiopia. Painted Globe. Painted Universe. […] Words, words, words, I am words, I am art, I am stone, and I am perfect never tell a lie.’ For the artist, truth seemed less attached to specific facts as to energies generated in creative repetition. While this might mean the veracity of his accounts is, at times, difficult to ascertain, one thing is undisputable, Perry upended the status quo everywhere he went.

Lee Scratch Perry’s exhibition is on view at Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, until 5 January

_{Main image: Lee Scratch Perry, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the Visual Estate of Lee Scratch Perry; photo: Cedric Mussano.}