I’m guilty of using the metaphor in a single way. As a critic, I’ve sometimes referred to works as being xeroxes of other, more original ones. This is not complicated or cryptic—biting, copying, track nine on Cuban Linx, and so on, they’ve always been rightfully derided. It’s not only an aesthetic or formal failure, but a failure of imagination, purpose, even humanity. That may sound extreme, but I’m not talking about artists who are still working through their influences, filtering what they love through their own ideas and experience; I’m talking about those who try to deliver an exact copy of something that already exists, dressed up as their own invention.
But in 7 Piano Sketches, the silent short film directed by Graham Mason, starring Andre 3000, and soundtracked by the latter’s EP of the same name, the xerox becomes something else entirely. In an early scene, Andre—carrying a piano on his back like a knapsack—waltzes into a print shop, opens the lid on a copy machine, and makes prints of his fingers in various positions and with various different pressure points, a silent piano played for electrostatic pulses. An employee looks on curiously; the images print out in black-and-white; Andre folds them carefully, tucks them inside a worn sketchbook, and steps back out into the night.
From there, Sketches is the comic journey of a man on his way to work. Most of the people Andre encounters have nothing on their backs, but the three who do represent, like the finger pads on those printouts, different constellations of friction. There’s a love interest who ambles through a park with a matching piano, but there’s also the young woman, coughing and seemingly in a trance, who’s forced to tote around a casket. Both of those items have obvious semiotic weight. But it’s the first, and least romantically beset character, a man lugging a washing machine, who’s wholly unimpressed with Andre. When the two get into a standoff about who should pass through a stretch of sidewalk first, the man smacks the sketchbook out of Andre’s hand, scattering those xeroxes into the wind.
The Evolution of the Creative Process
The word sketch connotes a midpoint in the creative process, or a work that never reaches maturity. The 7 Piano Sketches film puts that definition in conversation—and in conflict—with the unique position that Andre 3000 has found himself in for the last two decades. Since the effective end of Outkast, Andre has occasionally drawn ire from rap fans for his comments that rappers of a certain age have little to say; the clamoring for a solo rap LP has all but evaporated. Instead, when the now 51-year-old does appear to the public, it’s with this 15-minute peek into his piano sessions, or a 90-minute exercise in ambient jazz, or simply by playing flute for unsuspecting passersby in Atlanta, or in Philadelphia, or in LAX terminals.
Because of the intense interest in his creative output—and because that output has slowed to a drip—the works in progress, the bits of art that would otherwise be seen as part of an ongoing practice, are instead scrutinized as finished pieces. Hence the static images of fingers working out a melody blowing away, no longer his, no longer under his control.
Artistry and Scrutiny
It’s possible that you read that last paragraph with exasperation. But 7 Piano Sketches is not a complaint, and is not defensive. Though Andre’s character is eventually revealed to work as a piano tuner, he is also clearly, taxonomically, an artist. This is work, to be sure, but he knows it’s not exactly the same type of work that the washing machine repairman is forced to perform. After talking shit to a character named Mr. Anthony about the latest Braves game, Andre says that he has to get to work. “You call that work?” Mr. Anthony snaps back. “Yeah, yeah,” Andre replies. “I know, I know.”
That tonal balance, as finely calibrated as the tuning we see Andre fiddle with on a brown baby grand, is a joy. Where William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops were a study of what time and degradation do to creative work that was allegedly finished long ago, 7 Sketches, like Andre’s late period writ large, suggests work transformed not by material forces, but by scrutiny and runaway celebrity, where not only subtext, but the text itself, is warped by the artist-audience relationship.
Perhaps the overriding sense of calm Andre exudes here comes from the acceptance that the pieces left behind—not only the xeroxes, but the sketches that are temporarily lost—can have their own life with critics and audiences precisely because there are always going to be more coming. The artist merely has to get back to work.
7 Piano Sketches is available to stream exclusively on MUBI.